#i got sick as a direct result of a policy change

[natandacat]

It does suck that being stuck in my own body has been my n°1 phobia since childhood 😅 it is so incredibly claustrophobic to be unable to move, unable to THINK, to understand words.... i need to develop strategies to not panic when this happens. Its so hard to endure!

[callsignspark]

change your ticket home

a top gun maverick AU

pairing: Bradley Bradshaw x Sherrie McHone (fem!OC)

summary: After a successful business trip on the West Coast, two Wells Corporation engineers have problems getting back home. Thank god for Bradley Bradshaw, a man who is determined to make their hours waiting in the terminal as enjoyable as possible. And if he and his pretty travel companion (and colleague) get closer along the way? Well that’s just a bonus.

warnings: difficulties of being a woman in a male-dominated field, minor misogyny from coworkers, yearning, pining, Bradley being an absolute sweetheart, it's vaguely alluded to but Sherrie is named after the Steve Perry song, American Airlines bashing bc this fic is based on a real and horrible experience I had a few years ago. and yes, the title is from the one direction song.

word count: 9.8k | masterlist

note: happy saturday! this has been in the works for almost a year and I'm so thrilled to finally be sharing it! this is dedicated to @gretagerwigsmuse, who gave so many wonderful ideas and has continually been a cheerleader for this fic. happy birthday!

Friday, July 15, 2016 | 06:36 AM PST | San Diego, CA

“If I fake a heart attack, we can get out of this meeting, right?”

She looks over at Bradley sprawled in the uncomfortable café chair in his navy suit, his arm slung over the back of her chair. He’s down to just his crisp, white button-up, jacket, and tie abandoned within the first ten minutes of the call.

“Suck it up, we’re almost done.” She rolls her eyes. “And Martin knows you’re a supremely healthy thirty-two-year-old, so no, I don’t think that will work.”

“Sherrie…” His whine is cut off by her hand covering his mouth as she unmutes her microphone and mentally praises his decision to sit so close to her. Not having to pull out both laptops was just an additional perk on top of her ability to silence him.

“That’s correct, Sean. We got them to agree to a small batch trail run for the connectors. We’ll be working together on running them through environmental testing before committing to a full contract.”

“And why are they agreeing to that? Because frankly, it makes no sense to me why they would want to do that.”

Bradley straightens up, his eyes narrowing at the Teams box showing the older man’s initials. “Well, Sean, as Sherrie explained before. Harris hasn’t produced connectors like this before, and they’re interested in the test results, specifically the shock data. So they agreed to take on half the burden so they can use the information for their own use. If this works how we think it will, this will be a huge boost for their business, even if the patent is shared.”

She looks at him, half admonishment and half appreciation, always a little bit amazed when he had her back, no matter how many times he had done it. “The contracts team is drawing up the final agreements and negotiating with their team next week, so best case scenario is we have reports with usable data by the end of the summer. Worst case, it’ll drift into the middle of Q1.”

“That’s great work you guys did out there, thank you. Alright, I think that covers everything we had to talk about today. McHone, Bradshaw - have a safe flight back, and everyone have a good weekend!” Martin ends the call before anyone can add anything.

Bradley laughs. “God, he’s just as sick of Sean as I am. I can’t wait until he retires.”

“He’s not that bad; you’re just grumpy because you had to dress up for the staff meeting, and then Martin said cameras off today.”

“I am upset about that! I will be logging yet another suggestion that we should have casual Fridays and casual travel policy. But I’m more upset because he talks down to you all the time! Like you haven’t been carrying this department on your back since we started ten years ago!”

“Carrying is an exaggeration, Bradley.” She looks up from where she’s putting her laptop away. “I think you have time to change into something comfy before we board.”

“American Airlines Flight 2307 from San Diego to Charlotte, Boarding Group A can now board.”

“Or not.” She giggles as he groans, reaching over to pull her other air pod out of his ear. “Come on, it’s a long flight; you can sleep on the plane. Just be thankful you’re not wearing an underwire bra and heels.”

“I don’t know how you do that.” He mutters, shooing her away when she tries to pick up her carry-on, throwing it over his shoulder alongside his own.

“I don’t either. I’m going to get a massage when we get back to Boston.”

“Ohhh, a massage sounds nice.” He subtly sticks his elbow out for her grab, which she gratefully does, letting his tall frame guide her to their gate. “You know you didn’t have to wear heels, right?”

“You should shut up while I’m still thankful you yelled at Sean for me.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

Sherrie leans her head on his arm as they wait in the priority boarding line, one of the perks of traveling on the company’s dime. Normally, she would worry about being more professional while carrying her work bag that had the Wells Corporation logo embroidered on it, but she can’t bring herself to care. Yesterday’s meetings ran late, and the following client dinner had kept them out until almost midnight. After packing, going to bed late, and having to get up at 3:30AM to get to the airport, she was exhausted.

She takes her bag before they scan their tickets, not fighting when he grabs it again on their walk down the jet bridge.

“Where are you sitting again?”

“I’m in 16C.” She snorts at Bradley’s pout. “What? You knew we weren’t going to be sitting together.”

“But I’m going to be bored all the way back in 21D by myself.”

“Bud, you’re going to fall asleep in the first 30 minutes like you always do, and then I would be stuck for the next four hours with you leaning and drooling on me.”

Bradley whips his head around, “That is a baseless accusation. I do not drool!”

“You 100% definitely do drool, I’ve seen it.” Her smirk widens when his attempt to fight back is cut off by the flight attendants greeting them.

He ushers Sherrie on first, politely nodding to the flight crew before following her down the aisle, ducking down to whisper. “I do not drool.”

“You absolutely do drool. You also snore.”

She can feel eyes on them as they shuffle down the aisle, making eye contact with an older woman who raises her eyebrows in appreciation at the hunk of a man behind her.

This happens everywhere they go.

Bradley is such a gentleman, always opening doors and carrying her bags, that people never believe the two are just friends and coworkers. She’s had complete strangers fight with her when she says there’s nothing between them. Unable to accept that it’s just platonic.

As much as she wishes it could be more.

After years of learning all the little details of each other, she knows they would be good together. Their decade-long friendship allowing her to thoroughly analyze how well their personalities would mesh. They share the same beliefs and have the same interests; they even have overlapping friend groups. They’re made for each other.

On paper.

In reality, it will never happen.

She won’t let it.

“Is this good here?” Bradley’s question interrupts her weekly internal spiral; his big brown eyes blink at her over his shoulder as he puts her bag into the overhead compartment.

“That’s fine. Can you grab my water bottle out of the side pocket?

“Here ya go, ma’am. I’ll meet you by the water foundation when we land, okay?”

She nods, smiling as he hustles back to his seat to avoid a family almost flattening him in their haste to get to their assigned seats.

Her seat neighbors haven’t arrived yet, so Sherrie sits down without bothering to buckle, tucking her work bag under the row in front of her after pulling out her plane kit. Her pencil case from college that she’s repurposed to hold her headphones, phone charger, gum, hand sanitizer, and a few other small necessities.

Her phone buzzes as she’s storing her water bottle and the little bag away in the pocket of the seat in front of her.

Bradley is woken up by his seat neighbor hitting his arm as he reaches to grab a drink, nodding at the guy’s apologetic face before trying to get comfortable again. Alan talked way too much at dinner last night, and it was a struggle to stay awake during the project manager’s third round of gushing over how brilliant and profitable Sherrie’s proposal would be for both companies.

“Sir? This is for you, do you want it?” The muffled question is accompanied by someone shaking his shoulder. He peels open his eyes to see the flight attendant holding out two packets of Biscoff cookies.

His face must be confused enough for the short woman to take pity on him. “Your friend up there said these are your favorite and asked me to give hers to you.”

His heart warms up, taking the treats and saying thank you. He enjoys the cookies, washing them down with the ginger ale he also got, thinking about how well Sherrie knows him. He forces himself to wait for them to finish snack service before he gets up to use the restroom.

“Thank you.” Bradley revels in the way Sherrie jumps when he pops her headphone out, purposefully brushing his lips against her ear. “Hmmm, you were right, your seatmate is cute.”

She glares up at him, a smile threatening to break through. “Isn’t he? He fell asleep five minutes after take off, just like you.”

“Yet, another baseless accusation!”

“I heard you snoring.”

“You shouldn’t lie in front of small children.”

“His mom said he’s seven months old; I don’t think we have to be concerned about teaching him to lie while he’s still in a car seat.”

“Probably shouldn’t chance it, though. Say I don’t snore.”

“You just said I shouldn’t lie. Should probably go to the bathroom before you start holding up traffic.” She puts her headphone back in, wiggling her fingers at him before going back to reading on her phone.

It gives him the strangest sense of déjà vu.

Tuesday, March 25, 2005 | 10:43 AM EST | Charlottesville, VA

“…and he said you had already-” Bradley cuts himself off, realizing she can’t hear him. He chuckles; he should have known better than to just walk up and start talking.

He doesn’t know Sherrie McHone very well. They had taken all the freshman intro to engineering requirements together, and this year their classes had split into their chosen disciplines. His mechanical, hers electrical. But he knows her well enough to know that she can pretty much only be found without her headphones during class.

He remembers the first time they spoke last semester after he accidentally walked right into her. He had told Danny it’s because she’s so much shorter than him, but it’s really because he wasn't paying attention.

Sherrie had only taken one earpiece out to make sure he was okay before continuing onto her class, seamlessly weaving between upperclassmen as she shoved her headphone back in.

“Sherrie?” No response.

He lets out a tiny huff and checks his watch. Normally, he wouldn’t care that she’s clueless to his existence even as he’s right beside her, but he’s got a class soon, and he’s still two buildings away. So he does the only thing he can.

He pops her headphones out and steps back for fear of getting smacked.

Her head whips up, narrowing in on him freakishly fast. “What the fuck, Bradshaw?”

He’s surprised to learn that she knows his name.

“Sorry, Sherrie! I’ve been trying to talk to you for like five minutes, and you somehow haven’t noticed, but I’ve got class in 15 minutes, so I needed to get your attention.”

“Oh…” Her green eyes widen in surprise, the apples of her cheeks turning a light pink. “Sorry about that. What did you need? Wait. How did you find me?”

A fair question.

“Khondker told me where you sit.” He partially fibs.

All semester he had been watching her disappear after EE221, the one class they shared. It had taken him a while, but he was pretty sure he had found her secret study nook in the electrical engineering wing of the building. Their TA had only confirmed Bradley’s theory of where he could find his fellow sophomore.

“I don’t understand this last section we’ve been learning, and Khondker said you had already finished the homework and could help me. So could you?”

“He didn’t help you?” Sherrie raises an eyebrow in disbelief.

“He tried.” Bradley scratches the back of his head, remembering how frustrated the patient man had been after his third attempt at explaining. “I just really don’t understand circuit loops. And he thought having a classmate explain it to me would make it stick. That or he was just so sick of me, he’s pawning me off.”

He watches her think, her pencil rapidly tapping against her notebook, making him nervous.

“I don’t want to be rude, but if you don’t understand current loops, I’m not sure how much help I can be. I understand the material, but I’m not a miracle worker.”

Her bluntness makes him smile. “I’m not expecting miracles, just help with the homework. If you have time.”

“Okay, just as long as you don’t get your hopes up too much.” She grabs a bright pink notebook and opens it up. “So, I’m usually free-”

“I don't want to interrupt, but I do have to get to class, so could we figure out a time later today?”

“Sure, I’ll be here until my class at four. Feel free to sit down if I’m not here; it just means I’m grabbing food.” He nods, backing away. “Wait! Bradley! Go down this hall and out the side door. You’ll be like halfway there already.”

“Awesome, thanks!” He starts to jog down the hallway, looking back to see her putting her headphones back in. Waving back when she smiles and wiggles her fingers at him before going back to her homework.

Friday, July 15, 2016 | 3:16 PM EST | Charlotte, NC

“Our flight got delayed, and I’m hungry.”

Sherrie jumps, not expecting Bradley to get that close to her face three seconds after she exited the bathroom.

“Okay, I could eat. Where do you wan-”

“Auntie Anne’s.”

He’s walking away before she can even process what he said. She allows herself one second to appreciate the way he looks, walking through the concourse - navy slacks fitting his legs perfectly and all their bags thrown over his broad shoulders - before she’s clicking along after him.

“Bradshaw!” He freezes and turns, almost taking a lanky teenager out with her backpack. “Oh my god, Bradley! Be careful! You almost took that kid’s head off.”

His smile is sheepish as she shuffles them over to the wall. “I did not do that on purpose.”

She giggles and takes her backpack from his shoulder. “Yeah, I kinda figured. But you should have seen his face. His life flashed before his eyes. All sixteen years.”

“I can carry that Sherrie.”

“That’s okay, I got it. No! Bradley!”

He ignores her, smiling at her frustrated little stomp when he hands over her tan, cross-body purse out of her work bag. “You just carry that and make sure I don’t take out any toddlers or old ladies.”

“How am I supposed to do that if I’m ahead of you?” She snarks as he steers them toward the food stands.

“You’re smart; I’m sure you’ll figure it out.” Bradley laughs when she mocks him under her breath. “I can hear you, smartass.”

“You were meant to, Bradley.”

His heart flutters at the teasing wink she sends over her shoulder. It’s been twelve years since they became friends, and he still feels like that 20-year-old kid who was nervous to talk to the pretty red-headed girl he had a crush on.

He can feel eyes on them as her heels catch people’s attention, and he finds himself glaring at men who are shamelessly staring. Her shoes aren’t loud as they click along on the tile floor, but it’s hard to ignore the beautiful woman striding along in business casual.

It happens everywhere they go.

Sherrie has always been beautiful and painfully unaware of her effect on men. It never matters where they are - at work, the rare baseball game he forces her to attend, happy hour with their friends from school - she always catches attention. It doesn’t bother him because she never reciprocates, and he’s always the one to give her a ride back to her apartment.

Even if he wishes it was their apartment they were going to.

He’s watched her change over the last decade, seen her grow as a person. He’s risen through the ranks with her professionally, the two of them matching each other step for step with each promotion and raise. He’s publicly assured her that her hair still looks good as it’s deepened color with age, now less red and more auburn. He’s privately appreciated the way her body has changed, softer and curvier than when they were kids. Her wide hips are a frequent star in his daydreams.

It's the only place where they’ll ever be in a relationship.

He knows they’d be perfect together. Old friends who know each other so well they don’t even have to talk to communicate sometimes. Whose attitudes fit together like puzzle pieces, perfectly in sync with each other. He knows it won’t happen. Can’t happen.

“Grab us a table, and I’ll get the food.”

“Okay.” He doesn’t fight her about paying, knowing this will be covered under their per diem. “Don’t forget my-”

“You’re frozen lemonade, I know!”

Bradley rolls his eyes at the hand that waves over her shoulder, settling their bags at a table and keeping an eye on Sherrie while sending an update to Mav.

His thumbs hover over the keyboard. He wants to tell his uncle the whole situation - that he’s not afraid to flirt with Sherrie.

“Everything okay?”

Bradley looks up to find her eyebrows furrowed as she sets a tray down.

“All good. Just sending my family an update that we’re delayed.”

She nods, sitting in the chair across from him. “Here’s your mini pretzel dogs, with mustard and a frozen lemonade. This is my pretzel nuggets, cheese sauce, and Diet Coke. Oh! And I got us these cinnamon sugar pretzels to share!”

“Thank you for remembering the mustard.”

“Bradley, when have I ever forgotten the mustard? Here, take some napkins.”

He shoves an entire mini pretzel dog in his mouth in lieu of answering her question, which they both know the answer to. Never. She has never forgotten his love for pretzels with mustard.

They eat in comfortable silence, the way only two friends can, occasionally dunking into each other's sauces as they scroll through their phones.

“Hey, how is your da- oh Bradley! You got mustard on your shirt!” His head snaps down to his shirt, groaning when he sees the yellow blob on his white button-up.

“Fuck! This is new, too!”

Sherrie dives into her bag, muttering about a stain stick, a triumphant noise escaping when she comes up successful. Scooting closer to him, she’s hit with a wave of nostalgia as she helps him clean his shirt.

Friday, April 6, 2007 | 10:12 PM EST | Charlottesville, VA

“You should’ve been gone, knowing how I made you feel!”

Sherrie’s head pops up from the lab reports she’s grading.

“And I should've been gone, after all your words of steel!”

She knows that voice.

“Oh, I must've been a dreamer! And I must've been someone else!”

She knows that voice very well.

“And we should've been over!”

She rushes for the front door, hoping and praying that the idiot she’s become close friends with this year isn’t actually outside her townhouse.

“Oh! Sherrie, our love holds on! Holds on!”

She whips the door open and, sure enough, drunkenly singing to her neighbor's house is Bradley Bradshaw.

“Bradley!” She hisses at him, ignoring the flutters in her stomach when he points his big, goofy grin towards her and not the tulips the soccer girls next door planted in front of their bay window. “What are you doing? It’s 10 PM!”

“You didn’t come.”

“First man to ever care about that.” She mutters, snorting at her joke.

“What’s funny?”

“Nothing. What are you doing here?”

His puppy dog eyes are vicious, and she has the urge to slap her hand over her eyes so she doesn’t succumb to their power. “You didn’t come to the party!”

Sherrie sighs, she thought he might be disappointed she didn’t come to the annual Sigma Chi Easter Bash, but she never thought he would actually notice her absence. Or that it would result in a drunken serenade.

“Bradley, I told you I had a lot of grading and might not make it tonight.” She gently reminds him, stifling a laugh when he trips over his own feet while standing still. “You okay?”

“I have to pee. Can I come in?”

She’s pretty sure he’s just making excuses but lets him in any way; she doesn’t need to deal with him getting a public indecency charge on top of everything else. “Shoes off, Bradshaw. Bathroom is right here; I’ll be in the dining room.”

“Yes, ma’am!” He sloppily salutes her, losing his balance and thunking against the wall, one shoe still on.

Sherrie just blinks at him before returning to her spot at the dining room table, holding in the laugh threatening to escape. She settles in her chair, focusing on the mediocre reports her students had turned in.

“I washed my hands!” Bradley’s abrupt entrance startles her. “Can we have a snack? I’m hungry?

She watches in amusement as he shuffles to her fridge, riffling through the shelves before opening the freezer and gasping.

“I love pretzels. Can we make these? Please?”

The box of pretzels belongs to her roommate, but she’s not strong enough to deny Bradley’s big brown eyes two times in a row so she makes a mental note to buy Amna a new box the next time she goes to the store. “Yeah, we can. But no touching the oven when you’re drunk. Go sit down.”

“I’m not drunk!” He argues even as he follows her directions, plopping himself at the table and nosily leafing through her done pile. “Wow, lots of red here.”

“Bradley! Don’t look at those!”

“Why not?”

“Would you want some random student looking through your homework?”

His rebuttal gets cut off by the oven beeping, announcing it’s up to temp. After she pops the tray in the oven, she turns and catches him appreciating the pj shorts riding up her shapely legs.

“What?” Her head cocks in confusion.

“Nothin'… cute shorts.”

“Thank you.” He watches in fascination as she snips at him even while her cheeks turn pink. “It’s almost like I was dressed for comfort and not planning on being interrupted.”

“But you’re glad I’m here, right?”

“I’ve had worse company on a Friday night.” She nudges him out of her chair. “While those are baking, go find something to watch, and I’m going to finish grading this report.”

“Such a responsible TA.”

Pride fills his chest as Sherrie snorts at his joke and goes back to work. They’ve officially been friends since last year, but he still tries his hardest to make her laugh. She's always so busy and stressed, and she does the cutest little snort-laugh when he catches her off guard.

He puts on a random movie, just grabbing a VHS case with the Disney logo on the side, before plopping on the couch. “Is there a reason you have so many kids movies?”

“Those are Jayla’s, she collects them.” Sherrie answers, never looking up from the table. “What did you choose?”

“It’s a surprise!”

“You don’t remember, huh?”

“Nope! I’ll be quiet now.”

She hums a thank you in his direction, and Bradley keeps his promise, watching her work and staying quiet until the timer goes off. His chin hooked on the back of the couch; he follows her movement through the kitchen as she pulls the pretzels out and transfers them to a plate.

“Can I have mustard, please?”

“Sure can.” Sherrie smiles at his dopey smile as she makes her way to the couch. “Here, take these, then we can eat.”

He gulps down the painkillers she drops in his hand, chugging the rest of the apple juice after they’re gone, smiling when she absentmindedly praises him for listening. He shoves a bite of pretzel in his mouth and mashes the play button, and is pleasantly surprised to find A Bug’s Life was the mystery choice.

“I love this movie,” he garbles through a pretzel. “I love how Flick wins over the princess just by getting a chance to show off his true self.”

“That was shockingly wise for the drunk man sprawled on my couch.”

Bradley thanks her, already a bit more sober but not enough to pick up on her teasing. “So, why didn’t you come? Grading really couldn’t wait?”

“It probably could have, but I’m not a partier, Bradley. You know that.” She dips a piece of pretzel in the mustard. “Besides, I really didn’t think you would notice I wasn’t there, Mr. Popular.”

“You’re the only person I invited; of course, I noticed when you didn’t show up.”

“Really? No one else? Why?”

“I know it’s almost finals, but I wanted to hang out without any books in front of us; that’s all we do lately. Study. Plus, you’ve been extra stressed about something that you don’t want to talk about, and I just wanted you to relax since you won’t talk to me about whatever is bothering you.”

“That’s sweet of you, Bradley. It’s not that I don’t want to tell you; it’s just that my family has been…” She waves a hand through the air, a deep sigh escaping. “It’s complicated. I’m trying not to think about it too much.”

“Well, I’m here if you do want to talk.”

“Thanks bud. How about you? How’re your parents?” She takes one last chunk before nudging the plate in his direction and settling back into the corner.

“Mom is good; she’s close to being considered cancer-free. I think we’re gonna throw a party when she gets there.”

“That’s awesome, Bradley! I’m glad she’s doing so well. How’s your dad?”

“Mav isn’t my dad.”

A record scratch plays in Sherrie’s head as she freezes. She knows she’s heard Bradley talk about his dad, and she’d seen photos of his parents the one time she had visited his frat house last year. He had specifically pointed the photo out, telling her it was his parents. She had even been next to him when he was on the phone when he said “dad” to the person on the other end.

“My dad died when I was three. Mav is- was his best friend. I call him dad sometimes because he’s the closest thing I’ve got.”

Sherrie feels her heart break as Bradley sniffles and sadly shoves a mustard-covered pretzel in his mouth, unshed tears clumping his eyelashes. She’s never seen her friend like this before; she’s experienced many other emotions - frustration, joy, confusion - but the pain creasing his brow is new.

