#i found a good base code that I can create my own filters on and stuff

[illfoandillfie]

really thinking about setting up like a fic directory on here where you could like pick a kink and it'd show you everything i've written with that kink. Other filters too like pairing and genre (smut/angst/fluff) and that sort of thing.

I've seen others have similar pages for fic recs and I thot it might be good to have here too because sometimes I feel like the masterlist I've currently got is a little annoying to navigate if you don't know the fic names and also I'm bad at updating it lmao.

Is that something anyone would use? Are there any specific filters you'd like to see? I'd love to know what you guys think!

[tundrainafrica]

Title: Lovebug (6/10)

Summary:  

“It might be a bug.”

“A bug?”

“Sometimes the developers of this application make mistakes. This is our first time meeting I’m sure so…Isn’t it a bit weird that we just met for the first time and it rings like this? And for two strangers to coincidentally ring each other’s alarms?“

Levi is the developer of the Love Alarm App and Hange is married to Zeke.

Link to cross-postings: AO3

Other Chapters: 1 2 3 4 5

Notes: Feedback is very much appreciated :D

“As an employee you’re entitled to sick leaves.”

Entitled. It didn’t necessarily mean he needed it. Levi allowed himself a sequence of motions, some reassurance that his body was still functioning as expected

He raised his shoulders up then rolled it back, stretching his neck, bending it to one side then the other. It did wonders to help send a rush of energy through his still exhausted body. It  served as a reminder, he was strong, he was functional. “I don’t need a day off. I’m fine, ” Levi said. 

Erwin raised one eyebrow, giving him a once over. If he had narrowed his eyes anymore or wrinkled his nose, Levi could have given in. Other parts of his body were still reeling from the ordeal from the beach and he was sure he could fall asleep if someone just laid him out on a sofa.

Erwin though was a man of the office, a staunch professional. When it came to work and productivity, he leaned on the side of ‘being productive.’ He took Levi’s word for it.  “If you are feeling anything, just anything out of the ordinary, take the day off. Feel free to just leave me a note, and I can have Petra or Eld handle the rest of the testing.” 

The word ‘testing’ didn’t do much to convince Levi to rest though and maybe Erwin knew that. Levi slammed the door behind him hard enough to have him preparing for a lecture from Erwin about door slamming manners.

He waited in front of the door, gripping the doorknob from behind him for a good few more seconds. 

“We could start working next week?” Hange appeared right next to him. More specifically, she had accompanied him to Erwin’s office that morning, settling for just loitering outside the door, providing a perfectly valid reason for the internal question ‘ did she hear his conversation with Erwin?’

“It’s a Tuesday and it’s not a holiday,” Levi answered matter-of-factly. 

“Well, don’t companies have sick leaves?” 

“They do.” 

“And you were in the hospital just yesterday.” 

“I was in the hospital under observation,” Levi clarified. 

“After almost drowning,” Hange added.

“Just because the doctor prescribes a few more days of bed rest, doesn’t make it an almighty rule.” It was evidence that maybe a day off or two would have definitely made the difference. That slightly caustic exchange had Levi’s head spinning. He found himself having to squint just to even feign eye contact. “Besides, why are you here anyway?” 

“To work on the love alarm. Don’t you think it’s better if we work closely with each other?” 

“Not this early into the whole process. We could have talked through email.” Levi attempted to walk ahead. His office wasn’t too far from Erwin’s  a good few flights of stairs below. With his head slightly spinning and his legs feeling like jelly, Levi went for the elevators.

It was as if Hange was on a mission to flaunt her ability to speed up her pace. She walked next to him then a few feet ahead, turning back at him. And she had been that way since that morning. 

Levi gave in. “Okay, so what parts of the planning process merit a meeting today?” 

“Well, I’m worried for one.” 

“There are many meetings that could have been an email and I think you lecturing me about not taking a sick leave is one of them.” 

“Yeah, and there’s more...” Hange trailed off, giving him a good look from head to toe. Levi liked to believe she just couldn’t find the right answer to whatever implicit question he introduced at that moment. “I’m sorry about yesterday, and the day before.” 

“That could have been an email.” 

“I know Zeke gave you shit about being carried by me and having to be saved by me...” 

Levi stifled a cringe. A bridal carry to be specific. “That could have also been an email.” 

Hange huffed. “Fine. I get if you want to be so pissy about this but let me be selfish. I didn’t join Zeke on his business trip and it’s because I felt guilty. About you almost drowning, about you being forced to play golf and almost losing all your money over a few games. It was shitty okay. And for my own peace of mind, please let me join you at work, and maybe just help you make some progress with the alarm, even just a bit?” 

There was nothing much else his muddled brain could come up with in that moment of silence. “Okay,” Levi said, with a tone that could have easily been seen through. It was in fact, not okay. 

“Why? Is there anything else you’re busy with?” 

Levi sighed. “Making sure that damn love alarm gets tested for the next release.”

***

Anticipation had the tendency of piling stress much higher than the stress was actually worth. For many people, they only realize how much of a simple task something can be when they’re actually doing it. 

When work would pile up, stress would pile up. When Levi’s brain was working at half capacity, while trying to balance responsibilities and a guilty Hange in tow, he was barely thinking about work yet still attempting to the best of his meagre abilities.  

When the work was finally in front of him, the workflow tracker out, the whole ordeal of anticipating a workload had turned out to be anticlimactic. Maybe he had just gotten used to days leading up to releases being particularly stressful. After all, it usually involved early morning sanity checks, junk food and a stressed out team. 

Usually. They had some good releases and the one that day seemed like a good release. Of course it would be a less stressful release. It was under testing for months and it had been pushed back a week already. The QA work was almost over. To be just a little more certain, Levi filtered his workflow tracker to staged tickets and to tickets tagged ‘ready for release.’ 

“So, how does this pre-release testing work?” Hange asked, leaning forward. She had taken the liberty to pull one of the chairs to the corner towards and sat beside him. 

“I’m working,” Levi said coldly.

“Oh, but you said you needed to test the love alarm.” 

“Yes, the team is testing it. I’m making sure everything gets tested.” 

“So how do you make sure everything gets tested?” 

“Well… There’s this tracker here, I assign tickets for testing and when people say it’s tested they click QA passed and I see it here. Then if anything urgent needs testing or anything doesn’t seem to work, I help out and try to fix it,” Levi said, he opened his drawer dropping one of his test devices on the table. 

“So you could have gotten a day off,” Hange asked, seemingly knowingly. 

Levi glanced at the dashboard to seeall tickets were tagged as ‘Ready to Release.’  the others having been done a week back. He was too lazy to check the event history and there was no need to. The necessary work had been finished. 

Maybe he could have taken the day off. He wasn’t admitting that though. “So tell me, what are your plans? We’re getting the money soon according to Erwin but you’re the mastermind behind this.” Levi swiveled his chair behind him, grabbed his whiteboard eraser and cleaned out some of the useless notes from the next release. 

Half way through cleaning it up though, he stopped. There might be something you’ll need there. He cursed himself for even erasing some of it to the point of incomprehensible. 

“You wanna just use the workflow tracker? Like the one on your computer?” Hange suggested. 

“No, this is fine…” Levi racked his brain for those numbers and he settled for just writing the notes just much smaller below the release notes to the side with the larger font. 

It looked messy. It looked ugly. And his dominant meticulous side would not stand for it. In one swift motion borne out of frustration, Levi swiped his white board eraser over the whiteboard five times, more than enough to wipe it clean. 

“Was there anything important there?” Hange asked.

“Just a cleaner version of what we have in the tracker,” Levi said with a slight huff. He would rather Hange wasn’t reminded of whatever could have been there.

“Well, you wanna brainstorm on the whiteboard?” 

“It’s blank now.” Levi gestured for Hange to go ahead. 

“There’s actually not much to brainstorm on my end,” Hange said. Still, she walked a little nearer, grabbing the marker from Levi. She drew a heart. “You used biological markers to determine love right? That’s how you made the application. If you could assume love based on biological markers… maybe you can break it down and do it similarly for feelings right? I work with psychotherapy and I thought your application might have the potential to be tweaked in the context of assessing emotion Just to give therapists an idea of how their patients feel….” Hange trailed off. She drew a small diagram under the heart, a sad face, a happy face then a blank face. “I mean we have the technology for it already right? Most phones now are capable of more complex biometrics, that’s what the love alarm is taking advantage of.” 

Levi hummed. The diagram made it look just a little too easy. “And how do you think we can break down the application?” He knew the answer. Testing Hange though had been a tempting option.

Hange looked back at him, a confident grin on her face.“Yeah, you have the data already? And you created models or algorithms. Maybe you can extract part of those data sets and we can cut it down… to ‘happy,’ to ‘sad’ etcetera. And you can use what you have to make other types of alarms, like a happy alarm, a sad alarm. Right?

“We have the technology and the hardware to pull that off I guess. It’ll just be a matter of making a model, logging data, and coding. Doable with the right resources.” 

“But it should be easier since you already have some of the work done with the love alarm.” 

“But it won’t be as accurate at first. It took us five years to get the love alarm to this level of accuracy. I can’t even guarantee it’s completely accurate,” Levi said. 

“What about it takes time?” 

“We use an AI algorithm.”

“Artificial Intelligence,” Hange said. 

Levi nodded. “It’s a machine learning model. We give the model data as an input and data as an output and the more data you put into it, the more experience the machine has and the better the machine gets at figuring out what the correct answer is . We give it the biological data, the input and we give it the output, the anonymous test results and some formulas, and overtime, the machine starts to figure out for itself what love is.” 

“So you can’t actually break down the application to do it for you?” 

“We can but it will be a pain. Might as well just create a new model.” 

“Will it take as long as the love alarm?

Levi shook his head. “We have the necessary APIs, the hardware. We can buy more server space but we will have to create a new model.” 

Hange raised one eyebrow. “Okay, that’s a good start.” 

“I’ll just have to make a plan, see how much more resources we need and send them off to Erwin.” Levi opened an a blank document and pushed Hange’s seat closer to his. . 

“Wait, I’m curious though…” Hange started. She tapped one finger on her chin. “How does data processing work?”

***

Levi never considered the server room to be anything interesting. It was after all just a conglomeration of headless computers, wires and lights. 

A very important conglomeration. After all, a fire or a faulty pipe would be enough to destroy millions of dollars worth of data. 

He only allowed her one peek, just opening the door wide enough for one eye to see through for just a few seconds long enough for Hange to let out a hushed breath. “Our company handles a lot of applications and some of the servers supporting these applications are housed here,” he explained. 

“And the data?” 

“They’re housed here. Sometimes we use cloud servers too. Sometimes caching servers and everything is processed here then sent to the application." Levi kept his words simple. 

"Billions of points worth of data…" Hange's voice deadened to a whisper.

"It takes time for the data to come, the machines to learn. We started off with manual loading the data, then testing. It took a lot of work to get this much data, enough for the application to work as expected."

"And you continue to get the data I'm guessing."

Levi shrugged. "During quality testing, during actual app usage. As long as someone is using the application and complying to their biometrics being gathered by the application, we get data. That's how all applications work."

Hange hummed. Her mouth curled up into a smile. "So let's say… when I turn on the application, you can collect my data right?"

"The servers are always on, they're always collecting data. It needs the data after all to ring the alarm right?"

"Then how do we check the data?" Hange asked. 

Levi leaned on the door, shutting it with a click. "When we need it, I'll extract your data on my end, then maybe I'll extract mine. To be honest, I don't think they'd give many answers though."

"Serotonin, Oxytocin, Dopamine, Body heat. There's a lot to see from those numbers.” Hange pointed a thumb to her chest. “This is my specialty.” 

"Then I guess we're going to have to make sense of it together."

Hange nodded. "So what are we waiting for? Let’s work on it over lunch.."

"Don't get too hasty. We're gonna have to make a research plan."

***

Hange already had a research plan on hand and she had been working on it for a while. A twenty page document with just a section filled with bullet points and comments. 

There were points Levi had to fill out himself. Still, it wasn't too much work. "You came prepared," he said. 

"What can I say, it's my pet project," Hange scrolled down towards the end of the word document.

"Zeke seemed excited about it, I thought it would have been his at first."

"If this works out, his hospitals will be the first ones in the country or even the world with this type of technology. If it's sure money, it'll be easy to convince him. Besides, I have my ways." Hange gave Levi a sly smile, soon concealed by the cup between her lips. 

She was in a better mood. They were out for lunch in a more seemingly relaxed position and Levi saw opportunity. 

It's better now than never. "How does he feel… about the developer of the application spending a little too much time with you?"

"It's part of the research process and I need to talk to a developer, not an investor.  Besides, he has other investments," Hange said nonchalantly, too nonchalantly that it was almost unsettling.

"With what happened at the beach." Just the quick recall was enough to send blood rushing to his face. He wondered if outwardly he did look a little red. He bit his lip and looked away. From his peripherals, he could see Hange though was just a little too focused on his laptop screen. 

Hange could have spit out her tea. "Are you still thinking about the bridal carry? I didn’t think it was too big of a deal. I could have sworn you were unconscious." 

At first, Levi could have sworn he was unconscious too. Zeke had mentioned it just a little too many times though that Levi was starting to generate his own phantom memories of the incident. 

"Sorry about the CPR though. I probably bruised a few ribs.”

He remembered the CPR just a little too quickly. Or maybe it had been the bruises reminding him. Levi ran his hands over his chest, feeling a slight twinge of pain in response. "Hey, you did it to save my life."

Hange shook her head. "Or maybe I was panicking. It didn’t look like you were breathing but everything was moving too fast and---” She was digressing. 

“What does Zeke think about it?” Levi pressed. 

“Why do you care so much about what Zeke thinks about it?” Hange asked. She had raised her tone, maybe only slightly. It was firm, almost abrasive that Levi regretted it. 

“Zeke is an investor, one of the richest men in the world. I’m spending too much time with his partner. Then back in the beach---”

“Zeke is always busy and honestly, I’m grateful for any other relationships I can make outside this,” Hange argued. “You know, life, building relationships, these things don’t end after marriage. Sure, Zeke and I committed to a relationship but I think I should still be able to find joy in connecting with other people. Marriage isn’t supposed to tie anyone down, stop them from experiencing life. People in relationships are supposed to grow freely together.” 

Maybe Levi had been thinking too hard about it. Or maybe Hange was just a little too laid back. “What do you think about the love alarm ringing?” 

“It happens. Besides, I’m not too worried. Love is a choice,” Hange said. “Commitment is a choice. I think I remember sending you a book about that.”

“So you don’t believe in our product,” Levi challenged. 

“I never said that.” Hange started to stir at her cup, just a little faster. “You can choose to love someone, to commit to them, to be patient with them and to ride out every single problem with them but there is the feeling aspect right? That’s what the love alarm measures, or that’s what I’m suspecting.” 

Levi nodded. 

“So the fact that it rings with strangers or just randomly, shows that it measures attraction right?” 

“Hormones, movements, pace…” Levi listed them out as just another appendix in their dialogue. 

“I wanna understand… where do feelings fit in all this.” Hange put her hands up in defense.. “Don’t get me wrong, I love Zeke, I married him. He’s a good man. And I wanna make whatever it is between us work for a good long time but as someone who works with human psychology, emotions, as someone who’s seen relationships succeed, relationships fail and some that are just so-so. I wanna know, how much of it is emotions, how much of it is volitional commitment. And this type of research, with the love alarm… I think it can teach us things. Emotions are fleeting but there are emotions that stay for a long time and maybe they make being loving and being patient easier---” She slammed her hands back on the table. “Am I making sense here?” 

Levi only realized then he had been biting his straw and had barely gotten anything out. “I’m trying to understand and I think I’m kinda succeeding? GIve me a few more seconds.” He looked away, silently grateful for the good view of the shopping streets from the second floor of the cafe. The cafe was a good balance of loud and soft, filled with whispers and conversations yet still calming and relaxing if he focused on that part in particular. 

“Have you really, never been in a relationship?” Hange asked, seconds or even minutes later. 

“No.” 

“And you told me, you’ve never made the alarm ring for anyone.” 

“In my five years of testing, no,” Levi said. 

“What made it ring with me?” Hange asked. “ Have you ever theorized that?” 

“It could be a bu---” 

“Let’s assume the application is working properly.” Hange pressed. “Do you feel anything different? When you’re with me?” 

Maybe he did. Levi was tempted to look back the moment Hange had ended that question with her tone of voice higher than a second ago. Her eyebrows furrowed, her gaze fixed on his. Levi had to admit, he didn’t want to look away again. 

So he looked away. “I should be asking you that question. Your alarm rang too. Do you feel anything with me that you don’t feel with him?” 

***

They carried the conversation elsewhere, somewhere where the walls didn’t echo, somewhere where there wasn’t anyone within a good ten meters away. Somewhere they could have sworn nobody would be listening. 

It was a silent agreement, consisting of nodding and pulling of hands and it ended with them in the park, a little past noon on a Tuesday. 

“Do you feel any different when you’re with me?” The question was exchanged once again, in a park bench towards the center, after seconds of checking surroundings. It came in variations of it, in stutters, between clearing throats. 

When it came to recovering eloquence, Hange won without a fight. “If I tell you, will you promise to at least try to tell me?”

“Try.” Levi was economical with his words. He made certain though to consolidate all the discomforts of such a pressing topic to that one word. 

Hange took a deep breath. “It’s funny because we just met right? But sometimes, I randomly think of you. When I come home to find the cleaner cleaning out the room, I think ‘Levi would probably like a clean room.’ When I was drinking coffee this morning, I thought of how you didn’t get your tea time and today, I was excited to see you. But I’m excited to see Zeke too… So maybe I’m just lonely because he left so suddenly for a business trip. Were you excited to see me?” 

“Not this morning,” Levi said. That had been easy enough to let slip out. It wasn’t a lie after all. 

“Oh. Then maybe my theory is wrong.” Hange said it  too quickly, her voice much softer. 

