#i have a whole system where i bring three books. one ive already started and the other two are options in case i hate one of the new ones.

[alpaca-writes]

Mystics, Chapter 6

When Arch becomes hired on at Mystics, by Lyrem, everything seems to be going well- their life nearly becomes perfection. Soon enough, however, Arch realizes that perhaps not everything is as good as it seems…. 

 Directory: [chapter one] [chapter two] [chapter three] [chapter four] [chapter five]

 Tag list: @myst-in-the-mirror 

 CW: aggressive religiosity, deadname use, police questioning, hospital setting,

CHAPTER SIX: THUNDER AND PRAYER

       Arch awoke upside down in the passenger’s seat of the blue truck. The midnight storm was still sweeping through the ranches and into the city and they were alone there. The man who had thrown them against a brick wall and threatened them into their vehicle had disappeared. 

       The seatbelt dug into the side of their neck and injured shoulder. The moment it was released, Arch would fall headfirst into the top of the cab. They tried the clip as best they could with their left arm. It tingled, threatening to combust in a fury of pain if it weren’t for the rush of adrenaline fighting the broken glass and seatbelt. It was stuck. The clip wouldn’t release. They could be here for hours, for ages... all alone.

        Flashing lights came from above them- or was it ahead of them? And the shouts of a man and a woman could be heard overhead. Some kids were also talking and yelling.  

        “Call 911, Janey!” The man shouted. The passenger-side door was forced open with a crow-bar.

        Arch cried with relief as he pulled them out, supporting their head as they dropped down. The wife was speaking to someone over the phone as she helped Arch lay down flat on their back in the over-grown wet grass. A blanket was placed rolled up under their head. The comforting cloth mixed with a strong sense of relief. If they had the energy, Arch might have started crying, but doing something even that simple was just too exhausting. Raindrops splattered against their face until the recognizable sound of an opening umbrella prevented any more from dropping down. The family spoke amongst themselves but the words were jumbled now and nearly incoherent for Arch to pay attention too. A little boy was holding the umbrella. He couldn’t have been more than eight. Arch managed the tiniest smile for him as they floated in and out of consciousness.

       “You’ll be okay,” he said. “My mom’s a nurse. She’ll fix you up.”

       His raincoat was dotted with little red and blue dinosaurs. Arch counted them. There were six red tyrannosauruses, eight blue triceratops’ and then-

       There was a beep... And another... And another. Their throat was dry as a brick. Arch opened their eyes first. Glowing light of day from a veiled window to their right drowned everything around them in white. They blinked, becoming accustomed to the brightness.

        In the corner of the small room was a chair reserved for visitors. Alarm bells sounded in their mind as Arch narrowed their gaze and spied on the person sitting there, still yet unaware that they had awoken.

         He was reading a book; a used and reused copy of Meditations. Lyrem licked his thumb, and turned the page. The alarm bells calmed. Arch chalked it up to being beaten to a pulp and then waking up in a strange new place; a hospital bed.

        “Save some for me, will you?” Arch spoke dryly, literally, as well as figuratively. They managed a crooked smile as Lyrem looked up from his book of yellowed pages and kindly smiled back.

        In a fit of dry coughs, Arch tried and failed to lean up. They found the tubes leading to an IV out their arm and a blood-oxygen measure clipped onto one of their index fingers. Lyrem put his book down on a small side table and stood. He pressed a button on the side of the bed, and Arch was lifted to a more comfortable sitting position. He brought them a clear cup of water with a straw. Arch tried lifting their arm to accept it, but Lyrem shook his head at them and pushed it back down gently. He brought the straw up to their lips. Arch nearly drained the cup before finally nodding it away.

        Lyrem leaned against the windowsill and watched them carefully. Their whole body had been battered. Whether it was entirely from the crash or something else, he couldn’t be sure.

        Arch looked back at them curiously, and puzzled. Then they looked around the rest of the small room. The door to the hall was open and filtered through white noise from doctors and nurses all around.

        “What are you doing here?” They asked, “where’s my mom?”

        “She… was here. She called the store. She left to run a couple errands and said that she would return soon.” Lyrem grimaced as he answered. “I’m not sure what could have been more important than being by your side, but alas, I remain. I closed the store for the day.”

        “What? Why?” Arch coughed lightly. “You make the most dough on Saturdays. You should keep it open.”

        “I’d much rather not.”

        Lyrem left his response hanging there. Without more to say on the matter Arch shifted in their bed uncomfortably. Relieved, they were, they were also troubled. Angry, even, but for what reason, Arch couldn’t say.  

        “There were officers waiting by the door for you to wake. Should I let them in for you? Tell them it’s an alright time?”

        “Officers?”

        “Well, nobody knows what happened to you or how you ended up on a rural highway flipped over in a truck”- Lyrem stopped himself. Becoming too passionate, he sensed.

        “Huh. Right.” Arch nodded. Thinking back to the night before was causing a pain in the back of their eyes- like they were being pulled into the back of their head.

        “What if you told me what happened first, then I’ll let the officers in and you can repeat it back to them. It might be easier for you,” Lyrem helpfully suggested.

        “No, no, I can speak to them now.” Arch insisted. “I’d rather speak to them now.”

        Lyrem nodded, and then stepped to the door, finding the two officers chatting down the hall. One blue uniformed woman with a tight, blonde pony-tail glanced in his direction over a steaming Styrofoam cup. He motioned for them to come in with a wave of his hand. The other, a tall, younger man with a thin chin pulled out a small notebook as he entered. Their name tags read Parsons and Grenn, respectively.

        Detective Parsons began by explaining that the police were unable to find the driver of the blue Ford. The truck was both unregistered, and uninsured, so there was no trail to follow to know who it had belonged to. The last known owner died in 2003 and afterwards there was no trace of it anywhere in the system. The plates on the vehicle had been stolen, and if the driver was careful enough, its stolen plates would have gone unnoticed for as long as the registration would last on it.

        “At the moment, we have no leads on finding this individual”-

        “My attacker, you mean. They attacked me.” Arch spit out. “Labels are important, you know.”

        “I know it can’t be a comforting thought. And I am sorry, but you must understand that we are doing everything we can to find the person who attacked you.” Parsons implored. Never once had her professional demeanor faltered under the scrutiny of the rightfully furious teenager.

        “He was a man.” Arch started. “He was quite a bit taller than me too. Probably six feet at least… White. It was dark but I could tell he- he had dark hair. Kind of shaggy-like”-

         Grenn had written it all down, and Lyrem stared at Arch in interest as they described the man. Parsons stopped Arch from continuing to describe him as she placed her cup down on the side table beside Lyrem.

        “We’ll send this to the sketch artist. They will be flying in over the next couple days. With the disappearances of your classmates as well, we are pulling out everything in our arsenal to get a detailed picture of who attacked you. We will be calling you in a couple days and you’ll be coming into the police station to speak with them.” Parsons explained emphatically. “For now, we need a timeline- where did they find you? What time was it when they attacked?”

        “Oh…” Arch felt rather silly for some reason. “I… I was pulled into the alley by the flower-shop...”

        “Which flower shop?”

        “Bloom Treasury, downtown. Half a block from Mystics.”

        Lyrem looked concerned, or possibly angry… with the thickness of his brows and the wrinkle in his forehead, Arch couldn’t be quite sure what he was thinking.

        “Mystics?”

        “It’s just a store, where I work.”

        “Were you working last night?”

        Their heartrate started to increase. Arch carefully measured their breaths by seconds.

        “No... No, I wasn’t, I was just walking.”

        “What time were you walking?”

        “I..” Arch had the strangest sensation of being back in the passenger’s seat of the blue Ford. The voice of the man rang in their head in an echo of a memory. Missing time? He had said. “I.. I think I’m confused.” Arch finished.

        “It’s understandable. I know its very hard to think back to the incident, but for the sake of finding this man and bringing him to justice, we have to know what time it was when it happened.”

        “It was after sundown.”

        “Can you be more specific?”

        It wasn’t long after dinner that Arch had left, and sundown wouldn’t have been until after ten. It only took a half hour to reach the downtown core from their house so where was the missing time? There was an hour, maybe even longer that was completely unaccounted for.

        “I think it was just after ten,” they said finally.

        Grenn made his notes again.

        “What kinds of things did he say to you?” Parsons inquired. “Anything you can remember will be helpful.”

        Lyrem gazed across the room steadily at Arch who met his eyes. It was hypnotically comforting to know he was still there, watching over them and keeping them safe.

        “He was… kind of strange.” Arch said, almost in a mutter. “Though, he mentioned the other kids. He knew that the others were taken: Jess, Kyle, and … Marcus.”

        “Did he tell you they were still alive?”

        Arch shook their head slightly and winced.

“He said he killed one of them already. He couldn’t be sure when the other two would die- if they already were… y’know, dead.”

        Parsons paused and turned to Lyrem who was laid back in the armchair deep in thought. She had noticed an odd connection. Arch had been darting their eyes to the corner each time they responded. Seeking approval, she surmised quietly.

        “How did you escape?” Parsons asked turning back to them again.

        Arch thought for a moment.

        “I stabbed him… in the leg... with his own knife. That’s when he lost control of the truck.”

        Grenn looked up from his notes briefly, with brown eyebrows raised.

        “What kind of knife?”

        Parsons looked at officer Grenn; surprised by the question.

        Arch switched their gaze to them. “A hunting knife… the big kind with a dip at the end.”

        “How does a guy walk away from a car crash with a Bowie knife in his leg?” Grenn asked allowed.

        The question caused Arch a visible discomfort. They turned away from everyone and remained quiet.

        “I believe that is everything for now.” Parsons gathered herself and straightened her uniform, “Thank you for your time, -----. We may have more questions for you when you come into the station for the sketch artist. You’ll soon be contacted with a date and time.”

        Parsons handed over her card to the bedridden teen who was unable to lift an arm, much less retrieve it from the detective’s hand. Parsons placed in on the table beside Arch instead and then followed Grenn out the door, leaving her Styrofoam cup behind.

        Arch took a long breath of relief as they left. For the first time, they stared down at themselves. Fresh cuts littered up and down their left arm, while their right was also cut up, but supported by a sling. Beneath the blankets, Arch could feel the light stinging of several more wounds against their legs. Their neck ached with every miniscule turn of their head and their back…

        They wiggled their toes, thankful for the movement, but regretted it all as they tried mightily to bend one of their knees. The middle of their back screamed of pulled muscles and bruises that were carved into them. Arch seethed as they let their leg down gently.