Comforting crying people has never been her forte, but instinctively - almost like they moved without her permission - Sherrie’s fingers run over his hair. Gently stroking the sun-streaked waves as a few tears escape down his cheeks and she scoots closer, letting her body press into his side and hoping the proximity helps.

“I’m sorry for crying on you.” He quietly apologizes after a few minutes of tears.

“S’okay. Family can be hard sometimes.”

“Complicated.”

“That too.” She hums, not moving as he swipes at his eyes and leans against her more, his head resting on her shoulder in a slouched position that can’t be comfortable.

“I love Mav; he’s my dad in all the ways it matters. It just sucks that my actual dad won’t be here for graduation. Like, I know he’s missed so much of my life already, but something about him missing college graduation is worse than everything else. It’s just so unfair; I barely remember him, but I just- I just miss him so much, Sherrie.”

Her heart cracks in half at the whispered confession. She can’t even imagine the pain of losing a parent at such a young age. The inability to remember one of the people responsible for giving you life, all memories fuzzy and most built from second-hand recollections of those who can remember. So she says the one thing she would want to hear.

“Tell me about him.”

Sherrie knows she said the right thing when his red-rimmed eyes brighten, and he immediately launches into a beloved story detailing his father’s love of pranks. She listens dutifully — laughing at the right moments and asking questions when Bradley gets carried away, forgetting that she doesn’t know all the people in his story — and feels her heart warm more and more. She’s always liked Bradley, probably more than she should, but it’s hard not to like him. He’s considerate, smart, and funny, not to mention handsome.

Thankfully, before she gets lost in thoughts of broad shoulders and strong jawlines, a big glob of mustard drops on Bradley’s t-shirt, abruptly cutting him off. The two stare in silence at the yellow condiment sitting on the black cotton shirt, somehow surprised at its appearance, before breaking down into giggles.

“C’mon Bradshaw,” Sherrie grabs his hand, pulling him off the couch. “I have a Tide pen we can use on that mess.”

Bradley follows her up the stairs and into the bathroom, teasing Sherrie about the way her tongue pokes out when she focuses. She takes the gentle taunts, grateful he’s focusing on that and not on her pink cheeks or the way her eyes keep darting to his toned stomach. She’s not sure it was completely necessary for him to strip his shirt off, but she won’t be complaining.

“Well,” A few minutes later, she interrupts his rambling story about a slip and slide. Or she thinks that’s what it’s about; she missed the first part. “I think this is as good as I can get it.”

“That’s okay; it’s not like it’s new or anything. Thanks, Sherrie.”

She steadfastly ignores the pounding heart in her chest as miles of golden skin gets covered back up, trying to not feel too disappointed by its disappearance.

Friday, July 15, 2016 | 3:56 PM EST | Charlotte, NC

“Oh, this is ridiculous!” Bradley complains a bit too loudly, ears going hot when several pairs of eyes curiously dart toward him, but his focus doesn’t stay on that for very long when he catches the face Sherrie makes. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing!”

He squints suspiciously as she avoids eye contact. He usually takes her at her word and doesn’t push, but the frown pulling down the corners of her pink lips sets off bells in his head. “Sherrie, what’s wrong?”

“Nothing, Bradley. I’m fine.”

He grumbles at her lack of response but settles again in the spot they had claimed after finishing their snack. The gate was still packed, but they had found a prime location with outlets; the only downside was having to sit on the floor, something that is getting harder the older they get.

Bradley scans the area, trying to scout out some open chairs for them to grab, while Sherrie goes back to the movie they’ve been watching on his phone. His eyes drop away from the chairs in surprise when she scoots closer and leans on his shoulder. It’s not uncommon for them to sit close like this at home in Boston, sides pressed together, but she makes a point to be professional when they’re on travel.

“Hey,” he gently nudges her side, concern rising when she doesn’t lift her head, choosing to tilt her neck back, looking up at him with tired eyes. “Are you sure you’re okay?”

Panic grips his chest when tears start forming, clouding her green eyes. “Sherrie?! What’s wrong?”

“We were supposed to be halfway home by now, and I’m so uncomfortable. I’m sorry, Bradley, I’m just so tired.” She whimpers, hiding against his bicep.

It hits him like a glass of cold water. Of course, she’s uncomfortable. She’s been walking around in heels and her pantsuit since 4AM California time after getting maybe three hours of sleep. His suit and shoes are comfortable and easily wearable for twelve-plus hours, not to mention the jacket and tie that were ditched sometime after the mustard incident.

“Oh, Sherrie, it’s okay. Let’s go change, yeah? Then we’ll find a quieter place so you can close your eyes and maybe get some sleep.”

“But the policy…”

Bradley resists the urge to roll his eyes at her insistence on rule-following. “In the nicest way possible, Sher, fuck the policy. You’re uncomfortable, and I care about that way more than I could ever care about a stupid, archaic policy.”

He stands, unplugging their phones and gathering their bags on his shoulder before turning to his best friend, who is still on the floor. “C’mon, we’re putting comfy clothes on.”

“But Bradley-”

“No arguing.” He interrupts, helping her off the ground and directing them back towards the restrooms. “We’re not going to sit in our suits for god knows how much longer.”

“But Bradley, I don’t have anything to change into. We had such a packed schedule I didn’t bother to bring normal clothes.” He ignores the thumping of his heart when her hand grabs his forearm, warm fingers slipping under the edge of the rolled-up sleeve as she tugs to slow his pace. At that information, he slides them out of the flow of traffic and over to the wall, Bradley pressing her against one of the columns lining the concourse atrium.

“You don’t have any regular clothes? What about your pajamas?”

“I have a pair of leggings because I was going to do a training run in the gym last night, but that’s it. I can’t wear my pjs because… well, they’re not appropriate for public.”

“Your leggings are clean, though, right?” He asks, ignoring the thoughts of what non-public appropriate pajamas might look like.

“Well, yeah, dinner went so late I barely had time to sleep before we had to be up. I guess I could buy a shirt at one of the SmartShop- what are you doing?”

Bradley peers up from his knees, where he had started digging in his bag. “I’m grabbing one of my shirts for you. Would you prefer a t-shirt or a sweatshirt? Actually, you’re definitely gonna get cold, sweatshirt for you.”

He pulls the worn, gray crew neck out, shaking it out before handing it over.

“You still have this?” The disbelief in her voice makes him laugh.

“Of course, I still have that! Relay was always my favorite event of the year. And that year was my favorite one.”

As the philanthropy chair of Sigma Chi, part of his job was to sign the brothers up for volunteer events and fundraisers. With his mom’s diagnosis, he ensured their schedule included the campus’ annual Relay for Life event, pouring as many resources as he could into the fundraiser that directly helped advance cancer research.

“Wait, but why was junior year your favorite?” She asks, brushing her fingers over the cracked, screen-printed logo.

“Because that’s the reason we became friends, Sher.”

Surprised green eyes meet sincere brown eyes, a thousand words said in the silence of their stares, both remembering the lead-up to that day in April so many years ago.

Bradley’s eyes widen in panic as everyone at the gate starts moving as a herd. They had finally found seats to relax in after changing, the group of passengers waiting with them shrinking as time went on. And now, with only ten minutes until boarding, their gate has changed again.

“Sherrie, wake up!” He feels bad shaking the snoozing woman off, but they have to move with the group to make it to the new part of Terminal A in time for their flight. “C’mon, honey, they changed the gate again — we gotta go!”

“What are you- again?! Shit!” She wipes the bleariness from her eyes, slinging her bags over her shoulder and grabbing the hand he holds out.

The two coworkers, along with fifty of their fellow passengers who have stuck this out, speed walk down the first branch of the terminal. The entire group picking up the pace when turning the corner towards the second branch where the new gate lives. By the time they hit the second branch, everyone is practically running — time ticking down to boarding — no one wanting to miss this flight.

As if the blob of Flight 1121 passengers racing toward the end of the terminal didn’t garner attention from other gates, the entire terminal is staring by the time they reach gate A28, and several people start yelling in frustration.

“This is unbelievable!” An older gentleman’s unhappiness is interrupted by three simultaneous updates pinging everyone’s phones.

Bradley’s head drops back in disbelief, wrapping his arm around Sherrie when her head thunks against his chest. He doesn’t even get a chance to comfort her before the gate agents are making announcements about getting people on other flights, providing hotel rooms, and the vouchers that will be shared.

“Again, we apologize, but if you have flexible travel plans, we ask that you please go to the end of the line so those with time constraints can be taken care of first. Thank you for your cooperation, folks!”

“Well, that’s us, huh?”

“Yeah, I guess.” Sherrie blows air out of her lips, a mischievous smile taking over her face. “Hey, at least this means extra per diem money.”

Bradley laughs as they move to the back of the squiggly line that’s forming, letting her take the bags so he can step away to call to update their supervisor and then his pet sitter. It only takes a few rings for his boss to pick up. “Bradshaw! What’s up? You okay?”

“Hey Martin, all good. Just wanted to let you know that our flight has gotten supremely delayed. We won’t be home until tomorrow morning sometime.”

“Jesus, do you guys need anything?”

“Nah, we’re good. The airline is putting us up in a hotel for the night and giving vouchers for a bunch of stuff. Just called to let you know and for a heads up on the expense report.”

“Well, that is the most important part!” Martin’s honking laugh makes Bradley chuckle as he glances to check on Sherrie’s progress in line. “How’s Sherrie? She good?”

“Yeah, she’s good. She’s holding our spot in line for getting new tickets and stuff.” And it looks like she’s made friends already, he silently adds, smiling at her interacting with the elderly couple in front of her.

“Good. Alright then, I’ll see you on Monday, but let me know if you guys need anything. And hey! If you two end up in the same hotel room — remember what I said on your first day!”

The line goes dead, and so does Bradley’s smile, his stomach churning like it does every time he remembers his first day at the Wells Corporation.

Tuesday, July 10, 2007 | 11:15 AM EST | Boston, MA

“Will you calm down?”

“I can’t, Bradley. What if no one likes me? What if I fuck up?!” She hisses, working to appear calm as they wait for their supervisor to show up, but failing.

“First of all, we’re starting together, so you have at least one person that likes you. And you’re great, everyone will like you. Second, there will be mistakes, but we just graduated — they’re not going to let us do anything alone because we don’t know anything yet.”

Sherrie nods, tucking her hands under her legs and trying to breathe. Bradley’s words are encouraging, but he doesn’t know how difficult her internship was last summer. The older engineers she shadowed treated her like a glorified coffee girl and secretary. Even when she had pointed out a mistake they all had missed, there was no change — just the addition of making her type their reports to see if she could catch something the non-engineer tech writers would miss.

This is a brand new company, but misogyny wasn’t unique to Waite Green Construction. Every woman has to work twice as hard to prove her worth and intellect, no matter her age or experience. She’s just hoping her onboarding mentor will be the only other woman in the department; it would be the perfect way to gain a professional mentor once she’s out of the probation period.

“Good morning, kids! How was orientation?” Mr. Teresi walks into the conference room.

Bradley shakes his hand first, “It was good, sir. Nice to see you again.”

“Good to hear! Learn lots of new things.”

“Yes, I think we can be considered experts on trade secrets now.” Sherrie jokes, focusing on making sure her handshake is firm but not too firm.

“Wonderful. So, I’m guessing you two have been introduced, but just in case you haven’t. Bradley, this is Sherrie McHone; she’s an electrical engineer. And Sherrie, this is Bradley Bradshaw, a mechanical engineer.”

“We actually went to school together, sir.”

“We’re friends,” Bradley adds, the two of them exchanging small smiles.

“Oh, great! Well, that makes things easier getting started. Now let’s go over my plan for the two of you, and then we’ll get lunch, my treat for your first day.”

Their supervisor talks for half an hour, going over things they’ll need to be trained in and their first assignments. By the time he’s done, several notebook pages have been filled and highlighted with things that need to be looked up.

“Alright!” The older engineer claps, rubbing his hands together. “I’m sure your brains are overloaded with information, so go drop your things at your desks, and we’ll head to lunch.”

The recent graduates gather their notes and head for the door, quietly talking about a training they’ll be attending next week when he stops them. “One more thing, guys. They never mention it during R&D orientation, but I feel it’s necessary to mention it to new people. Here at Wells, there isn’t a fraternization policy among non-management coworkers or between any employees in different divisions. But we are a fairly small department, so keep in mind who you interact with and what impacts that may have at work.”

Sherrie feels the blood drain from her already pale face as her brand new supervisor stares at her the entire time he speaks, ignoring Bradley completely. She’s going to be sick. Less than four hours into the first professional role of her career, and it’s already happening.

This is the moment it starts, she thinks, her heart pounding in her throat as she robotically nods. It’s never the men that get these warnings. It’s always the women. Always us. Always me.

“I don’t care about that. But there are some people who will, even though they shouldn’t. And I want you guys to have the best experience here you possibly can. You’re both extremely bright, and I’m excited about your futures. I don’t want you to get bogged down by the opinions of others. Understand?”

“Yes, sir.” They answer in unison before filing out of the conference room.

“Sherrie, don’t worry about that. He’s just-”

“Trust me, Bradley. I know exactly what he was saying. I’m going to use the restroom, and then I’ll meet you guys at the elevator.”

“Sherrie…”

But she ignores her friend, shrugging her purse over her shoulder and keeping her face neutral as she heads for the single-stall ladies’ room. Fighting to hold the tears back until she’s inside for fear of being perceived as emotional. A quality no woman can afford to have in a professional setting.

Friday, July 15, 2016 | 8:05 PM EST | Charlotte, NC

“Hey, everything? Martin says hi.”

“We’re good! This is Mr. and Mrs. Ludden; they’re going to visit their newest granddaughter. How’re Sophie and Louis?” Bradley smiles at the excited way she introduces them, putting a steadying hand on her back when she bounces up on her toes.

“Oh, congrats! They’re good; Marie can watch’em one more day, problem.”

“Good, we’ll have to get her a thank you present for the short notice.”

“You didn’t tell us you guys had kids!”

Bradley and Sherrie freeze in place, eyes widening in surprise at the older woman’s words.

“Oh- uh- we-” Sherrie giggles awkwardly. “Sophie and Louis are our cats; we don’t have kids.”

“I’m so sorry!” Mrs. Ludden gasps, hand covering her mouth in shock while her husband groans her name.

“Louise, how many times do we have to do this before you stop making assumptions?”

“It’s okay, innocent mistake,” Bradley assures them.

“Well, they’re such a cute couple. I just thought they would have adorable children, too!”

“Actually… we’re not…”

“Oh, lord. Let me guess. You’re not dating. You’re just friends.”

“Coworkers too, but we were friends first.” Sherrie suppresses a laugh when the older gentleman rubs a hand over his eyes in exasperation.

“Don’t even start, Clayton!”

“I wasn’t going to, dear.”

Bradley can’t help the laugh that escapes at the comfortable ribbing they give each other; it reminds him of his friendship with Sherrie. The easy way they tease, never going too far.

“Would you two like to join us after we get rebooked?” Bradley asks. “We’re going to use our food vouchers tonight to grab dinner before we head to whatever hotel they put us up in.”

The four adults move through the line, chatting about small things and comparing pictures of grandkids and cats. It’s a nice way to spend the time, especially when they get to share judging looks when a woman throws a tantrum and yells at the gate agent. But soon enough, they’re walking back to the main concourse and deciding what food to get.

“No, stop. You just sit here with the bags, and I’ll grab the food.” Bradley gently pushes Sherrie back into her chair, rolling his eyes as he talks over her protests. “I know. You want mac and cheese, Diet Coke, and whatever pulled pork flavor looks best.”

“He’s sweet,” Louise says, watching the two men make their way over to the BBQ place.

“He’s annoying.” Which makes her companion laugh. “Yes, he’s very sweet. I’m lucky to be such good friends with him.”

“Can I ask why the two of you aren’t together? He even knows what food to bring you.”

“It’s just never been like that between us. We’ve always just been friends. And he’s annoyingly smart, so he always remembers what I order.” Sherrie half smiles, pushing down the pain in her chest at the harmless curiosity, watching Bradley laugh at something Clayton says as she remembers the first time he remembered one of her favorites.

Saturday, March 4, 2006 | 1:34 PM EST | Charlottesville, VA

“Thanks for meeting me on a Saturday, Bradshaw. It’s just such a busy semester.”

“No problem. You know you can call me Bradley, right?”

“Oh, sorry. Do you not like being called Bradshaw?” Sherrie blinks when a bottle of Diet Coke and a small bag of Skittles is set on the table in front of her. “What’s this?”

“Your favorite snack.”

“Right… but why?”

“Because you have that about 50% of the time when we meet up to work on this project. Now, I finished transcribing the interview with Commander Buck last night. Did you want to- Sherrie?”

She shifts her focus from the food to the boy across from her in the study nook they’ve claimed as theirs for the semester. “Why do you remember my favorite snack?”

“Because we’re friends?” Brown eyes look into hers, equally confused.

“We’re friends?”

“I hope so; otherwise, this is gonna get awkward when you hug me in a minute.”

“Why am I going to hug you?!”

Bradley laughs at her flabbergasted expression, but it doesn’t hurt her feelings like it does when other people laugh at her. Something about the tone of the laugh makes it feel like he’s laughing at her, but rather with her, and she just doesn’t know the joke yet.

“Because as team captain, I am happy to announce to the Relay Chair that Sigma Chi has officially raised $5,000 thanks to your idea.”

“Bradley, that’s incredible!” She doesn’t feel silly when she bounces around the table to hug his neck, rocking them back and forth in excitement.

“Well, if you think that’s good - let me show you what we’re anticipating to raise this month…”

Friday, July 15, 2016 | 10:12 PM EST | Charlotte, NC

“I just don’t understand how we’re having such bad luck!”

Sherrie rolls her eyes as he unlocks the door. “Bradley, breathe. You’re being very dramatic right now.”

“How is “we’re out of rooms” a legitimate reason for the hotel to give? Not that I mind sharing with you, but like how is that possible? The airline specifically works with them to book rooms for things like this! And the airline! That gate agent who wanted to book us to fly into Hartford and then drive the rest of the way to Boston! That's insane!”

“I don’t know, the Bradley flying into Bradley joke was pretty funny.” She mutters, clicking the lights on as she checks the cleanliness of the room.

“It wasn’t.” Bradley pouts, flopping onto the bed closest to the door. “Do you want to shower first?”

“No, go ahead, but I’m going to wash my face first so I can do a face mask. I’m so dry from the airport air.” He listens to the sounds of water running and the quiet humming as she carefully applies the drenched sheet to her skin. “All yours!”

“Thanks, Sher. I won’t be long.”

He showers quickly but takes extra time cleaning his teeth, his mouth feeling gross after the long travel day. When he comes out, he’s surprised at how cozy the room feels. With only one lamp on, the air conditioning set low to keep the fan running, and an old movie on the TV, it almost feels like they could be at home in his living room. They silently move around each other, Sherrie heading to the bathroom with a pile of things while Bradley organizes his things for the morning, wanting to get as much rest as possible before their early alarm.

He scrolls through emails and texts while he waits for her to shower, turning the television off since he knows there’s a small chance of either of them making it five minutes after they kill the lights. He's updating Mav on tomorrow’s travel plans when Sherrie comes out of the bathroom, her hair wrapped in a towel. Bradley sees her packing things out of the corner of his eye, not fully paying attention until he plugs his phone in.

“That’s what you wear to bed?”

“Bradley!” He laughs at how she jumps, her hands coming down to cover her shorts.

“What? They’re cute! Very pink.”

Her face goes as pink as the pajama set she’s wearing. “Stop making fun of me!”

“I’m not! You know, I love strawberries.” He can’t help the way his eyes roam up and down her body, admiring from the spaghetti straps on her smooth shoulders to the scalloped edge of her shorts. “I see why you didn’t want to change into those at the airport.”

“Oh my god…” She huffs, climbing into her own queen bed and stuffing herself under the sheets. “You set an alarm, right?”

“Yes, ma’am. Want me to turn the light off?”

“Please. God, this day cannot be over soon enough.”

He chuckles and turns the lamp off, listening to her shuffle around in the sheets as she gets comfortable. It’s quiet for a few minutes, and he can hear her breathing leveling out, but he can’t keep quiet; the conversation at the airport running through his mind.

“Sher?” It takes a second, but she quietly hums in response. “We have to talk about it again.”

“No, we don’t.”

“Sherrie-”

“No, Bradley. We talked about this two weeks ago. Nothing has changed since then.”

“Yes, things have changed since then. You interviewed for that principal engineer position. Which if you get-”

“I’m not going to get it. They’re going to pick Trevor.”

“They’re going to pick you. You’re the best person for the job!”

“That’s not how it works, and you know it.”

He’s silent, the crushing weight on his chest feeling heavier when he hears her sniffle.

“Oh, Sherrie…” He slips out of his bed and into hers, wrapping the woman he loves in his arms. He lets her cry, knowing she’s frustrated and exhausted, only speaking up again when she’s calmed down. “I’m sorry, honey.”

“No, I’m sorry, Bradley. It’s not fair that we’ve been dancing around this for so many years, and I keep saying no. You deserve someone who isn’t afraid to be with you. Not a coward like me.”

“You’re not a coward; you’re one of the bravest people I know, Sherrie Anne McHone. I know how critical people are of women, in this field especially. And I love you, so I don’t mind waiting until we’re in a position that you’re confident won’t jeopardize your career. So, we’ll wait to hear about the job, and once you hear that you’ve gotten it, I’m treating you to the nicest dinner in Boston.”

“Bradley, we don’t know-”

“I know we don’t know. But think about how it would be if it does. Wouldn’t that be amazing?”

“But what about-”

“Doesn’t matter, honey.”

“You don’t even know what I was gonna say.” Sherrie mumbles, cuddling further into his side, making it clear that he wasn’t allowed to leave.

“I know, but it doesn’t matter, whatever it is — we’ll figure it out.”

Saturday, July 16, 2016 | 10:32 AM EST | Somewhere over Virginia

“She’ll take a ginger ale; thank you so much.” Bradley balances his apple juice, the two packets of Biscoff cookies, and the bubbling soda he got for Sherrie. The smiling flight attendant moves past their row as he turns to his row companion.

They’re finally on their way home after waking up to more delay announcements. The additional time meant there was time to get coffee and some fruit from the hotel before their taxi back to the airport arrived, and the Luddens had even stopped to chat for a second at the gate, excited that they had gotten bumped up to first class since the flight was nearly empty.

All things considered, it had been a good morning even though Sherrie was insisting on working during the flight. Bradley is sure it’s an attempt to ignore their talk from last night, not wanting to dwell on the emotional moment when things are still so up in the air.

He looks over at the woman he’s known since he was eighteen, overwhelmed for a moment by how little things have changed since the first time he ever noticed her. Bradley fondly watches as she furiously types, hunched over her laptop with headphones, playing what he knows is eighties hair bands.