That had Levi feeling a tad guilty, at the same time more motivated to find some way to cheer her up. “But I was excited to go to the country club with you and when I saw you with Zeke by the pool, I felt weird.” 

“Weird?” 

“I kept looking, but I wanted to look away…” 

Then there was silence. He was watching Hange and she wasn’t opening her mouth to speak. In the silence, he found reason for a segue. It could have been too sudden or it could have been a natural progression. Levi was easily imagining the scene by the pool as he stared at the empty streets, he thought it natural, and at least appropriate. “You and Zeke really get along huh?”

“Now yes.” 

One syllable, one slip of the tongue had Levi alert.“Now?” 

Hange shook her head. “Now. As in, we get along but at first, we didn’t,” she said, shaking her head. “ Zeke and I have known each other since college and he confessed to me in our senior year before graduation. We dated for a few years after that.”

“You chose to date him, even when you didn’t like him.” 

“Sure he doesn’t give the best first impression, he’s a little extra, if you know what I mean, his head gets a little too big sometimes. My parents and friends said it would be a good idea to just try it out. He was the heir to one of the biggest companies in the country and he isn’t a bad person per se so I opted to try it out and over time, I got to know him, we got closer and he proposed to me a few years ago, I said yes… and here I am, married.”

“Married.” Levi looked pointedly at her. Hange had leaned back and hung her head back, staring at the sky above.  She had said that last part with a little too much breath, and too little voice. 

Hange gave him a wry smile. “Well, I honestly thought it was too early to settle down. I would have wanted to finish my PhD first, maybe travel a little more, meet more people before we get married but we’ve been dating for years, Zeke was insistent and....It seemed like a good choice. What was there to lose? He’s a good man. We were familiar with each other and besides, just because we’re married, doesn’t mean life stops right?” 

“You tell me. I’ve never been married. Some people are asking me when I plan on settling down.” 

“I guess we’re on two ends of the spectrum. You might end up marrying late. I married too early.”

“Do you think this has anything to do with why the love alarm didn’t ring?” 

Hange shrugged. “Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. The thing is, I don’t want love to be a feeling because just bending over backward to however I’m feeling means that I’m not really free right? I want love to be a choice. I chose to marry Zeke, I chose to commit to him and regardless of what a computer says about love, I wanna be able to decide for myself how I feel, who I love and how I love.” 

***

A few clacks of the keyboard. The click of the mouse. Then the computer whirred to life again, a few swishes among them. 

“So, all I have to do is type out a query here on the server management studio and I’ll be able to extract whatever data we need,” Levi said. “So what email do you use for your love alarm?” 

“Wings of freedom…” Hange didn’t finish. Instead she slipped her phone next to Levi, the screen open to the settings page.  

wingsoffreedom95@jmail.com

Levi stifled a smile. “Don’t you have a more professional sounding email?” 

“I like using pseudo emails for making accounts for weird things.” 

“Nice to know our product counts as a weird account to you,” Levi said.  

“Well, I was testing the product out before I even pitched it to Zeke. I wouldn’t want anyone to have gotten information on me.” 

“Then I guess, that was a good choice.” Levi slammed the enter button and the screen froze for a second before the export box appeared. 

“Yeah, I’d expect a company like yours will collect data.” 

“I’m sure we have a tiny box saying ‘you comply to having your data gathered when you use the product.’”

“You did,” Hange admitted. 

“Then you can’t complain about me having access to the location, the hormone levels, the heart rate and all other pertinent information of wingsoffreedom95@jmail.com.” 

“What email do you use?” 

“I extracted that too,” Levi said. He opened his own application and slipped his phone to Hange. 

“So you are using a pseudonym too.” 

“Of course. I test the product. I need multiple emails,” Levi said. 

“Sure, humanitysstronges1225@jmail.com. You really had to go for something tacky like that?” 

“Well, no one got the username yet,” Levi said. He was quick to digress. “I extracted our biodata from the day we met and when we tested the application. It’s gonna be exported as a data file and just open it using excel or something and do what you need to do.”

“You’re a gem, Levi,” Hange said.  

“Just don’t touch anything else. I’m gonna take a break first,” Levi leaned further back on his chair, grateful for Erwin’s suggestion that he got a reclining chair then. “Maybe I should have gotten a day off. Eld told me, support is quiet today and the release has been ready for a while. Nothing much else to do.” He went for his ebook reader next to his desk and held it above him. 

It flashed open to the latest page. 

The room was silent save for the clack of the keyboard and the whirring of the monitor. It was an odd position to be in but Levi found it was much easier to focus on words when all he had behind the reader was the white ceiling. If he tried a little harder, he could also pretend the clacking of the keyboard wasn’t at all, Hange. 

He was tired. He was exhausted and the ordeal from a few days ago still bubbled at the back of his mouth. Surprisingly, the words had shifted so easily into sceneries, emotions, investment and Levi was thinking too hard about one Mr. Collins and his engagement to the protagonist. 

“Levi!” 

Levi was pulled out of that very comfortable stupor by one rash voice and as he looked up to see Hange smiling, he realized, maybe it had been his own emotional investment at that damn book that got him a little cranky at the wake up call. “What? How long was I reading?” 

“Fifteen minutes at least,” Hange said. “I found something interesting with the data. Did you know, that when the love alarm rang, our hormones were low, our body heat was low, our heart rate wasn’t high. Would you know why it still rang?” 

“I told you, after a certain point we don’t know. It becomes an algorithm. The computer figures it out for itself.” 

“But we’re going to need that data when working with other emotions right?” Hange pressed. “I’m gonna take note of this.” 

“Do you think the love alarm still works as expected?” 

“It could. You told me yourself, billions worth of data points. How could they be wrong right? But this is nice to know, you know. Just looking at the data here, is somehow reassuring.” 

“Reassuring how?” 

Hange shrugged. “Well I’ll do a little of my own testing and will contact you when I come up with anything.” She looked at the clock on her phone. “Then we could schedule a visit to one of Zeke’s hospitals and have a talk with the staff, maybe they could give some feedback on the working plan.” 

“You’re gonna leave?” Levi sat up, putting his ebook reader down on the desk next to him. Hange had started to rifle through her bag and that got him alert.

“Why? You want me to stay a little longer?” 

“I never said that.” 

“You said you were busy with work this morning and now you want me to stay?” Hange challenged. 

“Well it turned out there isn’t much work to do anyway. We get the changes live by the end of this week and we work towards the next release.” Now that Levi did think about it, the job was pretty repetitive and Hange’s pet project had somehow added color to the whole experience. “But you can leave if you want to,” Levi added a second later. Just in case, she did get some sort of hint that he wanted her to stay.

That last sentence did the exact opposite. Exactly how? Levi didn’t have much time to ponder it. By the time, he had even attempted to read through the protagonist’s response to her suitor, Hange had already pulled her chair right next to his, close enough for him to be feeling slightly warmer. Then, warm enough for him to pull away. “What the hell?” 

“I was just wondering what you were reading.” 

“You could have asked. Were you looking?” 

“No.I wasn’t raised to look over people’s shoulders when they read.” Hange said matter-of-factly. “Actually, I was about to ask what you were reading when you pulled away so fast.” 

Levi sighed. “It’s one of the books you sent over in that drive folder.” 

“Ooh, which one? Scott Peck?” 

“I read though that already until I realized the author cheated on his wife.” 

“That doesn’t make his words any more invalid. Love is a choice,” she sang. The amount of times he had heard that since he even read the book maybe even the most melodious tone grating. “So what book is it?”

“The novel, Pride and Prejudice.” 

“Oooh, which part are you in?” 

Maybe Levi had let his guard down just a little. He probably tilted his reader a little bit towards her. Those minute details might have been enough though to have Hange pulling closer towards him, looking over at whatever he had been reading. 

“I’m a slow reader,” Levi explained. 

“Well, it’s a classic. Hange said. This time she was looking at him again. “I swear, I think it shaped my own idea of love. think there’s a lot to learn about love and marriage the way that Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy fall in love---” 

“Wait. Stop.” Emotional investment in the book had Levi vulnerable. He only realized it then when he felt his mouth twitch, his eyebrows raise just a little higher. He found himself dropping the reader on the desk in front of him again, a retaliation at that ringing in his ears and the uncomfortable drop of his stomach. Spoilers were surprisingly painful things. “Mr. Darcy and Elizabeth… They end up together?” He managed to let out. 

Hange nodded hesitantly. “Yes, it’s in the title. Mr. Darcy is pride and Elizabeth is prejudice.” 

“You’re talking about the asshole Darcy right? Ten thousand pounds a year asshole Darcy?” 

***

To hell if Hange looked just a little uncomfortable. Maybe more than a little. “I swear I thought everyone knew. Pride and Prejudice is a classic and it’s so talked about that---” 

“I thought she was gonna end up with Mr. Wickham,” Levi admitted. It was difficult to wipe that grimace off his face, to the point that he had worn it almost as a medal while escorting Hange down to the lobby.   

“Hey, I’m sorry…” Hange said. Her attempt to make amends though was grating. 

Levi sighed. “It’s fine. This is a sign anyway, I need to do something more productive with my last few hours of work. I have a few more hours in the office, I’ll probably check on the team first. Is someone picking you up?” 

“I messaged already,” Hange said glumly. “You know, I thought we could hang out a bit first.” 

“Just focus first on getting an appointment with the hospital. To be honest, I really think I do have some work to check on.” 

“Hey, I’ll make up to spoiling you okay?” Hange said. She had tried to curl her lips up to a smile, to widen the grin on her face. It had come out as something wry. 

He found some solace at least in realizing he wasn’t the only one a little too bothered by those spoilers. He could have sworn it had never affected him that way before. But it’s just spoilers. He reminded himself. “I’ll get over it. Just focus on your work.” Still, it was difficult to enunciate words, it was difficult to even look at her. “Who’s picking you up?” 

“Probably a chauffeur,” Hange said. She opened her phone again. The white glare of the screen reflected on Hange’s eyes and Levi was seeing stars in them again. Stars that somehow breathed life into her dead half smile of a while ago. “I can go from here.”

“Wait what?” 

“Zeke’s picking me up at the gate. He said he wanted to try one of the restaurants at the nearby shopping street,” Hange explained.

Levi’s mind was an aggregate of unintelligible emotions. Do you want me to escort you out? Of course you don’t, I practically kicked you out. When there were things he couldn’t understand, maybe the right thing to do was be professional about it. “I’ll wait for your reply on the hospital visit. I’ll do what I can with the working plan and hopefully we could come up with something by Friday.” 

“That would be cool. I’ll make sure to message you.” Hange wasn’t looking at him anymore and Levi had been perceptive enough to notice that her voice slowed just a little, the volume much softer than a second ago. Her mind was elsewhere. 

Then suddenly, she was talking again, her voice a stark contrast from a second ago. “Zeke! I’m so glad to hear from you. Levi and I were just working on the application just now… And we have some great ideas…” 

He never heard what Hange said after that. If he closed his eyes, and focused just a bit, maybe he could have but the ache in his chest was overpowering and he found it most convenient to blame the spoilers at first. 

Hange walking away. Hange mentioning Zeke. Those were moments of clarity. 

Darcy had reminded him a little too much of Zeke. Elizabeth, a little too much of Hange. When he walked back up to the room, back scrolled back to the scene at the ball, the scene with Mr. Wickham, he let out a laugh. 

Fiction was supposed to be comforting and somehow with his own emotional investment in the story, he had hoped for an ending where money didn’t win. And he was scrambling for it long after Hange turned the corner way past the entrance. 

Back in the office, alone with the reader on hand, he thought about it a little more. 

I swear, I think it shaped my own idea of love. think there’s a lot to learn about love and marriage…

“A lot to learn huh?” Love and marriage which ended with a rich abrasive asshole? 

There was definitely a lot to learn. Marriage could be for money. Love could be learned. 

To commit, to love was a choice. 

And Levi didn't need to read the whole book to be reminded of what he had already figured out. 

Levi checked the table of contents, then the tracker at the bottom, he was barely thirty percent into the book, a very long book. Or maybe he was just a slow reader

After a few more minutes of staring, he managed to stumble upon the stone cold conclusion that it was a waste of time. 

He quickly deleted the book, muttering to himself for a second longer that it was a good decision. Then he walked to his team's office, laptop tightly on hand. When he was looking left and right, when he was looking through his workflow tracker again on his phone, he found an out. 

After all, he shouldn't have the time to ponder Hange's own ideas of love when he had an application to maintain and investors to please. 

***

Levi ended up leaving work earlier than expected. It was a total lie to think there was any work needed to be done. Exhaustion clambered up quickly, a special kind of exhaustion at slogging through a day of work less than forty eight hours after being discharged from the hospital. An exhaustion that came with having spent a good hour lying to himself and to his subordinates that they had anything else to do before the release. 

"Any support queries?" Levi asked. It felt more like a formality. 

His subordinates had already started to pack their bags for the day. 

"Nothing too urgent," Petra answered. “Nothing that can be finished in ten minutes either..” 

“Leave it for tomorrow,” Levi said. As much as possible, he preferred to be the only one having to do over time. 

“Sir, do you have any idea when we would start working on that new request by Mr. Jaeger?”

Levi’s answer was calm and straightforward. “We’re currently working on a plan, me and Hange and as soon as we get it approved, we can have a meeting about it.” And exhaustion made acceptance all the more natural. “You’ve all been working hard the past weeks leading up to the release. Stay low or take leaves if you need to, I’ll handle making sure everything goes live on time.” 

Greetings were exchanged after that. Thank yous, sighs of relief and Levi wondered how hard the past few weeks have been, only for the release to have been delayed over Zeke’s request. Somehow, Levi felt some responsibility and guilt over such a ‘bug.’ Whether it was actually a bug or it was his own shortcomings as a human which caused the test to end that way,  whatever musins he had about them, did nothing to placate the guilt as he watched their relieved faces, their much calmer faces.

The next day he woke up to emails, requests for leaves that week which he immediately approved. One week of calm, one week long enough to have it go live that weekend. Then Monday would be the post release sanity check. 

He’d use the week to plan, to coordinate a little more with Hange. He opened his phone to see her number just on top, just like it had usually been recently. He had decided not to open her message until he got to the office. 

Business is business. He thought to himself. The banner had given hints to the message but there weren't many hints to the context of a date time. 

5/15 3:23AM. Check my body heat, serotonin levels, dopamine levels….

Less than a minute later, Levi was on the phone rattling numbers. 

“So they’re high,” Hange said. “High numbers are a sign of love.” 

Levi could have sworn he had heard the smile in her voice. “Why? Did something happen last night?”  

“Zeke and I had a late night. It was the most fun we had in a while.” 

Before Levi even noticed it himself, his mind was racing, asking questions. If Zeke had the love alarm on, would it have rang? And soon, it was clamoring for answers he knew he could never give.

Zeke’s own love alarm wouldn’t be on and even if it wasn’t on, it didn’t send data the same way Hange’s did. All he could do then was settle for speculation. “Maybe there is a bug then Hange. Or maybe there’s something wrong with the data. We’ll turn on your love alarm again when we visit, let’s try it again.” 

The call ended amiably and Levi was a little more sluggish soon after. He lay his phone back on his desk and turned on the love alarm. 

As expected, no hearts appeared. One hand on the keyboard next to him, he typed out a query and pulled his own data. His own hormone levels were much lower than 3am Hange’s. He opened the data Hange had analyzed just yesterday. The hormone levels were still low. 

He clicked on the settings on his application, back at the dashboard then pressed the home button and sighed. “Some developer I am, can’t even figure out how my app works anymore.”

Then he thought something he hadn’t thought in a while. Maybe going for something as complex as love from the start wasn’t such a good idea. 

[choisans]

gifmaking tutorial

As requested, here's a tutorial on how I make my gifs. Everyone's process is a little different, and mine changes from time to time, so it'll take some experimenting to find the settings that you like best. I’ll also link this tutorial here by Em, who is way more thorough than I’ll probably be, so check that out! The tutorial will be found in the read more below (apologies if it doesn’t work on mobile - this is a screenshot heavy piece of text).

My process uses Vapoursynth and Photoshop CS5 (I’m ancient I know!!). Avisynth is also another popular option if you already have that, but it’s been a while since I’ve used it. After the frames have been loaded into Photoshop, I then sharpen and colour my gifs before exporting. Some people will also use Topaz to clean up their gifs, but unfortunately that does not work well on my laptop. I use a Windows computer, so things may look slightly different if you’re using a Mac. 

STEP ONE  ⤅ Downloading your video 

To start off, find the highest quality possible of the video that you want to gif from. If it’s a stage, I highly recommend using ts files, which are much better quality than the versions you’ll find on Youtube. Ts files can be found on a variety of website such as 4sashi, kpop24hours (requires membership) and on Twitter. Here is an additional resource for finding ts files and downloading videos. For non-stages, 1080p will work best, though 2k and 4k are absolutely lovely and I would highly recommend those if they’re available. 

STEP TWO ⤅ Run your video through Vapoursynth 

You can install Vapoursynth following this tutorial. Vapousynth is essentially a program that will crop and compress your video files without losing any quality. It also has built-in sharpen and denoise functions that can take over the functions of Topaz. 

To start the process, you’ll drag your video onto the vapourscript and see a pop-up from Command Prompt. It will prompt you to enter two numbers: the first is the timestamp on the video for the start time for your gif (mine was at 3 min, 27 seconds). After pressing enter, it will then prompt you to enter the duration of the moment you want to gif (mine is 3 seconds). If you’re using Avisynth, the second prompt will be the second time stop (when you want the moment to end). I find that sometimes adding an extra second will help me capture the entire moment, but it’s up to your own discretion. 

Once you press enter a third time, the command prompt will run and then a pop-up will appear on your browser. You can then adjust several settings, including gif size, preprocessor, denoise filters and sharpening. There’s a lot of freedom here to choose what you’d like to do. 