        “Don’t try to move.” Lyrem advised, picking up his copy of Meditations once again. “You can press the button next to you if you want more pain medication.”

        “I don’t want more medication; I want to go home.”

        “And you’ll get to your house of horrors again soon, but for now, just close your eyes, and get some sleep.”

        “I can’t sleep. He knew my name, Lyrem. How am I supposed to rest if he’s still out there?”

        Lyrem looked up from his book, becoming impatient, but in his eyes, it was clear that he tried to be supportive. He steeled his gaze on Arch and opened his mouth to speak. He was interrupted by Arch’s mother, who peered in with a bouquet of pink lilies in one hand.

        “Is she awake? Oh, thank the Lord.” She crossed herself as she entered and put herself directly next to the bedside. Letting the flowers down, she planted a hard kiss on Arch’s forehead that was too close to the rest of the injuries already planted there.

        Lyrem rolled his eyes to the ceiling and stood up.

        “Well, now that your mother is here, I suppose I should get going; leave you both in peace”-

        “Oh no, you should stay,” Arch’s mother turned on her heels to Lyrem and ushered someone else through the door: a short balding man, recognizable to Arch as a family friend with a plain white collar around his neck. “I invited Father Ferley to lead us in prayer. Won’t you stay, Lyrem? The more hands we have lifting to the Lord, the better.”

        So that was the errand, Arch realized.

Lyrem stared at the woman and managed a facetious grin. There was a bit of levity to the situation after all. Arch nearly burst out in laughter as he stood there, unsure of himself or what to say to the invitation.

The presence of the priest in the room was clearly putting him off. It wasn’t that Lyrem was nervous or humbled by the man, as much as it was like he had just drank a glass of spoiled milk and was desperate to get the lingering vile taste off his tongue.

        “I’d prefer not to,” he stated simply.

        “Ah, you read Aurelius?”

        The priest lifted his thinly rimmed glasses, pushing them higher up the bridge of his nose. He inquired Lyrem innocently and continued.

        “Quite possibly one of the wisest Emperors of Rome. ‘Live a good life,’ he said. ‘for if the gods are just, then they will not care for your devotion, but will welcome you based on the virtues you have lived by,” the priest smiled to him warmly.

        Lyrem regarded him with suspicion, but played along.

        “You quote his Meditations like Corinthians,” Lyrem observed. The annoyance slowly drained from his face and he stood taller, squaring himself. “Tell me then, the next line of that heavenly wisdom. Do you recall what it is?”

        Lyrem waited for a beat and met Father Ferley’s gaze with a coldness he usually reserved for the most wretched of people. He finished the verse himself.

        “If the gods are unjust, then you should not want to worship them.”

        “What the hell are you weirdos talking about?” Arch spouted rudely. “Can we please just pray and get it over with, if that’s what we want to do?”

        “Yes, lets.” Arch’s mother pulled the two men by their elbows into a half circle around the bed. Lyrem stood at the foot of it, unhappily supporting himself on the bars of plastic and metal.

        Father Ferley led the small group in prayer. The details of the prayer itself were unimportant, except for the fact that Arch heard their name being correctly used. That was a nice change. The other detail that was noticed by Arch before the ‘amens’ commenced, was Lyrem, white-knuckling the edge of the bed as he suffered through the words spoken.    

        The man didn’t offer an ‘amen’. He turned around as it ended, and picked up the Styrofoam cup that was mistakenly left behind by Detective Parsons. He bid the three farewell, and finally escaped them.

                                   --------------------

        “I see it too,” Father Ferley fiddled with the edge of his glasses, as Arch’s mother breathed a sigh of relief. “It’s not uncommon for many older gentlemen to be wary of the promises of God. But I sense that there is a negative energy towards the Lord, and that Arch may be picking up on that.”

        “Her name isn’t Arch- It’s”-

        “Their name is Arch, Charlotte,” Father Ferley continued. “Your child has spent many years honouring you. Perhaps it is time that you also honour them. It may be this very thing that is driving Arch away from you and towards figures of authority that respect them. People like Lyrem. It is what drives them out of their home and onto the streets where they encounter devils like the one from last night.”

        Charlotte buried her face into her hands although there was little energy to stop the tears from flowing. The hospital halls were still bustling with activity though they had left Arch in their room to continue resting for the night. She sniffed, and finally lifted her head. Then she nodded. Clutching the small gold crucifix around her neck, she lifted it to her lips and breathed a deep sigh- thankful that her child was safe from harm.

“What happened was not your fault, but if you want to repair this relationship with your child, you must accept them for who they are. If I were you, I would try to get to know this ‘Arch’. You might even like them better than who they were before.” Father Ferley smiled lightly.

With her spirits lifted, Charlotte followed Father Ferley out of the hospital. She was already planning her words carefully to her child for the next time they’d meet.

[jungshookz]

I rlly love librarian joon so much that ive been rereading it and i was wondering,,, maybe a drabble on how y/n gets a tutor for her philosophy (or any subject) class and they have lessons in the library and joon gets jealous esp when y/n tutor is obvioUSLY flirting with y/n but shes an oblivious walnut (we still love u y/n) and he gets kind of insecure that y/n doesnt ask him for help instead and constantly ditches him for tutoring lessons and overall just seems to have more fun with her tutor

→ pairing: kim namjoon x reader

→ genre: librarian!joonie is back!!!!, let me introduce you all to arthoe!taehyung, oblivious!y/n, fluffy times + lil bit of angst + tinY bit of smut u know how it be 

→ wordcount: 3.4k

(gif isn’t mine!)

namjoon usually doesn’t take things personally because he’s groWn and he has better things to fret over

but sweetie

he is FREttING over this very very hard

you decided to take up art history this semester and you didn’t want to sLip so you hooked yourself up with a tutor

you just came out of nowhere and you were like hey by the way i can’t hang out after class today because i have my first tutoring lesson and namjoon was like ?? do you have another philosophy exam or something

“nah i don’t have any more exams i’m just taking art history this year and i want to be ahead of everything and stuff”

wha-

namjoon thinks that he makes a pretty good tutor himself and he would totaLLY memorise 100 books worth of information so that he could teach you because that’S how much he cares for u

but of course he doesn’t think much of it because yeah it makes sense

art history isn’t namjoon’s specialty so obviously you would reach out to someone who’s actually learning the stuff

okay

whatever it’s fine

“okay! are we still going for dinner?”

“i’ll let you know but honestly probably not?? i’m behind on coursework and taehyung’s going to go over everything that i missed which is a lot!!! i’ll text you later dweeb” namjoon doesn’t even get the chance to respond before you’re leaning down to give him a quick peck and then you just yeEt out of the library

….taehyung

your tutor is a guy

which is fine!!!! totally fine

he’s just curious as to who this taehyung guy is

he’s not like a super jealous freak of a boyfriend it’s all good

namjoon purses his lips before shrugging to himself and bringing his attention back to his laptop

about 20 minutes pass and namjoon’s phone buzzes on the desk

‘we’re still on for dinner!!! i’ll meet u outside the library at 6’

hAh

see

nothing to worry about

hey

so

remember the thing namjoon said about having nothing to worry about

now he has something to worry about

it’s nearing 6:45 and you still haven’t shown up

namjoon sighs and leans against the front door

he could go back into the library but he already set up the alarm system for the night and he locked everything up

god it’s cold tonight

he shudders and wraps his coat tighter around himself

where are you??

and right on cue namjoon’s phone starts ringing in his pocket

he scrambles to unlock his phone and he brings it up to his ear

“y/n?”

“joon?? i’m so sorry!!!! i completely forgot about dinner i didn’t even know how quickly time was going by!!!”

“it’s fine, don’t worry about it!” namjoon clears his throat and musters a smile “i’ll see you tomorrow?”

it’s good that you’re taking your studying more seriously

yeah it kinda sucked standing out here in the cold for literally 45 minutes but u know what it’s greAt that you’re so passionate about learning new things now

“uh-huh! oh, i have to tell you aLL about taehyung he’s hilarious and he taught me so sO much and i didn’t even know studying could be this much fun! anyways i promise i’ll make it up to you-”

uh

UM

U M

what’s thAT supposed to mean

was studying philosophy with namjoon not fun???? he made like a shiTload of fancy flashcards and you seemed like you were having fun!!!

namjoon presses his lips together to keep himself from saying anything snarky even tho he really wants to

“i’m sorRy i’m sorry i’m soRRy i’M sorrryyyyryryryryyrryyr-“ you whine and slump in namjoon’s arms when he opens them up to give you a hug when you come in the next day

“it’s hard to hug you when you’re all floppy and boneless.” namjoon chuckles and you stand up straight before wrapping your arms around his neck loosely

you stand up on your tip-toes to give him a peck or two (or three or four or five) and namjoon hums contently

you should ditch him more often if it gets u to act like this (just kidding he didn’t like being ditched it was awful)

he has you sandwiched in between the book cart and himself and you’re not usually a PDA kinda gal but you can work with this

“do you forgive me?” you adjust his tie and namjoon leans down a little to sneak another kiss from you

“i haven’t decided yet.” namjoon jokes and you let out a small whine

“maybe if you take a quick break.,.. we can go into the backroom..,.,., i’m sure i can find other ways for you to forgive me.,,” you whistle and trace your finger along his chest and namjoon scoffs playfully before stepping aside and letting you out of the bookcart-namjoon sandwich

“i forgive you, don’t worry about it, hm? i’m sure it won’t happen again.”

“yes, you’re right! it won’t happen again. …and i wasn’t kidding about the backroom thing.”

“tempting, but… someone was being a little too loud in there last time.” namjoon pokes your nose before sliding a couple books onto the shelf and wheeling the cart back to the front counter

meanwhile you’re trailing behind him the whole time

“touché. you’re coming over to my place this weekend, right?”