Her nose wrinkles in frustration, and suddenly it’s 2003 again, and he’s trying to get the attention of the red-haired girl whose table has the only empty chair left, something he desperately needs since this book can’t leave the library. He’s unable to get her attention and resorts to knocking on the table, heart skipping a beat when the prettiest green eyes he’s ever seen blink up at him. Bradley gestures at the empty chair, silently asking if he can sit, and is grateful when she nods because her smile is making his knees wobble. For the next hour, he tries to take notes for his paper, but he keeps getting distracted by the beautiful girl across from him. Bradley isn’t sure if he’s upset or happy when she packs up her stuff and leaves, giving him a little wave when she notices him watching her.

That had been thirteen years ago, and her intense focus still distracts him, but he’s not afraid to interrupt her this time. Fingers rub her arm that is covered in his sweatshirt again, but this time, he knows it smells like her shampoo instead of his cologne. Her smile still sends his heart skipping when she looks up at him, her pretty eyes widening in joy when she catches sight of the red snack packaging and the plastic cup holding her second favorite soda.

“Thank you!” She whispers, leaning across the empty middle seat in their row to kiss his cheek. “Oh, and we should go out to lunch when we get back! I want to try that new noodle place that opened in Southie.”

He just smiles when she immediately gets back to work; cheek puffed out from the cookie she stuffed in her mouth.

Maybe she’s not avoiding our talk from last night.

Thursday, August 11, 2017 | 2:15 PM EST | Boston, MA

“You got a minute?” Bradley knocks on the edge of her cubicle. It may be a different floor of their building, but all of the office space is the same dated stuff from decades ago.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“First of all…” He ducks down and presses a swift kiss to her plush mouth, still trying to make up for all those years he couldn’t. “And don’t say anything because I already checked before I did because I wanted to kiss my girl.”

He chuckles at the pink spots that shine on her cheeks. It’s been a year since Sherrie snagged the promotion, and they officially became an item, but she still turns a little red whenever he says something sweet.

“Second, you are all packed, right?”

“Yes, why?”

“I was gonna swing by the apartment and get our bags so we can head straight to the airport after work.”

“You took the afternoon off? Why?”

Bradley was expecting this question and smoothly fibs. “I worked the hours out with Martin for this week so I could run a few last-minute errands. Do you want me to grab snacks?”

“Okay, Mr. Secrets. When you’re at home, could you water the ivy? I forgot this morning, and I don’t want it to die while we’re gone.”

“Of course! Need me to do anything else?”

Sherrie hums, staring at the ceiling as she thinks. “One more kiss?”

“Yes, ma’am.” Bradley happily complies with her request.

“Okay, now you have to go. I have to finish prepping for this meeting where I get to yell at Sean.”

“That’s my girl. I’ll pick you up later. I love you.”

“I love you, too. Have fun with your mysterious errands.” Sherrie teases, and Bradley smirks back, knowing how much she would be freaking out if he knew what he would be doing while she professionally reamed out their least favorite colleague.

“Thanks, honey. Text me if you think of something.” Sherrie waves over her shoulder, already zoned back into her work.

Bradley doesn’t dare look at his buzzing phone until he’s safely on the elevator, pleased to see confirmation texts from their hotel and the airline. Would it be cheesy to quietly propose in the airport that was a catalyst in their relationship? Maybe, but he knew Sherrie would love it. He’s just hoping the TSA didn’t call out the ring that would be hiding in his carry-on.

#deltasupremacy I also want to give a special thanks to @sometimesanalice, who gave so much encouragement through the texts despite having no idea what I was writing - you're the best! tagged some friends and most those who interacted with the original announcement post for this fic all those months ago!

tagging: @gretagerwigsmuse @sometimesanalice @laracrofted @theharddeck @hangmanbrainrot @hangmanssunnies @thesewordsareallihavetogive @princessphilly @katieshook02 @atarmychick007 @kmc1989 @a-court-of-roscoe-and-baby @misfitpeach @luckyladycreator2 @scarlettwidow19 @mini-bee-bee @midnightstarqueen @shamelessghostwagonwobbler

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[thedreadvampy]

"But if there's a revolution people might get hurt!!!"

Ok so first off not all revolution is violent revolution so jot that bitch down, there is in fact several steps between "vote every few years" and "form an organised militia to conduct guerilla warfare against the state apparatus"

but also yeah I'm with you, those who are harmed in times of turmoil are usually the most precarious and marginalised - the poor, disabled, sick, unhoused, othered, dehumanised, etc. Revolution often does cause huge harm to those at the bottom.

but you know when else people might die? LITERALLY CURRENTLY. RIGHT NOW. The fear of how, say, people reliant on medical support will survive infrastructure disruption is a valid one. It would be a more valid concern if those people were getting access to their basic needs now.

I remember sitting on a bench outside the jobcentre in 2015 bawling my fucking eyes out at the idea that the Conservatives could win a landslide victory at a time when disabled, elderly and poor people were starving and freezing to death in their homes as an explicitly deliberate result of Tory policy. And things have got a lot worse over the interceding decade. Right now a lot of lifesaving medication is straight up unavailable and people are waiting over a year for urgent surgeries.

Is it so different, starving or dying or being imprisoned at the hands of the status quo, to starving or dying as an unwanted side effect of change, that the hypothetical possibility of harm from revolution is enough to outweigh any amount of death, trauma and deprivation in reality?

It's good to be concerned about who might be unintentional casualties of a revolutionary act. The next step after that isn't to write off the idea of any kind of action, it's to think about ways to mitigate and minimise that harm. Let's talk about who might be harmed if you block a road or blow up a pipeline, and then we can plan to negotiate emergency passage, or build up mutual aid support in areas affected by blackouts, or consider which wires to cut to shut down an arms factory without blacking out the neighborhood, or look at alternative food and medicine provisions during an action which might limit them.

We probably can't see a revolution which fully avoids harm to human life. We absolutely can plan revolutionary action which does less harm than the murderous systems it opposes.

"but what about the people you might hurt" should always be the first question, not the last. if you're so worried about the fallout of revolutionary action, the best place to be is in the midst of organising it, so you can make sure that those concerns are accounted for.

People are already being killed and wounded. tens of thousands in Palestine, of course, but closer to home too, hundreds killed crossing the Channel every year, thousands kept in internment. Millions living in the everyday injuries of traumatic poverty. A third of UK children born after 2010 are malnourished. People are being denied healthcare through austerity, underfunding and means testing. A majority of the country live in houses which are so poorly maintained that it's making us sick, and with the stress of precaution that comes from living month to month.

We are privileged by our relative safety in the imperial core but nonetheless a huge, huge chunk of our population are dying deaths of poverty and neglect, and marginalised people particularly are increasingly subject to direct state violence as well. The great political project of this government is literally to defy the law in order to round up disenfranchised people and send them to an Overseas Fucking Concentration Camp. All any of the major parties disagree on at the moment is the best way to do the harm - they all agree that harm is the goal, whether it's against migrants, Muslims, trans people, disabled people, or just The Poor.

so fucking no I don't think that the possibility of collateral damage is an argument against trying to take action against the reality of deliberate violence, actually. I am a pacifist in that I don't believe in violent escalation or violence for violence, but I also think that shoving someone off you if they're beating you to a pulp is morally justified, even if there's a risk they might accidentally hit their head and die falling back.

Pacifism isn't passivism - it means the goal is to minimise violence and not to cause it, but that doesn't mean ignoring the vast amounts of violence already in fucking play.

I never know if I'm getting more radicalised or my old friends are getting more centrist but the amount of "just vote! work within the system! revolution is nice in theory but should never be allowed to happen!" posting I see on dash - from people I used to feel on the same page as - is. exhausting.

[blueonwrestling]

Jon Moxley had a great interview with alot of detail about AEW dealing with covid, his wwe exit and a few other things, someone on reddit wrote a great write up of it, and heres a direct link to it just so i can give credit, but heres the lot of it.

Past few days have been hectic at the Moxley household, Renee has been doing a photoshoot for her cookbook, there's food all over in the house, Moxley doing 5-6 trips to the supermarket and messaging Renee "What is a shallot?"

First two months of 2020 has been insane in terms of travelling going from Sapporo, Memphis, Cleveland, Osaka & Texas

2020 before the pandemic was gonna be insane with Dynamite every Wednesday, going to Europe (Yes AEW/UK Tour), Japan, Indie Shows, opponents outside of AEW & bringing the belt everywhere

Originally his contract with WWE was suppose to end in September 2018 but WWE added more months due to his injury which coincidently 3 weeks before Double or Nothing that's literally in Las Vegas where he currently resides

Tony Khan & Cody came to his house laying out the details of AEW (TNT/Booking) and was onboard for the ride

Currently has no deal with Japan, he originally had a deal set in place from June till WrestleKingdom (Original Plan for WK beat up Juice, young boy from the New Japan Dojo, out comes Karl Anderson stun guns Moxley) & was for that specific run. The situation now is a verbal deal they know he can't work Wednesdays due to Dynamite but when he is available in terms of scheduling he'll be down to wrestle in Japan

Actually wanted to do some work for New Japan, Rocky Romero called him up and was onboard

As talks progressed with New Japan, Rocky suggested "how about G-1? that would be sick", initially wasn't gonna do it, as the conversation ended 10 minutes later was down to do it

Prior to G-1 he wasn't in the best shape after he left WWE (only been wrestling 6-man tag team matches or 4minute matches), knowing that he'll be wrestling 20-30mins matches in Japan he called Gil Guardado (Strength & Conditioning Coach from Xtreme Couture) in preparation for the G-1 tournament he was put on a full Pro-MMA Fight Camp schedule 5 days a week, sometimes twice a day which later become beneficial when he wrestled Tomohiro Ishii

Last few months of WWE when it was public knowledge he was gonna leave, he was waiting for something bad to happen like a burial but that never happened and WWE gave him a sending off

Was initially worried if fans were gonna cheer or boo because of being in WWE for a long time

Has so much gratitude for the people that chanted MOX on that night of Double or Nothing

New Japan's vignette of Moxley was a stunt double, name death-rider came from the jacket that was found from goodwill

Covid/Renee Situation - apparently someone from Orlando had Covid, everyone got tested, came back negative, She flew back home, after 5-6 days se wasn't feeling the very best, couldn't get out of bed, eventually got the test, had people come over to their house to get the test via Insurance (Ready Responders), already pulled out of Dynamite taping in advance if anything happens, 36 hours later about 11pm-12am as they were about to go to bed, they received an email (Mox was negative & Renee positive), during the quarantine Mox slept on the couch during the time while she recovered and was fine afterwards

Moxley: "They've got a kajilion dollars and they couldn't afford a couple of tests?"

Had to pull out from another taping (Fyter Fest) due to the positive result from Renee but Taz made him feel better with the Sloppy Shop Line

His AEW Champion run feels meaningful from breaking out of the prison to the winning the championship, His WWE Championship run felt like an 'Emergency Situation' (Roman Reigns Wellness Policy), they needed someone to carry the company during the summertime mainevent Sumo Hall & MSG but felt hollow

While WWE champion he didn't get a new T-Shirt, was talking to the merchandise people, they were re-making shirts with different colours, "Why isn't there any new T-shirts?" says Mox, merchandise people reply "Dude we've sent 25 different designs to Hunter and he just keeps rejecting them all", "I'm freaking WWE champion give me a fucking t-shirt!"

Still hates scripted promos (the one thing he hated during his time in WWE, having writers write stuff for him), a runsheet/format for AEW would be 'Jon Moxley Promo 2 Minutes' not 48 pages

Moxley: Nothing is gonna change until one person is gone (VKM), has watched some of WWE during the pandemic and is kind of relieved he isn't still there "could you have imagine if it would be any good?"

Moxley thinks the thunderdome looked like zoom call and reminded him something from a particular part from the book 'Fahrenheit 451'

Moxley "I want WWE to be awesome but when they suck it pisses me off, they're the number 1 brand of wrestling to watch, they represent the sport and when there product is embarrassing to watch it makes all wrestling look bad, driving away fans from the sport that could be WWE/AEW fans"

First three opponents were random Hager (done in two hours), Brodie came out of no-where (originally was to have an opponent for Double or Nothing - wasn't disclosed who) and Brian Cage

Meltzer/Moxley agreed that Stadium Stampede was awesome, super entertaining and fun during a time when people were feeling miserable in a pandemic this was need to cheer people up

Meltzer/Garret talk NXT unopposed show's ratings, why didn't the female demographic increase while the male demographic increased? Moxley replies two words Jungle Boy

Moxley asks for Dave's opinion with the current situation WWE's ratings going down "If things don't change (VKM/booking/stories) is it possible AEW could overtake WWE as the most watched show in five years?" Dave believes short term AEW could beat Smackdown's 18-49 demographics (but not viewers) if they moved to Friday and prove to be more valuable to FOX, If WWE continue to go down this same route, the numbers will decrease whilst AEW's will increase, WWE will have to make changes quicker inside of five years

[irkenheretic]

okay i promised id do it and im doing it: Explaining The Plot Of That AU I’m Vague About: The Post

(as i was preparing to write this i actually got my 250th follower, which slapped)

so i’m just gonna start with the simple version, which is this: it’s a rebel AU which primarily centers around the tallest, who are both defective. they give up on trying to make any meaningful changes as figureheads, and instead direct their attention to being involved with the “neo defect revolution,” or NDR. they do manage to make one change as tallest- there is a garbage dump planet turned into a sanctuary for defectives (who in this au are executed once discovered,) and eventually enough of the populace finds out about it that the tallest have to deal with it. they finesse their way into kicking it out of the empire, so now it’s its own planet with its own rules, governments, and most importantly, immigration policies and protections

a lot of stuff happens and it’s gonna be structured using arcs, and each arc has a separate protagonist/deuteragonist/tritagonist lineup (but that doesnt mean the same lineup won’t be used multiple times!) and yes the insane list of OCs are for this au alone: some arcs are very OC-centric, some have OCs as supporting characters, and a couple are all-OC or mostly-OC. 

its going to be very longform and it’ll span from the tallest’s elite training days to twenty years after zim arrives on earth. (the 20 year gap btwn zim arriving on earth and the story proper isnt as tightly plotted as later tho.) the point is to see how a revolution on the scale of the NDR works, who was fucked over by defact laws, who was fucked over by other laws, etc. theres a lot of lore and a lot of headcanons i made for this AU and even a conlang. i am a being of hubris. itll be a series of fics, some multichapter and some oneshots. 

the series as a whole is gonna be called Invader Zim: Annexed or just Annexed for short. its a pun on an irken word that sounds similar but means the exact opposite. i am not explaining more bc itll be explained in the fic itself. but thats why the tag for it is #anx lmao

i didnt mean for this to be as long as it got but under the cut im gonna breakdown some of the early arcs:

so it all starts with a fanfic called Love Is The H-Word (no the “h-word” isn’t “hell.) it centers around red and purple as elites-in-training, who do a little whoopsie and have an egg. purple doesnt wanna smuggle it into a smeetery, bc then he’ll never see it again, so they go to the defect sanctuary (still a part of the empire at this point.) purple knows he’s defective while red has a hard time accepting that he is as well, due to events from his past. but being around all these other defects are starting to wear down his denial, and the fic is all about that. it also sets up some plot stuff, like how defects adopted a self-identifier in the word “heretic,” hence the sanctuary being named, “heretirk.” (hey look my url!) (no, the “h-word” is not heretic, either.) 

i dont wanna say what happens in that fic bc spoilers, but stuff Happens. its also when we meet some ocs that end up being important, and the existence of others are foreshadowed. this is also where we meet the tallests’ future advisor, rarl kove, for the first time, as a local who decides to keep them company. purple bonds with kove due to their shared interest in politics, while red reluctantly bonds with titch, a young irken (a smeet in heretirken standards, an adult in imperial standards- did i mention he and red are roughly the same age? lol) who is interested in military stuff and thrill-seeking and general destruction. titch is pissed because he claims his father is stealthing on devastis as a military commander, but won’t let titch sneak in as a soldier, as titch is deaf. 

(fun facts: in the au, “titch” is regional slang for “a little bit.” ironically, titch the character is above-average in height.)

due to titch’s deafness, he developed “gesturespeak,” irken sign language, so he can communicate. this existing becomes important later

a oneshot called invade the system is right after h-word in publishing order. it details zim’s exploits in leaving foodcourtia, where he was assigned and infiltrating the invading academy he eventually graduates from (in this au, zim is too short to be an invader, which sucks because the hight minimums for the military are really short to begin with lmao)

the fic chronoligically after H-Word focuses on red and purple being back in their platoon on devastis, specifically red navigating his training and his relationships with two defective platoonmates, pon and zi (who are in h-word a little,) after the realization that he too is defective. it also focuses on how the irken military works, and how they train their soldiers. 

the first arc overall focuses on red and purple going thru training and such, and ends after they graduate and are on the field, working to get commander rank. (they planned to gain commander rank then leave and go back to heretirk to train an army there, as heretirk has.... no army.) in the middle of this, they’re pulled out and told they are to become the next tallest. they debate over staying and taking the job or just running to heretirk, and they ultimately decide to stay.

the next arc i call the “bridge,” tbh. its less tightly plotted than the other arcs; fics are spread apart from each other chronologically and all that. it spans the time after the tallest being appointed to a little after zim arrives on earth. it also has a couple of anthologies focusing on imperial defects- each chapter is a new character. these guys are all important and the easiest way for me to introduce their backstories without cluttering everything up is anthology style, lmao. other things that happen are a look into how the tallest work, eventually culminating with the resolution of the tallest having to Deal With Heretirk, tenn’s rescue from meekrob, and zim on earth obtaining a half-irken smeet named pip due to stealing an Unethical Science Experiment from dib (which is pip.) the bridge is basically just. “heres some stuff that happens between point A and point B so when we get to point B you’re not confused as all hell.” 

the next arc focuses on zim. in the first fic, pip is sick and zim is trying to get into his neighbor’s pants, to cope. this basically sets up that zim in this au has no idea how to find personal fulfillment in living- he’s only OK if he focuses on pleasing someone else, be it taking care of pip or doting on the neighbor, some rando human named piqu (pronounced, “peek.”) this is mainly a cute romance story with the underlying veneer of “a child is slowly and painfully dying” in the background. fun! 

without spoiling the circumstances, zim and pip end up on heretirk, which at this point is its own independent planet. pip is in the hospital for most of it so zim has to do his own thing. computer fans rejoice bc hes basically zims dad at this point, who tells him to go outside and get some fresh air and talk to the locals instead of schmooping or screaming in anxiety. im sneakily introducing more characters like ini, the “next-gen zim;” a short bio-engineer (she works on PAKs) who was constantly passed over by everyone because they dont trust someone that short or they dont trust someone that spazzy, even though shes actually brilliant. also her brother mo, who’s a pilot that NOBODY will teach military-class ships to (at this point, HTK has a population of ex-military that had their old ships, but still no formal army) because he doesnt talk and they think hes “slow” as a result. for the curious, he is physically able to talk most times, he just doesnt like it. zim ends up teaching him how to fly military-class which ends up being important laterrr

(haha ini and mo. wheres meenie and minie? ILL GET TO THEM)

no really, theyre quadruplets. named ini, myni, minie, and mo. these are real characters. 

minie isnt introduced till later. shes too cool to be the side character in someone elses arc. she is feel uncomfortable when we are not about her.

myni is busy palling around with pip and pip’s friend “elly” (real name elevenn, with two N’s.) elly is a half-meekrob War Crime Baby and tenn’s smeet. he has vision problems (he can “see” energy signatures of things, as opposed to conventional sight. everything is monochrome and he has to really focus to see like, words on a paper. also fuck tablets) but the trade-up is telekinetic powers (that he cant use too much or his brain will melt. fun!) this isnt relevant until the arc AFTER zim’s, where they end up poking around a historical site due to myni’s interest in that kind of thing, and they find logs of an old revolution (that was actually pretty successful in their goal, before they were caught and executed,) that lead them to a man named lefy. he helps with revolutions and helped these guys, and the trio go to seek him out; myni because he wants to impress his parents with helping them, pip because after they’ve recovered enough to walk around and do stuff, feel like they need to justify the choice to save their life and make their dad proud and all that, elly because he doesnt want pip to get hurt and die. And thats where the stuff REALLY starts happening and i cant tell u more sorry

this seemed kind of disjointed but thats bc i cant really be too detailed otherwise id like.... spoil it lmfao. but thats the summary of the first few arcs.

[hopethisdoesntawakenanythingnme]

Everything just sucks with politics now a days. And I just can't stomach the idea of supporting Kamala Harris when she has helped get pedos out of trouble on multiple occasions... I just feel sick about all of this

I know, everyday is some new piece of shit flying against the proverbial fan. I’m not happy with my choice of canidates, but Biden got the nomination, and against all senses of my own morality I absolutely have to vote for him if I want to be a part of enacting any semblance of progressive change. 

A lot of what Biden has stood for, including his vote against ending segregation and anti-Gay rhetoric during his formative years puts him at the very bottom of my list, to say the least and Kamala may have put away dregs of assholes, but her words in regard to her principals are questionable at best. I don’t want either of them making decisions for this country on any normal day, but obviously there is nothing normal about this year and the current “president.” In just four years, Tr*mp has openly emboldened nazis, encouraged violent racism, championed homophobia and transphobia, created literal concentration camps, and referred to BLM as a terrorist group but white nationalists are “very good/fine people.” Trump is a misogynist, a racist, a homophobe, and a known affiliate and friend of an infamous child trafficker. I am going to vote for anyone who isn’t Donald Trump. Four years has been a very long time, but eight is unfathomable and unspeakably terrifying. 

Donald Trump is an unhinged and endlessly dangerous, privileged old man who cannot be reasoned with, while Joe Biden is a dim-witted boomer who can be pushed in any direction he believes will make him look best in the eyes of the public; luckily the loudest parts of the public in recent months seem to be in favor of progressive leftist policies, which is a direct result of Trump’s fuckery. I think what this election ultimately comes down to is: unprecedented fascism or the familiarity of centrist democracy that we saw with Obama? At least Obama didn’t openly threaten North Korea which could have realistically lead to WWIII, and send the literal army to shoot and teargas his own citizens. The jokes about choosing “the lesser of two evils” every election has never been more apt than it is this year. 