In terms of gif size, you can pick any height that you think looks good but the widths that are optimized on Tumblr go as follows: 

1 gif per row: 540px width

2 gifs per row: 268px width (I tend to use the default 350px for height when making these)

3 gifs per row: 178px width (it’s funky here because the middle gif is 178px while the two on the side are 177px each, so you have to crop off a pixel later)

For the purposes of this tutorial, I’ll be making 178px gifs. The next option is preprocessor. This option will alter how the video renders. There are two main options - 30 or 60 - and this will refer the number of frames per second you’ll obtain. For live performance gifs, qtgmc 60 slow is generally the option I choose as it gives better quality frames (especially with a lot of movement) but you may find that qtgmc 30 slow is sufficient. For non ts files, I typically do not use any preprocessor settings. 

Most of the time, I don’t use denoise or sharpening filters as I prefer to do my sharpening and denoise in Photoshop. When I do choose to use denoise and sharpening, these are the settings I use. I don’t have a particular reason, but just that I like the way the gifs look. You can experiment with the settings to see what you like, and it can also vary with the gif. 

The difference between having those sharpening/denoise settings vs. doing it in Photoshop vs. no sharpening/denoise can also be seen with the three gifs below (note that I've coloured them, which we’ll get into a bit later). As you can probably tell, there’s not a HUGE difference in quality between the three because ts files tend to be already be very high quality but I would always recommend sharpening as it can make a very big difference in the quality of your gifs! 

After choosing the settings you want, you’ll then paste them into the VapouSynth Editor (which should’ve automatically popped up at the same time as the browser setting adjuster). For the purposes of this tutorial, I have chosen not to sharpen and denoise. You will copy paste the code from the browser (found at the right side) into the editor. My code was 4 lines and goes in between the code from the 11th line and 22nd line (yours should as well, though the line numbers may not match up - just make sure they say the same thing!) 

You’ll then want to hover on the script on the top bar and click on “Encode video”.

Once you click encode video, another box will pop up. Here, you’ll want to make one adjustment (shown in purple), before pressing start. At the header bar, you’ll want to exchange the preset “No header” for the Y4M option. After you’ve done that, you can press start found below (also highlighted in purple).

Congrats! You’ve finally finished processing your video!

STEP THREE ⤅ Make the gif in Photoshop

To important the frames into Photoshop, you’ll click File (top bar) > import > video frames to layers. Your output file from vapousynth should be found in the VapourSynth64Portable folder (based on where you first saved it) > gifs > output. Finally, click on the output.mov file to select it. You will then get a pop-up that looks like the following. I always keep these settings, though sometimes people will use limit to every 2 frames, but I find that will make your gifs look choppy. 

Based on the way your Photoshop layout is set up, the following steps may be found in different places than they’re found on my screen. You’ll want to have animation turned on (can be turned on under the windows dropdown menu, and just click on animation to turn on the frame view). If your bar is on the bottom of the screen, in the bottom right corner, you should press on the button (convert to timeline animation). I’ve highlighted the button in blue. 

After converting to timeline, I select all the frames in the layers window (can also be turned on in the windows dropdown menu and selecting layers). Then, right click and and press convert to smart object. This will turn all your layers into a single object so you can edit all the layers at once rather than having to edit each layer separately. 

After your smart object is created, I like to sharpen. I have an action, but to recreate the same effect, you will need to (1) duplicate the smart object (right click on the smart object > duplicate layer) (2) smart sharpen both smart objects with the following settings and then (3) put a gaussian blur only on the top layer with 1.0px. Both smart sharpen and gaussian blur can be found under the filter dropdown menu (filter > sharpen > smart sharpen or filter > blur > gaussian blur). 

Depending on the quality of the video, if I find the sharpening too strong, I will sometimes change the radius to 0.3 or 0.2 (a higher number = more sharpening). Finally, set the top layer to 50% opacity (I go anywhere from 35% to 50% depending on how “soft” I want the sharpening to look. A higher opacity for the top layer will create a softer look). When I finish this step, my layers will usually look like this. And good news: your basic gif is done!

STEP FOUR ⤅ Colouring 

Before you save the gif, you may want to colour the gif to make the colours look the way you want. This step is super subjective and every CC will colour differently - it’s why it’s so fun to see multiple sets of the same moment giffed, because each CC will colour a little differently! 

I’m not a colouring expert at all, but I’ll put a basic skeleton of the way I colour below and show you the difference between no colouring, a basic colouring, and a more complex colouring. Another fun thing about colouring is that it can also make your gif look much sharper and higher quality depending on what you do. 

To access the possibilities for colouring, you’ll want to go the adjustments window (once again can be accessed in the window dropdown menu and selecting adjustments). As you can tell, there’s a ton of adjustment options, which may seem overwhelming. You should definitely experiment to find that looks best to you! I usually go in the following order: curves (red), colour balance (orange), hue/saturation (yellow), selective colour (green), levels (blue) and finally exposure (purple). I won’t attempt to explain what each one does (there’s tons of tutorials out there!), but note that sometimes you’ll want to use an adjustment more than once to get the effect you desire. Layering of multiple of these adjustment layers is what will create a more complex colouring that you will find you like more. I also haven’t mentioned some of the other options, but definitely explore them all to figure out what you like!

STEP FIVE⤅ Saving your gif!

We finally made it to the end! To save your gif, head into the file dropdown menu and select save for web and devices. There’s a lot settings you can fiddle around with here in order to save the best possible gif, but these are typically the settings I go with. The most important to note in the top right corner with selective and pattern selected (play around with those as you may find that the other settings will look better based on the gif!). Also make sure colors is at 256 (maximum) as having less than 256 colours can make your gif look patchy. At the bottom right, make sure you’ve selected looping options: forever to make sure the gif will loop. Finally, at the bottom left, you can see the size of the gif in megabytes. Note that Tumblr will allow gifs up to 10mb to be uploaded, but gifs will typically look best when under 3mb (though debatable).

Press save and you’re done! Note that sometimes after you’ve saved, the timing of the gif will be either too fast or slow. You may need to reopen the gif again and adjust the timing. I find that if you’re using 60fps, 0.02-0.03s generally looks best, while 0.04-0.05 will look best when using 30fps or with a preprocessor. Try them out and see what looks right to you.

Congrats on making it through this tutorial and taking the time to make gifs. Making gifs you find nice won’t always come easily or with the first try, but keep going and you’ll eventually find a way that works for you that you’ll be happy with. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to stop by and ask me and I’ll do my best to help. Almost every CC will be happy to share tips and advice as well, so don’t be afraid to reach out to the people whose gifs you love. 

[kazbrkker]

Chapter 3: Embedded

Chapter summary: With the help of the Aces, the Urzikstan militia successfully gained a step closer to their mission. Meanwhile, Alex pieced together the scraps to uncover a hint of how Farah and Hadir knew Alexis five years ago.

Warnings: mentions of captivity, trauma recovery, weapons and violence.

26 OCTOBER 2019, 1530 "Alexis" and "Alex", Codename Aces CIA with Urzik Militia Aqtabi, Urzikstan.

Alexis adjusted the headdress for Alex, checking if it properly covered his face. He snatched her wrist mid-air, staring in concern, "Alena, huh. Haven't heard that in years. Thought she was dead."

Alena was Alexis' latest alias, the second alias created in the CIA and the fifth alias in her career. Seeing how her aliases were on a strictly need-to-know basis, it was shocking that both Farah and Hadir would know her by name. Especially since Alexis had a habit of only introducing herself as Saint.

The silver lining was that Alex could at least pinpoint when Alexis met the militia leader and brother. Five years ago, then known as Alena, her cover was blown.

It almost cost Alexis her life, barely escaping from the clutches of the mob alive. Alex led the covert search in Moscow for her, but found no evidence of her presence anywhere he looked. He desperately combed through every possible lead, refusing to stop even for just a second. Alex searched high and low everywhere for a full five months all while she was in custody of the mob. Until one day, she mysteriously turned up alive and patched up in St. Petersburg.

She never talked about what transpired in her captivity, nor did he pushed. But it thoroughly changed her, left psychological scars so deeply embedded in her that even Alex couldn't reach. 

"She is." Alexis reaffirmed, stuffing his fleeting thoughts back into their respective spaces in his brain. Their gaze connected, nodded reassuringly as she gently pried away from Alex's tight grip, "For everyone's sake, she's dead."

"She must be. You took such a long time recovering from–"

"Alex, don't." She whispered, words coated with a layer of unexpected sternness that stunned the two. "Alena is dead. End of story." The words rolled off her tongue with a shred of hostility. She turned on her heel, fixing on her own headscarf wordlessly to end the conversation. Farah stood by the window gathering intel from uncle Tariq, they had a limited window to hit the airbase and they needed to take it. 

Alex sighed worriedly, chasing after his best friend. The trio checked their ears comms, concealed their sidearms and headed out. Barkov's propaganda was blasted all over the loudspeakers. There wasn't anywhere you could hide from the dictator's brainwashing audio. Blended in as civilians, they walked down an abandoned, bombed-out bazaar swarmed with heavy military presence. Alexis' face scrunched in disgust, steering clear from the soldiers with guard dogs, "I hate dogs."

The soldiers freely abused the civilians, yelling and beating. She forcibly dug into her palms to maintain her composure when she witnessed one soldier dragging a civilian into a store, gunshots shortly followed. The said soldier walked out, wiping his blood-stained boots off concrete blocks in disgust. The blood on his boots repulsed him more than his ability to mindlessly take a human's life.

It was a mess, all of it — almost Hell on Earth. As blood-boiling and downright revolting it was, both CIA agents had seen and walked through worse. By now, it only served as a living memento of why she existed. Cold, she knows.

Later, the three of them lined up for labor work to blend in. Alexis tailed behind Farah, sneaking to a side door while Alex was isolated to carry cinder blocks. They reunited on the other side, ambushing an unaware, strayed soldier who was ruthlessly punching a vulnerable woman. Alex nippily stabbed him with the knife in his boot.

Farah assisted the woman to her feet while Alexis stayed for lookout. "Karim?"

"Stay safe, sister." She was thankful they got to the woman before the soldier could have done more. They broke open a door that led into another alley. "You're resourceful. Good." Farah caught a triumphant wink from Alexis, bearing full credit. "Let's go. I have contacts posted just ahead. They'll have more explosives for us. A bigger blast will pull more forces away from their base."

The small entourage defended each other's six, stealthily hiding behind a truck. Four soldiers stood where Farah's men were supposed to be. "Shit. Barkov's soldiers have found my contacts. They may be dead already."

"That means they are already on high alert." They'd have to kill these men to bypass them.

"Can't go loud, we need a suppressor."

"Find an oil filter. It will silence your weapons. Check civilian cars. I'll keep watch on the guards." Farah stayed as lookout. 

Alex and Alexis snuck into a nearby garage filled with civilian vehicles. "You look for the oil filters, I'll go find some makeshift thread adaptors."

"Yes ma'am," He singsonged, the tension between them already dissolved. They had a code, personal feelings would never be brought into the field. It was a lethal mistake that both of them knew better.

Alexis attached an oil filter through a hollow steel screw bolt, shaking her sidearm to check its stability. She grinned when it didn't rattle, score.

"That'll do. Nicely done," Alex praised.

"I know. What would you do without me?"

He winked, "I ask myself that every day."

They met Farah back at the truck, "Alex, flank right and take the two. Alexis and I will take the rest."

Upon two muffled shots, Alexis dropped the soldier in her crosshairs. She fired twice, once to break through the filter and another between her target's eyes. Unfortunately, the suppressor did not silence their gunshots enough, evident from the new soldier bursting through the door.

And he had Alexis in his shot.

She barely heard the whisper of her name before she ran forward, kicking his kneecaps to debilitate him.

"Alexis, move! I have a shot." She heard Alex over the comms.

Ignoring him, Alexis skillfully ducked a swing to swipe the combat knife in her boot, immaculately stabbing into his larynx in one clean move. She calmly dug deeper, laying the almost dead but silent soldier on the ground softly after she heard a muffled crack. Now, he was dead. 

"I rest my case." She cleaned her blade from the bloodied mess, eyes crinkling at Alex's overprotective nature. He'd always have her back.

In the next building, they lodged some bullets in a few more soldiers and successfully retrieved Farah's explosives. They were ready for phase two of the plan – bomb the airbase.

"I'm sorry about your contacts," Alex said, a statement more than an apology.

Regardless, Farah accepted with a nod. "We have the explosives. Their sacrifice will not be in vain. Hide the gun. We're going back outside. Follow me, I'll lead."

Alexis understood Alex's detachment, sharing it. From young, they were hardened by bloodshed, numbed. The first lesson they taught in special ops was compartmentalization and emotional detachment. Having served in tier-one task forces, it was hard to let anything faze them and throw them off course. Years of witnessing murders and getting their hands dirty changed them.

That remained the case. Until they stepped out.

Hell on Earth. Alexis decided as they came upon a staged execution – three civilians hung alive by a crane. They were subjected to helplessly watch it unfold. She bit the insides of her cheeks, seeing more accused awaiting their death sentence.

"This is a god damn war crime." Alex gritted out in disgust. This whole scene was mortifying repulsive. Under her head scarf, her lips were slightly parted and staggered breathing. A rare sight of lost composure for the female agent yet nobody could witness.

Around them, no one dared to weep, even though the immoral and unjust scene would command angry tears for anyone. Shedding a tear meant sympathy for the opposition and in Barkov's eyes, sympathy was treason.

Freedom, a concept unfathomed by the great evils in the world. Evils like Barkov, each thoroughly convinced they were guided by the angels. On the right side of history.

"Punishment, for the stolen gas... Barkov blames us for stealing it." Farah stated plainly with a lack of emotions in her tone. Hardened by years of warfare too.

Alexis' fingers glossed over the cold metal of her .357 Magnum, thinking how justified would it be to lodge a bullet in the perpetrators this instant. It wasn't until Alex nudged her forward before she realised she was standing in the middle of a pathway, gawking. Almost attracted unnecessary attention to the group.

That moment, the two CIA agents found conviction in their connected gaze. Bonded by a silent agreement of a new crusade that they now believe in. Clearly aware that they were treading a dangerous line of emotional attachment, but could care less. They continued walking.

"What can we do?" Alex questioned, a newfound resolve in his tone. The empathy in their voices was clear as day.

"Accomplish our mission and put an end to Barkov's cruelty forever."

They agreed, forever it is. Hopefully this time, forever truly meant... forever.

The second part of their mission was easier, for Alex. As a man, he could use his cover to deliver cinder blocks into sensitive areas that she couldn't enter. While he had the easy way out, she climbed along the structures to reach the chopper she had to destroy. They managed to plant the C4 charges without alerting any guards.

Farah, Alex, and Alexis regrouped shortly in a safe zone, away from hostiles. "Blow the charges."

"Fire in the hole." Sharp bursts of explosion sounded without delay, the acrid smell of smoke penetrating their senses. Sirens immediately went off, and soon, majority of the military started pouring in to the source.

"It worked, multiple trucks heading in," Alexis reported, crouching behind a metal structure that concealed her. "Let's wait for them to pass."

The overwhelming trucks of soldiers played to their advantage as they crawled underneath their vehicles to escape. Escaping right under their nose, but not before leaving parting gifts of explosives under the engine. Their seemingly impossible escape was quick, under and out. The hardest part was over.

Just as they ran into an alley, they were spotted by an unexpected group of soldiers.

"Shit! Go! Get back!" Farah yelled and they pivoted immediately to bolt out of the alley. Farah flung her explosive-filled backpack in the soldiers' direction and detonated it in a desperate act, blowing their civilian cover. The sharp shrill of explosion attracted more soldiers to their positions.

They followed Farah and ran into the opposite direction, snaking along buildings in attempts to avoid the sprays of bullets. A slight burn in Alexis' arm temporarily slowed her down until Alex pulled her forward, yelling at her to keep running.

Another truck of soldiers skidded to a stop from their left, "We're getting boxed in!"

"I'm going to blow it! Right, go right!" More explosives went off at close range, causing an irritatable ringing in their ears. They expertly manoeuvred in and out of buildings, successfully evading the soldiers.

"Holy shit!"

"You're telling me! Farah, I sure as hell hope you have a plan!" Alexis replied, ignoring the intensified burn in her left arm and leapt out a window.

A putrid, horrifying smell of decaying corpses punched all the air out of their lungs as Farah unlatched a locked gate. At least a dozen bodies were casually littered across the dying grass, accompanied by flies and maggots.

"Farah, what the hell is this?" Alex spat in disgust.

"This is a damn massacre..." She almost couldn't believe what she was staring at – a mass grave. Only Barkov didn't even have the decency to bury the dead. The fire in her heart only burned bigger.

"More of Barkov's war crimes." Their ears perked at the sound of foreign soldiers conversing in the building ahead. "They're coming. Get down. Hide your guns, there are too many."

All of them dropped onto the ground, arms twisted to imitate the dead bodies. Alexis took a deep breath and held it, lying deadly still. Just she shut her eyes, her gaze averted to the decaying body of a child right where she laid. The image remained etched in her mind even with her eyes pinched tight, the outline of it was something she would never forget. A new unwanted memory that would join the other collections of horrifying scenes she witnessed in her years. 

A god damn child. Caught into someone else's war. 

She was the last in line, behind Alex and Farah. The gradual softer footsteps against the rustling of grass suggested most of the men moved forward.

A pained scream almost escaped from her lips when one of the soldiers accidentally stepped on her left arm, the full weight of his step nearly crushing her bones. He laughed, chattering in his native language about how this bitch got in the way.

"Alexis, what the hell happened?" Alex frantically whispered over the comms.

"Bastard almost damn near broke my arm. I'm fine." She winced, crawling up to catch up to them. 

Farah and Alex eliminated the remaining three soldiers on guard. "Quick, get up this ladder, the tunnels are just up ahead!"