“correct” namjoon opens the little gate to let himself behind the counter

“good!!! i made sure to fluff up your pillows anD i put the shirts and boxers that u left last time in the drawer”

“oh, i get my own drawer already?” namjoon teases and although you roll your eyes your cheeks are starting to heat up

ya he has his own drawer now so what it’s not a biG deal okAY

“ooh, by the way - do you think i can study here today?” you point over to the lounge area where your backpack is thrown haphazardly over the couch and your notes and pens are scattered everywhere

..classic

“the classroom that we usually go to is booked up.” you lean over the counter and give namjoon your cutest pout “and i already told taehyung to meet me here”

ah

right

taehyung

he still doesn’t know who the guy is

whoever he is he made you ditch dinner but namjoon isn’t biTTer or anyThing

namjoon rolls his eyes playfully “don’t look at me like that, you. of course you can study here! just make sure to keep it quiet and stuff since this is the library, after all”

hey

spoiler alert: namjoon agreeing to let you study here was a big fat MISTAKE

why do bad things happen to good people

in this case the bad thing is kim taehyung and the good person is namjoon in case that wasn’t already painfully obvious

namjoon resists the urge to roll his eyes when he hears another giggle slip past your lips

yes

he loves the sound of your giggle

but noT when it’s caused by kim taehyung

namjoon peeks over the top of his book to look over at you two again

what even is he wearing

are those shoes from guCCI

he has dad-looking square framed silver glasses which look a loT lamer than namjoon’s thick-framed glasses in his humble opinion

and he’s wearing a dangly earring but it’s only in one ear like if ur going to wear dangly earrings u might as well wear them in both ears

and he’s wearing a beret???? this is the LIBRARY this is not PARIS

cE N’EST PAS PARIS

taehyung leans forward and tucks a strand of hair behind your ear before grabbing the leg of your chair and pulling you closer as you continue to babble on about something

meanwhile namjoon’s just sitting behind the counter gawking at the two of you

what is happening????? what the hell is this??????

“now, lift your hand.” taehyung’s baritone voice is suddenly all namjoon can focus on

jesus

his voice is like.,.,. smooth dark chocolate.,.,,. warm honey.,,.,.,.smokey,.., bbq sauce?,.., the point is namjoon sounds like a frog going through puberty compared to taehyung

namjoon is very obviously staring at the two of you now he’s not even going to try and hide it

“-the elegantly, loosely held hands from da vinci probably represent the most exquisite drawing of hands in the history of art…” taehyung hums and presses his hands against yours before loosely intertwining his fingers with yours “every detail of the long fingers and the beautifully modulated shading produces a convincing effect of reality so that one can almost know the person from her hands…” he pulls away and traces his finger from the tip of your middle finger down to your wrist

hausdhKJSHFJKHDS

is that allOWED ??? is that alloweD????????

namjoon is noT going to let this.,.., this.,,.,., ART HOE steaL you from him

and that’s when the lightbulb appears above his head

art history can’t be thAt hard to master…right?  

long ass story short: namjoon spends the entire night going through your syllabus and making sure he’s brushed up on all of the topics so that when he teaches you he’ll have somewhat of an idea of what he’s talking about

he took out a bunch of history books and lugged them all home and he has sticky notes everywhere and his brand new notebook is full of information relating to art history

he pauses and stops typing and leans back against his chair

what the hell is he doing

he’s seriously going to sit here the whole night doing research on a topic he’s never studied before because HE wants to be the one to teach you instead of stupid taehyung

….the answer is yes

namjoon adjusts his glasses and begins typing out his notes again

“the elegantly loosely held hands represent the most exquisite drawing of hands in the history of art…” namjoon mocks taehyung when he gets to a part in the textbook where it talks about da vinci “i bet he has some kind of hand fetish.,,. that beret-wearing weirdo”

maybe he’s being a little too harsh

namjoon is not a mean-spirited person

he’s just not used to.,..,,. relationship.,,., things..,., and the..,., the jealousy thing

he thinks that it’s stupid that he’s jealous but he can’t help it okay

he can be insecure sometimes and right now he’s kinda insecure because taehyung is smooth and handsome and charming and namjoon is weird and awkward and dorky but like in an endearing way??? kinda?? and-

u know what he’s not going to worry about this he doesn’t have time to worry he needs to write out these notes

the point is  

these are unfamiliar waters

he lets out a small breath

okay

nice and calm

everything’s good

EVERYTHING IS NOT GOOD

EVERYTHING IS BAD AND EVERYTHING IS ON FIRE AND THIS LIBRARY’S LOCATION IS IN HELL

“aw, joonie, that’s awfully sweet of you, but you didn’t have to! taehyung has it covered.” you coo and reach up to cup namjoon’s cheek “okay i’m going to go back to-“

“wait- you don’t even wanna try studying with me?? l-look, i made flash cards and everything!” namjoon sets the textbooks down on the counter with a thud before reaching over and grabbing the whole stack of multicoloured flash cards

“well, maybe we can study together… later! you really didn’t have to do all of this for me…” you trail off and furrow your brows

namjoon did a LOT of work like he filled out an entire notebook with notes and this is a thicc stacc of flashcards

“plus you need to dust the bookshelves, don’t you? why don’t you go ahead and do that?”

“y/n, you coming back?” you look over your shoulder and taheyung’s looking over at you worryingly and you wave him off

“yes! hold on, i’m just-“

“c’mon come sit let taehyung take a pee break or something let’s do some study- oH OH u know what i actually have a surprise for you!” namjoon rifles through his papers before sliding a brochure over to you “there’s an art exhibition in town this weekend! i can take you!!!!”

namjoon’s not aware of this but you’re not really paying attention to him because you’re looking through all the notes he wrote out for you

this is a loT of work how long did he take to write all of this down

you look up at him when you realise he’s stopped talking “sorry what was tha-“

“y/n! c’mon, i was just getting to the good part of the book.” taehyung suddenly appears behind you and wraps his fingers around your wrist

“oh, yep! okay, uh-“ before you know it taheyung’s dragging you back to the couch and you shoot namjoon a sheepish smile

it’s officially been three weeks since taehyung became your tutor

and these have been the worst three weeks of namjoon’s life

after the whole desperation act everything’s just seemed to get worse and worse and woRSE

suddenly taehyung is sucking up all of your time

you can’t grab a bite to eat with joon because taehyung wants you to watch a documentary to learn more about the mona lisa

you can’t hang out with joon in general because you’re spending every free minute studying your ass off

and all of these things have a common link

KIM TAEHYUNG

oOH god namjoon has never actively hated a person before but there’s always time to try new things!!!!!!!! HE HATES HIM

but this

this is just the iCIng on the cake!!! the cherry on the sundae!!!!!! the KICK IN THE ASS

“where are you going?? i thought we were finally going to grab some dinner together.” namjoon raises a brow when he notices you beginning to pack up early

“tae’s taking me to some art exhibition because he says it’s better for me to see the pieces up close rather than through the textbook” you hum as you start packing up your things “but don’t worry! i’ll make it back in time for dinner!!!”

namjoon’s eye twitches

u

you’re going to

you’re going to the art exhibition…. with taehyung……….. but u didn’t want to go when he suggested it.,,.,,.,.

“oh. i see.” namjoon slaps his book shut and clears his throat

you look over your shoulder before turning around

“…something’s wrong.”

see you have a thick skull but not to the point where you can’t see that something is obviously wrong

namjoon can practically hear the gears click-click-clicking away in your head as you stare at him blankly while trying to figure out what it is….,,. you did wrong,.,.,. ??

namjoon looks up at you and raises a brow “nothing’s wrong.” he shrugs casually before checking the time on his watch “you should probably head out to meet tae soon.” he murmurs a liTTLe more aggressively than he would’ve liked to murmur and brings his attention to his laptop

click-click-click-click-click

oh

OH

OH SHIT

oOOOohHHhHHH

“aw, joonie… i’m sorry!!!!” you pout and bend down and wrap your arms around him from behind as best as you can

“have i not been giving my doting boyfriend enough attention?” you tease and pop a kiss on his cheek before propping your chin up on his shoulder and namjoon lets out a sigh and stops typing

“cut it out, y/n” namjoon mutters and shrugs you off and you let out a breath

damn

he really mad

“namjoon, c’mon. i’m sorry, alright? i should’ve- you know how thick i am sometimes i thought tae was just being friendly because he seems like a naturally touchy person!”

“no one that friendly ever has friendly intentions.” namjoon turns around in his wheely chair to face you and raises a brow  

“i’m sorry, joon. really, i am.” you plop yourself down on his lap and wrap an arm around his neck before leaning down to rest your head on his shoulder

his arm slinks around your waist and he rests his other hand over your lap

“no, you don’t have anything to apologise for… it’s just me and my dumb insecurities.” namjoon coughs and you pop up immediately

“what insecurities?”

“i… i dunno… taehyung is… well, he’s not ugLy, that’s for sure.,., and he seems like he’s pretty well-off with his gucci shoes and his fancy berets.,.,. aNd he seems super smart like i heard him speaking fluent french and yA i can speak french too but not thAt well and whenever i hear him explaining things to you he’s super well spoken and it makes me feel like maybe i… maybe i’m not good enough for-“

“Don’T finish that sentence. don’t!!!” you gawk and furrow your brows

how could he even think that???

“you have absolutely nothing to be insecure about. i don’t like taehyung like that, i like you. i don’t care about his gucci shoes and his french and his fancy terminology.,.,, i only like him because he makes tutoring really fun! i like you, okay? you with your dorky glasses and your grandpa cardigans and your big, big… brain!” you beam at joon and he scoffs and rolls his eyes “if it makes you feel any better i think his cologne is waY too overpowering.”

“huh. that oddly does make me feel a little better.” he hums and you grin before leaning in to give him a kiss

you tilt your head to deepen the kiss and your hand slides up namjoon’s chest to fiddle with his tie

namjoon nudges you off his lap and you’re confused for a split second but then he’s pulling you down so that you can straddle him

“how much time do you have before you have to meet taehyung?” namjoon asks innocently although his hands are not so innocently sliding down your back and getting dangerously close to underneath your skirt

he buries his face into the crook of your neck and starts planting warm kisses on your skin  

you glance at his laptop over his shoulder “mm, 20 minutes?” you breathe out and let out a gasp when namjoon bucks his hips slightly

“is the,, uh.,, the act of forgiveness that you owed me for ditching me last week.,.,., is that still a thing?” namjoon pulls away and you nod quickly because YES it is still very much a thing “…u wanna… help me restock some books in the backroom before you leave?”

…u don’t even need to answer that question

taehyung enters the library to see that nobody is at the front desk

you were supposed to meet him by the math building but u didn’t show up.,., so naturally he decided to come to the library

he raises a brow and looks around the empty library

where-

“oh my god, namjoon!”

tae’s eyes pop out of their sockets when the silence is suddenly broken by a very loud moan

is that

is that u

oh my god

“yes, please, oh my god yes-“

…he’s just going to wait outside for you

help me help you make your wishes come tru (aka send me a request)

masterlist

[wattlebunnie-blog]

Egyptian Languages

Hey! As a first post, I assume it is the norm to just post an essay. This was my first historical investigation for my senior years at high school, and it is on Egypt and the progression of its alphabets. This is the original! I already have recieved my feedback (I recieved 28 / 30) but more critique would be greatly appreciated!