Everything sucks with politics nowadays, but four more years of Donald Trump would suck a lot more.

edit: NOT TO MENTION his handling of a global pandemic. His concerns not with the people but the economy?? Fuck the economy, I don't want to die in a plague, and neither does anyone else but what has he done to flatten the curve of infection? Instead of fighting the plague alongside the WHO and CDC, he publicly complained about the water pressure in the white house, saying that it takes too long to wash his hair because his hair needs to be perfect. (I shit you not.) He mocks mask wearers, called Covid a hoax then backpedaled to a lie that he "always" believed it was a pandemic once the numbers began to rise, fired Fauci who handled the AIDS crisis, and thought that sunlight on the inside of our bodies might be worth looking into as a cure. Everyday for the past four years, I wake up and say what the fuck

[urlology]

How Netflix Reinvented HR

https://hbr.org/2014/01/how-netflix-reinvented-hr

by

Patty McCord

From the January–February 2014 Issue

Sheryl Sandberg has called it one of the most important documents ever to come out of Silicon Valley. It’s been viewed more than 5 million times on the web. But when Reed Hastings and I (along with some colleagues) wrote a PowerPoint deck explaining how we shaped the culture and motivated performance at Netflix, where Hastings is CEO and I was chief talent officer from 1998 to 2012, we had no idea it would go viral. We realized that some of the talent management ideas we’d pioneered, such as the concept that workers should be allowed to take whatever vacation time they feel is appropriate, had been seen as a little crazy (at least until other companies started adopting them). But we were surprised that an unadorned set of 127 slides—no music, no animation—would become so influential.

Netflix culture slide deck

People find the Netflix approach to talent and culture compelling for a few reasons. The most obvious one is that Netflix has been really successful: During 2013 alone its stock more than tripled, it won three Emmy awards, and its U.S. subscriber base grew to nearly 29 million. All that aside, the approach is compelling because it derives from common sense. In this article I’ll go beyond the bullet points to describe five ideas that have defined the way Netflix attracts, retains, and manages talent. But first I’ll share two conversations I had with early employees, both of which helped shape our overall philosophy.

Crafting a Culture of Excellence

The first took place in late 2001. Netflix had been growing quickly: We’d reached about 120 employees and had been planning an IPO. But after the dot-com bubble burst and the 9/11 attacks occurred, things changed. It became clear that we needed to put the IPO on hold and lay off a third of our employees. It was brutal. Then, a bit unexpectedly, DVD players became the hot gift that Christmas. By early 2002 our DVD-by-mail subscription business was growing like crazy. Suddenly we had far more work to do, with 30% fewer employees.

One day I was talking with one of our best engineers, an employee I’ll call John. Before the layoffs, he’d managed three engineers, but now he was a one-man department working very long hours. I told John I hoped to hire some help for him soon. His response surprised me. “There’s no rush—I’m happier now,” he said. It turned out that the engineers we’d laid off weren’t spectacular—they were merely adequate. John realized that he’d spent too much time riding herd on them and fixing their mistakes. “I’ve learned that I’d rather work by myself than with subpar performers,” he said. His words echo in my mind whenever I describe the most basic element of Netflix’s talent philosophy: The best thing you can do for employees—a perk better than foosball or free sushi—is hire only “A” players to work alongside them. Excellent colleagues trump everything else.

The second conversation took place in 2002, a few months after our IPO. Laura, our bookkeeper, was bright, hardworking, and creative. She’d been very important to our early growth, having devised a system for accurately tracking movie rentals so that we could pay the correct royalties. But now, as a public company, we needed CPAs and other fully credentialed, deeply experienced accounting professionals—and Laura had only an associate’s degree from a community college. Despite her work ethic, her track record, and the fact that we all really liked her, her skills were no longer adequate. Some of us talked about jury-rigging a new role for her, but we decided that wouldn’t be right.

So I sat down with Laura and explained the situation—and said that in light of her spectacular service, we would give her a spectacular severance package. I’d braced myself for tears or histrionics, but Laura reacted well: She was sad to be leaving but recognized that the generous severance would let her regroup, retrain, and find a new career path. This incident helped us create the other vital element of our talent management philosophy: If we wanted only “A” players on our team, we had to be willing to let go of people whose skills no longer fit, no matter how valuable their contributions had once been. Out of fairness to such people—and, frankly, to help us overcome our discomfort with discharging them—we learned to offer rich severance packages.

With these two overarching principles in mind, we shaped our approach to talent using the five tenets below.

Hire, Reward, and Tolerate Only Fully Formed Adults

Over the years we learned that if we asked people to rely on logic and common sense instead of on formal policies, most of the time we would get better results, and at lower cost. If you’re careful to hire people who will put the company’s interests first, who understand and support the desire for a high-performance workplace, 97% of your employees will do the right thing. Most companies spend endless time and money writing and enforcing HR policies to deal with problems the other 3% might cause. Instead, we tried really hard to not hire those people, and we let them go if it turned out we’d made a hiring mistake.

Adultlike behavior means talking openly about issues with your boss, your colleagues, and your subordinates. It means recognizing that even in companies with reams of HR policies, those policies are frequently skirted as managers and their reports work out what makes sense on a case-by-case basis.

Let me offer two examples.

When Netflix launched, we had a standard paid-time-off policy: People got 10 vacation days, 10 holidays, and a few sick days. We used an honor system—employees kept track of the days they took off and let their managers know when they’d be out. After we went public, our auditors freaked. They said Sarbanes-Oxley mandated that we account for time off. We considered instituting a formal tracking system. But then Reed asked, “Are companies required to give time off? If not, can’t we just handle it informally and skip the accounting rigmarole?” I did some research and found that, indeed, no California law governed vacation time.

So instead of shifting to a formal system, we went in the opposite direction: Salaried employees were told to take whatever time they felt was appropriate. Bosses and employees were asked to work it out with one another. (Hourly workers in call centers and warehouses were given a more structured policy.) We did provide some guidance. If you worked in accounting or finance, you shouldn’t plan to be out during the beginning or the end of a quarter, because those were busy times. If you wanted 30 days off in a row, you needed to meet with HR. Senior leaders were urged to take vacations and to let people know about them—they were role models for the policy. (Most were happy to comply.) Some people worried about whether the system would be inconsistent—whether some bosses would allow tons of time off while others would be stingy. In general, I worried more about fairness than consistency, because the reality is that in any organization, the highest-performing and most valuable employees get more leeway.

The company’s expense policy is five words long: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.”

We also departed from a formal travel and expense policy and decided to simply require adultlike behavior there, too. The company’s expense policy is five words long: “Act in Netflix’s best interests.” In talking that through with employees, we said we expected them to spend company money frugally, as if it were their own. Eliminating a formal policy and forgoing expense account police shifted responsibility to frontline managers, where it belongs. It also reduced costs: Many large companies still use travel agents (and pay their fees) to book trips, as a way to enforce travel policies. They could save money by letting employees book their own trips online. Like most Netflix managers, I had to have conversations periodically with employees who ate at lavish restaurants (meals that would have been fine for sales or recruiting, but not for eating alone or with a Netflix colleague). We kept an eye on our IT guys, who were prone to buying a lot of gadgets. But overall we found that expense accounts are another area where if you create a clear expectation of responsible behavior, most employees will comply.

Tell the Truth About Performance

Many years ago we eliminated formal reviews. We had held them for a while but came to realize they didn’t make sense—they were too ritualistic and too infrequent. So we asked managers and employees to have conversations about performance as an organic part of their work. In many functions—sales, engineering, product development—it’s fairly obvious how well people are doing. (As companies develop better analytics to measure performance, this becomes even truer.) Building a bureaucracy and elaborate rituals around measuring performance usually doesn’t improve it.

Traditional corporate performance reviews are driven largely by fear of litigation. The theory is that if you want to get rid of someone, you need a paper trail documenting a history of poor achievement. At many companies, low performers are placed on “Performance Improvement Plans.” I detest PIPs. I think they’re fundamentally dishonest: They never accomplish what their name implies.

One Netflix manager requested a PIP for a quality assurance engineer named Maria, who had been hired to help develop our streaming service. The technology was new, and it was evolving very quickly. Maria’s job was to find bugs. She was fast, intuitive, and hardworking. But in time we figured out how to automate the QA tests. Maria didn’t like automation and wasn’t particularly good at it. Her new boss (brought in to create a world-class automation tools team) told me he wanted to start a PIP with her.

I replied, “Why bother? We know how this will play out. You’ll write up objectives and deliverables for her to achieve, which she can’t, because she lacks the skills. Every Wednesday you’ll take time away from your real work to discuss (and document) her shortcomings. You won’t sleep on Tuesday nights, because you’ll know it will be an awful meeting, and the same will be true for her. After a few weeks there will be tears. This will go on for three months. The entire team will know. And at the end you’ll fire her. None of this will make any sense to her, because for five years she’s been consistently rewarded for being great at her job—a job that basically doesn’t exist anymore. Tell me again how Netflix benefits?

“Instead, let’s just tell the truth: Technology has changed, the company has changed, and Maria’s skills no longer apply. This won’t be a surprise to her: She’s been in the trenches, watching the work around her shift. Give her a great severance package—which, when she signs the documents, will dramatically reduce (if not eliminate) the chance of a lawsuit.” In my experience, people can handle anything as long as they’re told the truth—and this proved to be the case with Maria.

When we stopped doing formal performance reviews, we instituted informal 360-degree reviews. We kept them fairly simple: People were asked to identify things that colleagues should stop, start, or continue. In the beginning we used an anonymous software system, but over time we shifted to signed feedback, and many teams held their 360s face-to-face.

HR people can’t believe that a company the size of Netflix doesn’t hold annual reviews. “Are you making this up just to upset us?” they ask. I’m not. If you talk simply and honestly about performance on a regular basis, you can get good results—probably better ones than a company that grades everyone on a five-point scale.

Managers Own the Job of Creating Great Teams

Discussing the military’s performance during the Iraq War, Donald Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, once famously said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” When I talk to managers about creating great teams, I tell them to approach the process in exactly the opposite way.

In my consulting work, I ask managers to imagine a documentary about what their team is accomplishing six months from now. What specific results do they see? How is the work different from what the team is doing today? Next I ask them to think about the skills needed to make the images in the movie become reality. Nowhere in the early stages of the process do I advise them to think about the team they actually have. Only after they’ve done the work of envisioning the ideal outcome and the skill set necessary to achieve it should they analyze how well their existing team matches what they need.

If you’re in a fast-changing business environment, you’re probably looking at a lot of mismatches. In that case, you need to have honest conversations about letting some team members find a place where their skills are a better fit. You also need to recruit people with the right skills.

We faced the latter challenge at Netflix in a fairly dramatic way as we began to shift from DVDs by mail to a streaming service. We had to store massive volumes of files in the cloud and figure out how huge numbers of people could reliably access them. (By some estimates, up to a third of peak residential internet traffic in the U.S. comes from customers streaming Netflix movies.) So we needed to find people deeply experienced with cloud services who worked for companies that operate on a giant scale—companies like Amazon, eBay, Google, and Facebook, which aren’t the easiest places to hire someone away from.

Our compensation philosophy helped a lot. Most of its principles stem from ideals described earlier: Be honest, and treat people like adults. For instance, during my tenure Netflix didn’t pay performance bonuses, because we believed that they’re unnecessary if you hire the right people. If your employees are fully formed adults who put the company first, an annual bonus won’t make them work harder or smarter. We also believed in market-based pay and would tell employees that it was smart to interview with competitors when they had the chance, in order to get a good sense of the market rate for their talent. Many HR people dislike it when employees talk to recruiters, but I always told employees to take the call, ask how much, and send me the number—it’s valuable information.

In addition, we used equity compensation much differently from the way most companies do. Instead of larding stock options on top of a competitive salary, we let employees choose how much (if any) of their compensation would be in the form of equity. If employees wanted stock options, we reduced their salaries accordingly. We believed that they were sophisticated enough to understand the trade-offs, judge their personal tolerance for risk, and decide what was best for them and their families. We distributed options every month, at a slight discount from the market price. We had no vesting period—the options could be cashed in immediately. Most tech companies have a four-year vesting schedule and try to use options as “golden handcuffs” to aid retention, but we never thought that made sense. If you see a better opportunity elsewhere, you should be allowed to take what you’ve earned and leave. If you no longer want to work with us, we don’t want to hold you hostage.

We continually told managers that building a great team was their most important task. We didn’t measure them on whether they were excellent coaches or mentors or got their paperwork done on time. Great teams accomplish great work, and recruiting the right team was the top priority.

Leaders Own the Job of Creating the Company Culture

After I left Netflix and began consulting, I visited a hot start-up in San Francisco. It had 60 employees in an open loft-style office with a foosball table, two pool tables, and a kitchen, where a chef cooked lunch for the entire staff. As the CEO showed me around, he talked about creating a fun atmosphere. At one point I asked him what the most important value for his company was. He replied, “Efficiency.”

“OK,” I said. “Imagine that I work here, and it’s 2:58 PM. I’m playing an intense game of pool, and I’m winning. I estimate that I can finish the game in five minutes. We have a meeting at 3:00. Should I stay and win the game or cut it short for the meeting?”

“You should finish the game,” he insisted. I wasn’t surprised; like many tech start-ups, this was a casual place, where employees wore hoodies and brought pets to work, and that kind of casualness often extends to punctuality. “Wait a second,” I said. “You told me that efficiency is your most important cultural value. It’s not efficient to delay a meeting and keep coworkers waiting because of a pool game. Isn’t there a mismatch between the values you’re talking up and the behaviors you’re modeling and encouraging?”

When I advise leaders about molding a corporate culture, I tend to see three issues that need attention. This type of mismatch is one. It’s a particular problem at start-ups, where there’s a premium on casualness that can run counter to the high-performance ethos leaders want to create. I often sit in on company meetings to get a sense of how people operate. I frequently see CEOs who are clearly winging it. They lack a real agenda. They’re working from slides that were obviously put together an hour before or were recycled from the previous round of VC meetings. Workers notice these things, and if they see a leader who’s not fully prepared and who relies on charm, IQ, and improvisation, it affects how they perform, too. It’s a waste of time to articulate ideas about values and culture if you don’t model and reward behavior that aligns with those goals.

The second issue has to do with making sure employees understand the levers that drive the business. I recently visited a Texas start-up whose employees were mostly engineers in their twenties. “I bet half the people in this room have never read a P&L,” I said to the CFO. He replied, “It’s true—they’re not financially savvy or business savvy, and our biggest challenge is teaching them how the business works.” Even if you’ve hired people who want to perform well, you need to clearly communicate how the company makes money and what behaviors will drive its success. At Netflix, for instance, employees used to focus too heavily on subscriber growth, without much awareness that our expenses often ran ahead of it: We were spending huge amounts buying DVDs, setting up distribution centers, and ordering original programming, all before we’d collected a cent from our new subscribers. Our employees needed to learn that even though revenue was growing, managing expenses really mattered.

The third issue is something I call the split personality start-up. At tech companies this usually manifests itself as a schism between the engineers and the sales team, but it can take other forms. At Netflix, for instance, I sometimes had to remind people that there were big differences between the salaried professional staff at headquarters and the hourly workers in the call centers. At one point our finance team wanted to shift the whole company to direct-deposit paychecks, and I had to point out that some of our hourly workers didn’t have bank accounts. That’s a small example, but it speaks to a larger point: As leaders build a company culture, they need to be aware of subcultures that might require different management.

Good Talent Managers Think Like Businesspeople and Innovators First, and Like HR People Last

Throughout most of my career I’ve belonged to professional associations of human resources executives. Although I like the people in these groups personally, I often find myself disagreeing with them. Too many devote time to morale improvement initiatives. At some places entire teams focus on getting their firm onto lists of “Best Places to Work” (which, when you dig into the methodologies, are really based just on perks and benefits). At a recent conference I met someone from a company that had appointed a “chief happiness officer”—a concept that makes me slightly sick.

During 30 years in business I’ve never seen an HR initiative that improved morale. HR departments might throw parties and hand out T-shirts, but if the stock price is falling or the company’s products aren’t perceived as successful, the people at those parties will quietly complain—and they’ll use the T-shirts to wash their cars.

Instead of cheerleading, people in my profession should think of themselves as businesspeople. What’s good for the company? How do we communicate that to employees? How can we help every worker understand what we mean by high performance?

Here’s a simple test: If your company has a performance bonus plan, go up to a random employee and ask, “Do you know specifically what you should be doing right now to increase your bonus?” If he or she can’t answer, the HR team isn’t making things as clear as they need to be.

At Netflix I worked with colleagues who were changing the way people consume filmed entertainment, which is an incredibly innovative pursuit—yet when I started there, the expectation was that I would default to mimicking other companies’ best practices (many of them antiquated), which is how almost everyone seems to approach HR. I rejected those constraints. There’s no reason the HR team can’t be innovative too.

A version of this article appeared in the

January–February 2014

issue of Harvard Business Review.

[forsetti]

On The Myth of American Individualism

In light of people completely, and sometimes arrogantly, defying public health recommendations to address a pandemic in the name of “Freedom” and “American Individualism, I thought I'd repost this article I wrote in 2012.

Recently, New York Times resident hack pundit, David Brooks, wrote an article arguing that Republicans are the party that “celebrates work and inflames enterprise”.  The GOP come from a long lineage of hard working, God fearing individualists that can be traced back through American history from Mitt Romney to the first Pilgrim who stood, buckled shoed, atop Plymouth Rock. Here are his opening two paragraphs: “The American colonies were first settled by Protestant dissenters. These were people who refused to submit to the established religious authorities. They sought personal relationships with God. They moved to the frontier when life got too confining. They created an American creed, built, as the sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset put it, around liberty, individualism, equal opportunity, populism and laissez-faire.

This creed shaped America and evolved with the decades. Starting in the mid-20th century, there was a Southern and Western version of it, formed by ranching Republicans like Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush. Their version drew on the traditional tenets: ordinary people are capable of greatness; individuals have the power to shape their destinies; they should be given maximum freedom to do so.”

For Brooks, America was built by hard working people who cowered from a smiting God, lived like Ted Kaczynski , didn’t accept handouts and loved the soft reach around from the Invisible Hand.  From this great tradition sprouted great men who were the salt of the earth, ordinary men who lived off the fruits of the sweat of their brow.  People like Mitt Romney and George W. Bush, two men who grew up in luxury, went to topflight prep schools and colleges, were able to walk into business with a long list of powerful, influential people already in their contact lists and didn’t fuck up and when they did, had other doors and opportunities open for them because of who they are and who they knew.  I highly doubt that John Q. Colonialist could get a government bailout to safe his business (Romney) or have one failed business after another yet have people willing to throw money and opportunities at you over and over again (Bush).  

On the claim that Republicans are the party of work and this tradition has been passed down from John Smith and Patrick Henry to Laura Ingalls Wilder and Belle Starr, I call “Bullshit!”  This country was discovered, settled, expanded, progressed and rose to the world’s greatest economic power because of the community, not the individual.  This love affair and worship of individualism in America is not based on its history or facts.  It is a complete myth.  A myth that has become a fundamental underlying principle of today’s Republican Party.  A myth, that Jim Jones-like devotion to has resulted in horrible, often progress stifling, policies.  It is an even more deeply rooted myth in conservative lore than Ronald Reagan being a tax cutting, small government, hard line hawk.

The first wave of immigrants that came to America came for economic, not religious reasons and they didn’t migrate to our shores to frolic in the Fountain of Laissez-Faire. They were employees, mostly indentured servants, of major trading companies who sent them here to harvest resources like timber and furs.  They were “company men”, not individuals who were looking to forge a new life by braving the elements or testing their mettle. The manner in which they worked and lived was communal.

The next wave of people coming to America was the religious immigrants.  For Brooks, this meant the hardworking, God fearing Protestants who sired America’s work ethic, loved the eight pound, six ounce baby Jesus and who planted the love and respect of individualism into the country’s psyche where it grew and flourished for three hundred plus years and can now be seen in the standard bearers for the Republican Party. Unfortunately, “There goes another wonderful theory about to be brutally murdered by a gang of facts.” (author unknown).

There certainly were groups of very devoutly religious people who came to America during this time. However, what Brooks conveniently omits are the multitude of the other groups that also made their way across the Atlantic to avoid the religious persecutions and heavy handed dogma in Europe. Atheists, Deists, Agnostics, etc., left Europe for the New World because of the religious environment in Europe.  Being part of the religious wave didn’t mean you were religious, it meant you left because of religion.  There were just as many, if not more, non-religious, non-fundamentalist immigrants to America during this period than the “Forebears of Freedom and Republican/American Greatness” as Brooks would have it.  This group played as much a role in America’s formation as a country and culture, if not more, than the Puritans or Quakers.  Some of the non-religious people who played a bit part in the formation of America include: Thomas Paine, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Benjamin Franklin, Adam Smith…

The fundamentally religious in early American history was not the dominant group and it was not individualists.  They in fact were the opposite.  They were communal socialists.  In order to afford ship passage to America they often pooled their money together to ensure they could travel as a group. They formed settlements where they helped build each other’s homes, businesses and defenses.  They had community storages and would mete out food and other resources as necessary.  They didn’t cut off someone who was sick.  Instead they would get together and, as a group, figure out the best way to address this or any other problem. What they didn’t do is as they were ascending the gangplank of the Mayflower wave to each other and say “Good luck!  Maybe I’ll see you around.”  They stayed together, worked together and helped each other.  They didn’t abandon the sick and weak or withhold food or shelter.  If you want to see the modern day version and descendants of the early religious settlers to America, visit the Amish community in Ontario Ohio or Lancaster Pennsylvania.  The Amish, Mennonites and similar groups have been the ones to continue the traditions of the early settlers.  One word that is never used in describing these groups or their members is ‘individualism’.

Not to mention that there were a lot of other settlers in the early America who were not the Protestant, white New Englanders yet had just as much impact on society and culture then and now.  The Spain heavily influenced Florida, California and the American Southwest.  France’s influence was felt all along the Mississippi River and Great Lakes areas.  To ignore or deny these groups’ impact on American culture in favor of a tiny sliver of white, New England Protestants, is intellectually dishonest.  Brooks takes a sliver of early America, ascribes general characteristics to it that were not true and then claims these traits are what made this country great.

Let’s fast forward a dozen score years or so to the early 1800’s and visit another group of people touted as the champions of The American Spirit of Individualism-The Pioneers.  You know the salt of the earth, lovers of capitalism and all things holy, the people who settled the West and spread the seeds of rugged individualism like they were John Holmes at Burning Man. According to people like Brooks, the Pioneers were the hardworking, Bible toting, individualist progeny of John Smith, William Bradford and Adam Smith.  Again I call “Bullshit!”  Hardworking? Absolutely.  It was pretty difficult to not have to work hard to survive during this time unless you were filthy rich.  The technology at the time was better than it was in colonial times but it still wasn’t good enough to diminish the day-to-day demands of life in the 1800’s.  Individualists?  Hell no!  I don’t even know where this idea came from.  Even the most cursory look at this era shows quite the contrary.