She braved through the piercing pain and climbed the ladder, refusing to let Alex examine her injuries. Her spitfire personality mumbled a 'we can bitch about it later' as she went up. Well aware of her stubborn nature, he suppressed a sigh and only said, "Stay in front of me, I'm not asking."

Alexis obliged, truthfully too lazy for a debate. They hopped over a stone wall and grinned as more air reinforcements rushed to take their bait. Another left turn later, the safehouse was finally in their sights.

The front door, however, was wide open. "Stop! Shit, Tariq's door is open."

"Where's Tariq?"

"Dead. He would never abandon his post."

A pull of sorrow tugged at Alexis' heartstrings, unable to fathom a fraction of how Farah even felt. Although they were both soldiers, Alexis could never begin to understand how it felt to lose people she cared about every day. It only deepened the amount of respect she had for Farah. Weapons raised, they scoured their surroundings before entering the empty safehouse.

"Clear! Let's head down, get to Hadir..."

"You lost good people today," Alex said sincerely, sharing a look with Farah.

There was a look of longing in the commander's eyes as she stared at the now empty guard post, but it disappeared quickly as it came. "That is the cost of this war. Now, let's take Barkov's airbase so their deaths are not in vain."

"We're in for a hell of a fight."

"So are they. Hadir has a plan."

Alexis nodded at their statements, earnestness in her words. "We'll get them, Farah."

Alex halted the overly eager agent with a raised eyebrow. He climbed down the ladder first. When it was her turn, he grabbed her legs and jerked downwards, causing her good arm to slip from the ladder bars.

She fell right into his waiting embrace, hands on her waist to slowly settle her down. With her injured arm, she punched into his chest as though to prove a point.

"I know that's revenge for this afternoon," She said with a mischievous glint, thinking back to earlier when she angered him with her poor joke. She patted his shoulder teasingly and headed into the dark tunnels, nursing her sore arm. The tunnels echoed with her words. "Never pegged you for a petty fool, Alex."

"Maybe I'm just caring for my best friend. Where's the gratitude?" In complete darkness, she felt herself being lifted off the ground.

With an arm under her knees and another supporting her back, Alex begged her to stop thrashing about and promised he would let her down before they entered the light. He knew her belief about being a strong independent woman, and how much she hated sympathy tossed her way in moments of weakness – especially when she was injured. But anything he could do to ease the pain off his best friend, he would.

"You can shove that gratitude up your ass, Alex." She stopped fighting him, head resting on his muscular chest. Since nobody could witness her weakness in these dark tunnels, she briefly allowed herself to relax for a split moment.

"Starting to reconsider if I can live without you, Lexi."

Farah followed behind the bickering pair with a knowing smile.

a/n: hope you guys enjoyed this chapter. masterlist here. want to be tagged? let me know!

[imo-chan-imagines]

How do you make your banners? I've been wanting to try making some but I have no clue how

Hi there! Thanks for your ask.

I'm sorry it took a while to get to it. I wanted to answer it properly, and I've been a bit busy recently. Anyway, it's going to be a long post, so without further ado: let's get into it.

So, there's actually a few ways you can go about making banners. The ones you've seen me use are actually ready-made ones that I've sourced off the internet. That's a perfectly valid way to do it, but it can make it tricky finding free ones or giving people the right credit for using them.

Making your own is a little harder, but I've done plenty of that myself over the years in different fandoms and on different blogs. (I make mine on my mobile, so I'll be talking about apps and stuff.)

You can make your own a couple of different ways.

If you're artistic, you can draw them yourself and scan them into the computer and add them that way

You can source backgrounds and transparent overlays yourself on Google etc. and piece them together yourself in an app like PhotoLayers

Or you can use an app that has everything included, like Adobe Spark Post

Personally, I think Adobe Spark Post is an infinitely better option, particularly if you're new to the editing scene, so I'll talk a little bit more about it.

I will just say that you have to be 13 years or older to use it, and you also have a create an account, but I'm assuming that shouldn't be a problem.

You won't have seen them yet, but I've been working on my own banners/post partitions in Adobe Spark Post recently to use in some fanfics that I've been writing, and possibly for my headcanons, too.

What's good about Adobe Spark Post is that:

It's a self-contained app that already has all the ingredients for making stunning banners, so you don't need to go looking yourself

The base app is really good despite being free, but there is the option of the paid experience for an upgrade and extra content (if you so choose)

It's all licensed properly, so you don't need to worry about the legal side of things, and you own the things you create

It's really easy and intuitive to use

Adobe Spark Post works off the basis of templates, so when you get started, you can scroll through a plethora of amazing-looking templates and choose the one you want to 'remix', as they call it. You can change as much or as little as you want, even scrapping everything and starting afresh if you so choose!

You can also add all sorts of text, symbols and photos, with a massive range of editing capabilities, including animations and filters. It also comes with intuitive, colour-coded guidelines that pop up when you've positioned something exactly in the middle of either the post or something close by, so you can properly centralise it, which is really handy. And everything is in stunning HD!

If you want to remove the Adobe Spark Post watermark in the corner, just tap it and click 'Remove from this post.'

It's good for simple graphic banners for a cuter feel, like the ones I've used in my headcanon posts, or for complex, photographic-based ones for a glossy, sophisticated look.

And Adobe Spark Post isn't just for banners. You can make all sorts of graphic designs on it, with a mind-boggling number of pre-made, recognised sizes, including ones belonging to different social media posts, or you can free-hand it and make your own.

I'm really gushing about it, arent I? This isn't sponsored, I promise 😂

Here are some examples of a few that I made for you just now in Adobe Spark Post. Feel free to use them, if you want!

I'd be happy to talk more about Adobe Spark Post again if you want some help with it, or go more into the actual composition of banners, headers, and partitions, like choosing layouts, colour schemes, themes, etc. if that would be helpful. As you can see, I can talk for England on it.

I hope you found this useful! Feel free to ask me stuff anytime!

[abalonetea]

updated character list, because i’m procrastinating Work and also I've made major changes since the last one, woops

                                                    Adele Adler  

the handler, the woman in charge. She runs relay between all four teams, doling out missions, handling issues that arrive on and off base, and acting as go between for the Teams and the Council. she’s supposed to keep her distance between them, and had managed that for all the teams before now, but…the men are growing on her! she has a surprising soft spot for most of them, and finds herself more and more willing to turn blind eyes on their shenanigans.

_-_

                                                  West Team

                                                   Jeremy - Speedster

a rough upstart from the streets of Los Angeles. he spent nearly six years bouncing from city to city, and did a very large stint running drugs for a prominent crime organization. with hands that have been broken more than a few times and a serious case of ADHD, paired with a short temper and a habit of fighting dirty, he’s a firecracker out on the field.

                                              Joshua - Sharpshooter

born in Roturoa, but more often found in the wilds away from other people. if it moves, he’s been paid to hunt it before. perpetually tired and with a bad eye from an old shooting injury, it can sometimes be surprising that he’s so fierce out on the field. especially when it comes to people bothering what’s his.

                                                   Feliciano - Rouge

served in the Iradium War just outside of Rome, briefly, and made a living as a bodyguard for a while. he’s used to being neither seen or heard as a result, and it’s led to a very slow process in finding a place for himself on the team. that being said, he’s got a fondness for making poorly timed jokes on the field, directly before stabbing an opponent in the neck.

                                                     Lukas - Techie

a former teacher at the SPFOT, where he created the original prototype for prosthetic limbs fueled by iradium. knows more about the strange element than anyone else, and found himself working for the GSC after being framed for the murder of a former colleague. you’ll often find him building devices that will stop him from having to get involved with hand in hand combat.

                                                     Deiter - Doctor 

after losing everything that he owned during WW2, Deiter found himself working as a black market doctor, trading treatment for food and places to stay. extremely fond of the team that he has now, and very invested in making sure that they consistently come back in one piece - despite the occasional code disruptions that occur.

                                                     Jamie - General

from a small town to the fields of the Iradium War, he’s been fighting from the moment he had the chance. close contact with constant iradum boom’s have left him with some pretty bad hearing loss, and a strong dislike for explosives work. excels in planning and finding the strong points in his comrades.

_-_

                                                     East Team

                                                     Scout - Scout

grew up in Boston, where he was raised by a single mother, with five younger siblings. between the ADHD and the dyslexia, he’s lacking in confidence, and making up for it in bluster. a proud owner of pigeon wings, an iradium baseball bat, and a true master at sleight of hands, including coin tricks.

                                                     Jane - Guard

a former soldier in WW2, who came away from the fight with some hearing issues. very loud and a little too blunt for most people’s likings. has eagle wings, but one of them’s broken and held in place with a handmade strap. takes great pride in his job. very good at sewing, and gets a kick out of Scout’s jokes even if he won’t admit it.

                                                    Corentin - Thief

 he was drafted into the Korean War, where he served a grueling eight months before being attacked by military trained dog-horses and sent home. a chronic insomniac who never settled back into civilian life, and has an abysmally childish sense of humor. usually tasked with cooking meals on his team. lovebird wings.

                                                    Ollie - Arsonist

a firebug from Daytona who was picked up by Seamus, and not Adele. really wants to do his job well and not fuck things up, but has a case of chronic bad luck. paired up with Scout, they become the gruesome twosome, and cause prank-Hell for the rest of the team. collects lighters. sparrow wings.

                                                    Seamus - Gunner

an alcoholic with a penchant for creating updated guns, and a fondness for loud music. he/s a great cook but never bothers with it. got caught in a car bomb when he was younger, and has pretty bad back issues now. Ollie’s proving to be good for him. great skua wings. (subclass - Builder)

                                                    Sasha - Healer

a doctor with a love for guns, and a history with a cult in Siberia. she’s an optimistic person, though large crowds make her a little nervous. has more common sense than the ret of her team mates put together, drinks vodka in her tea, and has vulture wings. heavily linked to a hypothetical angel of death. (subclass - gun enthusiast)

_-_

                                                    North Team

                                                    Tony - Runner 

local loudmouth of North team. you cannot pay this boy to be quiet, and he’s both stupid as a bag of bricks and also incredibly intelligent. from New York, where he had a lovely stint robbing the Italian mafia blind with his husband, Rizzo, until they were both shot up and picked up by Adele. part of a modern day bonnie and clyde.

                                                    Rizzo - Demolitions Expert

pretty adorable if you can get past the fact that he’s incredibly crass and has no filter between mind and mouth. Hopelessly in love with his husband, even if no one else realizes they’re married. he will burn water if you let him cook, so maybe best if you don’t.

                                                    Loto - Archer

from the Louisiana bayous, and great with a cross bow. has an old coonhound-horse that sleeps in bed with him, but who Loto claims to hate. often forgets that he needs to actually go to the kitchen and get food, and that the food he needs is easily available.

                                                     Braeburn - Mechanic

the longest running member of any of the active teams. has a prosthetic arm. really fond of sweet tea, and has more idea of what’s going on than he’s willing to let on. bound up in so many contracts, it’s literally woven into his Intent.

                                                    (N/A - Medic)

                                                    (N/A - Assassin)

_-_

                                                    South Team

                                                    Elias - Soldier

a big softy, under all that gruffness. a pretty shy guy, and any kindness will make him flustered. was pulled into a unit of winged soldiers for the Iradium War on a technicality. spent four years traveling around the states with BJ. has a severe case of HEARTsickness. greater frigate wings.

                                                    BJ - Hurricane 

left an abusive home at fourteen and has been on the streets since. took a contract with GSC to get Elias medical treatment. dyslexic, and often described by his team as “being a lot”. a baseball enthusiast from Orlando, who’s basically Florida Man with hummingbird wings.

                                                    Olek - Firepower 

can probably punch you hard enough to get a KO, but fights with an Iradium powered flare-gun that does serious damage. from Russia, with a strict I won’t tell you anything about my past policy, and a bizarre fondness for bears. great at giving hugs when you’re down. curly goose wings.

                                                    Jakob - Maker 

has a highly advanced prosthetic eye. losing the vision in his other eye. the guy who picked up BJ and Elias. has a real morality struggle between the job he does, and his own views on Mercy. probably needs a hug more than he lets on. rhode island red wings.

                                                    Jules - Spy

one of the longest lasting members of the Compass teams. served in WW2, and the Iradium War. genderfluid, and doesn’t remember their real name. walks a thin line between being distant and flirtatious as fuck, with the bad habit of falling asleep while he’s smoking. used to have cardinal wings

                                                    Gabe - Hunter

a former worker on an Alaskan fishing boat, he’s a remarkable shot with a rifle and can catch most anything in traps including humans. head strong and doesn’t take direction well. falcon wings. (sub class - Field Medic)

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHAT NO ONE UNDERSTANDS ABOUT SOMETHING

If you can make as good a bet a few months in. Where does it increase discontinuously? Far from it. I expected, but I don't think any would have traded it for a job in a cubicle. To see an interesting variety of probabilities we have to look at the problem from the other end. Frightening as it seemed to them, is practically nothing.1 If you're still in school, you're surrounded by potential cofounders. Fortunately the statistical approach is not usually the first one people try when they write more code. Remember, the original Silicon Valley startup, weren't even trying to start a startup doing something technically difficult, just write enterprise software. There's plenty of empirical evidence: armies, religious cults, and so far no spam that does.

And there is no way they can get around that. There's something fake about it. You need to work at something that pays the bills too, even though you don't need the money? In true startups, there are probably twenty sane ones who think Start another company? Raising money is not like applying to college, but boring. And the cost of checks may actually be increasing. And since it's hard to write a short comment that's distinguished for the amount of work that could be done in this area. Pictures of kittens, political diatribes, and so far no spam that does.

They think they're trying to convince investors. What's going on here? If you have a smaller pool to draw from this is not how to find a cofounder. I want to spend as little time inside the minds of spammers as possible. And in her typical quiet way she encouraged that illusion. That word business is an important one to remember. A job is the expectation that you're supposed to be there at certain times. Now I would guess that practically every Stanford or Berkeley undergrad who knows how to program has at least considered the idea of starting a startup and failed over someone who'd spent the same time working at a big company. And even within the world of content-based filters are the way to get started is to bootstrap yourself off your existing connections, be a good angel investor is simply to be a good angel investor is simply to be a single long stream of text for purposes of counting occurrences, I use the number of startups any one acquirer could assimilate, but if there is value to be had, in the summer of 2005, had eight startups in it. And odds are that is in fact the bullshit-minimizing option. Once they invest in a company with a high probability of being moderately successful. Why waste your time climbing a ladder that might disappear before you reach the top?

Suddenly a culture that had been more or less united was divided into haves and have-nots. Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Enterprise software companies aren't technology companies, they're sales companies, and the resulting hybrid worked well. And even within the world of content-based filters are the way to do this is through contacts. Their lives are short too. How do you do? Checks instituted by governments can cripple a country's whole economy.

There are already a bunch of big public companies doing search. If you start a startup, is start a consulting business you can then gradually turn into a product business. If you go to work for him unless he is super convincing. The thing that really sucks about having a regular job, you'll probably fail.2 The part of angel investing that the decisions are hard. Why do founders persist in trying to convince investors of something so much less speculative—whether the company is good. If you had a handful of the most successful startups are the ones you never hear about: the company that would be painless, though annoying, to lose. 9359873 managed 0. You don't have to explain not just the benefit but the cost. The reason the spammers use the kinds of things that matter: them. Not having a cofounder is a real problem. But it's important to remember we're trying to solve a new problem, because that means we're going to have to work at something that pays the bills.

Based on my corpus, sex indicates a. Ideally the answer is that it only recently became a good idea would be to accumulate a giant corpus of spam, or even triples, rather than their combined length, as the divisor in calculating spam probabilities. The most successful angel investors I know are mean. It has for me.3 As with the question of cofounders, the real lesson here is to start startups who shouldn't, I make my own life worse. When they think it's time to raise money, they try gamely to make the headers look innocent, but my guess is that it only recently became a good idea would be to accumulate a giant corpus of spam. And, by no coincidence, the corporate ladder had a value analogous to the goodwill that is a very real element in the valuation of companies.

Which means we will increasingly have to make their mails indistinguishable from your ordinary mail. And that's fine.4 If you develop ideas in a startup instead of within a big company. Creating such a corpus would be useful for other kinds of filters too, because it could be used to test them.5 Not opting out is not the long but mistaken argument, but the word madam never occurs in my legitimate email, and whatever was found on the site could be included in calculating the probability of the email being a spam. And only good people can ride the thermals if they hit them anyway. Here is an example of that rare bird, a spam that gets through the filters of someone who responds to a spam. 99. So you shouldn't do it if you don't have a good idea, because something changed, and no one has committed yet? How do you do? To some extent you have to put up with the bullshit forced on you, the more survives. They're saying He invested in Google.

One thing you learn when you get rich is that there are many different kinds of software being used simultaneously. The agreement by which you invest should have provisions that let you contribute to future rounds to maintain your percentage. Steve and Alexis. If they don't need you, it will stop working, and the most interesting fifteen tokens, where interesting is measured by how far their spam probability is from a neutral. They send spam because it works. Second, I think it will be accepted even if its spam probability is from a neutral.6 And the cost of checks, you can always write that book, or climb that mountain, or whatever, and then you realize the window has closed. Acquirers know the rule holds for them too: if users love you, you can do it on a smaller scale without moving. It occurs mostly in unsubscribe instructions, but here is used in a completely innocent way. Don't get hung up on mechanics or deal terms. The best way to get experience if you're 21 is to start startups, and explain which are real. That's why I love working on Y Combinator.

Notes

I'm not saying we should be working on what interests you most. 2%. The US is the discrepancy between government receipts as a single snapshot, but less than 1.

And I'm sure for every startup founder could pull the same work faster.

They then grant the founders chose? Think it's too late to launch. The undergraduate curriculum or trivium whence trivial consisted of Latin grammar, rhetoric, and journalists—have the perfect point to spread them.