Egypt And Its Writing Systems - 

Throughout history, Egypt has experienced many changes in its alphabetical systems. Although hieroglyphs are the most commonly referenced of the few, the Egyptians had three main writing systems that were used at differing points throughout its incredibly massive timeline. This report aims to outline their uses and how they fell out of use throughout history. It also aims to describe how they relate to one another. 

Early - 3500 B.C Onward

In her article, “The Conception and Development of The Egyptian Writing System,” Elise V. Macarthur talks about some of the oldest examples of Egyptian writing found. “but  the  most  salient  early  examples  date to the Naqada I period (ca. 3750–3500 b c) ... Among the more popular motifs displayed are boats, animals, and humanoid figures with feathers ... Their composition is seemingly narrative, but their meaning is difficult to ascertain.” These first examples can be hard to distinguish from pictographic iconography, as most ‘writing’ dating from the predynastic period in Egypt is hieroglyphic in nature. Hieroglyphs usually consisted of  few consonants condensed in one symbol, with each symbol meaning something in its own right. The connection between Mesopotamia and Egypt in the early writing systems is hard to prove, but their close proximity may have influenced the introduction of a written syllabic alphabet (the intersection of the cuneiform forms of akkadian and sumarian, for example, may have contributed to the progression of hieroglyphics to syllabic), progressing the movement of the Egyptian alphabet past Hieroglyphs. Although spending time looking for sources on the matter of external influences on the Egyptian writing system from this period, it proved hard to come by and as such this theory could not be proven, although this connection is very likely. Hieroglyphs as a system were only the beginning of writing in Ancient Egypt and the progression goes as follows (although any dates involved are fluid and may intersect, as these written languages were often used for different purposes):

Hieroglyphics

Hieratic

Demotic 

Coptic

Through Egypt’s long kingdom ship, they experienced many influences that affected their language that impact the progression of writing.

Hieratic Script - 3200 B.C Onward

Hieratic is the script credited as being the catalyst for the progression of Egyptian cursive in Egypt and the New Kingdom. It was a multifunctional text type, and despite being called ‘Hieratic’ the writing system was not commonly used in religious practice until the rise of demotic, which replaced hieratic in its secular function. There are a few notable cases where hieratic has been used in burial rituals and tombs, but hieroglyphics were the preferred writing system for that matter, as symbols could have different meanings depending on context. 

There are two main and well known forms of hieratic script in Egypt: ‘Normal’ hieratic, hailing from Lower Egypt, and “abnormal’ hieratic, also hailing from Lower Egypt but more commonly known for its use in the upper parts of egypt (more specifically in Thebes, where it is known as Theban cursive). 

A notable area of concentrated hieratic graffiti is in the tomb of Nakht the Gardener, as written about in the journal ‘The Hieratic Texts in the tomb of Nakht the Gardener, at Thebes (no.161) as copied by Robert Hay.’ In this journal, the author Stephen Quirke provides commentary on the hieratic graffiti in the tomb. His tomb dates to around the time of Thutmose IV and Amenhotep III, and was also dedicated to his wife. Although in his journal he is labelled as a gardener, Nahkt and his wife Tawy  most likely worked in temples and in the delivery of flowers to places of worship. His tomb would not be such if Nahkt did not have an education, as he also trained as a scribe. 

The tomb of Nahkt and Tawy is interesting, as it represents the use of both hieroglyphics and hieratic in a tomb, which the scribe or scribes actively switch between throughout the tomb. This shows us, not only the incredible skill of the scribes, but that 

alphabets in ancient Egypt were interchangeable in their uses.

 Hieratic as a text type fell out of popular use by around 200 BC and was replaced by demotic for the use of non-religious activity. Used extensively throughout its time in the Egyptian limelight for the legal, administrative and financial aspects of society, Hieratic was a precursor to a similar writing system that would begin to take itself to the grave of writing systems.

Demotic - 650 B.C Onward

Throughout the Ptolemaic period and even into the Roman era of Egypt, demotic was used extensively for almost everything in Egypt. Demotic marked the end of the solely Egyptian way of doing things, as during the reign of the Ptolemies and into the occupation of Egypt by the Romans, Greek began to be used in many legal matters around Egypt. Although more common than hieratic, demotic proved to be just as exclusive; bringing it to a grave that many great writing systems fall in to. 

Demotic began to be replaced by Greek during the Ptolemaic period in Egypt, where demotic began to be only used for minor graffiti and notes on already Greek documents. As Egypt fell towards a more Roman and Greek influence, so did its language, resulting in the gradual decline of demotic throughout Egypt. 

Used extensively throughout Egypt under the reign of Psamtik I, demotic, especially late demotic, shows little resemblance to its beginning in hieroglyphics (unlike hieratic, which still had shapley resemblance). It is noticeably more cursive, smaller, and can in some cases look very similar to modern Arabic. This disconnect is evident in the practice of converting demotic script back to hieroglyphics. Many scholars can link certain spellings of words back to hieratic and subsequently hieroglyphics, but this does not mean that any readable sentence structure will come from this. The result is often jumbled and muddled up, to the point where no Egyptian scribe would write like that.

From the point of foreign rule onwards, Egypts legal work began to move from demotic to Greek, but the literary side of things flourished, and many famous works of this period were written in demotic. “The first tale of Setne Khaemwas” was a literary work based on the fourth son of Ramesses II by the name of Khaemweset. This fictional version of the prince was said to have fought the ghost of a prince long dead over a magic book thought to have been written by Thoth himself. The piece, as a whole, is exceedingly complex and long, proving that literature of a high standard (held to such a standard even today) could have been written in a dying alphabet in the time of Roman leadership. 

Coptic - 200 A.D And Into The Future

Coptic is an Afro-Asiatic language which developed in Egypt that is still prevalent to this day, although very ancient. Coptic is a written language which is primarily based on Greek, using their alphabet and borrowing letters from demotic to create a new Egyptian alphabet. Coptic is still used today by the Coptic Christians, who are one of the most persecuted religious groups in Egypt. Coptic is noted as being much easier to learn than demotic, hieratic and hieroglyphics, as the alphabet that coptic was built on was already established and only borrowed a few things from the previous alphabets of Egypt. 

Coptic is a dying language. It's not dead yet, but it's close and the inevitability of it is very distressing. Coptic is the closest thing that us as a society have to ancient Egyptian, and it is so upsetting to know we are not actively working to save an ancient language that is a known link to the past that we can study. 

Many orthodox christian texts dating from the second century AD were written in Coptic Egyptian, and many of these texts are still studied today by the modern day Coptic Christians. Some of the earliest Egyptian chirstian texts were written by the “Desert Fathers” in Coptic Egyptian, and these go on to prove some of the earliest Christian texts from this area.

There is a dire importance that modern day scholars take interest in the Coptic language; it is a vital link to the past and is still of cultural relevance today, as proven by the Coptic Christians. There was much struggle finding resources and articles on the Coptic languages. Coptic is a necessary addition to the many scholarly articles that exist about every previous Egyptian alphabet. 

How Egypt Progressed Through the Years

Egypt has had to travel a long way to get to where they are today. Throughout the years they have experienced many interferences and influences on their writing systems that have changed it, for better or for worse. At first there were the hieroglyphics, which is the writing system not covered in this report. Hieroglyphs in Egypt are some of the most well known and speculated forms of putting things on paper (or walls), and was the base for the rest of Egypt’s alphabetical development. There are many similarities that can be seen between the next in line hieratic - hieratic is very pictographic, and very large in its cursive form. Demotic is starting to stray even farther away from its hieroglyphic ancestors, as the form and shape shrinks, and it overall begins to resemble modern day alphabets. Coptic, the final stage of the ancient Egyptian alphabetical development, is not similar at all to hieratic or hieroglyphic. It is based of Greek and only borrows from demotic. Coptic, although still used today, is the least researched ancient Egyptian alphabet. 

Egypt has travelled a long way since the first hieroglyphic carvings on monumental rocks, and this progression has lead to what we know of ancient Egypt today. 

Bibliography (the original had footnoting)

Woods, Christopher, Visible Language, The Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, 2010.

 Gee, John, Two Notes on Egyptian Script, Journal of Book of Mormon Studies

Bagnani, Gilbert, The Transcription Of Late Hieratic, Sage Publications, Ltd. A

Author Unknown, TT52, The Tomb of Nakht and His Wife, Tawy. https://www.osirisnet.net/tombes/nobles/nakht52/e_nakht_01.htm

Quirke, Stephen, The Hieratic Texts In The Tomb Of Nakht The Gardener, At Thebes (no. 161) as copied by Robert Hay. Sage Publications Ltd, 1986. 

Author Unknown, Hieratic Script, Britannica. Viewed 30/7.  https://www.britannica.com/topic/hieratic-script

 Lewis, Naphtali, The Demise of the Demotic Document: When and Why. Sage Publications Ltd, 1993.

Author Unknown, Demotic Script, Britannica. Viewed 30/7. https://www.britannica.com/topic/demotic-script

uthor Unknown, Hieratic and Demotic Script, Viewed 30/7. http://egyptianhieroglyphics.net/hieratic-and-demotic-script/

Vinson, Steve, Demotic: The History, development and techniques of Ancient Egypt’s Popular Script, https://www.arce.org/resource/demotic-history-development-and-techniques-ancient-egypts-popular-script 

Author Unknown, Coptic Language, 

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Coptic-language

Viney, Steven, Who are Egypt’s Coptic Christians And Why Are They Prosecuted? ABC News, Updated 10th April 2017. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2017-04-10/who-are-egypts-copts/8429634

Author Unknown, Coptic Literature, Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/art/Coptic-literature

[scarletrebel]

oh god okay alright

so this is an au ive been thinking about for A While Now, cause im a dramatic fuck who cant finish anything and is living in wip city right now. 

rook (@mrpinstripesuit‘s boy because of course) somewhat reluctantly and through ~plot~ that i do have in mind actually turning into the next dredgen yor because in a small twist of events killing just one guardian in crucible wasnt enough for him.

cue avia being sent to hunt him down and getting marked down as scared and horny when she meets him for the first time

i do have a whole story planned for this and ive been thinking about this au a lot, i bashed this out in about three hours so there might be little errors here and there and critically i think it moves way too fast but hey i havent uploaded in so long so shrug emoji i hope its at least readable aha

When Ikora calls her to the Vanguard chambers, Avia is expecting Cayde’s presence too. Her Hunter Vanguard will do all he can to remind her of her class, even butting into mission briefings with Ikora.