Remember the stories and pictures of the Pioneers moving across the Great Plains along the Oregon Trail? Did they make this trek one wagon at a time, as individuals?  No. There is a reason they were called wagon trains because they moved as groups.  When they arrived at their intended destinations did they head off in different directions and go all Jeremiah Johnson?  No. They either joined settlements already in progress or started their own, as a group.  They moved as a group, built communities as a group, defended their properties and families as a group…  I come from Pioneer stock.  My genealogy tree has a branch that goes back directly to Brigham Young (of course with 56 kids from 16 of his 55 wives, you can’t swing a dead cat along the Wasatch Range of Utah without hitting someone who is related to Brigham).  Every single aspect of Mormon history, from moving to and building up Nauvoo Illinois, to crossing the prairie, to Brigham leading the faithful into the Salt Lake Valley through Emigration Canyon and pronouncing “This is the place”, to building Salt Lake City was a group, not an individual activity.  It was so communal and such a collective effort that Marx and Engels would have been “Whoa, lighten up a bit, let a brother get some alone time.”

One argument against my take is-“These groups had to band together for pragmatic reasons.  There were extenuating circumstances and variables that forced them to operate as a group in order to survive.”  My response to this critique is-“Yeah.  Your point being what?”  Either working together, spreading out risks and rewards works and yields positive results or it doesn’t.  What the reasons are for doing so are irrelevant.  It doesn’t and shouldn’t matter what the reasons are for opting for the group versus the individual approach.  I fail to see how changing the reasons either changes the efficacy or the results.  Another way of looking at it is to ask the question, “Do you think they could have achieved the same results via the individualism route?”  There doesn’t seem to be any historical evidence to support that they could.  I’m skeptical that the Pioneers didn’t know how to deal with the big issues they faced and followed the community approach to problem solving out of ignorance, stupidity or tradition.  If you think they could have achieved the same or better results by acting as individuals, I would need to see some evidentiary support to back up this position.

The next defense of individualism is along the lines-“That was then, this in now.  The world has changed so the need for the community approach has diminished in importance and has been replaced with the superior, individualism approach.” There are two main problems with this argument.  First, Brooks and the defenders of individualism are not saying, “The community approach WAS the driving force behind early American exceptionalism but now it is the individual.”  The view they hold to be innately true is that it WAS individualism that made America great. Individualism brought to this country by God fearing, religious freedom seeking, hardworking  Europeans, passed down through the generations or absorbed by some sort of osmosis where the trait, like blond hair to Scandinavians, is dominant in conservatives.  Brooks and company might admit that the community approach played a role, just not THE role in making America great.  It was individualism that built that.  Uh......., no.  

Second, the “but the circumstances have changed and the individual plays a fundamentally more important rule” argument is also bullshit.  Certainly the nature of the problems have changed.  We don’t typically worry about packs of wolves, marauding Indians, small pox, the plague, dysentery, being snowed in an unable to get food for weeks in today’s society.  We live in a much more technologically advanced world where these types of problems have adequately been addressed and dealt with.  When it comes to many of the problems and situations that faced the early settlers, we will never face them.  Why?  Because are Founders and those that came after them, as communities, found solutions to those problems.  But, just because those problems either don’t exist or are rare does not mean that we currently are sans problems.  With the advancement of technologies, the world has expanded where people are not limited to living in a small area of the world most of their lives, where commerce and ideas travel around the world at an unbelievable speed.  We’ve gone from regional to a world economy. While the small, regional problems of the past have been handled, there are larger often global problems that need our attention.  I don’t see how, if individualism couldn’t properly deal with the small, regional problems, it can possibly take care of larger ones. If anything, the larger problems need a larger community.

Imagine a small town in Nebraska in the late 1800’s whose local bank is having a cash flow problem.  The town needs the bank so they come together and as a group, deposit enough money to keep the bank going.  Fast forward to September 2008 where the large banks and financial institutions in the U.S. who have branches across the country and all over the world and also have deep, financial ties to other countries’ banks.  They have a serious cash flow problem.  One of these banks was Bank of America. Imagine the B of A branch in Minden Nebraska, population 3000.  It doesn’t matter how community minded and organized the kind citizens of Minden are, nothing they do can safe their local bank from collapse because it belongs to a much larger entity.  So, in order to address the problem, the definition of community needs to expand. The financial problem was nationwide so it took the entire nation to adequately address the U.S. banking problem.  The global financial problem took the global community to address and fix it. It is not that individuals have not made significant contributions but outside the arts, very few have had a big impact on the economy or culture of America.  What makes America great and the advantage we have over just about every other country is our diversity. Homogeneous societies can accomplish a lot and often quickly because as a group, they think pretty much alike.  Their greatest limitation is thinking outside their cultural box.  America, with its wide diversity of cultures always has voices outside the box providing input.  This is a major force behind our innovations and progress the past couple of hundred years.

Name a major economic event in America’s history that was the result of individualism.  There might be some but the majority are ones undertaken by either groups or the government (group) for the betterment of its citizens (huge group).  Louisiana Purchase, Seward’s Folly, Transcontinental Railroad, Interstate Highway System, Tennessee Valley Authority, Space Race, WWII, GI Bill, Erie Canal, St. Lawrence Seaway, Panama Canal, Hoover Dam…all were paid for by the group, built by groups and benifitted groups of the population.

Individuals who have been put on the pedestal of individualism didn’t accomplish what they did by themselves.  Edison is thought to be one of America’s greatest inventors (Tesla was much better but Edison was a better marketer). Growing up, the image of Edison was him laboring long, arduous hours by himself in is laboratory. The reality is he had a very large team of some of the world’s top people working in his lab in Menlo Park and was heavily funded.

Individualism is important and certainly has played a role in America’s rise to power.  But, individualism didn’t have the starring role in “Making America Great”. That role was played by a cast of thousands.  Individualism was a bit player whose name wouldn’t come up in the end credits until half the audience had already left the theater.

[thethistlegirl]

It’s horrible, I feel like a kid in a 🍭 store, Cornelian choice : 🏹 for Ronin 💔 for John 🔬 for Mac in what if I fall 🍄 your Mac in Wunderkid And you, what would you choose, because it’s not you’re « only » the writer that you don’t have to choose what you like or would like to write/read 🥰

This is SO late, but I hope the length makes up for it!

🏹 used for target practice for Robin (For clarification this is pre-novel when Robin is still with the agency that trapped him in a contract and the team who was using name magic to control him)"Staking a vamp isn't as simple as it looks on TV," Michaels says. Robin watches the man lay out a series of stakes on the table in front of the new cadets. "Okay, choose your weapon."The cadets by and large reach for the stake that most closely resembles the classic horror movie weapon, a rounded stick with a pointed end."And, you're dead," Riverdon says dispassionately. "That's an antiquated weapon that's as unreliable as a flintlock. Welcome back to the dark ages of hunting, everyone."Most of the cadets appear shamed into silence."She's right," Michaels says. "This kind of stake is almost never used in the field. It's only viable if your vamp is already so incapacitated they're not moving." He sets aside the handful of round stakes. "Basically, this is the kind of thing you tend to see most when you're taking it off vigilante hunters. In a pinch, if you've run out of standard issue weapons, making something like this might be a trick to fall back on, but I wouldn't recommend it."Riverdon picks up a long, flat stake. "You probably won't see this one a lot either, since it's never used outside of legal executions." She bends it forcefully, and the wood cracks. "It's narrow so that it slides between the ribs and offers virtually instant death, but it's also fairly fragile. Impractical for field work.""This," Michaels says, gesturing to a small pile of the third and final type, "Is the field stake." Robin is quite familiar with that kind, he's made plenty of his own. The stake starts out with a long diamond cross-section, but every hunter shaves theirs down to fit their own hand. Generally, the grip area is smoothed but with a wide section at the very end so that the hand won't slide off the end of the stake, the tip area is shaved narrow, and the middle of the stake has the wider-angled parts of the diamond shape sliced down. The result is a stronger stake that is still capable of penetrating between the ribs. "Knowing what stake to use is only half the battle," Michaels adds. "Since a vampire can only be truly killed by a penetrating stab to the heart, you need to know exactly where and how to strike, so that the stake bypasses the ribs and enters the heart." He glances at the assembled class, then at Robin. "There's no way to accurately learn the feel of this on a training dummy. You'll use them to test the force and pressure you'll need to use, and learn the location of the ribs, but for learning to hit the right areas of the body on a moving target, you'll need a moving target."Robin can tell some of the cadets are getting uncomfortable, knowing where this is going. But most of them look totally unfazed. "Who's first?" Michaels asks, and a burly looking guy steps up, picking up one of the stakes. "Alright, a vamp is coming at you, what are you gonna do?" Robin knows what this means. He fakes a lunge at the cadet, who sidesteps his movement and then digs the stake in under Robin's outstretched arm. Robin winces as the point of the stake jabs into his side. That was a hard blow. He can feel the broken skin, the faint trickle of blood starting to slip down his ribs. He bites his lip and glamours the evidence. There's still an hour left of this class. And causing trouble will mean a punishment so much worse than a few more overzealous cadets' stakes. 💔 broken promise for John He said he was never gonna use the kid's true-name. He'd promised the kid, he'd promised himself. And now here he was holding Robin's limp body in his arms, the true-name stinging on his lips like poison.He tries to tell himself that it was the only way. That if he hadn't taken control, he'd have had to kill Robin, and he couldn't do that. Couldn't hurt the kid even as his hands closed around John's throat. It wasn't Robin trying to kill him, but it would have been Robin who died when John slammed a stake into his chest. And he couldn't do that. Not when there was another way. That doesn't change the fact that the last thing he promised the kid before he was taken is the first thing John has done to him since they found him. He doesn't know all of Robin's history, but he knows enough. And using his true-name...well, he'll be lucky if Robin ever wants to look at him again. Still, the kid will be alive for that to be an option. He carries Robin out to the waiting medics. The kid is so light and fragile, he feels like he could shatter if John handles him too harshly. How he didn't see that the kid's heart is as fragile as his body John doesn't know. How he managed to ruin everything with careless words.Although nothing about today has been careless. John may not have known what he was doing when he turned Robin's true-name into a joke months ago in Maira's office, but he knew all too well what he was doing today. And he knew that if he lost the kid's trust forever, it was better than taking his life.So why does he feel like using Robin's name tore out a piece of his OWN soul?🔬 lab rat for Mac in what if I fall He shivers, wrapping his wings around his shoulders. If he's caught, things will be BAD, but he's just so cold. And then the door slams open. Doctor James stalks in, his coat billowing around him like his own set of wings. Mac jumps and folds his own behind him, hoping James hadn't seen."We are on a DEADLINE." James strides up to the head night scientist and grabs the collar of his coat. "WHY do I not have the subject's test results?""We...didn't run the tests. The subject is sick. Not functioning at optimal capacity. I didn't think you'd want to take those reports to the board.""Well, I have to take them something. How fast can you turn them around?" Doctor James asks."A few hours, if I push the night staff.""Get him out and do the tests now. Have them on my desk by morning." James turns to the cage where Mac is huddled, shivering and sniffling. "And stop playing with your wings. Those are tools. Not security blankets." Mac struggles to his feet when the cage door opens and he's pulled out. His whole body feels stiff and shaky. He's not sure he can stand, let alone fly. But if he fails, he'll be sent to the Basement. And no one comes back from there. He flexes the muscles in his wings, trying to warm them up. He can't fail. He can't. 🍄 poisoned for your Mac in Wunderkind Mac sets down his drink after a small sip. These fancy parties always have the worst tasting things. Mac guesses they're supposed to be for cultured, refined tastes. He'd take a beer by the fire with his teammates over this stuff any day. He hopes their target won't be too concerned about his lack of enthusiasm for the beverages. After all, the guy's here to buy a set of classified documents from someone he thinks is an agency sellout. He tries not to jump when a voice comes from his elbow. "Enjoying the party?"Damn it he really hates being snuck up on. He disguises his moment of panic before turning around. "I'd enjoy it a lot more if I had some cash to spread around and impress some of those lovely ladies." He makes a pointed nod in the direction of the bar. Riley turns around with a drink in her hand and waves. Pretending to flirt with her has never gotten any less weird. Especially not now that she's his actual sister. At least she's pretty cool with it. "You have the documents?""You have the cash?" Mac says, turning around. Or trying to. The room kind of feels like it's spinning. "Actually I have something better." The man's voice sounds like it's coming through a tunnel, and Mac frowns. "The antidote to the poison you just ingested." The drink. Damn it. Mac stumbles, leaning heavily on the stair railing to keep himself upright. Is it just the shock, or does this poison really work this fast?"See, I need a little insurance policy. I have someone who is going to verify that these codes are genuine. If he does, then you get the antidote. If he tells me you're setting me up...well, then, you won't live long enough for your little plan to succeed." Mac grits his teeth, reaching into his pocket for the papers. He knows his team heard all of that. Now he just has to hope they find a way to fix this before it's too late. And you, what would you choose... ⛈ bad weather for Riley in Pre-series WunderkindJack wakes up to the sound of rain on the roof, the crash of thunder shaking the ranch house, and the sounds of soft muttering from the room next door.He long ago stopped being able to sleep through the sounds of storms. He's learning not to be able to sleep through the sounds of his partner in distress. He crawls out of bed, grabbing his jacket from the chair beside it, and steps carefully across the hall. Momma's probably still asleep, no reason to wake her.

He knocks on the door. Startling agents, especially ones who are probably either in a nightmare or waking up, is a bad plan. Riley might only be as big as a soaked kitten, but she's got some scrappy fighter in her, and even with one shoulder out of commission she's not someone he wants to tangle with. 

"Who is it?" The voice is shaky and a little wet.

"Jack. Can I come in?"

"Okay." 

He pushes open the door and steps inside. Lightning flashes, showing the room in sharp blue and white relief. Riley is huddled at the end of her bed furthest from the window, blanket pulled up over her head. He can see the white of her sling and the shimmer in her eyes.

"Can't sleep either, huh?" He's pretty sure he knows what she's reliving. The bomb blast that threw her across a Venezuelan street...and killed two families in an apartment building. The first time Riley's been up close and personal for the casualties of an op gone wrong. 

She shakes her head. "It's really loud."

"Yeah, this old house is anything but soundproof," Jack says. "You know what I do when I need to drown it out?"

"N-no..."

Jack grins. Another gullible one. He sits down on the bed and breaks directly into the first of the Metallica songs he knows by heart. He knows he can drown out the thunder. 

There will be time to talk about the trauma. About the damage and the scars this job leaves in its wake. About how Riley is going to have to learn to live with the body count on ops sometimes. About how to move forward.But for now, he just has to make things a little better, get her out of the bad place in her head, because that's no place to be for the kind of serious conversations they need eventually. And from the way Riley is shaking her head at him and his singing, he's succeeding. Just a little. And that's okay. 

[trumplerlaw-blog]

Trump’s Grand Reopening of America

I am first and foremost a patriot. I love this country in a way that I could never fully articulate in words. Every generation of Trumpler and Hlaudy (my mother's maiden name) that has lived in the United States have served our great nation in the armed forces and deployed.

 It is difficult for me to be critical of our government, particularly in times of crisis. These are the moments when, as a People, we are expected to and should be able to cohesively unify and stand together irrespective of age, race, gender, gender identification, sexual orientation, religion, economic situation, cultural background, or political leanings. Yet as the days wane, my frustration at irresponsible and indecisive national leadership mounts. It is difficult to stand together when those steering the ship wish to tear us apart.

 Undoubtedly, there is an enormous tension between protecting our nations' public health and saving its faltering economy. It is a balancing act that the most brilliant political minds and tacticians who have ever lived would have a difficult time tackling. It is an unenviable task that I would not wish upon anyone.

 Nevertheless, it is a time for strong, decisive leadership. It is not a time for politics, campaigning, and pandering. Our nations' need for a guiding hand goes out not only to our President but to Congress and state and local leaders and authorities, as well.

 My overwhelming desire for leadership in this time of crisis brings me to the point of my rant that came to me during Tuesday morning's "Rage Walk."

 For those of you that missed President Trump's daily briefing Monday night, I will give you some of the more alarming and questionable highlights.

 The President's responses to every question that the press asked, even those directed to others, were long-winded, rambling, politically motivated, frequently incoherent, and often, he said contradictory things. At times, he also randomly attacked the press and democrats for no reason. The above behavior was typical bluster from the President, and while annoying and not something you would want from a leader during a crisis, I expected it.

 Of note, during Monday's briefing, President Trump paraded out his new "expert witness," Dr. Deborah Birx. She is a member of President Trump's lauded "Coronavirus Task Force." If you are familiar with litigation strategy and data manipulation at all, President Trump is going to use the data projections that she, along with others, are coming up with to "reopen" the country.

 When Dr. Birx was speaking, lyrics from Don Henley's song, The Garden of Allah, came to mind:

 “Today I made an appearance downtown. I am an expert witness because I say I am. And I said gentlemen, and I use that word loosely. I will testify for you. I'm a gun for hire. I'm a saint. I'm a liar. Because there are no facts, there is no truth. Just data to be manipulated. I can get you any result you like. What's it worth to you? Because there is no wrong, there is no right. And I sleep very well at night. No shame, no solution, no remorse, no retribution. Just people selling t-shirts Just opportunity to participate in the pathetic little circus. And winning, winning, winning…” [This is very important to the President.]

 While she was talking, Dr. Birx mentioned that the mortality rate is lower than we expected. Dr. Birx then threw out a paltry figure. The President immediately interrupted her by rambling about how there were all of these incredibly sick people who just got well on their own without seeking medical help (perhaps by divine intervention) who may have had or may not have had the virus.

 After that prompt, Dr. Birx further explained that the mortality number could theoretically dramatically drop. The existing mortality number does not take into consideration a potentially large number of asymptomatic people who never got tested. It also did not account for those who had Coronavirus symptoms that medical professionals never treated or tested. It will remain a mystery, I suppose, however, how we are supposed to count those who never made themselves available to be counted or who never got counted for some other reason.

 Not surprisingly, Dr. Birx then talked about how the mortality curve increases for those who are elderly or have preexisting conditions. Dr. Birx indicated, however, that the data clearly showed that while the curve increases, the majority of the dead across the board as a result of COVID-19 worldwide were over the age of eighty. While tragic and sad, reading between the lines, she and President Trump seems to agree that this age group, at the mortality rates projected, is "acceptable loss" to "Keep America Great."

  Dr. Birx expects to have a full "incomplete" report to the American people by next week. Once the "incomplete" version is ready for dissemination, Dr. Birx, along with President Trump, will brief the American people on its conclusions. You should assume that the data in this report will be manipulated and spun to such a degree that it is acceptable for the President and Fox News to say "America is Safe to Reopen" again. At the very least, they will spin it to say that it will be safe to reopen within another week and change of the release of the report. Therefore, if your governor or local leaders still want to keep you and your family home or ask you to stay in your house after President Trump says it is okay to go out and play, they are assholes.

 The upcoming release of this report will only cause further division and resentment in an already fractured, frustrated, and frightened nation. Rather than come up with a cohesive, unified solution to a unique, never before seen, life-altering problem that is plaguing our entire country, the President appears to want to deal with this crisis municipality by municipality, county by county, and state by state. He seems to be trying to unburden himself with the responsibility of leading this magnificent country through this epidemic.

 It is a coward's move. Not the action of a daring, determined leader. It is not the move one would expect from the leader of the greatest nation this world has ever known. How a President handles him or herself in a crisis is what builds legacies, not how the stock market performed or your job numbers. 

The President's piecemeal approach to crisis problem-solving is also leaving governors holding the bag and the tab. States now have to compete for the minimal remaining resources and supplies devoted to combat the virus individually. This state by state competition is leading to artificially high prices on supplies and even price-gouging.

 Concerning the forthcoming report mentioned above, I imagine that the White House is already leaking information regarding its contents to your favorite Fox News types to start setting up "President Trump’s Grand Reopening of America" like it is a shopping mall. If the President had it his way, this reopening would probably include much fanfare and a military parade.

 Again, this alienating approach is a narrow-sighted. America, collectively, is a robust and complex but loose connection of the souls and minds of the different types that I mentioned at the beginning of this piece. As the President, in times of crisis, you have to speak to all of us, not just your base.

 Dr. Anthony Fauci, the Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, was conspicuously absent at Monday's briefing. When asked if Dr. Anthony Fauci agreed that America should reopen sooner rather than later, President Trump glibly offered, "if it were up to the doctors, they may say let's keep it shut down -- let's shut down the entire world."

 To put Dr. Fauci's career in context, he has served every President since Ronald Reagan. Dr. Fauci is a man of science and public health, and he does not operate in a world of spin and political parties. He has assisted previous presidents with AIDS/HIV policy, SARS, MERS, various FLU epidemics, and, most recently, the EBOLA outbreak.

 Additionally, Dr. Fauci has developed therapies for formerly fatal diseases. These diseases included Polyarteritis Nodosa, Granulomatosis with Polyangiitis, and Lymphomatoid Granulomatosis. His research has led to some of the most critical advances in patient management in Rheumatology (Arthritis) over the past 20 years. Moreover, Dr. Fauci has contributed to the understanding of how HIV destroys the body's defenses leading to the progression to AIDS.

 The scientific community regards Dr. Fauci as one of the world's foremost authorities on infectious disease. He has unparalleled academic and practical experience. Moreover, he has led a large governmental agency explicitly designed to combat infectious disease for going on four decades.

 As a youth, Dr. Fauci's parents raised him Catholic, and unlike the President, he grew up in a home with deeply held religious convictions. Somewhat paradoxically, while Dr. Fauci is a man of science, he has a Jesuit education and a Bachelor of Science in Classics from the College of Holy Cross.

 Dr. Fauci had previously acted as the voice of reason during this public health crisis. He had often contradicted the President's bold optimism. Dr. Fauci had gone on record and said, he had warned President Trump about some of his more careless and questionable remarks, but he can only tell him to, "be careful about this and don't say that." Ultimately, he stated when the President starts giving out inaccurate information, he "can't jump in front of the microphone and push him down."

 Dr. Fauci, throughout this extraordinary public health emergency, had been deeply concerned about misusing data and irresponsibly throwing around numbers and misleading information to justify a political position. He had to explain how medical trials work frequently. He also had to clarify how long it takes to get a vaccine or off label medical treatments approved for use, the risks associated with clinical trials, and anecdotal stories versus peer-reviewed scientific evidence backed up by reproducible data.

 In short, Dr. Fauci is an actual "stable genius," and possibly a wizard. The White House is muzzling him at a time when the American people need him most.

 If the most knowledgeable person in your administration about a subject will not assist you in getting the misinformation you want out there, you have to find someone else who will, in this case, enter Dr. Birx. I am not saying this to diminish Dr. Birx as a person or to reduce her impressive credentials. I am just telling you that you do not pinch-hit for Babe Ruth in the World Series.

 Sadly, I also assume as the President has done with everyone that has ever stood in his way, he is going to begin a misinformation campaign against Dr. Fauci. The President and his people will design this campaign to discredit Dr.Fauci and his impeccable qualifications and history of service.