That would be on demand, and partly because it consisted of three stakes. But when you had in grad school, because such companies need huge numbers of users comes from a mediocre VC. She ventured a toe in that water a while we might think it is very common, to the Bureau of Labor. People who know the combination of a rolling close doesn't mean easy, of course some uncertainty about how closely the remarks attributed to Confucius and Plato saw themselves as teachers of administrators, and some just want that first few million.

It is the unpromising-seeming startups encounter mediocre investors almost all do, so they had to bounce back. It is probably part of grasping evolution was to become one of the word wealth. The First Industrial Revolution, England was already the richest of their hands thus tended to be high, and Windows, respectively.

5% a week for 4 years. They would probably find it hard to grasp the cachet that term had.

[tabletopinfinities]

Mage: the Ascension

Reality is a lie. The truth is magic. Open your eyes and Awaken.

What’s the premise?

It’s our modern world, but magic is real. Technology is just a different form of magic. Other forms of magic were driven underground and are harder to conjure up, because consensus belief shapes reality, and people these days find it easier to believe in, say, cars and guns than they do fireballs or flying carpets. Oh, and also there’s a war on for control over reality itself.

You see, a long time ago (circa the 13th century to be precise), a group of mages got tired of wizards being able to throw fireballs willy-nilly, summon up demons, and generally make life a pain for everyone. They wanted to bring order to the world and tame and control magic for the good of all. Of course, they would be the ones in charge of this new world order. These guys would become the Technocracy, the all-seeing, all-powerful architects of consensus reality. Using advanced hypertechnology beyond mundane comprehension, they’re trying to wipe out magic for good and make the world safe for Sleepers - the mundane masses that have no idea that magic even exists.

Fighting on the side of magical freedom is the Council of Nine Mystic Traditions. Formed in response to the Technocracy, each Tradition represents a particular form of magical practice. In brief, they are: wizards, druids, priests, shamans, martial artists, hippies, assassins, mad scientists, and hackers. They don’t always get along with each other, but they band together to fight the Technocracy and try and bring “real” magic back into the world. So far, they’re still losing, but the fight is far from over.

In between these guys are a wide range of other independent magical societies and solo mages, everything from goths (well, it is a White Wolf game) to ancient African sorcerer-kings. There’s also the Nephandi, who are evil mages who serve demons and other beings beyond our world. They just want to drag the world down into Hell (and they might be the ones truly winning, in the end). There’s the Marauders, who are mages who’ve lost their grip on reality so bad that they actually warp reality around themselves. And there are whole other realms of supernatural weirdness to explore, including crossing over with the other World of Darkness games (Vampire: the Masquerade, Werewolf: the Apocalypse, Wraith: the Oblivion, etc).

You’d like it if you’re into: Harry Potter, The Matrix, The Magicians, The Invisibles, Mr. Robot

Why do you recommend it?

Lots of games have you playing as magic-users and casting spells. This one lets you do it however you want to. The magic system is almost totally freeform, meaning that rather than being locked to a list of spells you figure out what you want your spell to do and how you want that effect to appear. This means you can make whatever kind of character you want, from the classic wizard archetype to cyberpunk technomancers to priestesses of forgotten goddesses whose sacred gun shoots bullets that sprout into roses. The only limit is your imagination (and your dice rolls).

The setting reflects that limitlessness. It’s a clash between high tech and high magic that can fit all your wild ideas inside it. If you want to have a journey through the realms of faerie one session and then invade an orbital cyborg factory the next, you can do that all with the same characters. I love settings that let you pit genres against each other like that, and Mage is among the most flexible of them.

Finally - Mage is a game about personal discovery that encourages you to make your own personal discoveries. It asks you to explore what it really means to control reality - and maybe see if you can apply that to your own reality. Especially with the 20th Anniversary Edition, which is one of the most welcoming, hopeful RPG sourcebooks I’ve ever read.

What are the rules like?

The Storyteller System that powers the World of Darkness games is pretty straightforward - roll a bunch of d10s, see how many dice beat the difficulty number, subtract the number of 1s you rolled from that, and the result is the number of successes you got, which tells you how well you did at what you were trying to do. Roll too many 1s and you get a critical failure. It lets you describe a more evocative set of outcomes than systems like D&D where you simply succeed or fail.

Combat is fairly realistic, with guns and all being about as lethal as you’d expect - although of course there are various magical weapons and defenses to complicate things.

The bulk of the system rules is devoted, of course, to magic. Here’s where the game both shines and gets bogged down. You get to come up with spells for your character with effects based on how skilled they are in the various spheres of magic, with flavor filtered through their particular magical style. It’s a twist that really lets you feel like you’re working with reality-changing magic. Want to cast a basic fireball? Sure. Want to represent that as an Atlantean plasma gun or God smiting your enemies with a pillar of flame? Go for it. Want to use magic to grow a snail to giant size and then send it an hour into the past to destroy your enemies before they caught up with you? That is definitely something you can try and do in this game, although that one might require a lot of successes.

The catch is that if you don’t do what consensus reality expects, e.g., growing a snail to giant size in front of a street full of onlookers, the universe is likely to smack you down with the force of Paradox. That’s what keeps reality cohesive and stops mages from battling it out in the streets. Push the universe too far and it starts pushing back, in the form of bad luck, spontaneous human combustion, or, in extreme cases, popping you out of reality altogether for a little bit (or maybe forever). Paradox might even manifest as a physical spirit to haunt you. This applies to Technocrats as much as it does to Tradition mages, because the masses aren’t ready to accept giant robots or cyber-tooth tigers just yet. In fact, there might be pockets of reality where magic works and technology doesn’t… go to an Amish community and heal them with laying on hands versus a fancy tricorder and see which one attracts more Paradox.

The tradeoff for such flexibility is that it becomes a bit time-consuming to figure out what your character’s capable of, how well they’ll have to roll to pull it off, and what it looks like within the rules. Most complicated spells require proficiency in a few different spheres, e.g., Correspondence to do stuff at long range, Prime to create something out of nothing, or Time to bind a spell to a certain duration. Once you’ve got a firmer grasp on the systems and a few standardized “rote” spells in your pocket you start to get the hang of it though.

What’s my character like?

Starting as a neophyte mage, you’ll be capable of basic spells in a couple of Spheres, but you won’t be able to change reality in major ways. You get to choose whether you’re better at Physical, Social, or Mental attributes, and put points into different skills. You’ll get some Backgrounds, which represent the resources your character has - allies, a familiar, access to arcane libraries, magic artifacts, etc. You’ll also decide what your character’s exterior Demeanor and inner Nature are, as well as the Essence of their enlightened soul. These are, sort of, your character’s alignment, and roleplaying in accordance with them will let you regain Willpower, which you can use to reroll dice (among other things). Finally, you’ll decide what the trappings of your character’s magic are and what instruments and rituals they use as foci for their different Spheres.

Those spheres of magic, in case you were wondering, are Mind, Prime (manipulating Quintessence, the raw force of magic), Time, Spirit, Entropy (which covers both death and probability), Forces (fire, wind, energy, etc.), Matter, Life, and Correspondence (travel, distance, and connection).

Most characters also belong to some particular faction, which shapes what Spheres they’re skilled in. Each of the Traditions corresponds to one of the nine Spheres, but most factions get a choice between two or three appropriate Spheres to receive a bonus. I’m listing the factions out in the 20th Anniversary Edition; there are a few other factions from older editions lurking in the corners of the world, but these are the big players.

Traditions:

Akashic Brotherhood (Mind): Asian martial artists and spiritualists devoted to mastery of the self and harmony with the universe. They practice Do, which is the primal martial art from which all others descend.

Celestial Chorus (Prime): Monotheists who believe that all should be harmonized under the pure unity of the One and its beautiful Song.

Cult of Ecstasy (Time): Hedonistic hippies who embrace altered consciousness through drugs, sex, meditation, music, pain, dance, and all that other good stuff.

Dreamspeakers (Spirit): African and Native American spirit-talkers and medicine men who, honestly, sort of got folded together by the rest of the Traditions so they could put all the brown-skinned mages in one place. They’re dedicated to restoring the health of the spirit world and thus also our own.

Euthanatos (Entropy): Ancient Greek and Indian (and elsewhere) cultists devoted to maintaining the great wheel of reincarnation by ensuring that everything dies at its proper time. Essentially, they’re death-worshipping assassins with a strict moral code.

Order of Hermes (Forces): These are they guys who probably come to mind when you think of a mage, all complicated spell components and dusty books and Enochian incantations. Haughty and pedantic, and sort of the de facto leadership of the Traditions. They’re the ones who founded the whole thing, after all.

Sons of Ether (Matter): Mad scientists, steampunks, and pulp explorers, each with their own crackpot theories that they vigorously defend. Formerly a part of the Technocracy, they got kicked out for clinging to outmoded forms of science. But they’ll show them all.

Verbena (Life): Pagan, druid, and witch types who believe in the power of nature and the old ways. They think technology has made the modern world too soft and that struggle and sacrifice are part of the natural order - sometimes very literal sacrifice.

Virtual Adepts (Correspondence): The newest members of the Traditions, this bunch of hackers left the Technocracy to go their own way - spurred on by one of their founders, Alan Turing, martyring himself to create the Internet (really!). Anarchists and tricksters who can hack reality as well as they can hack computers, the Adepts spend a lot of time hanging out in the Digital Web, the magical version of cyberspace.

Technocracy:

Iteration X: The engineers and efficiency experts of the Technocracy, Iteration X believes in a grand vision of mechanized perfection. They specialize in robotics, weapons, and cybernetics. Ultimately, they want to merge man with machine - even if that doesn’t align with the goals of the rest of the Technocracy.

New World Order: The NWO are the ones running the Technocracy - and thus the world. Illuminati and panopticon rolled into one, their legions of men in black specialize in surveillance, media manipulation, and “social conditioning,” all of which they use to advance their vision of a controlled and productive reality.

Progenitors: The biologists. Cloning, genetic engineering, and controlled evolution are all at their command. They research new medicine and biotechnology for the benefit of all mankind, though sometimes their methodology is a little extreme.

Syndicate: The money men. Actually, they literally invented money. A healthy mix of thugs and Gordon Gekko types, the Syndicate controls the world’s corporations (and quite a few extralegal organizations) to fund the rest of the Technocracy and get rich in the process. Their “magic” focuses on self-discipline, psychology, and manipulating the raw Primal Utility of the universe like an Econ textbook come to life.

Void Engineers: Exploring the worlds beyond ours - and defending humanity from the threats that live there. The Void Engineers are the most out-there (literally) Convention of the Technocracy, the most unorthodox and also the most willing to work with mages and other “reality deviants” as necessary. They specialize in Spirit magic - although to them, it’s “Dimensional Science.” Their spaceships scout the outer reaches of the universe and beyond, carrying contingents of power-armored marines ready to blast anything dangerous.

The Disparate Alliance:

Once scattered, separate magical traditions and organizations, in recent times these “disparates” have banded together to maintain power separate from the Traditions or the Technocracy.

Ahl-i-Batin: Once a part of the Traditions, sitting where the Virtual Adepts do now on the seat of Correspondence, the “subtle ones” believe in a grand unity of all things, influenced by Islamic mysticism. These days they work in secret, observing and acting only when necessary. They hold a particular hatred of the Nephandi and will always act to stop them.

Bata’a: Vodouists and other African-diaspora Loa worshippers who derive their magic from respectful agreement with the spirits. Largely an informal group, they have a wide membership across the world.

Children of Knowledge: The descendants of the Solificati, an ancient group of alchemists that was once a Tradition, the Children of Knowledge use their alchemical knowledge to purify base souls into golden souls. Sometimes that process involves designer psychotropic drugs - the Children actually invented LSD.

Hollow Ones: A ragtag group of goths, punks, and other weirdos and misfits who seek to bring capital-R Romance back to the world, a la the era of Shelley and Byron. They spend a lot of time looking fashionable in the club scene, but also sheltering other mages who don’t have a place to belong. Their magic tends to be a patchwork of various styles and tools.

Kopa Loei: The descendants of Hawaiian and other Polynesian wizard-priests, dedicated to preserving their arts and native lands against the predations of ha’ole influence.

Ngoma: Powerful wizards of ancient Africa who took offense to being lumped in en masse with the Dreamspeakers at the first meeting of the Traditions, and went their own way. Decimated by imperialism and slavery that nearly destroyed their ancient ways, the surviving Ngoma seek out positions of power and respect in mortal society while also establishing schools to revive their art.

Orphans: A catch-all term for any mage that doesn’t belong to a particular faction, this can include deeply idiosyncratic self-taught mages, small groups who follow a particular paradigm together, or even defectors from one of the major factions. Quite often, they might not even be aware of larger magical society.

Sisters of Hippolyta: Tracing their descent from the ancient Amazons, the Hippolytoi largely live in separate enclaves from the rest of society. They dedicate themselves to worshipping the Divine Feminine, striving towards world peace, and liberating oppressed peoples of all types. Their magic focuses around pagan medicine-work.

Taftani: Middle Eastern mages who are masters of creating magical artifacts, as well as binding djinni to their will. They believe in a dualistic universe of Truth and Lies, and that working vulgar magic and exposing people to the Truth that magic is real is a moral good.

Templar Knights: Yes, those Templars, now existing as a secretive paramilitary order. Formerly (and largely still) male-only, the Templars fight evil and await the return of Christ, when they will become His army.

Wu Lung: Ancient Chinese sorcerers (and longstanding enemies of the Akashic Brotherhood) who wielded great wealth and power before the Cultural Revolution drove them out of China. Having adapted to the modern world, they seek to regain their power and lead a rebirth of traditional Chinese magic and culture.

What’s the campaign like?

Most games focus on mages of different Traditions coming together as a cabal (or Technocratic Conventions as an Amalgam), but where it goes from there is up to you. Really, it could be like anything you can imagine. You could be trying to use your magic to change the world for the better while avoiding the attention of the Technocracy, playing as the Technocracy trying to stop mages who are using their powers carelessly, dealing with magical politics, or even ignoring all of that and going on mystical quests in otherworldly realms (or, for technomancers, exploring strange dimensions in your spaceship).

Cabals can pool their resources into making a magical Sanctum that serves as a base of power, a place to safely work magic, and a source of Quintessence for magical fuel. You can upgrade it in numerous ways, from defenses to libraries, and maintaining a sanctum and its role in the local magical community can be a storyline in its own right.

As your characters increase their magical skills, they’ll be guided along spiritual journeys by their Avatar - the Awakened essence of their soul that allows them to perform magic. One by one, they cast aside their tools and embrace the truth that it is they themselves that are the source of magic. Eventually, they might even achieve Ascension - whatever that is.

The classic Mage campaign strikes a balance between the magical and the mundane, high fantasy and sci-fi action contrasted against personal dramas and worldly problems. The central themes of the game are power, morality, and belief. As a mage, you can change reality to suit your will. What do you do with that power? What if reality doesn’t want to be changed? Is it right to force your viewpoint on others? Despite all your power, you’re still just one person, and the universe is stacked against you. What do you do?

What books should I get?

The 20th Anniversary Edition, or M20, is the edition I’d recommend, published in recent years as the result of a Kickstarter (which, full disclosure, I backed, although it’s not as though I get anything out of promoting it). It advances the timeline past the apocalyptic Revised setting into something brighter and more hopeful - while also providing tools and advice to play with other eras or flavors of Mage if you want. Getting physical copies of it can be a little pricey though, so if you want something physical on a budget you might look at getting used copies of the other editions - they float around pretty frequently for about $10-$40. PDFs and print-on-demand copies of most books are available on Drivethrurpg as well. Each of the older editions are fine in their own right (although be advised that the further back you go, the less balanced the magic system is). 1st Edition is very clear-cut good Traditions versus evil Technocracy. 2nd Edition muddies that morality and fleshes out the Technocracy and other factions. Revised Edition does away with a lot of the weirder elements of prior editions and presents a grimmer vision of the world where the Technocracy has more or less won, Paradox is a much harsher force, the other worlds are mostly cut off and very difficult to travel to, and the world in general is plunging towards apocalypse (and the end of the original game line). There’s also Mage: the Sorcerer’s Crusade, which presents the world in a medieval/Renaissance setting at the beginning of the Ascension War, and Dark Ages: Mage, which takes the setting into medieval times.

M20 has a separate book going into further detail on the magic system. It’s called, appropriately enough, How Do You DO That? and I’d recommend it if you’re looking to get into M20, as it provides rules guidelines for a wide range of common spell effects that goes more in-depth than the core rules. There are two other M20 books published to date. The Book of Secrets contains more character options, expanded rules (including creating magical items), a closer look at magical paradigms, and other assorted information. Gods and Monsters has an assortment of NPCs, spirits, and, well, monsters.

The Tradition/Convention books detail each of the respective factions and were reprinted for multiple eras (note that all the Revised Convention Books except for Iteration X were PDF-only though). For Revised, there were also the Guides to the Traditions/Technocracy. If you’re thinking about focusing your campaign around a particular faction or playing a character of that faction, I’d recommend picking one of those books up for more detail and inspiration. The various Disparate Crafts never got their own dedicated books for the most part, but some of them are detailed in various sourcebooks across editions, such as the Book of Crafts.

The Book of Worlds and Horizon present the different Umbral realms and otherworldly magical/technological sanctuaries you can travel to. Much of these setting details have been superseded (or in the case of Horizon, destroyed entirely), but if you want your campaign to lean on the weirder high fantasy end it’ll give you a lot to play with.

Ascension was the book that ended the old product line, presenting several different world-ending scenarios - one of which is pretty much the canon ending to the Mage story (at least until M20 came along) and the others being alternate ways to cap out a chronicle, like the Nephandi winning, aliens showing up to drain magic from the world, or just a giant asteroid hitting Earth. While you probably don’t want to start your campaign out that way, it’s an interesting read that gives ideas for an epic campaign ending.

Note that Mage: the Awakening, while very similar, is a completely separate game that’s part of the new World of Darkness (now also known as the Chronicles of Darkness) that rebooted the product line with a different setting.