So it comes as a shock to see him not present at the table when she walks in. Ikora turns to greet her, and Avia casts a glance over her shoulder at Zavala.

“Don’t tell me you finally let Cayde out of the Tower?”

Zavala throws her a grim look, mouth set into a line and Avia meets it with a morbid confusion.

“What’s his problem?” She asks Ikora, whose face is set in an equally grim measure.

“Cayde left for a brief scouting mission, it was only supposed to take him a few hours,” Ikora reaches down to her holopad, and from its screen rises a map of an area of Earth Avia has never heard before. “This is the European Dead Zone. It’s highly off limits to Guardians due to the fluxuating levels of both Darkness and Light.”

“Why’s that?”

“A shard of the Traveler exists in that region, cast off from the Collapse.”

Avia watches the images cycle in front of her. A giant cascading shard towers over a forest, buildings rusted and decaying sit in its shadow. Lightning bounces off of the shard, storm clouds gathering around it.

“Looks suitably ominous,” Avia mutters, quickly realising that now is not the time.

Ikora simmers. Avia’s come to notice this in the Warlock Vanguard, when something is wrong and pressing up against her mind but she must remain calm and composed in the face of it all. Avia recognises it well, a quiet storm betrayed by only the smallest of movements.

Ikora places a hand down on the table, her fingers trembling.

“Cayde left two days ago. He hasn’t returned.”

Avia allows her mind to wander as Ikora’s words hit her. Cayde, bold and brass finding his way through this forest as easy as walking through the Tower. Enemies of the Light crowding him, surrounding him, and whilst he doesn’t go down without a fight it’s that one mistake that could cost him.

“You want me to find him.”

Ikora thins her lips into a line, looking from the holo pad and down to Zavala. Avia misses the minute way they communicate to each other, and when Ikora turns to her she can tell the Warlock is somehow sadder.

“Bring him home, however that may be.”

She has to receive the highest clearance from Zavala, Ikora, and the Speaker in order to fly into the Dead Zone. She was advised by Zavala to touch down on the outside of the forest and make her way in. His monotone suggestion didn’t exactly inspire confidence, and it left her riddled with annoyance that she couldn’t shake.

“Levi?” She calls for her Ghost, and they materialise with a whirl.

“Are you afraid?” They ask, and Avia scoffs.

“No. I just… Feel like I’m not getting the full picture.”

“How do you mean?” They ask as Avia looks down the scope of her sniper rifle. She spots the forest a breath away, the trees thick and coarse. No hostiles as she scans the horizon, and answers her Ghost.

“There’s something Ikora wasn’t telling me.”

“You always think that,” Levi floats in front of her scope, making her lower it with a sigh. “She has no reason to lie to you.”

“Lying by omission is still lying.” Avia says.

“You’re not in the Reef anymore.” Levi’s voice is soft, a comfort.

“I’m not sure sometimes.”

She starts to walk, making her way down a cliff face and landing as quietly as she can on the ground. She walks towards a gathering of buildings, the same rusted ones Ikora showed her. The air is still and quiet. As she climbs the structure, the echo of her movements starts to set her on edge.

“What was Cayde scouting?” She wonders out loud. Levi hesitates next to her. Then he whirls his shell once, twice, and answers.

“I think… ‘Scouting’ might have been a loose term for whatever he was actually looking for out here.”

Avia smiles under her helmet. “That doesn’t surprise me.”

“With the language in his recent reports, if you could even call them that, I think he was looking for something.”

“Like what?” Avia asks, moving through an empty room and shimmying through a grated wall. She jumps down and out of the building on the other side, trees at her left and right. She pushes in.

“Something he lost, I think.”

Avia hums, sticking close to the trees, trying to watch and be careful of the way her feet brush against the dead leaves and twigs on the ground. It’s not an environment she’s used to for stealth, but the same rules apply – stay close to the ground and keep your eyes open.

“Let me know when you detect anything.” She tells Levi.

“Aside from the insurmountable Darkness surrounding us alongside a general feeling of dread?” Levi asks, to which Avia laughs. “Can do.”

He was dangerously close to growing bored.

He sits with his back to the wall, flicking a knife up and down. In the cave system, dingy orange lights bounced off the walls. The Dredgen’s chattered around him, keeping to themselves mostly. He still didn’t understand what they wanted from him, what they expected from an exiled Guardian.

He’d told them as much, but still, they followed.

Some of their Ghost’s pitter around their heads, cowardly, having conversations they don’t want him to hear. He catches a glowing orb with his eyes more than once and it dissipates, causing the Hunter with his legs crossed to cast a glance over his shoulder. The Human stills the hand in her book, the scattered pieces of the scout rifle she’s trying to infuse into darkness around his feet.

“What?” He spits. The Guardian doesn’t cower, just tries to hide her smile as she begins to draw something in the soil between them.

“My Ghost thinks you’re dangerous.”

“Your Ghost is right,” he replies. He watches the gloved hand trace a pattern, and it takes him longer than he’d like to admit to recognise it as something Hive.

The Guardian places the main skeleton of her gun over the rune, speaking as she draws an intricate circle around it. “I think she doesn’t get it. I think the Light makes us blind, but I don’t think it’s our enemy either.”

“Aint that poetic.”

“You don’t want to lead us,” the Guardian starts. He stills his motions with the knife, catching it blade side, the metal biting into his skin. “But you could be the start.”

“The start of what, kid?”

The Guardian mutters something under her breath, and they both watch the runes on the floor glow a sickly green, a plume of smoke rising to intwine itself in the metal above it. The others around them stop to stare. When the spell finishes, the exo skeleton breathes with that same sickly energy, something black like ichor peeling off of it.

“I guess that’s up to you.”

A Warlock peels around the corner, harried, breathing hard.

“He’s gone.”

“What?” He asks, a quiet intensity in the way he tenses but doesn’t move.

The Warlock stutters, tries to find his voice. “He overpowered us. His Ghost did something, got herself out of her cage and then freed him. He subdued everyone so he could--”

He flings the knife between the Warlocks feet, a centimetre away from his foot. He stands and takes the hand canon off his hip, once laced in gold and now dark and peeling at the edges. With his fury it starts to feel warm in his hands, putting the scout rifle on the floor to shame. The young Guardian looks at it in awe, seeing the same runes she carved transcribed on the sides.

“Tell me which way he went and then get the hell out of here. Everyone.”

The Hunter pipes up from the floor as he walks towards the mouth of the cave system; “And then what? How will we find you?”

“I guess that’s up to you.”

“I don’t like this.”

“You’ve said that five times already, Levi.” Avia says, though her voice betrays her own unease.

They’ve been walking for what feels like hours. As they traversed deeper, the forest became darker, blocking out all sunlight. Levi told her a ways back that the influence of the shard was heaviest here, but what Avia didn’t mention was the solar flames beneath her skin, an ache to act. Something was coming, her gut felt out of sorts.

“Any sign of him?” Avia asks. Levi extends his shell and scans as far as he can.

“No, I – wait!” Avia perks up as her Ghost scans once more, pulling their shell back to themselves with an excited whir. “Cayde’s Ghost, she’s near!”

“Lead the way,” Avia says, following her marker and picking up the pace.

She breaks into a run as she gets closer, nearing a large tree trunk on its side.

“Wait!” Levi yells into her comm. She slides to take cover by the tree, her mouth opening to ask what’s wrong.

She hears two shots, the way they ring through the air all too familiar. Cayde yells, goes down, and the person wielding Thorn catches up to him.

She pops her head up and over the tree, looking into a circular clearing. Her Vanguard lies on his side, his Ghost fussing over him tirelessly. She watches another man move closer, black armour from head to toe, and she sees that his gun isn’t the hand canon she wields. No, it’s similar in nature, but corrupted in a completely different way.

“Is that a Guardian?” She whispers, as the man in question walks lazily over to where Cayde rights himself onto his back. Her Vanguard is hurt, his Exo plating damaged beyond recognition.

“No,” Levi answers. “At least, I don’t think so.”

“Aint this a little too – ahh, god – easy for you?” Cayde asks, pulling his Ghost to his chest. She gets the message and dissipates as the man stands over him.

“You made it hard enough when you ran the first time,” he says, pulling his helmet off. Ebony hair falls out around his shoulders, dark brown eyes boring holes into the Exo below him. Avia holds a breath. He’s human. But there’s something about him that isn’t. “I’m starting to think you just enjoy this.”

“I’m not the sicko running around like the next Dredgen Yor,” Cayde spits back. There’s a venom that Avia can’t place.

“Then why did you even try to find me?” The man asks, kneeling down, regarding Cayde like he’s playing with his food. “Trying to save my sorry soul?”

“Well, that’s real dramatic Rook, maybe those Dredgens have finally – ahh!”

The man, whose name is apparently Rook, fires a round into Cayde’s chest.

“He’s running on auxiliary power already Avia, we have to get in there.” Levi’s voice is small and strained.

“Wait,” she finds herself saying.

Cayde coughs and splutters, the machines where his lungs would be whirring in protest. “I’m sorry, Rook. But I know you -- you don’t -- you don’t want to be this.”

Rook stands, aiming his gun down and Avia sees the sightline – right between Cayde’s eyes.

“It’s too late to give me that choice.”

Avia hops over the tree and summons her Golden Gun, using the first blast to knock the gun from Rook’s hand. The Darkness around it absorbs the blast but knocks it off centre, and his eyes find her immediately. She aims the second for his chest, which causes him to stutter back, and she takes the opening to run forward and place herself over Cayde.

The man in black rights himself and they aim their guns at each other, Avia still engulfed in solar flame as something darker roils off of Rook’s body. When her Light runs its course, the solar light makes way for the Thorn in her hands to make itself known.

Rook looks her in the eyes, down to the gun in her hands, and then laughs.

“Oh you are a bunch of hypocrites, aren’t you Cayde?”

“Get out of here,” Avia warns. Levi scans Cayde’s body, coaxing his own Ghost forward so they can make enough repairs to keep Cayde stable for now. “Last chance.”