 Since taking office, the President helped create a series of unfortunate events that assisted in our nation's inability to manage and combat this unprecedented public health crisis effectively. Despite numerous warnings, the President waited until the last possible minute to create any sort of haphazard plan to deal with the virus. When the COVID-19 crisis finally came to a head in the United States, President Trump appointed a man of faith, Vice President Pence, rather than a person of science, to lead his Coronavirus Task Force.

 Most alarmingly, during Monday's briefing, the evening after 100 Americans lost their lives to the virus in a single night, the President spoke of the crisis in the past tense. He kept referring to it as a learning experience.

 "Our country was not built to be shut down," the President warned during the briefing.

 I certainly concur with this sentiment. My business probably will not survive the short-term shutdowns already ordered without substantial assistance. Most small businesses won't.

 While there is tension between saving jobs, moving our economy forward, and saving lives, statements like the following are propaganda, misinformation, and messaging designed to create a false narrative:

 "You look at automobile accidents, which are far greater than any numbers we're talking about. That doesn't mean we're going to tell everybody no more driving of cars. So we have to do things to get our country open."

 The above statements are reminiscent of the initial messaging the President ran with when he was trying to stave off panic by irresponsibly comparing COVID-19 to the flu. These are the types of reckless comments that drive Dr. Fauci and cautious, thoughtful, scientific minds nuts.

  No one disagrees with the President about wanting to reopen the county. We would all love that. And it is not whether people are recovering from the virus or dying. The figure on the overall mortality rate is the red herring here. It has always been about the tax the virus will put on our health care system as a whole.

 The fact remains that our health care system cannot sustain massive and exponential increases in the number of cases of COVID-19. We simply do not have the qualified personnel, equipment, or beds.

 At last count, we had in the neighborhood of 2.77 beds per 1,000 people. The lack of adequate care, necessary supplies, and the genuine fear that our entire health care system will collapse is real. This fear is one of the primary reasons physicians, infectious disease experts, and scientists across the board are calling for aggressive social distancing measures to at least attempt to slow the spread.

 Remember, when knowledgable people talk about the lack of hospital beds, supplies, resources, and personnel, and the toll that the exponential spread of COVID-19 will take on our health care system, the epidemic is compounding an already overwhelming problem. If we do not get the rate of exposure under control, doctors and nurses will not be able to treat or see people who are gravely ill with unrelated illnesses or who suffered other kinds of life-threatening injuries.

 I am not a politician, nor would I ever want to be one. Like most people who comment or judge, it is easy for me to be an armchair quarterback. I just find the current ineptitude even more remarkable and disheartening than usual.

 It must be difficult for the President to watch the stock market tumble and the job losses mount since his inflated sense of self-worth seems to be directly and inextricably tied to an artificially high market and strong job numbers. These numbers were and are the entire basis of his reelection strategy. He and his team apparently have no backup plan. Rather than pivot to becoming a reassuring leader during a crisis to a country in dire need of one like Lincoln, Roosevelt, and even George W. Bush after 9/11, he is choosing to continue to go on the divisive partisan offensive. As they always have when he attacks, his rabid fan base is loving it. Like many things about his presidency and everything about this crisis, the President's insistence on his brand of "Politics As Usual," makes me incredibly sad.

 ............................................................................

 In contrast to the President's distorted myopic view of this global pandemic, watch New York Governor Andrew Cuomo's factual, analytical problem-solving approach in his daily briefings. Unlike the President, he is not the Governor of Fantasyland. And if you want to see and hear leadership in action, Governor Cuomo had this say - off the cuff and from the heart - Tuesday before taking questions:

 “And we're going to get through it because we are New York and because we've dealt with a lot of things, and because we are smart. You have to be smart to make it in New York. And we are resourceful, and we are showing how resourceful we are. And because we are united, and when you are united, there is nothing you can't do. And because we are New York tough. We are tough. You have to be tough. This place makes you tough. But it makes you tough in a good way. We're going to make it because I love New York, and I love New York because New York loves you.

 New York loves all of you. Black and white and brown and Asian and short and tall and gay and straight. New York loves everyone. That's why I love New York. It always has, it always will. And at the end of the day, my friends, even if it is a long day, and this is a long day, love wins. Always. And it will win again through this virus. Thank you.”

 The above statement by Governor Cuomo is a stark contradiction to our President, who previously referred to the Coronavirus as the "China Virus." His feigned disingenuous outrage during Monday's briefing about violence and hatred toward Asian Americans, mainly by those who support him, as a result of the Coronavirus, was, at the very least, awkward and uncomfortable, and more accurately and tragically, laughable.

[desertbeetle59]

Will Melanotan 2 Deal With Kind 1 Skin And Red Heads?

Distinction Between Melanotan I & Melanotan Ii

Content

' Everyone Is Asking Me Where I'Ve Been On Holiday'.

Purchase Melanotan ☀ Tanning Injections.

Melanotan 2 Uk Distributors.

Buy Sun Tanning Injections From The Most Respectable Shop.

Featured Products.

Essentially, melanotan I binds to melanin making receptors that alpha-MSH generally binds to. Dr Andreas Kimegard provided his research on Melanotan II at the emerging research techniques seminar sponsored by the SSA. Undoubtedly, the disadvantage from way too much tanning is the quantity of damage UV radiation can do. This can lead to skin cancer and various other major health problems.

You need to more than 18 years of age to order or purchase from our site. You might not purchase this peptide for any individual who is under 18 years old. Products are not drugs and also have actually not been accepted by the FDA to prevent, deal with or heal any type of clinical problem, disorder or disease.

Does Melanotan 2 make you tired?

Melanotan II binds with a wider range of receptors than melanotan I and has a shorter life in your body. It can also cross your blood-brain barrier, which can cause side effects like appetite loss, sexual dysfunction, and fatigue. Melanotan II is not currently used to treat any medical conditions.

' Everybody Is Asking Me Where I'Ve Been On Holiday'.

You should know how long it will certainly take before your skin begins to melt. Yet this will certainly change as soon as your skin becomes tan since after that it'll take much longer for your skin to burn. You might see that your tan appears instantly within 36 hours after your skin has actually experienced UV ray direct exposure.

Buy Melanotan ☀ Tanning Injections.

Plus, the long-term results of utilizing melanotan I and also melanotan II remain largely unknown.

Melanin shots are unregulated as well as have the potential to cause life threatening negative effects.

Though https://ourdoings.com/couterifunc1/ like how their skin looks when it's bronzed, sun tanning has no wellness advantages.

Due to a lack of melanin, your skin will be a lot more prone to the results of the sun.

All melanin shots are dangerous when used for the objective of transforming skin color.

Unlawfully acquired injections got online may be mislabeled or have contaminations that might be seriously hazardous to your health and wellness.

One of the largest problems around tanning shots is that they're uncontrolled.

Without proper policy, there's no assurance that the product you're using has actually been effectively identified.

In several Western cultures, tanned skin is commonly regarded as appealing.

Although some companies claim that Melanotan 2 can stop skin cancer, this is misleading. What it does is to restrict damage to the skin by the production of melanin as well as the security of deep skin pigmentation in the type of a tan.

What happens when you overdose on melatonin?

Others find that taking too much melatonin causes them to feel extremely sleepy during unintended times or cause intense dreams or nightmares. Some additional symptoms of a melatonin overdose may include: crankiness. headaches.

The tanning effect created by Mt & Mt2 can be created and also seen within simply a few days. Melanotan EU for the best, quick shipment as well as top-performing tanning items. Melanotan functions by promoting the body's normally happening alpha-melanocyte stimulating hormone (a-MSH), causing Melanogenesis, a process where melanocytes produce melanin.

Are self tanners toxic?

Most drugstore and department store varieties contain some pretty nasty ingredients including dyes, harsh synthetics and fragrance in addition to DHA, which can cause reactions, or include known carcinogens and hormone-disrupters. Look for self-tanners that are made with natural and simple botanical ingredients.

Our tanning injections comply with the worldwide top quality standards, so you can relax simple understanding that you will certainly obtain a maximum result without placing your wellness at risk. The synthetic hormonal agent jobs by promoting pigment cells in the skin, creating them to produce even more of the melanin that provides skin its darker colour. The Medicines as well as Healthcare products Regulatory Company - which ensures drugs are safe to utilize - has branded melanotan harmful. It stated it has actually gotten records of approximately 74 different side-effects.

Can tanning injections make you sick?

These are the cells that become cancerous in malignant melanoma, so doctors fear users could in fact bring on skin cancer in the long term. In the short-term, side-effects of the chemical are numerous and include depression, suppressed appetite, nausea, high blood pressure, facial flushing and panic attacks.

Melanotan 2 Uk Suppliers.

Routine MT2 shots are the best method to see to it you're obtaining one of the most out of your treatment. This will certainly aid speed up results and also ensure that the peptide is totally soaked up. Quick & Lasting Tan - All-natural tans will fade after only a few days. Nevertheless, Melanotan 2 enables you to appreciate a deep as well as cozy tan for months on end without the requirement for any type of sun direct exposure, also if you stop utilizing it entirely. Let's encounter it, obtaining a full-body all-around tan is just one of the objectives that a number of us non-stop chase after.

Buy Tanning Injections From The Most Respectable Shop.

While MT2 certainly helps safeguard customers from shedding as quickly because of the reduced amount of time you'll invest subjected to UV rays, you still need to prevent overexposing on your own up until you have actually accumulated a base tan. Other than being one of the most reliable method to distribute Melanotan 2 peptide across the entirety of your body, injections are additionally near painless as insulin syringes are extremely thin as well as brief. Depending upon the customer's Fitzpatrick skin type from the graph above, the dose will certainly differ from person to person. Right here are some general guidelines in regards to period upkeep for the different skin types available.

I took suggestions from them and also got vials of Melanotan 2 online. " I would certainly spent thousands on tanning lotions and sunbeds in the past yet the injections guaranteed rapid and very easy tans.

Is Melanotan 2 safe to use?

“Side-effects of Melanotan 2 include nausea and vomiting. Users face high blood pressure, heart issues and blood disorders. “The jab makes moles darker, which could lead to skin cancer. “Anyone who uses a sunbed is around 20 per cent more likely to develop malignant melanoma.

This is most likely since there are two pathways for satiety, called leptin-dependent and leptin-independent paths. Study suggests MT-2 is a lot more reliable in stimulating both pathways and also therefore might be an extra efficient exogenous therapy for lowering hunger,. Despite some recent misconceptions amongst individuals, Melanotan 2 is not a remedy, therapy or preventative step for skin conditions, particularly skin cancer cells. Despite preferred false impressions, Melanotan 2 does not avoid your skin from burning.

Featured Products.

How can I get tan fast?

How to get a tan faster 1. Use sunscreen with an SPF of 30. 2. Change positions frequently. 3. Eat foods that contain beta carotene. 4. Try using oils with naturally occurring SPF. 5. Don't stay outside for longer than your skin can create melanin. 6. Eat lycopene-rich foods. 7. Choose your tanning time wisely. More items

It is best to take a dosage before going to bed in this instance to make sure that you can sleep through the negative signs and symptoms. As you proceed using the product, the negative effects will vanish. Intramuscular injection or subcutaneous injection is done to provide the product. It does not actually matter where the injection website lies.

Is Melanotan 2 Legal in the US?

There are 2 types of melanotan – melanotan I and melanotan II. It is currently illegal to sell tan injections such as melanotan, as this product is unlicensed. Both versions of the drug are injected into the skin.

The buyer is totally knowledgeable about the health hazards related to these items and also concurs that they are experienced in their handling. To stay clear of the health threats connected with way too much UV direct exposure, individuals are selecting Melanotan as a much safer choice for obtaining a tan quickly. When the "Alpha-MSH" hormone generates melanin, it'll trigger you to experience a much better libido, physical arousal, cravings, and also darker skin coloring. Whether you're a man or female, your sex drive will certainly boost considerably. You still have an obligation to monitor how much time your skin is revealed to UV rays.

Can you get melanin injections?

Melanotan II can only be injected with needles. It is designed to stimulate the pigment cells in your body to produce more melanin, which gives you a tan. After several injections and exposure to the sun or a sun-bed to kickstart the process, your skin tone is claimed to change from the inside out.

You can get a wonderful tan in less time as well as with much less UV exposure. " Curt is a body builder as well as his good friends made use of the injections to tan prior to competitions.

But regrettably for tanners, this typically suggests great deals of UV ray exposure - which does no good for your wellbeing and can eventually destroy your skin completely. still require some amount of sunshine to obtain you tanned, they are far safer than depending on the sunlight constantly.

Maintenance Dose-- You take 1 milligram one-time per week along with a tanning session. If you utilize a greater dosage in the beginning, you'll experience undesirable signs and symptoms like moderate nausea as well as a purged face.

Individuals come in all forms, dimensions, as well as, eventually, skin tones too. Due to the substantial degree of difference, the Fitzpatrick skin chart organizes skin types right into one of 6 easily identifiable categories. This simplifies your tanning efforts while aiding identify the skin-types that deal with one of the most run the risk of when it comes to UV ray damages. If you are seeking to achieve an ideal tan quicker, you can include a packing dose right into your treatment. This implies even more frequent MT2 shots, which allow you to build up the preliminary tan much quicker, hence arriving into the maintenance stage of your therapy much sooner.

It has been understood for some time that leptin neutralizes these aspects by boosting the uptake of sugar, subduing glucagon manufacturing, as well as interfering with the pathway that results in ketone body formation. These actions do not depend upon insulin as well as hence leptin signaling is being actively investigated as an alternate ways whereby diabetic issues may be dealt with. The effects of MT-2 are similar to those of the hormone leptin, often called the satiation hormonal agent due to the fact that it reduces yearnings and food consumption. Leptin, nevertheless, has never ever been useful in the treatment of obesity, also in individuals who are leptin deficient.

Whichever is comfortable and hassle-free to reach is just great. Once the injection is done, your bloodstream will certainly take in the item.

Course To Improved Health.

Do nasal tanners have side effects?

There have been a number of personal accounts of severe side effects popping up across the web with users noting that the tan injections and nasal sprays landed them up in hospital and left them with severe skin discolouration and other complications such as heart irregularities.

Melanotan 2 works in promoting melanin manufacturing depends on a number of aspects such as the individual's skin kind, their body weight, how much they are exposed to UV rays and so forth. Melanin is the pigment which is responsible for identifying someone's skin and also hair colour as well as the colour of their eyes.

Its production and also launch is managed by the pituitary glands by the polypeptide melanocortin as well as is a hormonal procedure. Once activated, this hormonal agent is normally produced by the specialised skin cells, the melanocytes which are located in the top layer of skin. The main advantages are self sunless tanning of the human skin, libido-enhancing attributes and with Pt141 assisting with erectile dysfunction.

How can I get tan fast?

How to get a tan faster 1. Use sunscreen with an SPF of 30. 2. Change positions frequently. 3. Eat foods that contain beta carotene. 4. Try using oils with naturally occurring SPF. 5. Don't stay outside for longer than your skin can create melanin. 6. Eat lycopene-rich foods. 7. Choose your tanning time wisely. More items

Easy Tan is the very best area to acquire Melanotan 2 online in the UK. If you want to purchase Melanotan 2 items, then ensure to look for a reliable supplier in your location. The pathogenesis of diabetes mellitus is specified by high blood sugar levels, hypersecretion of glucagon, and the production of ketone bodies.

When starting for the very first time, it is advised to get a minimum of 2 kits. A lot of first time users begin to see results after their first kits nevertheless, relying on your skin type individuals with reasonable skin will start to notice a tan establishing when utilizing the 2nd package. Each person is different to the other so we can not say if you will certainly require one to 4 packages.

Researches have been carried out on the effects as well as possible benefits of melanotan I. In a study on grownups with photosensitivity concerns, the efficacy of melanotan I's melanin generating activities were analyzed. It was found reliable in dealing with phototoxicity in such circumstances in Europe, and has been provided clinically as a subdermal dental implant. Melanotan I has a comparable device of action to alpha-MSH.

[prorevenge]

You try to cut my team in half so I outsourced your entire department.

This tale takes place over the course of many months and resulted in over 150 lay offs, all to save 22 IT Techs from losing their jobs.

I learned a long time ago that no one cares about the IT team at our company. They see us as "Those useless employees always complaining about rules."

We are a mortgage company, and those rules are the rules everyone follows to protect customer data privacy and to prevent theft. When your company suddenly loses 2 full payments for a house to some scammer in Nigeria and the FTC has questions for you, then it is time to change your policies.

This meant cutting legacy access, revoking unnecessary access, and correctly coding job titles in active directory to prevent people from granting their own access.

What this boiled down to was a meeting that I phoned into a year ago. This was one of those meetings where I did not need to be there. Budget meetings.

In this meeting the VP over the accounting department played a recording showing times when someone in the IT Tech team provided "sup par service." She tried using this as reason to fire half of the tech team.

The trouble was, that all of the people she played recordings of were already fired for giving terrible customer service. These people were replaced by 5 star techs who know what they are doing and give excellent customer service.

This started the whole chain of events that led to last week.

Since this meeting was every 2 months, VP has tried to use her position and influence to grow her team while shrinking ours.

Every budget meeting, I would show up and VP, who shall hence be referred to as Karen, would target my team. I would pull out the numbers, and pull out the logs showing how my team received a little over 3/4s of that team's call volume.

I show how my team of 22 techs personally receive more phone calls than every other inbound call employee by more than double the number.

I show how with the call volume we receive we still maintain a 98 percent satisfaction rating.

At the 3rd budget meeting the COO had been tired of "hearing the same excuses" and wanted hard data. He had a point. I was merely throwing out basic numbers without providing real data.

Our company was in the middle of a budget crisis and someone needed to be cut. These budget meetings were basically a way to defend our own department from the chopping block. Karen believed that the best defense was a good offence. She was right, but not in the way she thought.

When it became clear that the IT support team was on the chopping block, Karen starts to have her employees call into the tech center and have them make requests that she knows we can not assist with as that is handled by another company entirely. We are not able to transfer calls to an external line so the only thing we can do is give the number to call and hang up.

The negative CSAT's start to flood in after this. Every single call from that team regarding a vendor's password reset gets a negative csat. Our approval rating tanked to 72 percent in one day. I instantly took action.

First I contact a few of the users, on recorded calls, and ask them why they called the IT Tech team when they know we are not capable of resetting the vendor's password. She replied that she was told it was policy to do that now. I asked why she left a negative satisfaction rating and she said that those no longer count against the employee. That those are only used for macro metrics.

I walked over to Karen's office and walked in. "Karen, why are you having your team call mine to reset vendor's password?" Karen looked confused and stated that she did no such thing. She said she would talk to her team and make sure that they call the correct number in the future.

The calls did not stop. Now a few of her team were calling in with personal machines that were not an asset of our company. They were wanting things done which would violate license agreements with microsoft or dell. Each of these were refused and each of these were leaving negative CSAT.

It became clear that Karen was trying to tank our stats before the next budget meeting.

I let my boss know and he just gives me a sly smile. "The leash is off. Sick her." This is an inside joke between us as I am someone who is very detail oriented when I am focused. When you try and get my team fired because you want to grow your useless team, I am very focused on you now.

The first thing I do is enable call recording for every corporate employee as to not arouse her suspicions. Her team did not have call recording enabled because her team "handles CDP" on a daily basis.

I pull a live call and listen in.

"This is Employee with our company may I have your account number or your name?" The customer gives the name. "OK I have your account pulled up, are you wanting to make a payment?" Customer says yes. "Are you authorizing me to go ahead and make the withdraw from the bank account we have on file?" Customer agrees. "OK payment is processing. You will be notified in X days when it is complete. Your next due date is this date." The customer thanks her and he hangs up.

Entire phone call was 1:22. Short phone call so I listen to another. Similar situation. I listen to another and get the same thing. I start seeing a pattern here so I go through the rapidly building log and see that all of the phone calls are usually less than 1 minute and 20 seconds long. It takes well over an hour before an anomaly occurs and I see a 5 minute phone call.

The customer needed an extension and the employee was authorized to give her a 30 day extension to avoid a late fee if she would make a double payment next month. The person on the phone agreed.

At this point I also turn on the CSAT for her team only. I expected a largely similar rating as my team. I was not prepared for the nearly instant 50 percent rating that steadily dropped.

My boss comes over to my desk as he was getting the email notifications for the sub 75 percent csat rating and was flabbergasted at the sheer volume of negative reports.

Its now clear that there is no choice but to examine this further. I assign 4 people to review the negative calls from the other team and have them all. The amount of employees being downright rude to customers, not other employees but paying customers, over the phone was shocking. The negative tones in their voice, the unwillingness to fully answer questions, the extreme lack of empathy, and the shocking lack of mute button use was too much.

Then came another shocker. The number of customer facing employees was ridiculous. 152 employees to handle roughly 30 percent more calls than my team of 22.

I call the CIO.

$CIO - What you got for me?

$ME - I have something for you. Its incredibly evil, depressingly accurate, and can probably save the company a ridiculous amount of money.

$CIO - You know this is the second time you have said those exact words to me right?

$ME - Yup. But there is something I need to know first. I am not currently authorized to know it and I need to request it in a way that would not set off any red flags.

$CIO - What is that?

$ME - The starting pay scale for all account employees.

$CIO - Tell me your plan.

The next budget meeting was not a budget meeting. It was a IT Tech defend yourself meeting. The COO directed it and let Karen speak first.

Karen pulled out the same stuff as before. Calls upon calls to our group that were cherry picked as well as listing off dead zone times when we had people working but no one calling in. Then went on about how they could cut our group in half and hire more Account employees to reduce the workflow.

Instead of defending myself or my department, I played 4 of the short call recordings from Karen's department. I then pulled up the excel sheet that was color coded showing how many phone calls each account rep received and the length of time they were on. each call, and the customer satisfaction rating.

I explained the lack of high csat with my own little recording I liked to call a failtage. Its a montage of fail and her team were the stars. Before you ask, I did put music to it.

The recording starts off with an employee saying. "Yeah I guess I can take your payment." Then goes straight into one where a customer accidentally gave the wrong bank account info and said don't use that one. The rep responded with "Christ. What is the actual account number?" It only got worse from there.

This group was unmanaged for so long they were filled with rude and useless employees.

I then showed them a side by side comparison of each tech who received a call. I showed how my techs were receiving more than 4 times the number of calls, per rep, than her team was getting per day. I showed how we all were on the phone for well over 7 times the amount of time her team was on the phone for, and I demonstrated how each tech had double or tripple the satisfaction rating over all of her group.

Half the room that was uninterested in the conversation were suddenly interested when I closed out my presentation.