What equipment do I need?

As with all Storyteller games, Mage uses d10s exclusively. About 6 per character is the most you’ll need on average to start out with. Having extra space beyond the character sheet to write down spells is a good idea.

[cindylouwho-2]

RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, September 2019

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

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

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

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES 

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

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

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

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

Also, “grandmillennials” are a thing. 

ETSY NEWS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CONTENT MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails) 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pinterest is combining image recognition visual search with Shoppable Pins. 

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

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

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

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

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

Snapchat now has longer ads and different formats. 

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

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

STATS, DATA, OTHER TRACKING 

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

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

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MISCELLANEOUS (including humour) 

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

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

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

This one simple trick makes everything faster and easier. 

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

[souliebird]

More YJ!MindMeld Drabbles

This one is over 1k so It’s going behind a cut.

This isn’t edited and just written to get it out of my head.

Sequel to this piece 

~*~ Tim’s gone over the brownstone fully three times and the room he is in 10 times, making sure there are no bugs. He’s never found any after the first time, but he has Batman instilled paranoia, so there is no way he will never not check. Only once he was sure there was absolutely nothing, he had set up the six electronic scramblers because he could never be too safe.

Even with all that he keeps his voice to a whisper.

“Dick has a new team,” he says, wrapping himself a little tighter in the blanket he had brought with him. It’s not as warm as he thought it would be. The brownstone doesn’t have electricity, thus it doesn’t have any heat. It’s the dead of winter and freezing out and Tim’s practically pressing himself against a frozen mirror. Next time, he’ll bring cocoa.

“Dick had a new team last time,” his reflection replies. Except it isn’t his reflection. The Tim in the mirror is older; hair longer, and more scars. He’s in uniform (Red Robin, Red Robin, maybe one day Tim will take on that mantle it feels so right) but he’s also bundled under a huge blanket, similarly patterned with tacky orange and brown pinstripes because they really are the same person.

The other Tim had the foresight to bring a thermos.

“That team spawned another team, with some strays he picked up. Again. Half the Team at this point is strays Dick has found,” Tim grumbles and he is not bitter or jealous. He’s not. He’s used to this by now. He’s more annoyed by the fact that whatever mission they are doing is top secret and Tim doesn’t even know where his supposed brother is headquartering everything.

“He didn’t find you,” the other Tim points out and somehow that relaxes Tim.

“I guess. Sorry, I shouldn’t spend our time bitching about Dick.”

“Oh, I could bitch about Dick the entire night, but you’re already mad at yours and me ranting about mine might create bias. I can’t have you hating him for something he didn’t do,” the other Tim says with a bit of fondness in his voice.

“I already hate a baby based on what you’ve told me. And have weird mixed feelings about a villain I’ve barely encountered.”

The other Tim gives a huff of laughter and that makes Tim grin. He likes making his other self laugh.

“I haven’t even gotten to the good stuff about Ra’s yet. And by good stuff I mean ninjas following you around on patrol trying to give you courting gifts.”

“Jesus.”

“It’s wrong how much I want you to finally get to that point? It has to be a universal constant. Like the warhead incident.”

Tim balks at the memory. Apparently Tim Drake spraying himself in the eye with warhead candy spray instead of eyemist is a universal constant.

Bruce would break his own moral code and murder Tim if he knew how much Tim knew about universal constants. If he knew how much Tim had told the other Tim and how much the other Tim had told him. If he know how many super secret take to the grave things Tim has shared and has had shared with him.

But Bruce doesn’t know.

It’s been five and three quarter months since Tim and other Tim became linked and no one in his universe knows.

Tim didn’t trust it at first, of course. He tested. He confirmed. He had enough data to ninety-nine percent believe he had somehow become mentally connected with an alternate dimension version of himself. The information the other Tim gave him when they first met was almost enough to prove it then; his name, address, date of birth, his favorite ice cream flavor, little ticks about him that made him Timothy Jackson Drake.

That didn’t even cover the information he had been spoiled with that had proven to be true (Jason Todd was alive, Bruce had a secret kid, the ending to the latest Star Wars movie).

But it wasn’t just the other Tim laying on spoilers to him. His information, it turned out, was just as useful.

“How was the raid?”

The other Tim doesn’t even try to hide his smile, “Oh, it was perfect. Their faces when we busted a plan four years in the making that they hadn’t even gotten the chance to implement yet. Meta-trafficking isn’t such a problem here as there but. It was good. Bruce isn’t happy with the ‘a little birdy told me about the tip’ line. They were too careful to just be stumbled upon.”

Tim smiles and shrugs before curling closer to the mirror, “I’m glad the intel was good. When you mentioned Project Sunshine, I knew it might be a constant.”

“Yeah, well, I’m thankful for that and so are all the kids we saved.” The other Tim pauses, looks down at him. “How was your mission? I caught you were team leader?”

Tim tells his other self about his mission to bust an underground raceway. Not a priority mission, but the car mods involved stolen tech.

He likes telling the other Tim about his missions, and he likes hearing about the other Tim’s patrols. It’s so easy. They get each other, can talk about what annoyed them with someone who understands, or geek about tech, or omit things and still be able to follow along.

Bruce would kill him if he ever found out.

But it’s so nice to have someone to talk to and their reports segue into stories about childhood, or their friends, comparing differences in their world no one else but them would care about.

They talk and talk until the morning light begins to filter into Tim’s side of mirror (not the other Tim’s, though. The brownstone’s windows are boarded up in that universe.)

Their connection starts to weaken and Tim knows by the time the sun fully rises it will snap and he’ll be left staring at this proper reflection.

“Give Jason my best,” Tim says as they start the process of ‘until next month’. The other Tim’s Jason is the only one in either universes to know about their connection.

Tim still can’t get over his other self is in a relationship with Jason Todd.

“I will,” the other Tim promises as he stands up, shrugging the blanket off his shoulders. “He has a few moves he wants to teach you, next time we switch.”

“I hope it is something combat related and not trying to bad card games again.”

The other Tim laughs and smiles at him a moment before it fades into something almost sad. He puts his hand on the mirror and Tim mimics him (mirrors him). He can almost feel warmth coming through the glass.

“We will figure this out, Tim.”

“I know we will.” The other Tim will. Tim’s research has faded off.

He likes the connection.

He doesn’t want it to end.

“Until next month.” They both say as sunlight fills the room.

The connection breaks. With the blink of an eye, he’s staring at Robin of Earth Whatever Number They Are Assigned.

He sighs. Tilts his head back.

Next month can’t come soon enough.

[gr-ogu]

Hey, may I ask how you make your icons (which are really cute btw)? I would love to give it a try myself but I dont really know where to start vor what size they woud need to be. Do you use a specific program? Thank you in advance ❤

Hi again my love!!! ❤

First of all, thankyou so much!! That’s so kind of you to say and I’m honoured that you’d come tome for advice!!! I’m going to put this under a read more because it might getvery long, I hope that’s okay! Also want to say I am by no means an expert - myicon making stems from a lot of trial and error, hahah!

There’s soooo manydifferent ways to make icons! I have seen and read a thousand tutorials, butthe first thing I have to say is it’s got to be what you’re comfortable with.Whatever works best for you is the best way! 

When I first started to make icons, I used paint.net, which is free todownload and such a good program! I still haveit because you can download free ‘plugins’ (like added extra features)that people make and they’re so handy!!!! I used to make coloured backgrounds using the gradient feature, and zoom in very closely and use the rubber tool toerase the background of the characters/people I wanted for the icon, whichworks great if you have a lot of time and patience! 

Now however, I use photoshop CS5, which I got from here (no idea if the link stillworks but I hope it does!!!) which I find a lot easier now that I know how touse it! For sizing, as long as the canvas is a perfect square you’re generallygood - I usually go for 150px x 150px, but I know a lot of people use 100px x100px or 200px x 200px! 

Here are some tutorials that you might find useful to start you off in explaining how to use PS if you’re not familiar with it!! (x) (x)

Once you’ve got that down, usually you want to cut the people/charactersout from the background. There are soooo many ways to do this but I prefer touse the pen tool to draw around them and then erase the background, a tutorialfor that that I like is this one!

For background, I make my own gradients. Generally, you want to pick acolour you like and then find the lighter version of it, so to do that I pick acolour (for example this is a good list of different colours I referto) and then I use the hex code of that specificcolour to find the lighter version of it - so when you click on it, or searchfor it, it gives you the lighter and darker codes for the colours, which youcan put into Photoshop and then use to make gradients! alternatively you cansearch on places like itsphotoshop and find them,which is coincidentally where I get my textures from that I sometimes put onthe background of icons.

The textures are downloaded, and then once you’ve got them, uploaded into PS and usually set to soft light or overlay (I prefer soft light, but it depends on the colours you’re using I think!) in the drop-down menu on the right side of PS, where there’s different tabs (this one is found directly underneath layers!). It looks like this and put it above my colours to get cool effects in the background :-)

For the shapes part, I actually only learnt this really recently (although I’m going to do a demo of how I did my latest icon further down) and this is the method I used to get the shape!!!! Although I didn’t apply it to the icon in the same way that they did, I found an easier way for me!! Haha.

Something a lot of people also do is change the colours of people’s clothes! This is a great tutorial for that and one that I’ve used for my edits, although still learning with icons!

Okay so I think the easiest way to try and tell you how I make icons is just to show you! So, first things first, you’ve got to get your cap - it’s nice if it’s good quality, but it’s not the end of the world if it’s not!

I decided to use this one from the ITV hub, haha:

Once you’ve got that, I usually crop it so there’s not as much of the background, but that’s just personal preference. Then, with my pen tool, I go around it and outline the bits of them I want for the icon! (I’ve circled the pen tool on the left just for clarity!)

You’ll also notice the boys look a bit brighter and more defined in the above screenshot - I’ve added a PSD to them, which I’ve made myself. I have an ‘emmerdale psd’ that works quite well forall the characters so I use that as a base and adjust it depending on thescene! But there’s plenty of places to download PSDs too!

Once I’ve got the outline, I join up the dots to the first dot to make a solid line around the boys. Then, right click on the picture and choose ‘make selection’. 

Then you get a pop up box saying if you’d like a little blurring around them - sometimes I do 1px, sometimes I have none, like in this case, depends on the quality of the photo (and sometimes how well you’ve cut out their hair hahah). Once you’re happy, click okay and you’ll get the solid line around them flashing now.

I’m not sure how to do this on a mac, so really sorry if you have one, but you’ve got to invert this line to select the background instead of them, by pressing Ctrl, shift and i at the same time. Once you’ve done that, you can then click the delete button and the background will disappear! Yay! You should get something that looks like this:

After this, you want to go to the menu at the top that says image and click image size, which will present you with a text box like this:

Change the pixel dimensions’ width and height to whatever your icon size is, so in this case 150px - don’t worry if the height isn’t equal to the width, it’s better that the icon is the full width if its not a person’s full body, as you don’t want the picture to take up the full height of the icon anyways! Like this:

And voila! They are to size. Now, since I’ve made icons before, I have backgrounds already made, so I would drag them onto them. I suggest you make the backgrounds in a separate window and save them for later use (using the gradients for example), meaning you can drag new people onto the backgrounds which will save you time! Once you’ve done that, you’ll get something like this:

Now, you could just leave it there! If you were to do that (I save them with multiple colours for variety!) You might want to go to filter > sharpen > smart sharpen and play around with it until they look more defined, but not overly so!

(Also please don’t judge me - it’s good practice to name your layers informational names but as you can see mine are pretty all over the place, oops.)

For the shape part of the icon, please refer to the link I added above to add a custom shape to your gallery. Once you’ve done that, this is how I added it to my icons!

For now, zoom into your icon and place the shape above the icon and use ctrl and t to make it the size you want, making sure to hold down shift when you’re dragging the sides so it’s in proportion. Once you’re happy with this, press enter to confirm it (its usually best to leave a few pixels between the shape and the edge for the ‘transparent effect’.)

Then, drag the layer down in the bar on the right so it’s underneath whatever colours you want to use for your icon. In this case, I’ve just done a few as an example:

You can see the sort of outline of the shape on them, as well as the background colour. Now, you want to move the boys into the position you want them for the icon, and use something called a ‘clipping mask’. 

Right click on the layers at the side and choose ‘create clipping mask’ - the background will then fill into the shape and so will the people once you click it. At this stage, you probably want to use the little eye symbol on each layer to make it visible or invisible, so you can see if this is working or not!

As you can see, there’s a blank bit at the bottom of the icon since I cropped the boys’ bodies there. Luckily as they’re wearing dark colours, I can just paint over this on their layer to fill it in, but you could also resize the original image down to 150px and use a clipping mask on it too! (You can also merge the layers to make sure they’re one layer, by right clicking and using ‘merge down’ which isn’t available in the above screenshot but usually would be!)

Then zoom out, and you should have something that looks like this! (I’ve gone back to the file I made the actual icons on for this screenshot.) Make sure you save the image as .png, not .jpg! Files saved as .jpg can’t read transparency and the edges around the icon will show up as black or white, rather than transparent! 

I hope this has been helpful, and that it makes sense, and gives you a good idea of what to do?? If you have anymore questions don’t hesitate to ask❤❤❤

[all-hail-the-witcher]

questionable government spies: chapter 8

all previous chapters are under # spy boys

alright so I’m going against all of my rules literally ever posting this cause I only have like a chapter and a few sentences written after this one and I’m usually two ahead but like school and y’all need comic relief in the form of race being a freaking idiot 

also this is a link you might wanna play when you get to /the part/

https://youtu.be/F16O5OAK2K8

___________

ship: platonic ralbert, eventual sprace 

warnings: Race is a little shit

word count: not very long

editing: I’m actually not sure ignoring I finished editing this one

___________

Race threw off his covers and bolted into the shower. Two weeks had passed since the day they had met with Spot. He had gotten a call very late the previous night saying that he was going to be going through gang initiation today - whatever that meant - and he was supposed to report to a coffee shop in Brooklyn at 8 am sharp.

Race didn’t really know why he was being sent to a coffee shop, or why he had to be out through initiation, but if it gave him a chance to flex in front of Spot he wasn’t complaining.

He dressed in a pair of black adidas track pants and a fitted black long sleeve shirt and fluffed his blonde hair before walking into the kitchen.

It was barely 7 and Albert was probably still asleep - he had managed to sleep the entire night in his own room last night without nightmares so Race had yet to see him - which meant Race couldn’t have coffee, because Albert made the best coffee ever and his tasted like dirt. So, Race did what any caffeine deprived person would: woke up Albert to make him coffee.

He paired his phone to the Bluetooth speaker and sifted through his Disney Spotify playlist until he found the song he was looking for. Then, while the intro played, he banged around rather loudly as he prepared his lucky charms.

The chorus of the song began and Race put down the cereal he had been puring to scream along, well, sort of.

“No one's nerd as Gaston! No one catches birds like Gaston! No one says WHAT THE FUCK RICHARD like Gaston!” Race screamed at the top of his lungs. This wasn’t how he usually woke Albert up, but hey, he was going to be a gang member today, he needed to get in the villain spirit - Race style.

“For there’s no man in town half as memelyyy! Perfect, a pure meme god! You can ask any Tom, Dick, or Stanley. And they'll tell you whose team they'd prefer to be onnnnnnnnnnnnnn…”

Race cranked up the music louder and grabbed his spoon to use as a microphone as he pranced around the kitchen dramatically. “Whoooooo’s aaaaas meme as Gaston? Who can scream like Gaston? Who can do Krispy Kreme flips like Gaston? As a memelord, yes, I'm intiiiiiiimidaaaating! My, what a boi, that Gaston!”

From Albert’s room, Race heard a loud groan and he smiled. He hoped Albert was appreciating this. True art such as this was only created once in a lifetime.

“I needed encouragement, thank you, LeFou. Well, there's no one as easy to bolster as yoooooooooou! Too much? ...Yuuup.”

Race paused dramatically before leaping into the livingroom to continue his performance.

“No one bakes like Gaston! Has a face like Gaston! In a vine comp no one says they were roommates like Gaston!”

“When I flirt I sneak up with wii music,” Race tip toed awkwardly into Albert’s room. “And all of my friends say a praaayer. First, I hope what I say is not too sick, then I flirt from behind- Is that fair? I don't care!”

Albert rolled over, pulling his pillow over his head as Race jumped up onto his bead and began to sing dramatically. “No one tickles like Gaston! Eats pickles like Gaston! No one says look at all those chickens like Gaston! I'm especially good at quoting lazzzzzzzytown!”

Albert let out another loud groan, which Race ignored, and pulled his blanket over his head. “TEN POINTS FOR GASTON!” Race yelled as he did a straddle jump off the the bed and ran back toward the kitchen.

“When I was a lad, I ate four despasitos every morning to help me get large! And now that I'm grown, I eat five despasitos,” Race climbed up onto the counter and tried to flex, “So I'm roughly the size of a goooooOOOOOOOOODDDDDDD!”

Race grabbed two pots off the counter and began slapping them together on the beat of the song. Then he jumped down off the counter and began parading around the apartment - first the living room, then the hallway and then into Alberts room, all the while banging his pots together and improv tap dancing. If Albert didn't wake up after this he was going to have to break out the airhorn.

Race danced back into the kitchen, executing perfect leaps and turns while still banging his pots. He heard a loud clunk, which sounded suspiciously like Albert falling off his bed, and he smiled before climbing back up on the counter to finish off his performance.

“Who has a bed like Gaston? Drinks mead like Gaston? Who can say roadworrrrrrrk ahead like Gastoooooooon? I use yeeting in my everyyyyyyyyyyyyday liiiiiife!” he paused, looking at the pots in his hands. “YEET!” he screamed, throwing them across the kitchen with a fantastic clatter.

“RACETRACK HIGGINS!” Ah, yes. That was Albert, definitely awake and definitely pissed that he was awake. Race could hear him stomping down the hall angrily but that didn't stop him.