“Oh, sweetheart, you have no idea what this is, do you?” A wicked smile curls up Rook’s face as he lowers his own gun, taking a few steps forward.

“Shut up.” Avia spits back.

“Nah, I’d rather tell you all about how you’ve got a Guardian killer in your hands there. One that your Vanguard keep around for god knows what reason.” He inches closer, and Avia steps forward to meet him. His hands come up in mock surrender, and she ignores how her stomach curls at his easy smile. It’s infuriating, to some degree.

“The only Guardian killer I see is you,” she starts. “Go. Now.”

“Or else what?” He asks. He moves forward once again, and Avia misses the time in between him feeling like he was a mile away and being pressed up against the Thorn. She can practically feel his heartbeat through the gun.

Thank the Traveler she’s wearing her helmet.

“Avia,” Cayde rasps below her. He sounds better, and she hears the soft dissipation of a Ghost that must be his. “Don’t do anything stupid.”

“That is rich coming from you.” She mutters, and the man in front of her has the audacity to laugh as if they’ve known each other for years.

“Avia,” he says, his eyes raking down her body. “Pretty name.”

“I am seconds away from putting you down for good.” She bites back. He smiles at her reaction and it sends a wave of embarrassment through her.

“But you won’t. Killing Guardians is bad, remember?”

“You’re not a Guardian.”

Rook’s face falls, impassive and unreadable as the darkness rolls off him, still steady.

In a flash he grabs Avia’s wrist, and places the Thorn underneath his chin, his other hand on her waist as he looks at her and says; “I’m the same kinda Guardian that you are, sweetheart.”

She’s caught off guard, a steady and aggravating heat pooling in her chest. She doesn’t realise when his finger curls around hers on the trigger, squeezing it.

She pulls back as quick as she can, the bullet sounding off between them. She makes to reach for a knife, throw it at his chest and make some space but then she’s back on her ship, Cayde still on the floor below her.

Levi whirls in front of her; “Are you alright?”

“I…” She starts, shaking herself and taking her helmet off. Cayde groans behind her, and she turns and kneels at his side.

“Nice one, hot shot.” He splutters. Avia rolls her eyes, hooking an arm around his back and moving him into the co-pilot chair.

“Who was he?” She asks once he’s sat down, still clutching his chest as though some parts will fall out of him.

“That’s a long story.”

Avia set’s a course for the Tower, plotting the longest route she can find without raising suspicion.

“You’ve got time.”

[jam2289]

Making Speeches for the Harry Potter Festival - Part 2 of ?

You know when you start a project that's somewhat similar to one you've done before, and then it ends up being a bit more complex than you first imagined? That's what we're into here.

I've given hundreds of speeches on many different subjects. In the last month or so I've given speeches on resentment as the most destructive emotion, analyzing the philosophical roots of rock lyrics, how my family originated as Leprechauns, how I raised a dragon egg when I was a kid, the importance of comic books as an art form, and what a virtuous human being is. I've had people come up to me after every one of those speeches and tell me how much they liked it and how much it made them think, because I seem to have a unique view on most things. Next week I'm giving a speech titled "Alligator Wrestling and the Meaning of Life". But these Harry Potter speeches are a... challenge.

I have 2 things that are solid. I have 3, or 4, or 5 things that still have to be worked out. I have a good background for my career.

- - - - - - -

Jeffrey Alexander Martin

Visiting Lecturer - Sparta Institute for the Study of Muggles

Current Assistant Professor of Muggle Studies - Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

Former Professor of Muggle Studies - Ilvermorny School of Witchcraft and Wizardry

- - - - - - -

I have a good speech about the many uses of the rubber duck.

- - - - - - -

1. My first accidental encounter with a rubber duck as a child.

2. Reading Arthur Weasley's paper on "The Many Uses of the Rubber Duck" while in school at Ilvermorny.

3. A teenage adventure to try to observe a rubber duck in action. (factory and/or family)

4. What the research has revealed: humor, entertainment, child training in animal interaction, water transportation, distraction, possible growth into hunting decoys, relation to the rubber chicken, play as life preparation.

5. Questions fielded from the class. (Possibly hundreds of people from a large crowd in front of the main stage.)

6. Homework assignments.

- - - - - - -

I have to work out three more speeches. Here's the problem.

I am pretending to be a wizard professor speaking to a class of witches and wizards about muggles. But, I'm actually a muggle speaking to a crowd of muggles about muggles. That's a problem because what the imaginary witches and wizards would find interesting is going to be boring to the real muggles standing in front of me.

I've been drumming my mind on this idea for the last two months. For instance, it would be cool to do a speech about how planes stay aloft because Arthur Weasley was interested in that question. Witches and wizards would find that interesting because it would be a mind-blowing concept to them about something completely new. For muggles, everyone already knows that the air moves faster over the top of the wing than the bottom creating an upward pulling force on the curved wing. It's boring, heard it before and I didn't like it when they were forcing me to sit through boring classes in school. Outside of school it's interesting because my own interest naturally leads me to study what's in my current zone of proximal development. (But that's a whole other article about why the government-run education field is jacked.)

A straight take on the subject won't work, but that doesn't mean you just give up, you pivot. I'm guessing a lot of people would suggest making it funny, something like a standup comedy routine. That's a bad suggestion for two reasons. One, I'm not particularly skilled at preparing original jokes, only professional comedians are. Two, professional comedians will work on routines for months and years to develop a routine that's good. Jerry Seinfeld, the most successful comedian of all time, figures he gets about 20 good jokes out of every 500 that he writes. Also, he doesn't know which ones they are. You have to go try them in front of audiences. You develop good material by bombing and adjusting, getting a smile and adjusting, getting a giggle and adjusting, getting a laugh and then putting it in your paid routine. This won't work for me because there isn't a good place to try this Harry Potter role-playing material out in.

Just because that won't work we don't give up, we pivot. Stories are great. I'm good at stories. I can speak on the same general subject of planes and weave an interesting story around it. Let's say as a professor I was researching muggle transportation systems. I decided to take a plane ride to somewhere to see what it was like, for research. We go through the crazy process of security checks, waiting in lines, delays, how it doesn't seem safe, being offered peanuts, being cramped, having to pay for a movie, a shaky landing, having to find my luggage, etc. This part would probably naturally come out somewhat funny, great. Depending on how the details work out I could then dive into the history of flight and talk about people attaching wings to their arms and flapping while jumping off of barns, gliders, how bicycle mechanics made planes, and the current industry. It might be okay, it probably would be okay. I don't want to do it, too boring.

After we've pivoted around the same idea a few times, we give up. Knowing when to stick and when to quit is an art. I did this with a few different ideas, namely the mail system and dishwashers. It wasn't working.

I do have two original ideas that I still think are worth pursuing, the muggle duel and something about dragons. I have to do something about dragons.

For dragons I think I could simply relate incidents from history. A collection of stories with the theme of muggle encounters with dragons. I think that might end up turning out great actually. (I recently found a drawing that I entered in the Ionia Free Fair when I was twelve. It won a blue ribbon. It was of a dragon.) I will work out those details in a later article.

The muggle duel idea is the most logistically challenging, but has the potential to be the most entertaining. It's challenging because it would be so much more fun to do demonstrations. That means that I'll bring two people up from the audience and have them go through fist fighting, wrestling, knife fighting, stick fighting, sword fighting, and pistol fighting. It would be great. I would work it out with my helpers beforehand obviously. And, we'll simply cover some history with some odd observations. For instance, there was a tribe somewhere that didn't do a real fight. One person would hit the other on the top of the head with a stick. Then they would reverse roles. They would alternate until one gave up or passed out. That would be funny. Or, the Eskimos had singing duels. That's odd and could be fun, and funny. Apparently several different tribes around the world had that tradition.

See, it's coming together. I have my personal fictional background. I have a solid speech about the many uses of the rubber duck. I have a speech that will definitely work about muggle encounters with dragons. And, I have a potential speech about muggle duels. One more good idea.

This came to me earlier today when I was buying groceries: "The Great Gnome Conspiracy of ....". I don't know what it's going to be about, but it's a good name. The writer R. L. Stine often comes up with a good title and then figures out a story based on it.

It needs a year, so let's look at Google Ngrams. That allows us to search a word and see the history of it occurring in books. Let's search gnome. "gnome" first appeared in a book in 1753. Its use has had some ups and downs, but overall the trend has been slightly up over time. There were some big ups and downs until 1800, maybe we use that.

"The Great Gnome Conspiracy of the 18th Century". It sounds like a wizarding class about muggles. That's a good sign.

Here's something. In 1794 a book was published titled "A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain. Volume the Eighth. Containing Pope, Gay, Pattifon, Hammond, Savage, Hill, Tickell, Somervile, Broome, Pitt & Blair."

Gnome is used four times in this book. In Canto IV of "The Rape of the Lock" by Alexander Pope, this is the selection that I like.

- - - - - - -

Swift on his footy pinions flits the gnome,

And in a vapour reach'd the difmal dome.

- - - - - - -

(They often used "f" instead of "s" at that time in printing presses.)

There are now a ton of ways you could go with this speech, probably an unlimited number of options. Here are some that I'll think about. Maybe Pope was a wizard that thought the secrets of magic shouldn't be secret. Maybe Pope was a muggle with a wizard friend who leaked a secret to him. Maybe it wasn't a big deal until muggles started trying to catch gnomes for some reason. Maybe some rich people liked playing with them in their garden games, as royals are want to do. Maybe muggles tried to kill off the gnomes. Maybe gnomes weren't kept a secret until then because they were good at staying hidden. But, then when people realized that they were good at sneaking around they tried to catch them and train them to be thieves and spies. This got out of hand. Maybe the queen was robbed or something. Then, a decision was made.

It was decided that gnomes should be kept secret from muggles. They tried to do this through various means, but it wasn't fully working because the proverbial cat was out of the bag. Then, in whatever year, someone came up with the idea to hide gnomes in plain sight. The wizarding community hid gnomes in stories and myths. This mostly did the trick, but there were still a few problems later. I could go through an incident in here somewhere to make it concrete and engaging. Later, it was realized that the fake garden gnome could be invented and promoted and then everyone would think the idea of real gnomes would be ridiculous. That's a pretty good overall idea. Maybe I could include a local political meeting near the beginning of this whole ordeal where the different sides were presented. Maybe a witch became rich and famous for inventing the fake garden gnome. Ideas.