"In short, I saw no reason to defend the IT team today as I have successfully done so in every prior meeting. Since the last meeting, however, Karen has crossed the line and has had her team call mine in regards to things we have no access to."

I played the recording of me calling her minion. "As you can see here, she directed her team to call mine and to leave bad satisfaction ratings on my guys because of it. I have since deleted those CSAT's as they served no purpose whatsoever. " I then pulled out my next flowchart.

"This is the monthly expense, taken from the last 9 meetings, that our company spends on IT and Servicing departments." I look at the COO who was looking at me intently. "Before today I was on the defensive as I saw no reason to attack another group. But it is clear to me now that my team has a target on its back. That is why I now show you this."

It was a graph showing the starting pay scale for each IT and Servicing employee code as well as their average daily workflow. There was one glaring anomaly on this list. Account department had the highest starting pay scale with the least amount of work.

"So basically in laymen's terms, the Account department can reduced to one tenth of its current size, and we can reduce the pay scale to a little over one half as this department requires very little in the way of problem solving and critical thinking." I saw a few raised eye brows as well as one impressed smile from the CIO.

The COO ushers everyone out of the room except for me, my direct supervisor, and the CIO. He looked at me and said "Continue."

"Further, we can cut this department entirely and outsource THEM instead of IT. Since this group merely takes payments and sometimes allows extensions, we do not have to worry too much about technical ability. Outside of simply using windows we can hire high schoolers if we wanted to." This got a laugh from the CIO. Karen was staring through the window with this smug grin on her face the entire time.

"Now for my final bit for this meeting, I am going to play two cherry picked phone calls. These are the two most technical phone calls I could find from the last month for both departments."

I play a call where a payment fails to process and the rep realizes she typed in the wrong number.

I then play a call where it starts out with a user stating that her customer submitted a payment to the wrong CD. The tech breaks out into our procedure to prevent wire fraud. Thanks to the quick action of this tech we were able to reverse the CD and save this customer from losing their down payment.

The final masterful stroke was playing my final card. "As you all know, Karen has been coming after my team for months. She has been grinding her axe against us because she, like everyone else, has made the mistake that we are incompetent, inept, and useless to the company. What she did not know was that I have all of the logs showing the truth. The smoke she has been blowing for years is so thick that its ridiculous. Her team is highly replaceable and we both know my team would require extensive training and effort to replace."

The CIO spoke up. "With just 30 people, we can outsource her entire department and save the company millions a year. The next time we have a major IT issue, you will be regretting outsourcing us." He then pointed to the graphs and flow charts brought by both myself and Karen. "Her team is useless."

The next day I watched in pure joy as a term request came in for Karen. It came in with the double ** indicator at the beginning meaning this was a stealth term. To be done and coordinated with the person who will inform her of the termination. (Its not actually ** I changed that for here to protect identities.)

Over the next two months, the account team was shuttered. First they came for anyone with disciplinary issues or attendance issues. Then they laid off anyone who had been there a really long time. Then the newest employees.

The smart ones applied for other positions in the company or left before getting laid off. All the while the calls for payments were slowly shunted to the call center in India.

By the end of last week we only have 4 domestic accounts people who take escalations that the India call center is not authorized to take.

Do I feel guilty about being integral for 148 people being laid off? Yes quite. But I know it was necessary to keep my job and my health insurance. Without my health insurance I am a dead man.

The entire reason why this happened though, was because a division was slated to be cut and sent to India from the outset. Thanks to the actions of myself and my direct supervisor, we prevented it from being a sure thing that our team was going to get cut.

On top of that we cut out a festering wound in the company that was slowing it down and costing it money.

My team has not been brought up in the budgetary meetings since.

(source) story by (/u/TheLightningCount1)

[quakerjoe]

In the end, not even the Progressive Bernie Base showing up for Hillary in larger numbers than her own supporters did for Obama in 2008, could prevent the inevitable. A massively flawed candidate who failed to electrify the Democratic base and make the case to Rust Belt voters- why she is the better option than the Populist candidate spraying out anti-trade rhetoric.

Blame whatever you want. The blame rests squarely on all of us. But there is so many lessons to learn from the 2016 Primary and General Election. Populism and Progressive policy became the central topic. Healthcare is a right. The ultra-rich are KING in America, and they must be reigned in. Primary process should be more fair. Flowery platitudes aren’t enough to generate excitement for the poor to turn out, etc.

Literally ZERO of these lessons were learned. Even in the face of an ACTUAL Corona-virus pandemic, with over 30 million unemployed, more and more uninsured at the time of writing this- the Democratic party has done nearly nothing to fix the problems from 2016. Actually, in all my shock- they’ve made them worse. The Democratic party pulled every string it could. Bent over backwards to not only stop Bernie Sanders, but stifle Progressives and our policy agenda. All in an orchestration to crown their nominee just years after a 2016 lawsuit said the DNC can meddle how ever they like in their own “Democratic process”. All to push a man who did next to no campaigning in any states past South Carolina. A man who didn’t actually work for your vote, but instead- coasted on “Hope and Change” establishment nostalgia, for when times weren’t so chaotic.

So for pragmatism sake, let’s push all that aside for just one moment. We can debate all day about how “fair” Joe Biden’s path to the Democratic Nomination has been. But let’s view Biden on his own merits for his candidacy’s sake. What’s the incentive for Progressives to vote for Joe? Well- unless you’re sticking to the concept of the very first paragraph of this article, the answer is: There isn’t one.

If Hillary Clinton were a flawed candidate, Biden may just be the worst nominee in history. A long history of terrible behavior including coddling racists, racist behavior, repeated threats at slashing the safety net, warmongering for a devastating Iraq war that’s helped kill endless innocent civilians all based on a lie, the nomination of Justice Thomas and controversial treatment of Anita hill, the Obama administration’s failure to even pass a Public Option with a Super Majority government, while pushing a healthcare plan that was little more than barely a small step in the right direction.

Now- Biden stands as the presumptive Democratic Nominee, and with a sizable Progressive Bernie Base up for grabs, what has Joe Biden done to earn our vote?

Answer: Nothing. Well, at least nothing significant.

Three items come immediately to mind on what Joe Biden is doing to “reach left”.

1: Joe wants to lower the Medicare age to 60. By comparison, Hillary Clinton wanted to lower it to as low as 50.

2: Joe Biden wants to eliminate student debt for those making under $125K. By comparison, Bernie Sanders wanted to eliminate it universally.

3: Nebulously- Joe Biden and Bernie Sanders have created “working groups” on various policy issues focusing on education, criminal justice, climate change, immigration, the economy, and health care policy. As of yet, nothing has come of these “groups” on policy.

As the Primary was coming to a close, I as a Progressive- was completely open to Joe moving (not reaching) left on policy positions.

Overwhelmingly, if you ask Sanders supporters what they care about most, it’s Policy.

What will you do for the underprivileged working class people of America?

What will you do for my children and grand children facing a Climate Change future?

What will you do for your Mass Incarceration mess, ending the drug war, legalizing Marijuana, and freeing non-violent drug offenders?

What will you do for the upwards of 45K people who die each year because health care is not affordable?

The 67% of American bankruptcies being due to health care costs?

BUT. Sanders supporters also believe in principle. Consistency. History. Fighting for change. Decency. Human rights. We’re also majority young people (a group Joe Biden did not do well with). Perhaps these things could be talked out. But now there’s a bigger elephant in the room. One that establishment Democrats and Joe’s supporters are ignoring.

Joe Biden was credibly accused of rape.

Democrats spent months yelling about “Believing Women” during the Kavanaugh Confirmation hearings. Rightfully fighting for Christine Blasey Ford’s story to be heard- knowing it would be a fruitless task at the hands of a twisted Senate Republican majority. Now, establishment Democrats are making the media rounds with Biden campaign talking points with denials and every attempt to downplay Tara Reade as not a credible accuser, even as several corroborations of her story have surfaced, 1 of which was an archive video of who Tara Reade alleges is her mother discussing the issue with Larry King on CNN in 1993. Meanwhile, Joe Biden’s campaign has it’s surrogates and supporters on news networks shielding Biden. Nancy Pelosi downplays the accusations, Kirsten Gillibrand (who helped cancel Al Franken) is downplaying the accusations. Alyssa Milano, prominent #MeToo voice, who made a performative appearance at the Brett Kavanagh hearings, now wants to “change the rules” on the movement in favor of a sort of ‘Due Process’- a process that many perpetrators cancelled by #MeToo never got, in favor of protecting Joe Biden.

What this means to me is that Democrats think it’s perfectly fine to be selective on who and who doesn’t deserve to be heard and taken seriously, based on who’s on your team. As if it should be that easy to just shed your principles like Snake skin, hypocritically protecting one predator, while gunning for another that doesn’t fit with you politically.

In 2016, I was perfectly fine voting for the “lesser evil”. Now that the party has loudly stated that not only does my values, principles, and policy demands for the poor and sick of America, not matter- I should fall in line with a candidate that has helped endless innocent people die overseas with America’s imperial military reach, helped endless people die at home because they cant afford a doctor, said that he has “no empathy” for young people- the same young people that have to live and suffer under the conditions of Climate Change while he’s dead and gone, sexually assaulted and violated multiple women, said that nothing will fundamentally change for the same rich people who are now gaining BILLIONS under pandemic conditions while their workers get sicker, if they’re even employed at all.

Moderate establishment Democrats and voters tell me that Trump is the number one threat. That we need to “vote blue no matter who”. Just how “blue” is Joe biden? Just how dissimilar is Joe Biden and his supporters from Trump and his following? For all of the cries of the “angry Bernie Bros” online, I see countless accosting and abusive discourse examples from Biden supporters calling any dissenters “Russian Bots”, or “MAGA Hats”. Being told that I’m somehow a Trump voter by default, for not immediately supporting Biden. All this when all I’ve ever seen from “the Bernie Bros” is aggressively holding smear artists to facts and truth in a thick environment of misrepresentation of Bernie Sanders and his platform.

So- Why shouldn’t Progressives vote for Joe Biden?

This Democratic party doesn’t give a damn about you. Nor does it care about Progressive policy. The party and its supporters spend all this time, smearing Sanders and his base as “Not democrats”, angry “socialists who want free stuff”, “How are you gonna PAY for it?!” etc etc, all while claiming to support SOME form of our policy, and then dropping it the second it doesn’t feel politically advantageous. This party threw everything it could into stopping YOU. With tactics like voter suppression, using a silly app suspiciously funded and supported by shady actors in Iowa, taking WEEKS to give final results, running Super PACs against Bernie and our movement, fear-mongering about Bernie when he did win states, gas lighting the public on “elect-ability”, using a literal pandemic against Bernie to guilt him into dropping out while attempting to blame him for continued spread of COVID-19, while they sent voters to the polls and we didn’t.

And after zero policy concessions, zero good will, repeated demands we fall in line after more than a year of being slammed and disrespected, showing up for Hillary Clinton and then being blamed for her loss anyway, which is inevitable again if Joe loses? Are we just going to keep allowing that? Just how long do we have to hold our noses, voting for Moderate do-nothing lite Republicans who would sooner see you die, than provide you affordable and universal healthcare, because a Billionaire would stand to lose money. Even NOW, during a Pandemic this party has done next to NOTHING to secure the livelihoods of American citizens, as more and more die, get furloughed, and cant pay their bills. All while Trump and Republicans take credit for pitching more common sense plans (even though they want to send us all back to work/school to feed the machine).

This- is the “resistance” party? THIS is the best we can do? Performative rage against a fascist clown while propping up an accused rapist warmongering corporatist with cognitive decline and previous racist tendencies? THIS is what the party keeps telling us we better support or be shamed as somehow supporting the “bad guy”?

Listen, #NotMeUs- this will never stop. This party will NEVER stop using us as a prop for our ideas and passion, then throwing us under the bus when they think they no longer need us. They cannot continue to be allowed to drag us further to the right with guilt trips and shaming. They will NEVER take you seriously unto you take serious action. We’ve been preaching about “action” this whole campaign. Why should that “action” stop in the ballot box? Have some foresight for just a moment and envision how this plays out in future elections, unless you stand up and make them WORK for your vote.

I, for one will not vote for Joe Biden. But I wont shame you for your vote, no matter who it’s for. Why? Because the party did a terrible job at earning -your- vote. I’d maybe only criticize you if you don’t show up at all. There’s so many down-ballot candidate who need support. Even if you leave the President box unchecked, at least show up for the other races.

But consider: There are other options that have been stifled for way too long. Perhaps its time we give them a shot, no? Green Party is running Howie Hawkins and a platform that is much closer to our principles that Biden would ever try for. Justin Amash just jumped into the race if you’re a little more on the Libertarian side. Jesse Ventura is also discovering running on the Green ticket as well. Just imagine Jesse ‘The Body’ Ventura on the debate stage with Donald Trump? Popcorn for DAYS.

In order for us to be taken seriously, we must prove that we’re capable of holding the party accountable. Not voting for them is the ultimate accountability, and you get to keep your principles intact.

Now- to the ultimate argument you’d inevitably get: “You would be helping Donald Trump secure 4 more years”.

My response? You don’t have to bare the blame for that. You wont be at fault for Joe Biden losing any more than those who chose not to vote at all. It’s on the party to earn these votes. That’s how elections work. If you hate the candidate and don’t feel good about them as a person, why is it your responsibility to put them in office? To me- one of the most personal things a person has, is their vote. Not their dollars, or their Tweets. It’s checking a box for the person YOU chose to represent you. If that person doesn’t believe in hardly anything you personally believe in- why is it that they deserve your vote, again? How is it that they’re are somehow entitled to that vote? They don’t, and they aren’t. I’m looking at you too, Republicans.

In closing…

Progressives, I’m sorry to break it to you but- Medicare For All is not on the ballot. Taxing the rich is not on the ballot. Ending corruption and crooked politicians is not on the ballot.

But- ending a terrible two-party system IS on the ballot. Taking your personal vote back, IS on the ballot. In my opinion- the only wasted vote, is the one you were demanded in giving up to what you don’t believe in.

-LZ

https://medium.com/@legacyzero/why-sanders-supporters-should-not-vote-for-joe-biden-a9146bee189b

[macgyvermedical]

Top 10 Public Health Triumphs of the 20th Century (in the USA)

Have you ever gotten stuck in an elevator with me? Because let me tell you, it would be a good time. We would talk about all kinds of fun stuff, like this top 10 list of awesome public health things.

A lot of people think of “Public Health” as a new field, but its been around for a long while, and it actually has a lot of power when it comes to law and people’s behaviors. This list was compiled by UC Berkley based on information from the CDC and Johns Hopkins, and is pretty interesting. I even put pictures in to keep it lively!

Promise.

1. Vaccine (and Vaccine Mandates)

Even if you personally have never been vaccinated, there’s a good chance a vaccine has saved your life. There are currently 17 vaccine-preventable diseases that are targeted by US vaccination policy. Studies say that every year, 42,000 people are born (annual cohort) who won’t die of vaccine-preventable illness. And that’s not even looking at the 20 million cases of illness that straight up won’t occur in that same annual birth cohort because of vaccines. Check out this handy before-and-after chart from the Association for Ohio Health Commissioners:

For those of you more monetarily-minded, the use of vaccines saves each annual cohort $14 billion in direct healthcare costs, and $69 billion in lost work and other societal costs.

2. Motor Vehicle Safety

Cars and other motor vehicles have been a massive technological advancement in the last century. Unfortunately, crashing those motor vehicles into each other also causes a lot of death.

But don’t fret! Even though we travel more than 10 times the number of total miles yearly in motor vehicles that our 1920′s counterparts did, we’ve seen a dramatic decrease in death rate. In 1925, for example, 18 people would die per 100 million vehicle miles traveled (VMT). In 1997, that number was down to 1.7 people per 100 mil VMT.

How did we do this? Those fuddy-duddies over at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration figured out they could use epidemiology to track causes of traffic death, and came up with some cool interventions. These included things we take for granted today, including speed limits, road improvements (reflectors, breakaway signs, etc..), DUI laws, and vehicle improvements (seatbelts, airbags, head rests, etc...).

3. Workplace Safety

In 1913, 67 workers out of 100,000 died in workplace accidents. By 1997, that had dropped to only 4 per 100,000. While some of this is simply that people moved to less dangerous work (heart disease from sitting at a desk for 30 years is not counted), some really does have to do with increased safety measures on the job site. Some workplaces are inherently dangerous- Loggers, fisherpeople, and aircraft pilots among the most likely to die today as a result of their work. Even the most dangerous industry today, logging, with about 135.9 worker deaths per 100,000, doesn’t even touch one of the most dangerous jobs of 1911- mining, at 329 deaths per 100,000.

This decrease in workplace deaths comes from a variety of interventions. In the later part of the century, organizations like OSHA, NIOSH, MSHA, and USBM began to study workplace practices, publish standards, and inspect workplaces for compliance. They required the use of safer equipment (better ventilation systems), safer workplace practices (like dust suppression and wearing hard hats and other PPE), safety training for employees (OSHA certification, first aid training), and specialized training for healthcare professionals who might see occupational injuries.

4. Sanitation and Hygiene (and Health Department Police Power)

Do you like food? Water? Do you like not getting sick because you consumed it? Do you like flushing a toilet? Do you like not worrying about whether people with known cases of active TB are running around in public? Me too!

I want to be very clear that these weren’t always things you could count on. In fact, about 33% of deaths (of which, 40% were children under 5) in the US in the early 1900s could be traced to poor sanitation and lack of outbreak investigation and control. Today, that number is down to less than 4.5% (and that’s including HIV as an ongoing pandemic).

You may not be aware of this, but your local health department has a staggering amount of both legislative and judicial “police power.” For one thing, they are a separate entity from local government (under the health commissioner), and can therefore make their own decisions, even if the mayor orders otherwise.

They can...

Decide which restaurants, schools, businesses, and childcare centers are meeting health safety standards and therefore can stay open

Decide what the vaccination requirements for entrance to the schools and certain other public places are (and why you might have to wear a mask at work during flu season if you’re a medical professional who hasn’t gotten a flu shot)

Mandate the construction of public health infrastructure like sewer lines

Enter private property for reasonable suspicion (of a potential threat to public health)

Subpoena medical records

Issue mandatory quarantine, isolation, and vaccination orders

Detain people under police guard in a home or hospital if they have a significant communicable disease like active TB, meningitis, or ebola and are trying to escape (called a Code Brown in my area... thats a terrible name tho).

This is a really good thing. It allows the health department to do things that decrease the number of deaths from spoiled food and poor food handling procedures, as well as chlorinate your drinking water so you don’t get cholera, and make sure other people making poor choices aren’t going to be a threat to you personally.

5. Reduction in Heart Disease and Stroke (recognition of the role of risk factor management in disease)

You might recall from the Vaccine part of this post that Heart Disease and Stroke are leading causes of death today, so the idea that we somehow significantly reduced these deaths may not immediately compute. That’s because of 2 main things. One, just a staggering number of people were dying from infectious disease back then. Like, unless your name is literally Steven Grant Rodgers you have no freaking clue how many people were just... dying. All the time. From stuff you just straight up don’t see today because of vaccines and sanitation. And two, the peak for heart disease and stroke deaths came in the 50′s (307.4 deaths out of 100,000 due to heart disease in 1950), long after those initial measurements were taken, and have since decreased by about 56% (134.6 deaths out of 100,000 in 1996).

This decrease came, mostly, from a recognition of risk factors as a way to manage and prevent disease. The idea that there were certain things that you could do or not do that would make you more or less likely to end up sick or dead was unheard of before this. Studies done by a man named Ancel Keys of populations’ dietary habits throughout the US and the famed Framingham Heart Study determined that high blood cholesterol, high blood pressure, smoking, and dietary factors played roles in the development of heart disease. This list was later expanded to include socioeconomic status, obesity, and physical inactivity.

The recognition that modifying risk factors (like changing one’s diet, increasing physical activity level, and quitting smoking) could prevent morbidity and mortality, and that screening for blood pressure and cholesterol could allow disease to be managed early before it resulted in a heart attack, is credited with saving those lives.

6. Food Safety and Nutrition

Can you imagine a time before we knew what a vitamin was? Or even, that food was made up of fats, proteins, and carbohydrates? Or a time before we were well aware that poorly handled or packaged foods caused illnesses like typhoid fever, botulism, TB, and scarlet fever?

Well, there was one, and it was only the early part of last century. In 1940, 16% of the population had trichinosis, a disease of the muscles caused by eating under-cooked, infected pork. By 1996, only 38 cases were reported yearly. Similarly, typhoid fever occurred at a rate of about 100 per 100,000 in 1900, only to drop to a mere 1.7 per 100,000 by 1950. There are many, many more of these statistics, but I didn’t want to type them out.

Basically, we made food safer and healthier in many ways, including but not limited to:

Pasteurization of milk and other products

Use of prompt refrigeration

Hand washing before food prep/processing

Application of pesticides and insecticides

Control of application of pesticides and insecticides to prevent harm to humans and the environment

Improved animal husbandry and processing systems

Introduction of preservatives

Better antimicrobial solutions to sanitize food prep areas

Fortifying staple foods with vitamins and minerals to prevent nutritional deficiencies like rickets, beri-beri, and scurvy

Improved surveillance of food-borne disease outbreak

7. Maternal and Infant Mortality

Listen, the US hasn’t totally got this figured out compared to other countries, but we’ve gotten better over the last century.

Overall, in 1900, 100 children out of 1,000 live births died before their first birthday (that’s not a typo, folks, that’s 1 in 10) and the mothers of 8-9 out of 1,000 live births died in childbirth or infection afterward. At the same time in many US cities, up to 30% of infants would die before their first birthday, mostly due to infections. By 1996, that number had been reduced to less than 0.1 death out of 1,000.

Along with the decline of infectious and foodborne disease through improved sanitation, the introduction of vaccination schedules, antibiotics, oral rehydration therapies, and pasteurization greatly decreased both maternal and infant mortality.

A lot of the problems for the mothers had to do with poor hygiene in those attending the birth (resulting in sepsis before the invention of antibiotics), excessive use of medical intervention (including operations and induction of labor) in labor, and bleeding. The invention of cleaner and safer operative deliveries, safer induction medications, and safer blood transfusions improved this considerably.

Its also worth mentioning that the availability of safer, legal abortion starting in the 1960s reduced mortality from sepsis after illegal abortions by 89%.

8. Family Planning

Following right along, family planning- the ability to literally plan how many children you want to have and when you want to have them, is also a major public health triumph.

In 1900, not a lot was known about conception and family planning, and what was known was actively suppressed. By 1912, through the work of Margaret Sanger and others, it became legal for healthcare providers to discuss contraception and family planning methods with married couples, including use of condoms, diaphragms, douches, and withdrawal methods. The rhythm method was introduced in 1928 with the understanding of the menstrual cycle and fertile period, and by 1933, the average family size had decreased from 3.5 to 2.3 children.