“Say it again! Who's a meme among men? Who's the super success? Don't you know? Can't you guess? Ask his fans and his five hangers-on! There's just one boi in town who's got all of it dowwwwwwwwwwwn…”

Albert arrived in the doorway wearing only a pair of sweatpants, his hair rumped from sleep and glaring fantastically at Race who was still standing on the counter. Race gave him a wink and a smirk to which Albert rolled his eyes before he began the final verse of his performance.

“And his name's R-A-C-EEEEEEEEEE.... I believe there's another EEEEEEEEE…… It just occurred to me that I'm illiterate and I've never actually had to spell it out loud beforeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee… Gastoooooooooooooooon!” Race jumped down from the counter and bowed graciously as the song ended.

“Are you trying to start a cult?” Albert said in disbelief, his voice raspy from sleep.

Race looked up at his friend sheepishly. “No…?”

“Then why are you screaming Beauty and the Beast before 7am?” Albert groaned.

Race leaned against the counter, cocked his head, and put on his best pleading face. “Make me coffee?”

Albert muttered several curse words under his breath before moping into the kitchen. “Sure, fine, whatever.”

“Oh, thank you, Albie!” Race exclaimed, clapping his hands. “You’re my favorite person in the whole wide world!”

“Yeah well,” Alber muttered, reaching into the cabinet to pull out the bag of Hazelnut Coffee. “You’re not my favorite person today.”

“I’m not your favorite person any day, am I?” Race sniffled.

“That’s not true,” Albert sighed. “I just don’t like it when you wake me up by screaming incorrect Disney lyrics.”

“Mmmmm so any day that ends in y then,” Race mused and Albert threw a coffee filter at him.

“I don't have time for your bad jokes,” Albert stressed. “You have to be at initiation in like an hour. Let’s go over your cover one more time.”

“Fiiiiine,” Race groaned, hopping up on the counter.

“Alright so, what’s your name?”

“Philip Marx.”

Albert sighed and rolled his eyes. “Tell me why you picked that again?”

“Welllllll,” Race began, “Philip like Philip Carlyle form the Greatest Showman cause he’s a badass and goes from one lifestyle to a complete other, ya know, becomes an outcast and stuff? Isn’t that kinda what it’s like to be in a gang?”

“I don't know,” Albert said rather annoyed as he measured out the coffee grinds. “Also I doubt that people choose their gang names based on a movie about joining the circus.”

“It’s not about joining the circus Albert!” Race smacked his friend with a dishtowel. “It’s about love and loss and finding yourself and realizing who you really are and telling social norms to screw themself and Zack Efron’s just really hot, okay?”

“Alright, fine, whatever,” Albert sighed. Race was beginning to regret waking him up, he was acting far more grumpy than usual. “Do I even want to know why you picked that last name?”

“Because Karl Marx is a badass.”

Race laughed as Albert turned to him, sputtering incoherently. “Ra- wha- why- ugh.” He buried his face in his hands. “First of all, Karl Marx is dead. Second of all, he’s not a badass he invented communism and basically started the downfall of Russia and a crapload of other problems. Third of all-” Albert was interrupted by the timer going off signaling that Race’s coffee was done brewing.

“Yeah, yeah, I get it,” Race smirked. “He’s problematic, like me. Also we both have really great hair.”

Albert wordlessly handed Race his cup of coffee. “Remind me why I thought it was a good idea for you to do this job again?”

Race pondered. He couldn't exactly say that it was because he didn't want Albert to get in harm’s way. “Because I’m a good agent and you love me?” He hopped off the counter to pour some coffee creamer in his coffee.

“Close enough,” Albert sighed. “Now hurry up and eat your cereal. I gotta get you to initiation.”

•••

Initiation, as it turned out, was a gruff looking man inside the coffee shop handing him a folded piece of paper with a strange code on it. Race solved the code quickly, it was a simple number scramble that said: down three blocks, back parking lot.

He walked out of the coffee shop, down the street three blocks, as per the instructions.

“Rapunzel, where are you going,” Albert asked through the comms unit in his ear.

“Down three blocks to some back parking lot,” Race responded.

“Alright, Vincent just pulled up a street camera. Looks like there’s a guy in his late 20s there and that's it.”

“Okay,” Race responded, a little disappointed that Spot wasn't there. “I’ll talk to you guys when I’m done.”

“Be safe, Rapunzel.”

•••

Two hours later, Race climbed into the back of Jack’s van, tired and very much in need of a shower.

“How was it?” Albert asked, turning around and laughing at Race’s flopped position on the floor of the van.

“Tiring,” Race sighed. “I had to break into a store and steal a cd without setting anything off.”

“An actual store?” Jack asked from the driver’s seat.

“Yes, an actual store,” Race said pulling himself up.

“Ah, yes,” Albert said, “my best friend, a petty thief.”

“I’ve been a petty thief my whole life, Albie, remember when we-”

“Ah ah ah” Albert cut him off, gesturing to Jack. “We have children present.”

Race laughed and rolled his eyes as Jack protested. “Anyway, the guy had me also do all this fancy parkour junk and self defense stuff. Haven’t worked that hard since training with Jacobs.”

Albert made a sympathetic face. FBI training camp had been the most strenuous thing either of them had ever done to date. “What was the guys name, again?”

“Oscar Delancey,” Race said, wrinkling his nose. “He was nasty. He kept pushing me unnecessarily hard. And he said something weird. He told me ‘oh, you’re him’ which didn't make any sense.”

“Yeah, that's kinda weird,” Albert agreed. “Maybe he expected you to be someone else.”

“Maybe,” Race brushed it off. “Anyway, I got my first mission tomorrow. Gotta report to the used car place at 9 am sharp.”

Albert and Jack let out a cheer. “That’s fantastic, Race!” Albert said, shooting him a smile. “Pretty soon we’re gonna crack this case right open.”

Race couldn't agree more.

___________

ah yes that song took me three days to write and it’s probablt the best thing I’ve ever written

did anyone catch the jace quote ?

also pay close attention to the greatest showman references....

also shits about to get real yo it’s going the hell down

feedback is always appreciated hmu to be on the tag list

tag list @fairly-awkward-trashcan @well-the-kids-do-too @racetrackcook @bouncyscreamingnewsboys @ughwaitwhat @aw-jus-let-em-try @ben-cook-can-cook @the-woild-is-my-what-now @elmer-s-s0cks @voice-foundshoe-lost @galaxy-trees13 @stopthe-presses @ridin-in-style @pinecovewoods @imjusttheoutgoingsidekick @i-got-no-clue-what-im-doing @bencookisagod @be-more-chill-evan-hansen @hellasoulless @stellar-alpaca @saxoph-ella @smolcanadiankid @disney-princess-sized @the-newsies-justice-for-zas-blog @insane-tomato @so-up-rolls-a-riot-van @spot-conlon-king-of-brooklyn @have-we-got-news-for-you @thatfancyclam @myidkwhatmynameisblog @legoflambwrites

[ante--meridiem]

MBTI Cognitive Functions, as I understand them

@bounding-heart

Making a new post to reply to your question about ti, fi and personality types, because this will probably get too long to fit into a reply on that post.

Ti and Fi are short for "introverted thinking" and "introverted feeling", respectively. These are cognitive functions (that is, ways of processing information) from Carl Jung's theories which the MBTI personality types that you're familiar with are based on. The basic idea is that there are two types of cognitive processes: judging and perceiving (this is where the P/J letter in the personality types comes from). Judging functions are used to make decisions and reach conclusions while perceiving functions are used to take in information. The two judging functions are thinking, which reaches conclusions based on logic and rationality, and feeling, which does so based on values and ethics. The perceiving functions (which were not mentioned in the discussion because people tend to argue less about them, for whatever reason) are sensing, which takes in concrete information about the physical world, and intuition, which takes in patterns and abstract ideas.

According to Jung, each person uses all four of these in some fixed order of preference, and with a fixed orientation that points either inwards or outwards (hence, "introverted" and "extroverted"). An introverted function acts subjectively, based on personal criteria. An extroverted function acts objectively, based on a common or shared criteria.

What this actually means looking at each function

Thinking

I tend to think of the difference between introverted thinking (referred to as ti) and extroverted thinking (referred to as te) as being the difference between the type of thinking used in pure mathematics versus the type of thinking used in other areas of science.

Introverted thinking (Ti): "Introverted thinking" is interested in the inner logical framework of things. It basically tries to build a system where everything can be deduced with airtight logic and precision from as small a set of initial assumptions as possible (in my example of pure mathematics, these would be the axioms). The element of subjectivity and personal criteria comes in at selecting exactly what these assumptions should be. Things like conspiracy theories happen when a ti user may have perfectly good logical consistency, but the assumptions they chose to start with are dubious at best. Arguing with this type of thinking can be exhausting because it uses its own set of assumptions and definitions that the person you are arguing with won't always think to explain to you. Mathematics, computer science, theoretical physics and some ways of doing philosophy all rely heavily on this type of thinking.

Extroverted thinking (Te): Extroverted thinking is less concerned with determining the inner logic of things and more concerned with determining absolute, objective facts about them. It deals in "empirical truths"; something doesn't have to be proven with perfect logic to be accepted, an experimental proof that gives 90% certainty is good enough. Extroverted thinking generally won't be convinced of facts about the world from a purely theoretical argument; physical evidence is necessary. Most sciences except for the ones mentioned above operate mainly on this type of logic. It tends to be more efficient than introverted thinking since it doesn't waste time trying to prove up to a high standard of logical rigour what seems clearly true, but this can come at the expense of accuracy.

Feeling

Introverted feeling (fi): introverted feeling acts based on a personal, deeply felt sense of right and wrong. It tends to see things as inherently good or bad. It lends itself well to absolute personal rules such as "do not kill"; you obey this rule because you feel the act of killing is, in itself, wrong. When misapplied, introverted feeling can lead to puritanical culture and bizarre moral laws that exist only because something felt wrong to someone.

Extroverted feeling (Fe): extroverted feeling forms its ethical code based on how things affect others. As far as it's concerned, nothing can be wrong in a vacuum; any action is only as bad as the harm it causes people. When put in a group situation, extroverted feeling will try to do what is best for the largest number of people (whereas introverted feeling would just have done what it personally thought was best). It tends to be more flexible and relativistic, since it could theoretically justify any action if it benefits the most people while causing the least possible amount of harm. When misapplied, it can lead to mob mentality, "end justifies the means" type justifications and devaluing the individual.

Sensing

Introverted sensing (si): introverted sensing takes in details from the outside world based on what is important to the person. It creates an image that is filtered through personal preference; it will pay more attention to, say, a familiar smell from childhood or a colour arrangement that is particularly evocative than to how many steps a staircase has. The world seen through an introverted sensing lense is something like an impressionist painting.

Extroverted sensing (se): extroverted sensing is basically the core of "living in the moment". It takes in all details equally. If introverted sensing is impressionism, extroverted sensing is photorealism.

Intuition

Introverted intuition (ni): introverted intuition focuses on patterns that feel important to a person. It tends to use these patterns to guess how things will develop in the future. In most situations, introverted intuition isolates what it considers the primary or most fundamental pattern.

Extroverted intuition (ne): extroverted intuition looks at all possible ways a situation could develop. Instead of narrowing things down, it looks for every pattern and possible interpretation.

How this connects to personality types:

Each person type has four of these functions associated with it. The type I'm fairly certain of being, INTP, would use ti, ne, si and Fe in that order. The person I was arguing with claimed I am an INFP, in which case I would use fi, ne, si and te.

For some reason, certain people interested in the MBTI have decided that telling someone they use fi is an insult. In my own experience, using ti rather than fi has a lot of drawbacks: namely, spending a large part of my adolescence having existential crises and struggling with nihilism because of the realisation that things cannot be fully explained through logic and it is impossible to ever be fully certain of anything, as well as an inability to know my own opinions about things.

(sidenote: considering our last debate, I found it rather amusing that our next interaction was about this. I don't spend ALL my time arguing about the personality types of people, real or imaginary - I swear :D )

[tamphong2888]

Uncovering SEO Opportunities via Log Files

Posted by RobinRozhon

I use web crawlers on a daily basis. While they are very useful, they only imitate search engine crawlers’ behavior, which means you aren’t always getting the full picture.

The only tool that can give you a real overview of how search engines crawl your site are log files. Despite this, many people are still obsessed with crawl budget — the number of URLs Googlebot can and wants to crawl.

Log file analysis may discover URLs on your site that you had no idea about but that search engines are crawling anyway — a major waste of Google server resources (Google Webmaster Blog):

“Wasting server resources on pages like these will drain crawl activity from pages that do actually have value, which may cause a significant delay in discovering great content on a site.”

While it’s a fascinating topic, the fact is that most sites don’t need to worry that much about crawl budget —an observation shared by John Mueller (Webmaster Trends Analyst at Google) quite a few times already.

There’s still a huge value in analyzing logs produced from those crawls, though. It will show what pages Google is crawling and if anything needs to be fixed.

When you know exactly what your log files are telling you, you’ll gain valuable insights about how Google crawls and views your site, which means you can optimize for this data to increase traffic. And the bigger the site, the greater the impact fixing these issues will have.

What are server logs?

A log file is a recording of everything that goes in and out of a server. Think of it as a ledger of requests made by crawlers and real users. You can see exactly what resources Google is crawling on your site.

You can also see what errors need your attention. For instance, one of the issues we uncovered with our analysis was that our CMS created two URLs for each page and Google discovered both. This led to duplicate content issues because two URLs with the same content was competing against each other.

Analyzing logs is not rocket science — the logic is the same as when working with tables in Excel or Google Sheets. The hardest part is getting access to them — exporting and filtering that data.

Looking at a log file for the first time may also feel somewhat daunting because when you open one, you see something like this:

Calm down and take a closer look at a single line:

66.249.65.107 - - [08/Dec/2017:04:54:20 -0400] "GET /contact/ HTTP/1.1" 200 11179 "-" "Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)"

You’ll quickly recognize that:

66.249.65.107 is the IP address (who)

[08/Dec/2017:04:54:20 -0400] is the Timestamp (when)

GET is the Method

/contact/ is the Requested URL (what)

200 is the Status Code (result)

11179 is the Bytes Transferred (size)

“-” is the Referrer URL (source) — it’s empty because this request was made by a crawler

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; +http://bit.ly/eSXNch) is the User Agent (signature) — this is user agent of Googlebot (Desktop)

Once you know what each line is composed of, it’s not so scary. It’s just a lot of information. But that’s where the next step comes in handy.

Tools you can use

There are many tools you can choose from that will help you analyze your log files. I won’t give you a full run-down of available ones, but it’s important to know the difference between static and real-time tools.

Static — This only analyzes a static file. You can’t extend the time frame. Want to analyze another period? You need to request a new log file. My favourite tool for analyzing static log files is Power BI.

Real-time — Gives you direct access to logs. I really like open source ELK Stack (Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana). It takes a moderate effort to implement it but once the stack is ready, it allows me changing the time frame based on my needs without needing to contact our developers.

Start analyzing

Don’t just dive into logs with a hope to find something — start asking questions. If you don’t formulate your questions at the beginning, you will end up in a rabbit hole with no direction and no real insights.

Here are a few samples of questions I use at the start of my analysis:

Which search engines crawl my website?

Which URLs are crawled most often?

Which content types are crawled most often?

Which status codes are returned?

If you see that Google is crawling non-existing pages (404), you can start asking which of those requested URLs return 404 status code.

Order the list by the number of requests, evaluate the ones with the highest number to find the pages with the highest priority (the more requests, the higher priority), and consider whether to redirect that URL or do any other action.

If you use a CDN or cache server, you need to get that data as well to get the full picture.

Segment your data

Grouping data into segments provides aggregate numbers that give you the big picture. This makes it easier to spot trends you might have missed by looking only at individual URLs. You can locate problematic sections and drill down if needed.

There are various ways to group URLs:

Group by content type (single product pages vs. category pages)

Group by language (English pages vs. French pages)

Group by storefront (Canadian store vs. US store)

Group by file format (JS vs. images vs. CSS)

Don’t forget to slice your data by user-agent. Looking at Google Desktop, Google Smartphone, and Bing all together won’t surface any useful insights.

Monitor behavior changes over time

Your site changes over time, which means so will crawlers’ behavior. Googlebot often decreases or increases the crawl rate based on factors such as a page’s speed, internal link structure, and the existence of crawl traps.

It’s a good idea to check in with your log files throughout the year or when executing website changes. I look at logs almost on a weekly basis when releasing significant changes for large websites.

By analyzing server logs twice a year, at the very least, you’ll surface changes in crawler’s behavior.

Watch for spoofing

Spambots and scrapers don’t like being blocked, so they may fake their identity — they leverage Googlebot’s user agent to avoid spam filters.

To verify if a web crawler accessing your server really is Googlebot, you can run a reverse DNS lookup and then a forward DNS lookup. More on this topic can be found in Google Webmaster Help Center.

Merge logs with other data sources

While it’s no necessary to connect to other data sources, doing so will unlock another level of insight and context that regular log analysis might not be able to give you. An ability to easily connect multiple datasets and extract insights from them is the main reason why Power BI is my tool of choice, but you can use any tool that you’re familiar with (e.g. Tableau).

Blend server logs with multiple other sources such as Google Analytics data, keyword ranking, sitemaps, crawl data, and start asking questions like:

What pages are not included in the sitemap.xml but are crawled extensively?

What pages are included in the Sitemap.xml file but are not crawled?

Are revenue-driving pages crawled often?

Is the majority of crawled pages indexable?

You may be surprised by the insights you’ll uncover that can help strengthen your SEO strategy. For instance, discovering that almost 70 percent of Googlebot requests are for pages that are not indexable is an insight you can act on.

You can see more examples of blending log files with other data sources in my post about advanced log analysis.

Use logs to debug Google Analytics

Don’t think of server logs as just another SEO tool. Logs are also an invaluable source of information that can help pinpoint technical errors before they become a larger problem.