Alright, good stuff. Now, we have our good ideas: "Further Research on the Many Uses of the Rubber Duck", "The History of Muggle Encounters with Dragons", "The History of the Muggle Duel", and "The Great Gnome Conspiracy of the 18th and 19th Centuries".

I will work out the details of the three new ideas in further articles.

See how I can create something from nothing? It's because I'm a wizard.

Here's more Harry Potter:

http://www.jeffreyalexandermartin.com/search/label/Harry%20Potter

________________________________________________

You can find more of what I'm doing at http://www.JeffreyAlexanderMartin.com

[trendingnewsb]

Jaylen Brown: ‘Sport is a mechanism of control in America’

As the Boston Celtics star prepares to play in London, he talks to Donald McRae about race, the NBA and the death of his best friend

Jaylen Brown is one the most intelligent and interesting young athletes Ive met in years and it seems fitting that, midway through our interview in Boston, he should retell a parable that brings together Martin Luther King and the great American writer David Foster Wallace.

Weve got two young fish swimming one way and an older fish swimming the other way, the 21-year-old star of the Boston Celtics says as he considers the enduring backdrop of race in the United States. They cross paths and the older fish says: Whats up guys, hows the water? The two younger fish turn around and look back at the wiser fish and ask: Whats water? Theyve never recognised that this is what they actually live in. So it takes somebody special like Martin Luther King to see past what youve been embedded in your whole life.

Three years before his death, Foster Wallace included the parable in one of his most widely-read pieces of writing. Yet it carries fresh resonance when said with quiet force by a young basketball player who stands apart from many of his contemporaries to the extent that there have been numerous articles in which an unnamed NBA executive apparently suggested that Brown might be too smart for the league or his own good.

Brown was the No3 pick in the 2016 NBA draft and now, in his second season with Boston, he is a key figure as the Celtics arrive in London this week as the leading team in the Eastern Conference. Weve already spoken about Browns desire to learn new languages and his interest in books and chess while he loves playing the piano and listening to grime artists from east London. Even more intimately he has relived the death of his closest friend Trevin Steede in November. In the two games after that devastating loss Brown produced inspirational performances, which he dedicated to Steede.

He has also looked forward to playing in London on Thursday, against the Philadelphia 76ers, and answered a question as to whether his young Celtics team may become NBA champions in the next few seasons: Why not this year? People say maybe well be good in two years but I think were good now. Right now weve got one of the best records in the league. I think we could be as good as we want to be. But the more we let people construct our mindset, and start saying two years from now, is the moment we lose.

Last week the Celtics beat LeBron James Cleveland Cavaliers 102-88. Excitement and anticipation surrounds the Celtics but race still stalks our conversation and it has echoed hauntingly through Browns life. Racism definitely still exists in the South, he says, remembering his youth in Marietta, Georgia. Ive experienced it through basketball. Ive had people call me the n-word. Ive had people come to basketball games dressed in monkey suits with a jersey on. Ive had people paint their face black at my games. Ive had people throw bananas in the stands.

Racism definitely exists across America today. Of course its changed a lot and my opportunities are far greater than they would have been 50 years ago. So some people think racism has dissipated or no longer exists. But its hidden in more strategic places. You have less people coming to your face and telling you certain things. But [Donald] Trump has made it a lot more acceptable for racists to speak their minds.

Jaylen Brown takes on LeBron James earlier this season. Photograph: CJ Gunther/EPA

Brown admits that, when he was 14, It wounds you. But when I got older and went to the University of California [Berkeley] I learnt about a more subtle racism and how it filters across our education system through tracking, hidden curriculums, social stratification and things I had no idea of before. I was really emotional because one of the most subtle but aggressive ways racism exists is through our education system.

In his year at college, before pausing his degree to play in the NBA, Brown wrote a thesis about how institutionalised sport impacts on education. I was super emotional reading about it, he says of his chosen subject. Theres this idea of America that some people have to win and some have to lose so certain things are in place to make this happen. Some people have to be the next legislators and political elites and some have to fill the prisons and work in McDonalds. Thats how America works. Its a machine which needs people up top, and people down low.

Even though Ive ended up in a great place, who is to say where I wouldve been without basketball? It makes me feel for my friends. And my little brothers or cousins have no idea how their social mobility is being shaped. I wish more and more that I can explain it to them. Just because Im the outlier in my neighbourhood who managed to avoid the barriers set up to keep the privileged in privilege, and the poor still poor, why should I forget about the people who didnt have the same chance as me?

What did he think of Colin Kaepernicks protest against police brutality and racism which the former San Francisco 49ers quarterback began even before Trumps election to the White House? It was peaceful and successful. It made people think. It made people angry. It made people want to talk. Often everybody is comfortable with their role in life and they forget about the people who are uncomfortable. So for Colin to put his career on the line, and sacrifice himself, was amazing. But Colin was fed up with the police brutality and pure racism. He speaks for many people in this country including me.

Did Brown understand from the outset that Kaepernicks career was in jeopardy? Absolutely. I wasnt shocked how it turned out. Colin was trying to get back into the NFL and find another team and hes more than capable. But I knew it was over. I knew they werent going to let him back. Nobody wanted the media attention or to take the risk. They probably just wanted to blackball him out of the league.

Thats the reality because sports is a mechanism of control. If people didnt have sports they would be a lot more disappointed with their role in society. There would be a lot more anger or stress about the injustice of poverty and hunger. Sports is a way to channel our energy into something positive. Without sports who knows what half of these kids would be doing?

Were having some of the same problems we had 50 years ago. Some things have changed a lot but other factors are deeply embedded in our society. It takes protests like Kaepernicks to make people uncomfortable and aware of these hidden injustices. People are now a lot more aware, engaged and united in our culture. It takes a special person like Kaepernick to force these changes because often reporters and fans say: If youre an athlete I dont want you to say anything. You should be happy youre making x amount of money playing sport. You should be saluting America instead of critiquing it. Thats our society.

Has his anger been amplified during Trumps presidency? Not really. I just think Trumps character and some of his values makes him unfit to lead. For someone like him to be president, and in charge of our troops? Its scary to be honest.

Trumps Twitter war in November with LaVar Ball tipped the scales, for Brown, beyond credulity. The President accused Ball of being ungrateful following the release from China of his son, LiAngelo, and two other UCLA basketball players after they were caught shoplifting. He demanded a thank you, Brown says of Trump. Its ridiculous. What happened to people doing things out of the generosity of their heart or because it was the right thing to do? There have been multiple situations where its been ridiculous but that one was like: OK Im done. Im done listening to anything you have to say. A 19-year-old kid makes a mistake overseas and [Trump] demands an apology from his dad? I think Trumps unfit to lead.

Jaylen Brown dunks during a game against the Brooklyn Nets. Photograph: Justin Lane/EPA

Browns readiness to talk about politics and culture might account for the surreal suggestion in 2016 that he was too smart for the NBA. From the outside, smart seemed a euphemism for troublesome. What did Brown think when, as a teenager, he heard words unlikely to be used in conjunction with a white athlete? It was hinting at something very problematic within society. It bothered me but I was so focused on getting to where I was going I never dissected it or pointed it out to anybody.

But I disagree that an athlete cant be intelligent. Some people think that, in basketball, we have a bunch of masculine adults who dont know how to control themselves. Theyre feeble-minded and cant engage or articulate ideas. Thats a narrative they keep trying to paint. Were trying to change it because that statement definitely has a racist undertone.

Brown chose Berkeley because he knew he would be stretched academically. Has he missed the intellectual stimulus since swapping college for professional basketball? Absolutely. Ive missed it so much. Im in a good environment here but at Cal I was learning something new every day. Im now trying to keep well-balanced instead of single-minded. I take piano lessons after I spent the last year teaching myself piano. If Im frustrated or had a bad day, but need to keep engaged, practicing the piano does that for me. Same with the YouTube [vlogs which he makes]. I use the camera so I can show something of this life to the everyday person who is interested in seeing what its like for an athlete on a day-to-day basis. Everybody puts you on a pedestal especially when youre playing well and they make it seem like youre not human. But Im just a regular guy.

During his first year at Berkeley, in his spare time, Brown learned Spanish from scratch and became fluent. Im not as good now, he says. I started again because therere so many conjugations that slip your mind if you dont practice. But I also just learned the Arabic alphabet. Im proud of myself because the pronunciation is hard.

Brown starts to say the Arabic alphabet out loud and, to an untutored ear, he sounds impressive. Yeah, he says with a grin, Im trying.

He describes himself as an introvert and it must be hard being quiet and reflective in a boisterous sporting environment? Absolutely. Its not just the locker room. In life if you stay quiet youll get left behind. So I had to learn to be more vocal and outgoing. I just try to be respectful of everybody. But the closer you get with guys the more you talk to them. It becomes like a family especially when youre winning. Last year I was much quieter but this year my opinion is valued more. We have a good locker room.

Jaylen Browns Celtics are set for a deep playoff run this season. Photograph: CJ Gunther/EPA

The value of that locker room was felt by Brown after the tragic suicide of his friend Trevin Steede. Brown found the will to play against the NBA champions, the Golden State Warriors, the night after Steedes death and he inspired the Celtics to a memorable victory by scoring the most points [22] while producing tenacious defence. After the game Kyrie Irving, the Celticss superstar, gave Brown the ball and said: This ones for Trevin.

Before they played again, in Atlanta, where Steedes family live, Brown visited his friends mother and other grieving relatives. He then went out and shot a career-high 27 points. Im so thankful for the people around me. They lifted me up. I dont know what my mental state would be right now without them.

I met Trevin when I moved to Wheeler which is a big basketball school in Marietta, Georgia. Trevin was a year older so he was a sophomore and I was a freshman. They brought me in and there was only one spot left on the team and it was between me and him. They gave it to me.

I didnt know anybody when I first got there so at lunch in the first week Id eat by myself acting like Im on my phone. Trevin came up to me after the third day. Id seen him in workouts but I didnt really know him. He said, Man, come sit over here with us. Ever since then, we were best friends.

How did he hear about Trevins death? His mom called me. Im thinking shes just checking on me or saying hi. But she called to tell me hes passed.

Brown looks down and his hurt is obvious. He also admits he needed the support of Steedes mother to face Golden State. I probably wouldnt have played unless she called me. Brad Stevens [the Celtics coach] asked how I was doing. I told him, I dont think Im able to come in today. He said: Thats fine. Take your time. Three seconds after I hung up, Trevins mom called. I told her I wasnt doing well and I probably wasnt going to play that night. She said: You know thats not what I want and thats not what Trevin would have wanted. So if you can find it in your heart to go out and play for him, do it.