The number of children increased in the post-WW2 era to 3.7, but in 1960, two major breakthroughs- hormonal birth control and the IUD- further granted women the freedom to more effectively plan their childrearing. In 1965, it finally became (federally) legal for married couples to use birth control (again, not a typo, it really took that long).

By 1994, a combined effort of hospitals, Planned Parenthood clinics, and health departments were preventing an estimated 534,000 unintended births, 632,000 abortions, and 165,000 miscarriages annually through the use and education of contraception.

9. Fluoridation of Drinking Water, Toothpaste, and Other Products

This is another controversial one (why are interventions that save lives, decrease disability, and improve health so controversial in the US? Nothing is perfect, but we have the research to show this stuff works. Do you at least see how frustrating this is to healthcare and public health peeps by now? Your entire life has been saved and improved by these measures in some way or another. Stop it.)

No one likes going to the dentist. And whether you like it or not, if you drink tap water from many places in the US, you’re passively avoiding doing so! Yes, I’m talking about the fluoride in your water.

How did that fluoride get there? Well, its a much longer story than this, but, turns out, many water sources in the US already had fluoride in them- ranging from less than 1ppm to about 12ppm. A dentist named Frederick McKay noticed that people in Colorado Springs had an odd discoloration to their teeth. McKay found that there were other places in the US that had similar discolorations and hypothesized that there might be a connection to something in their drinking water. He had the water tested, and found that what these areas had in common were high levels of fluoride in their water. Another thing they had in common were lower rates of tooth decay. This sparked the possibility of controlling the amount of fluoride in drinking water to 1ppm- high enough to prevent cavities, but low enough so as not to cause the discoloration.

In communities where fluoride is added to drinking water, there are about 18% fewer cavities. This may not seem like a lot, but it results in a savings of up to $53 dollars per person per year in dental care, which is heavily skewed towards savings in lower-income communities. Compare this with an average cost of between $0.31 and $2.12 per person, per year to fluoridate the water, and you see significant savings. At least partially because of this (as well as increased access to dental care and the addition of fluoride to other things, like toothpaste), baby boomers are the first generation expected to reach their 60s with the majority of their teeth intact!

10. Recognition of Tobacco as a Health Hazard

Okay, folks, almost done! No one is happier than I, who has spent over 8 hours straight researching and writing this tumblr post. But I committed to it despite having (ironically public health) homework to do, and finished it shall be! Onward, Public Health!

I don’t think many people would be surprised when presented with the fact that inhaling smoke is bad for humans. I think the CDC said it best when they typed “Smoking- once a socially accepted behavior- is the leading preventable cause of death and disability in the United States.”

I sh*t you not, in the US in 1963, the average PER CAPITA consumption of cigarettes was 4,345. That’s the equivalent slightly more than of half the total US population being pack-a-day smokers that year. It is now (in 2015 at least) about a quarter of that, at 1,078.

Tobacco use contributes to many cancers, heart disease, COPD, low birth weight, asthma and many other diseases, either because of how damaging it is to lungs and blood vessels when smoked (smoke particles less than 2.5 microns enter the blood stream and damage the vasculature, and therefore all tissues with blood vessels in them), or because of the effects of nicotine and other toxic substances on blood pressure, intrauterine growth retardation, and substance dependency.  Death by lung cancer was 4.9 deaths per 100,000 people in 1930 vs 75.6 per 100,000 in 1990.

By recognizing tobacco as a health hazard, public health and healthcare professionals were able to initiate widespread anti-tobacco education in schools, which has drastically reduced teen and young adult smoking rates. They could also restrict advertising of tobacco products, increase taxes on those products, and introduce counter-advertising campaigns. It also allows physicians and other healthcare workers to be a part of the smoking cessation process (if you smoke, you’ll be offered cessation resources at every doctors appointment and hospital visit). This from only 60 years ago when doctors actively encouraged smoking and were used in advertising.

Fortunately, with these campaigns and reduction in overall tobacco use, we are seeing a decrease in death rates from tobacco-related illnesses listed above. Indoor air quality laws and the prohibition of smoking on many college campuses have reduced public exposure to second-hand smoke, and also helped decrease smoking as a norm.

The jury’s still out on newer nicotine-containing products like vapes and juuls. They’re probably better for you than inhaling smoke, and nicotine by itself is not known to be cancer-causing, but they can contain other substances humans also probably shouldn’t be breathing. Like everything, we’ll know in about 50 years.

[Patreon] [Ko-Fi]

[breakingarrows]

The Outer Worlds Doesn’t Want a Revolution

Partnering with publisher Private Division, Obsidian had the freedom to make whatever they wanted. Best known for licensed properties established by other developers (Bioware with Knights of the Old Republic 2: The Sith Lords and Bethesda with Fallout: New Vegas), Obsidian had the chance to do something completely new. With The Outer Worlds they successfully created another Bethesda game. This is an iteration rather than a revolution. While that is not bad in and of itself, it is the lackluster execution that makes it a disappointment, specifically to their previous work on iterating upon existing games.

Obsidian had proved themselves superior to Bethesda back in 2010 with Fallout: New Vegas. This was a follow up to Fallout 3 utilizing the same graphics engine but transplanted back to the western territory of the original two Fallout games. It improved upon Fallout 3 greatly with its humanizing of formerly mindless enemy types and allowing the player to pick and choose what factions to support with a reflexive loss of reputation with their enemy. You couldn't please everyone. If you have played any of the Bethesda Fallout games, and even to an extent The Elder Scrolls, you have essentially played The Outer Worlds. Character creation, skill allotment upon leveling up, perks, weight encumbrance, a slow-motion replacement for V.A.T.S., factions with reputations and oppositions, and mowing down enemies that exist soley to be killed by the player, all of this can easily be seen as a 2019 update of Fallout 3, a now 11 year old game. It is clear Obsidian was not interested in revolutionizing the Bethesda format, and instead made slight alterations and updates.

All these years later and I am essentially playing the same fundamental game with a change in aesthetic from alternative history post-apocalypse to corporate owned space colonies. There is a possibility here for that aesthetic to breathe new life into the now rote gameplay style, but this is where the deeper disappointment stems: the writing.

Role-playing games frequently employ the separation of main quest and side quests as a tiered to-do list for the player to check off in order to accrue experience, gear, and see all that the game has to offer. After over thirty years of these kinds of games, the fundamentals have been established: Fetch quests. Killing special named enemies with higher stats than your average bullet magnet. A succession of conversations with a split choice at the end. The best games hide these simplistic tasks underneath flavor text: a way to get the player invested in the goings on by expanding on the fiction of the world or the introduction of unique and likeable characters (or love-to-hate ones). Here is one of The Outer Worlds greater failings.

Edgewater, in the region of Emerald Vale, is the first major town you come across and the source of a good amount of side quests to engage with. As far as introductions go, Edgewater leaves a terrible taste of what is to come. As mentioned before, the standard goals appear, and their flavor text fail to disguise the monotonous nature of these tasks. Retrieve a book. Find some medicine. Find three books in separate locations. Kill three named enemies. Kill a robot. Collect gravesite fees. Find a missing person. These descriptions are overly simplified but the game does not do a great job at disguising their simplicity.

Retrieving a book is done for a vicar, a religious counselor who views his flock with contempt and laments that the book is in a different language. Finding medicine serves as an example of the cruelty of Spacer’s Choice, the corporation behind Edgewater’s existence. Finding three books is for an up and coming engineer who deserted Edgewater due to its cruelty. Killing three named enemies is not even worth further explanation as there is none. These names exist to be crossed off and nothing else. Much like the Marauders and animals you come across on every planet: they exist to be killed. Killing a robot is their stab at comedy, with the quest giver being paranoid about a lone robot outside the town walls and stashes his prized weapon in a bathroom. I promise the actual text is no more comical than my dry description. Collecting gravesite fees is another example of the cruelty of Spacer’s Choice and Edgewater. Finding a missing person is the only worthwhile side quest and even then that is not saying much. Zoe, another deserter, has gone missing. You find out she wanted to join a marauder gang to become their queen, and surprisingly, was successful. You find this out after murdering everyone to make her appear so you can convince her to return to watch some new serials she loves.

As far as being a template for what is to come in the rest of the game, Emerald Vale is a terrible introduction and future regions only marginally improves upon it.

My main disappointment in Emerald Vale is within its main questline. Your ship needs power, and in order to obtain that power you need to decide whether to direct a Geothermal plant’s supply away from Edgewater, or away from the deserters. Some of the side quests before served as examples of the inhumanity of working under Spacer’s Choice in Edgewater. The town is experiencing a plague, where the sick are sentenced to death in a “sick house” full of corpses, while Reed, the town mayor, hoards all the medicine for the hardest workers. Sick time is nonexistent and has to be worked back. Employees must pay their burial fees upfront and  suicides are punished collectively. It is an irredeemable monument to the brutalism of capitalism, or at the very least corporate greed (though there is little difference between the two). This is further reinforced by the Geothermal plant, the source of power.

Upon entering the building you begin to discover through text logs that the plant was once under human supervision before Spacer’s Choice took out a life insurance policy on all of them, installed new robot helpers, and then programmed those helpers to kill all the employees. One worker survives, though in a strange oversight you cannot release him from his basement life even after clearing out the plant and reprogramming the robot’s directive. You get to the point of no return but before you can stamp out Edgewater your companion for the past few hours, Parvati speaks up. She tells you the deserter leader, Adelaide, only wants to see Edgewater destroyed, but that the workers are just living the only life they know how and do not deserve to be stripped of that life.

Curious about how this decision would play out I made a hard save and shut down the power going to Edgewater. Doing so dooms Edgewater and its remaining workers to slowly die out. Adelaide refuses to take those in who will not recant their loyalty to Spacer’s Choice, and presumably even then does not help others as the ending slides explains she died soon after having never shared her fertilizer formula to grow natural food with anyone. She is a bitter old woman who delights in the suffering of Edgwater and Spacer’s Choice’s workers. Her reason? Her son got the plague and knowing medicine was available but denied by Reed, left after her son died despite it being a preventable death. The game treats this legitimate source of rage towards the established order as petty.

The opposing choice, providing power to Edgewater, means the deserters must return to be grinded to dust or die in the wilderness. However, if you talk to the right people a third way will open up after this decision. You can convince Reed to step down and Adelaide to take control. Doing so results in the cannery, the town’s main reason for existence and source of sustenance, to flourish in the aftermath. There was no need for such drastic change, all Edgewater needed was the correct person in charge, a kinder boss than that asshole Reed. This is an observation shared by others, though unlike them I never compromised when real change was possible.

This ethos of “reform from the inside” is made more explicit within the region of Monarch, and the second major decision point of the game. Here a company called Monarch Stellar Industries, and its leader, Sanjar, used to have membership on the Board, the group in charge of the entire colony. Sanjar wants back in, with the idea that he can promote a kinder, more ethical ruling from the top. You see, he is part of upper class/management, but the ethical kind who do good without having to revolutionize the status quo. His opposition lies within the Iconoclasts, those who fully reject the Board and their rule and live in a form of collectivist society. Their flaw is that their leader Graham is more concerned with spreading his ideology than with taking care of his people. This fault is even more manufactured than Adelaide’s justified hatred towards Reed and Spacer’s Choice. Within New Vegas, the NCR, the closest to a “good” faction, have a major flaw in the form of their bureaucracy. This is much more believable than an irresponsible leader whose second in command is too lax to depose him until you step in. You can either lead the Iconoclasts to violently overthrow MSI, force the Iconoclasts to break up and integrate with MSI, or you can kill Graham and have his second in command Zora work with Sanjar to provide workers with an alternative to the Board. Another potential status quo change comes with a recommendation to reach a middle ground.

At the very least The Outer Worlds does not fuck up its final major decision, between the Board’s Lifetime Employment Program and Phineas’ revival of Hope colonists. The former has the lower class put on ice for potential future use, freeing up even more resources to be hoarded by those at the top, and the latter has you overthrowing the Board and bringing in new blood to work towards producing a sustainable colony of cooperation. There is no third way here, and the choice is obvious.

Throughout The Outer Worlds the absurdity of the corporation’s power over people is routinely on display, whether in text conversations or the aesthetic of loading screen images and various NPC barks while running around the towns. All of it is screaming that the way things are is actively killing people and dooming the colony, but when it comes time for revolution the game would prefer you compromise until the finale. There, compromise with the Board, the highest source of everything wrong, would be incapable to stomach by even a sycophant.

Fallout 3 endures in our memories for its revolution to RPGs, while New Vegas endures due to its improvements within that new standard. The Outer Worlds does neither. As Eurogamer states, this is comfort food. That sentiment is not a condemnation, though with the games never stopping, a lesser entry in the Bethesda style is an easy pass. The Capital Wasteland with its hyper violence beckoned the player to go ham with slow motion close ups of splashes of blood and cleanly amputated limbs due to your gunfire or pummelling. New Vegas reoriented that mindset by largely removing the mindless raiders, super mutants, and ghouls, with their residences filled with hooked limbs and hives of bloody organs, and replaced them with humanized factions. The Outer Worlds regresses back to the former with a smaller scale overall, though sans the overdone gore. Exiting town means everything that moves now becomes something to kill, loot, and accrue experience from. It makes movement between quest markers mindlessly mechanical, which bleeds over into everything else about the game and what it is trying to accomplish.

I last played The Outer Worlds on November 9th and it has only been viewed less favorably the more I think about it. The combat is complete filler, there is nothing motivating behind the generic and tired numbers-go-up leveling process, gear you earn via quests may as well just be money or gear parts, entering a room means walking along the walls pressing X to gather everything you can carry to be sold/broken down later, skill checks are just numerical goals, you can rarely press X to talk to someone without your gun being pulled out, and a majority of the writing is just the essence of tweets like this extended through 15+ hours. The game consistently observes, “Man, shits fucked huh?” In spite of this, when it comes time to redistribute power, it backs away. And all of this comes from Obsidian, a developer who once outdid Bethesda at their own game is now stumbling through a poor imitation. Walking around Monarch’s wilderness, the ambient music frequently made me mistake what I was playing for Fallout: New Vegas. And I really wish I was.

[path-of-my-childhood]

Taylor Swift is the artist of the decade

By: Courteney Larocca for Insider Date: December 16th 2019

Not only has Swift been putting out No. 1 hit after No. 1 hit this decade, but her music has latched onto its listeners in deeply intimate ways. The singer has also been actively using her platform as a successful artist to shed light on injustices within the music industry to ensure a younger generation of musicians can thrive in an environment that cares about their work, as opposed to commodifies it.

Taylor Swift knows that if you're the smartest person in the room, then you're in the wrong room. Oddly enough, Swift usually is the smartest person in any room.

While the casual observer may see Swift as nothing more than a pop star, she's one of the few people who has actively been making her industry - and the lives of her fans - better in irreversible and notable ways throughout the decade.

Swift was barely 20 years old when she became the youngest artist to ever win album of the year at the Grammy Awards on January 31, 2010, for her sophomore album, "Fearless." While the album came out in late 2008, it set Swift up to become an international phenomenon over the course of the 2010s; it even landed at No. 98 on this decade's overall Billboard Hot 200 list.

Her early success made sense - audiences love a wunderkind, plus there was something so incredibly relatable about a teenager telling her crush, "you belong with me."

But for me, and other fans of Swift, it was more than that. She was someone we could see ourselves in as we navigated our own lives and romances. And with the release of "Speak Now," in late 2010, Swift proved she wasn't capable of just reinventing optimistic love stories, she had a complete grasp on heartbreak and pain, too.

Swift demonstrated her songwriting prowess early on, and her music only continued to get stronger all the way through her 2019 album, 'Lover'

"Speak Now" is an entirely self-written album that charted on the Billboard Hot 200 for 137 weeks, which was not only a huge middle finger to critics who claimed Swift didn't write her own music, but also proof she was one of the most promising songwriters of her generation.

Arming herself with lyrics like "I feel you forget me like I used to feel you breathe," and "The lingering question kept me up / Two a.m., who do you love?" Swift created a bulletproof foundation for a career built around her uncanny ability to pinpoint crucial moments of intimacy and turn them into universal anthems of heartbreak, love, and loss that became soundtracks to real fans' lives.

Obviously, the stellar music never stopped coming. With 2012 came "Red," an album that's aged so gracefully that it's landed on numerous best albums of the 2010s lists.

Swift dropped her pop masterpiece, "1989," in 2014 - an album that boasts her biggest Billboard Hot 100 hit to date, "Shake It Off," which stayed on the chart for 50 consecutive weeks. "1989" also earned Swift another album of the year win at the Grammys, making her the first woman to ever be honored with that award twice.

Swift continued her career growth with "Reputation" in 2017, which helped her break The Rolling Stones' record for highest-grossing US tour in history by earning a whopping $266.1 million. Then, capping off the decade came 2019's "Lover," an album that showcased all of Swift's immense musical talents, but stands out in her catalog as the first album that she outright owns - a triumph that goes far beyond the music itself.

It's important to note, though, that there is no singular album that can easily be delegated as the "fan favorite," largely because each album is so special within Swift's discography. If you picked seven different fans off the street, they could very easily all have a different answer to the question, "What is your favorite Taylor Swift album?"

Even critics can't fully answer that question. While "Red" is known for being critically beloved (and is my own personal favorite), Billboard had six of its writers argue for one of her first six studio albums as being her best. Also, when I ranked Swift's best and worst songs for Insider earlier this year, songs from every single one of her albums made the "best" list.

One of the reasons Swift's fans constantly latched onto her music this decade - leading to her chart-topping dominance - was because her lyrics always felt so personal, yet relatable at the same time.

Take "All Too Well," for instance. It was a deep cut tucked cleverly away at track No. 5 on "Red." It was never released as a single, but this mighty pop-rock ballad became the sort of musical zenith most artists only dream about writing.

Hearing Swift weave in intimate details about listening to her ill-fated lover's mother tell stories about his childhood or leaving her scarf at his sister's house might seem too specific to reach a larger audience outside of her piano room, but it's exactly that candor that makes Swift's best songs feel so ubiquitous.

Swift's relatability proved crucial in 2017 when it came to her impacts on societal shifts outside of the music industry

Two months before the New York Times exposé of Harvey Weinstein was published, Swift stood up in a Denver courthouse against an ex-radio DJ who groped her at a 2013 meet-and-greet and then had the gall to sue her for damages after he was fired from his job.

The phrases from her testimony, "I'm critical of your client sticking his hand under my skirt and grabbing my a--," and "I'm not going to let you or your client make me feel in any way that this is my fault," will forever be ingrained in Swift's fans' minds alongside the lyrics she wrote in her high school diaries.

After she won her symbolic $1, which she sought out for "anyone who feels silenced by a sexual assault," The Rape, Abuse & Incest National Network, or RAINN, told ABC that its national hotline saw a 35% increase in calls over the weekend following her testimony.

"Seeing someone that they respect, that they identify with [state they've been assaulted], has a big impact," RAINN's president Scott Berkowitz told ABC News at the time.

It's easy to look at a statistic and not think about the people behind it, but I can say that for myself, Swift played a pivotal role in how I viewed my own sexual assault.

Even before her fearless testimony, I turned to her 2010 ballad, "Dear John," for validation that I wasn't the only woman who ever counted her footsteps, praying the floor won't fall through again while dating a man with a "sick need to take love away." I later found solace in "Clean," the atmospheric "1989" closer that promises its listener that they'll one day be able to finally breathe after a roller-coaster relationship.

There's no doubt in my mind that I'm not the only one who saw their own pain reflected in Swift's lyrics, allowing them to grieve. After all, she wouldn't have become the artist with the highest-ever amount of American Music Awards, which is a fully fan-voted show, if her music was just OK.

Swift has also made strides at bettering the music industry for her fellow artists as well as herself

I won't rehash the recent legal woes brought on by Scott Borchetta selling Swift's former label Big Machine Records - and thus, all of Swift's catalog up through 2017's "Reputation" - to Scooter Braun (because who needs Big Machine anyway?). I will say that Swift fighting to own her art, and by proximity her fight for all artists to own their art, is just one example of the work she's done this decade to protect artists' rights.

You may remember that she got endlessly dragged for taking her music off Spotify or writing a letter to Apple condemning its policy of not paying artists during a three-month free trial period of Apple Music. But underneath all of the misogynistic, "she's only out for money" criticisms spat at her, you'll find she did those things to bring light to issues within her industry that hurt up-and-coming artists who don't have the millions of dollars that Swift has. Within less than 24 hours, Swift received a direct response to her open letter to Apple, saying the company had decided to reverse its decision.

When Swift chose to leave Big Machine behind in 2018, she didn't just leave for the sake of leaving. She instead negotiated a deal with Universal Music Group that not only granted her the rights to everything she would create under the label but also included a clause in her contract stipulating that "any sale of [UMG's] Spotify shares result in a distribution of money to their artists, non-recoupable."

She also said the label had agreed to this "at what they believe will be much better terms than paid out previously by other major labels."

That means that with her contract, Swift made sure other favorite artists of this decade, like Rihanna, Lady Gaga, Ariana Grande, and Kanye West, will benefit from the revenue their art brings in. The same goes for lesser-known and newer artists signed to the label.  

Even other artists have given credit to Swift for the way she changed the way we consume pop music

It's hard to imagine today's pop stars like Ariana Grande would be able to name-check their former lovers in songs like "Thank U, Next," and have them be the successful hits we know today if Swift hadn't previously crafted breakup songs like 2010's "Dear John" and 2014's "Style" that made it clear who the tracks were about - John Mayer and Harry Styles - right there in the titles.

Halsey, another artist who rose to prominence this decade, has even lionized Swift as one of her songwriting heroes, notably for her smart bridges.

"The bridge [of a song] is a fortune cookie. It pulls the whole thing together, it's the punchline, it's one of the most important parts of a song. Ask Taylor Swift, she writes the best ones in history," Halsey said in a November 2019 interview with Capital FM.

Anyone who's listened to "Out of the Woods," "Don't Blame Me," or "Lover" knows this to be true.

Swift deserves to be the artist of the decade because her music validated women while she simultaneously fought for a younger generation to make new music in a better environment

It took 13 years for Swift to come out with a track contemplating the misogynist double standards she's had to face as a woman in the music industry, and it's easy to agree with her sentiment: If Swift were a man, then she would, no doubt, be "The Man."

But while she maybe would have faced fewer obstacles and overtly sexist criticisms throughout her career if she were a man, she may not have touched as many women's lives with her music.

Being someone who has idolized Swift since I was 11 years old, I can say that the reason she matters is because not only does she produce beautifully-worded tracks that resonate with fans on extremely personal levels, but she also wants to make the world a better, fairer place - one music contract, open letter, and song lyric at a time.

And that's something that should never be shaken off.