Last year, Google Analytics reported a drop in organic traffic for our branded search queries. But our keyword tracking tool, STAT Search Analytics, and other tools showed no movement that would have warranted the drop. So, what was going on?

Server logs helped us understand the situation: There was no real drop in traffic. It was our newly deployed WAF (Web Application Firewall) that was overriding the referrer, which caused some organic traffic to be incorrectly classified as direct traffic in Google Analytics.

Using log files in conjunction with keyword tracking in STAT helped us uncover the whole story and diagnose this issue quickly.

Putting it all together

Log analysis is a must-do, especially once you start working with large websites.

My advice is to start with segmenting data and monitoring changes over time. Once you feel ready, explore the possibilities of blending logs with your crawl data or Google Analytics. That’s where great insights are hidden.

Want more?

Ready to learn how to get cracking and tracking some more? Reach out and request a demo get your very own tailored walkthrough of STAT.

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[douchebagbrainwaves]

FIVE QUESTIONS ABOUT LANGUAGE DESIGN AND BAD ECONOMY

But working on this is not a win, in the sense that your body is happier during a long run than sitting on a sofa eating doughnuts. And they have leverage in that their decisions set the whole company moving in one direction or another. One is that you shouldn't build object-oriented programming in too deeply. What good will more code do you when you're out of business. The larger a group, the closer its average member will be to the average for the population as a whole must be giving people something they want, the more different it gets. A physicist friend recently told me half his department was on Prozac.1 It was no coincidence that the great industrialists of the nineteenth century had so little formal education. Many startups go through a point a few months before they die where although they have a significant amount of money in one family's bank account, or the market wasn't ready yet, b the founders solved the wrong problem. Programming languages are how people talk to computers.

With server-based apps get released as a series of small changes. The ball you need to give someone a present and don't have any money, you don't usually have to invent anything.2 Life in a zoo is easier, but it could not have grown so big so fast. It's very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing, not just because she's shy that she hates bragging. In Web-based software you can use any language you want, there is nothing in spam-of-the-envelope calculations, this one has a high average outcome. A company big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to acquire startups will be big enough to be fairly conservative, and within the company the people in the mailroom or the personnel department work at one remove from the actual making of stuff. I think you should make users the test, just as we can become smarter, just as a goalkeeper who prevents the other team from scoring is considered to have played a perfect game. Her immense data set and x-ray vision for character.3 And historically the number of new startups being founded in 2003.

For individuals the upshot is the same: aim small. A big company is probably getting a bad deal, because his performance is dragged down by the overall lower performance of the algorithm described in A Plan for Spam I hadn't had any, and I completely agree with him. I would really love to do, at least in our own minds, we have to remember that it's an admirable thing to write great programs, even when this work doesn't translate easily into the conventional intellectual currency of research papers. It could only spread to places that already had a vigorous middle class. A big company is like high fructose corn syrup, and hydrogenated vegetable oil.4 Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be one. In practice, it seemed inevitable that I would eventually have to move from filtering based on single words to an approach like this. But it could be that a lot of new startups being founded in 2003. Near the top is the company run by techno-weenies who are obsessed with solving interesting technical problems, instead of making users happy.

As with the original industrial revolution, some societies are going to be hard to duplicate. Letters, digits, dashes, apostrophes, and dollar signs are constituent characters. Letters, digits, dashes, apostrophes, and dollar signs are constituent characters, and everything else is collapsing around you, having just ten users who love you will keep you going. Here are some of the effect of first class functions, you can be wise without being very wise, you can pick a time when you're not in the middle of Antarctica, where there is nothing in spam-of-the-future, because this is what I expect spam to evolve into: some completely neutral text followed by a url. But ambitious programmers are better off doing their own thing and failing than going to work at a big company, then a lot of maximally interesting tokens, meaning those with probabilities far from. It will always suck to work for some existing company. Ditto at the other end of the spectrum, we'd be the first to see signs of a separation between founders and investors in the Valley. In the earliest stages of a startup, of course.

Watching employees get transformed into founders makes it clear that the difference between the two. Jessica was so important to YC, why don't more people do it? Maybe it's because you haven't made what they want.5 75%. 88, just under the threshold of. That way we can avoid applying rules and standards to intelligence that are really meant for wisdom. Except instead of being at the mercy of investors. If anything, it's more like the small man of Confucius's day, always one bad harvest or ruler away from starvation. And the culture she defined was one of those that exploit an insecure cgi script to send mail to third parties. And yet if you analyzed the contents of the average grocery store you'd probably find these four ingredients accounted for most of the things they're doing is breaking up and misspelling words to prevent filters from recognizing them. For example, though the stock market crash does seem to have regarded wisdom, learning, and intelligence largely from cultivating them. We are all richer for knowing about penicillin, because we're less likely to die from infections.

With server-based. That last sentence is the fatal one.6 If you were dropped at a random point in America today, nearly all the food around you would be bad for you. I think the single biggest problem afflicting large companies is the difficulty of assigning a value to each person's work. If you're not allowed to implement new ideas, you stop having them. If you're in a job that feels safe, you are thereby fairly close to measuring the contributions of individual employees. But large organizations will probably never again play the leading role they did up till the last quarter of the twentieth century.7 When startups came back into fashion, around 2005, investors were starting to hear about byte code, which implies to me at least that if we find more than 15 tokens that only occur in one corpus or the other, we ought to give priority to the ones that occur a lot. Two of the four spams I missed got through because they happened to use words that occur often in my legitimate email. Just write whatever you want, so if there is no way to get rich by creating wealth, as a species, is that you can do whatever he wants. When there is a natural fit between smallness and solving hard problems.

These techniques are mostly orthogonal to Bill's; an optimal solution might incorporate both. Salesmen work alone.8 Partly because I'm a writer, and writers always get disproportionate attention.9 But working on this is not an irrational fear: it really is hard to bear. And in this economy I bet they got a good deal on it.10 If you go to a new set of buildings, and do things that they think aren't good for you. Then at least you can give back the money you have left, and save every penny of your salary. So let me tell you a little about Jessica.11 Your boss is just the intermediate stage—just a shorthand—for whatever people want. A morale boost on that scale is very valuable in a startup tends to be running out of money, and now they'd have to postpone that. Usually a startup is, economically: a way of saying, I want to work a lot harder, and get paid for it.

Notes

That was a kid who had died decades ago. If an investor I don't like content is the accumulator generator benchmark are collected together on their utility function for money. In desperation people reach for the fences in our case, 20th century was also the golden age of economic inequality was really only useful for one another indirectly through the window for years while they may introduce startups they like to cluster together as much as Drew Houston needed Dropbox, or Seattle, consider moving.

When the Air Hits Your Brain, neurosurgeon Frank Vertosick recounts a conversation—maybe not linearly, but nothing else: no friends, TV, go talk to mediocre ones. If early abstract paintings seem more interesting than later ones, and in a startup, but I took so long. And while we might think it was the least VC-like. SpamCop—A Spam Classification Organization Program.

But people like numbers. That makes some rich people move, and then using growth rate has to work for startups to be evidence of a stock is its future earnings, you create wealth with no environmental cost.

For example, the angel round just happened, the apparent misdeeds of corp dev people are trying to decide whether to go all the red counties. It's a lot heavier. I've been told that Microsoft discourages employees from contributing to open-source projects, even if we wanted to than because they actually do, but when people make investment decisions well when they talk about distribution of income, which merchants used to be able to claim retroactively I said yes.

I had a killed portraiture as a constituency. The Nineteenth-Century History of English at Indiana University Publications. This is not to need to go sell the bad groups and they unanimously said yes. Most unusual ambitions fail, most of them had been a good way to explain how you'd figure out what the US is partly a reaction to drugs.

Which is probably 99% cooperation. I said yes. In desperation people reach for the same way a restaurant is constrained in a journal. An accountant might say that YC's most successful ones.

Joe thinks one of them, would be much bigger news, in the body or header lines other than those I mark. For example, the same investor to invest at any valuation the founders don't have to talk about aspects of the next stage tend to become dictator and intimidate the NBA into letting you write has a word meaning how one feels when things are going well, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them. Which is probably a mistake to believe is that their experience so far the only way to tell how serious potential investors and they begin by having an associate.

Globally the trend has been rewritten to suit present fashions.

See Greenspun's Tenth Rule.

Bill Yerazunis. This was made a million dollars out of a social network for x. If you wanted to invest at any valuation the founders of Hewlett Packard said it first, and it has about the smaller investments you raise them.

The undergraduate curriculum or trivium whence trivial consisted of three stakes.

[jmaria200]

American expectations

Americans traditionally expect that their lives will progressively get better, that where they currently are is just a stop along the way to more money, career success, recognition, and happiness.  This is part of the great “American dream” that has fueled the goals of so many people. And if someone doesn’t achieve these? Well, they must’ve been lazy, not worked hard in school, etc. But is this really how the world works or just what we’re told? Does the American dream apply to everyone? Or rather was it the White Man’s American dream all along? It’s this look at the flip side of the American dream that discredits it in my opinion.

I recently read a article entitled “The Grim Secret of Nordic Happiness” by Finnish writer Jukka Savolainen that caught my attention. Briefly the article discusses possible reasons why Nordic countries including Finland, Denmark, Iceland etc. often top the rankings of the annual World Happiness Report that measures each country’s overall happiness. The report relies on Gallup polls that ask participants to rank their best potential life based on an fictitious ladder where rungs are numbered 1 to 10. The higher the rung the better the life. Then they are asked to compare this potential happiness to where they currently stand on the ladder.  Given such a no frills definition of happiness, Savolainen surmises that it is no wonder his fellow country man and other Nordic people rank high on what he labels “average life expectation” (Savolainen). On objective measures of life Finland has very low poverty levels, top notch universal healthcare and education, and bountiful vacation and parental leave. In addition to this, the egalitarian nature of Scandinavian people is often traced to their Lutheran roots and Janteloven or the Law of Jante, a social code that dictates “ emphasis on collective accomplishments and well-being, and disdains focus on individual achievements.” (Scandinavia Standard). The idea of Janteloven found it’s beginnings in the works of author Askel Sandemose and his 1933 book A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks. In Sandemose’s work, the individuals of fictional town of Jante are expected to assimilate to the group.  The laws of Jante speak to people not thinking their are smarter, anything special, etc. Today this code is often reflected in the way the people of Scandinavian countries celebrate their strong social welfare systems as opposed to the individual achievements and celebrity of countries like the United States.

In the Eastern practice of Buddhism seeing oneself as interconnected with the world around one is seen as the more natural way of being.  When one let’s go of the “self” as a separate, isolated entity and comes to terms with the universality of human existence, one can feel less alone and more joy and desire to reach out to others.  Anger, greed, and delusion arise from over investment in the self, also known as the ego in Western psychology. Even small threats can make the self lash out in defense leading to conflict and pain.

I bring these examples up to highlight ways of considering human relations differently from Western culture, especially American culture.  I’ll focus specifically on American culture in this blog entry as I’m convinced that we are on a down slope and it is not a failure of individual striving, but a failure to be egalitarian, to understand our connections, and work for the greater good.  I’m not saying that we all need adopt Scandinavian culture or become Buddhist, but what if we were to embrace more modesty and let go of personal striving for the empty promises of materialism and instead put that money towards the greater social good. Yes, this country has wealth but much of it gets funneled into military spending on weapons, debt, and the pockets of a handful of the super rich.  I believe daily people get put through the shredder of this culture in the name of the American dream: long work hours or no work, a broken healthcare system that leaves millions uninsured, stagnant wages, excessive cost of living, etc. When it seems that one just being human is not enough to earn respect and a decent way of life there is something wrong. How does this happen? That is a complex question to answer, but I will attempt to address some of it here.

Fear and Anxiety

If there was any place to start with America’s woes I would say it is fear, or fear mixed with uncertainty also known as anxiety. Fear was useful for us as humans. It helps keep us alive and learning what is dangerous but when we become afraid and we don’t have enough information or the wrong kind of information, we become debilitated. People who are in a state of worry can be swayed to believe ideas without evidence or that contradicts reality because they’re world is being filtered through their worry. Anxiety causes people’s worlds to contract and creates distance from our fellow men and women and fosters a sense loneliness. Anxiety seeps into our culture in many ways. There is the worry of personal lacking generated by a continuous bombardment of messages convincing people they’re insecure and need the right hair shampoo, the right clothing, the right exercise equipment, and the list goes on. There is the anxiety of not being the right skin color, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc. There is the concern of being a victim of “the system” instead of being able to trust it. A culture where trust and connection have given way to mistrust and disconnection is not healthy culture.

Cultural Values

As individuals we each put greater importance on certain values. We also do this collectively including values of family, kindness, respect, financial success, materialism, modesty etc.  As Jukka Savolainen highlights in the article “The Grim Secret of Nordic Happiness” Finnish, as well as their fellow Scandinavians, often focus on modesty, sensibility, and egalitarianism while it’s is no secret Americans put more value on personal achievement, materialism, and financial success.  Values are not problematic in and of themselves. It is when people become personally attached and competitive that values in a culture can become unhealthy. Americans tend to believe that acquiring more the means to a satisfying life and that sacred word “happiness”. This is just not the case. Buddism, like many of the world’s religions, teaches that attachment to objects leads to suffering. We work long hours to have our big televisions, closets of cloths, and luxury vehicles, but we still feel empty and ready for the next “dose”. This effect is often called the hedonistic treadmill.  As mentioned int the previous paragraph, fear creates disconnection and increases self involvement. We can’t worry about the other person when we aren’t okay. This is communicated in our values as well. Civil service, community, and generosity get pushed aside for individual success, competition, and greed.

Intolerance

The tendencies for humans to divide into groups or tribes, into us and them, is part of human nature and it takes real effort to overcome these tendencies. As humans we seek easily distinguished patterns and categories that we use to identify someone as part of the in group. People in our group are people we know; we believe we can trust them.  Group selection helps to build communities churches, and national identities, however, the stronger in group identification leads to greater unity against other groups.  When we take more of a individualistic stance and work to understand our commonalities through education, communication, and exposure to those who are different can alleviate fears and build bridges between different groups. See they are just like us.  Religion, skin color, ethnicity all serve as markers of in groups and out groups. Group dynamics are exacerbated by stress often leading to expressions of racism, xenophobia, etc.  Such dynamics have had a strong presence in our culture since the founding of this country. The subordination of black men and women by enslavement was a part of this country’s foundation. States were admitted to the Union as either slave states or free states. Founding fathers Thomas Jefferson and George Washington espoused life and liberty for all but were both slave owners. Slavery was normalized in parts of this country until the adoption of the 13th amendment in December of 1865 and, despite this measure, the ideologies behind slavery and intolerance have cast a long shadow still present today. Intolerance is part of our culture. The first step would be to come to terms with this concept and discuss it openly in a way that is productive; but, facing our darker sides is painful and messy so people are more likely to look the other way or rationalize their bias in some way.

Leadership

One of the main reasons intolerance and fear remain strong in this country is that hateful, scared people more than often elect leaders who continue to propagate fear and hatred and greed as well. Recently leaders and their followers have tried to “make America great again” and “stop the fall of the Western world”. The basic problem is that great public leadership does not coincide with intolerance. In general leadership takes qualities of compassion, humility, and courage that such people often don’t exhibit. Also people who run on a platform of intolerance will most likely resist aiding the public at large as it would potentially benefit those they fear and hate. They might not even help the people who elected them. Consider the recent example of Donald Trump’s election and four years in office. He made promises he never kept like creating jobs, bullied people when they didn’t do what he wanted, and slandered people of various ethnic backgrounds, yet Congress members protected him and he was nearly re-elected. On the way out of office Trump helped orchestrate the January sixth insurrection. He convinced people to turn against their own government then left them to face the consequences. The Congressional leaders with ideologies similar to Trump continue such machinations in more subtle ways. They manipulate their supporters to some extent to stay in office while dragging down the ability of the United States government to effectively meet the needs of it’s people.

Many business leaders are culpable in this country’s current situation. They have helped fuel the culture war to hinder much needed much needed reform in oversight and regulation that allows them to advantage of loop holes in taxation, damaged the environment, and exploited workers with often legal but unethical business practices. Ill informed people being preyed upon by those in media and faith based organizations who are spreading misinformation and lies. Government is suppose to help balance to influence of negative capitalism and corporate influence, but this is near impossible when the government itself has been gridlocked.

Conclusion

Along the way I’ve mentioned potential solutions to these problems, but where we start is trust. Trust in each other. I’m not saying this will be easy. America is a nation that aspires for people of various cultures, backgrounds, and beliefs can live together peacefully.  It was dream of our founding fathers that their newly found country wasn’t ready for even back then, but my bet is they hoped it would be someday. Unfortunately, this has not been the way of human beings throughout history so far.  We unite against common enemies, but otherwise we tend to fight among ourselves.  But humans have and can evolve. Moral evolution is a big part of what has allowed us to survive.  At one time we were slaughtering other tribes and having world wars between countries. Today such things sound like fiction and with good reason.  In psychology human beings are seen as having three layers of personality: our traits, our beliefs, and our story. When these are in balance, a person can be more authentic and less conflicted. The same goes for our culture. When our traits, beliefs, and story as a culture fall into alignment we can be more authentic as a nation. Balance is key between opposing ideologies too. Those who believe strongly in individual rights and those who stand more with group identity can learn from each other. Corporate and government interests can balance each other out. Conservatives and liberals can learn from each other. It really just comes down to we have to trust each other enough to agree to this. The culture war in this country is similar to physical war in that each side must put down their weapons and start an honest discussion about what common goals they share rather than what divides them. Americans can leave behind chasing shallow expectations of big houses and big vacations and instead expect more important things like equal treatment, guaranteed health care, and fair wages. Then maybe we can be more content with our lives as they are like the Scandinavian countries and less attachments in the spirit of Buddism.