Did he play in a daze, or was he inspired by Trevin to help Celtics win? I didnt feel anything. It was like I was out there by myself.

The chance to play in London lifts his mood. I visited London for the first time last summer. It was great. I went to see Big Ben because one of my idols is Benjamin Banneker [the African American scientist who, among other achievements, worked with striking clocks in the 18th century].

This week Brown would like to hear more grime and to see Arsenal. I like Barcelona because of the players theyve had traditionally from Ronaldinho to Messi. I really like Arsenal too. I like their tradition, and their diehard fans. I hope to see them in London. I think Thierry Henry is going to be there so Ill just hit him up and see if I can get some access to the [stadium] tour, get some shots on the field. Last summer I became really close with Thierry. I got to talk to him and we keep up with each other and he gives me advice about sports and life. Hes one of the all-time greats.

At the Celtics training facility, on the outskirts of Boston, Brown rises to his full 6ft 7in. He looks around the empty court before turning back with a smile when I say weve covered a lot of ground from the mysteries of water for two young fish and the enduring problems of race in America to the impact of learning and the pleasure of following sport around the world. Yeah, Brown says softly, stretching out his hand, thats the way I like it.

The NBA London Game 2018 sees the Philadelphia 76ers host Boston Celtics at The O2 on 11 January. The game will also be live on BT Sport and NBA League Pass.

Sign up to our weekly email, The Recap, here, showcasing a selection of our sport features from the past seven days.

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2018/jan/09/jaylen-brown-boston-celtics-nba-interview

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[howlofwinter]

Why I left the band

1) Issues with IRL meetups and schedule. This was before lockdown mind you throughout 2019. X basically couldn't reliably leave his house for practise, nor guarantee gigs even in our town. We turned down a gig that was in the next town which at the time me and Y hated. Meanwhile Y was technically living in a different city (something he did without consulting us) and while he was in town for three days a week he wasn’t a “free agent” who could do sessions whenever. He could normally only do one evening session. It just seemed very impractical to be a band that couldn’t meet to write, rehearse etc. At the same time X and Y were both adamant that it was totally fine and it still could work. While I felt there was a big disconnect between what they said that wanted to be as a band and their actual ability to meetup. Our last gig I had to basically beg for more rehearsal time because I’d barely played through the song with the band all the way through with all my parts written. There was also this idea that we could be “an internet band” where meeting was more of an additional activity, rather than a primary way of exchanging ideas. I really hated this idea. I can see it working for some, especially electronic acts etc. But we weren’t good at working in our own time and this was something before 2019 that we had highlighted a lot. Additionally my mac was pretty slow and we’d all need the same plugins for it work smoothly and I was confident that my mac wouldn’t keep up. Much of making music together is being in the room and exchanging ideas on the fly. Trying things again but in different ways. Change the chord scheme, change the dynamics, change the bassline etc. This new method only allows us to use recorded ideas. I was very close to leaving in 2019 because of this schedule issue. I even wrote an angsty email to our acting manager about it. They just didn’t seem to want to be in it anymore in terms of dedicating time. 2) It became too metal. And creative differences. I wrote about 10 tracks that just was never used. At a certain point when your input is rebuffed and denied - it stops feeling like a band you are equally a part of. X and Y wrote songs that we didn’t work on too, and so this wasn’t unique, but I felt like I didn't have anything to offer that they were really interested in. Even stuff I was proud of and very happy with, they didn't want to appropriate it or rework it etc. While some of the finished tracks weren’t really my style to begin with I still wanted to work on other people’s ideas. I felt like this wasn’t returned to me. It was less about them rejecting a certain amount of my ideas, and more that I felt like I wasn’t really of use to the creative process. Why would I want to stay in a band where my output isn’t valued. 3) Intrusive thoughts. I found it difficult hearing about Y’s girlfriend (Z) all the time and I was having intrusive thoughts related to that whole saga. We would be in session talking about this and that and my brain would be elsewhere. I had desires to lash out verbally at Y all the time and answer questions sarcastically  turning unrelated questions back on to Y about the Z saga. So yeah this really tipped the scales from being unsure about whether it was the right band - to knowing that it wasn’t for me anymore. I told X about this and how I didn’t want to do this anymore and he basically encouraged me to quit now rather than later as it would be easier for them. And so that was that - I left. I still feel awkward with Y now, and I feel like our friendship was strained too far because of what he did. Time and distance seemed like the only thing that would repair things. I’d already given it a year and things weren’t getting better so I don’t regret leaving when I did. 4) Those are the primary reasons. Here are some additional things that were bothersome but weren’t direct reasons I left - more observations/concerns. I just want to write them to get them out of my system. i - Money. I didn’t have money to actually invest in studio time. While X was very kind to offer to pay it for me, it would probably cause issues later down the line. Studio time is vital, as is money to tour. I didn’t have that money so I didn’t see how I could stay. ii - Ability. We started writing a couple of tracks that I couldn’t play, and much like my other band that I left, rather than simplifying it - I was just expected to get better. I learnt one of them but the other one I never got.  iii - Fashion. We had lots of discussions where X would try and show things he wanted me to wear on stage. I felt like I was being told to pretend to be someone I’m not and I really didn’t like the ideas and style he was interested in. Skinny jeans and black tshirts. I felt like it was quite generic and boring. Our acting manager gave other ideas like “be aggressive, bold, memorable” which I could understand a lot more. Regardless there were lots of gigs we did where I didn’t like what other members wore. I think we had clear differences in what stage wear is and what the aesthetic we wanted to have. iv - No replacement member. We never replaced our original guitarist. We didn’t really want to in a creative sense, but it limited what we could actually perform. Compositions needed to work within 4 tracks (guitar/drums/bass/vocals) or they were essentially a waste of time. When we did want to find a replacement it proved too difficult. We had three suitable candidates and none could sing. v - Direction. When we identified our scheduling issues in 2019, my idea was to take gigging off the table and to simply write an album of ideas that we were happy with. However once we finished working on our two new ideas, immediately there was desire to record it. X argued that it would avoid us fading into obscurity. And while I saw the logic behind it, if we knew we couldn’t gig, why were we investing into a product that couldn’t be sold. Spotify is great, but it doesn’t actually pay anything (at least in our case). This was a huge investment and I wasn’t that hot on the songs in question so I had two strong motives to disagree. But to make matters worst I really disliked the sound of the producer we decided to get into contact with - but I had no alternative option. When I heard a work in progress bounce of the song they’d worked on with the producer - I felt like it was so removed from the band I once was in, despite working on said song only a few months ago. This was positive to me because it showed that leaving was the right thing to do and that even if I had stayed that I wouldn’t be happy with our newest song/product/investment. vi - Gigs with bad pay. I will make a separate post about this because it really was infuriating. Selling out a gig as the headliners, and making £60 just felt like a robbery. Most venues took either ALL the money from tickets and drinks, or they gave you £1 or £2 per ticket while keeping the remainder. If you bring 60 people to a gig, and they all buy 3 drinks, you’ve made that venue (roughly) £900 on drinks. Assuming they make £5 per ticket thats another £300 (£1200 total). Of course that's not direct profit and I don’t claim to understand the finances of venues. But when you’re the reason that people left their home to come to the venue - why do we get £60 for 60 tickets and you get £1200. And that was a best case scenario. Most venues didn’t pay us anything. Some would offer us fuel money at most. But what could we do. We needed to perform and none of us knew how to negotiate better deals. But it did feel awful to do everything right and to put on a good show for a bunch of people and have nothing to show for it. vii - Y’s poor communication and poor planning. This was something that we did address from time to time but still was annoying. There were a couple of times where he left the country entirely and only told us about it once he’d left. One event that made me quite angry was when we spent a few hundred pounds on a video which required us to perform to a metronome. We knew this before we booked it. Our acting manager additionally reminded us. The video editor told us about it. On the day he didn’t use it because he thought it was more important to have an MP3 play off his phone for our intro - than use a metronome for the video. Yet he never thought of mentioning this to us and we didn’t know until the video editor told us. The video isn’t great, and I attribute that entirely to the lack of metronome. I wouldn’t care that much if it was a free video, but it cost us a lot of money and it was essentially a huge waste of both the money and the opportunity. There was also just the way we’d start a session, get things rolling and he’d suddenly go and cook dinner. Sometimes this was only 10 minutes and it wasn’t a big deal. Other times he would cook stuff from scratch. When he had Z round he would spend time speaking to her every time we walked past the room. It wasn’t uncommon for our sessions to have 30 minutes cut out of them where he was eating. I have no problem with having a break but at moments it felt like he was wasting my time and it wasn’t something he was committed to. Another thing is while Y is a fantastic musician, it was very obvious when he hadn’t been practising at all because his tempos would be incredibly sloppy. There was only so many times I could bring this up without being rude so at some point I just stopped. viii - No photographer. We asked so many different people to take photos of us. We even payed one of them. They almost never came out good. This made our achievements go largely undocumented. To me it was always really clear that our image of being a band is more important than actually doing the ground work - but again we never fixed the issue. There are little to no images of us even playing in our home town. As far as our facebook page is concerned we hardly did any gigs ix - Time required per song. It became very obvious from an early point that we were slow at writing songs. We were together for about 5 years or so, and in that time we gigged maybe 12 songs. Before almost every gig we’d talk about how it was ridiculous and how we should write more and stop being fussy. But actually putting that into practise never happened and it became increasingly obvious that our creative process was hurting our own momentum. While I think we were all happy with the work we did together, you can only do the same gig so many times. This was made even worse by point 2. There was plenty of ideas to work on. But instead people would write new ideas, that were very often deemed unfitting for us as a group. So on one hand we have a large amount of raw creative output and potential songs, but on the other hand we have very few finished ideas or even ideas deemed worthy to complete and as time went on this was a theme of the band. In reflection I just wish people worked on other people’s ideas more rather than writing it off without even trying to rearrange it. x- Style and writing method change. I did mention this with the second point but just to go into more detail. The project started as a progressive rock act. Our goal was to write interesting rock music with meaningful lyrics. We would work on songs by improvising entirely, or working on chord schemes and ideas would slowly evolve over time. We would add our own parts/layers individually and it was very fluid with sections being added and tweaked over time. But conversely this meant songs were somewhat up in the air for a while and it was hard to judge the merits of a project - meaning time could be invested into a project for no pay out. At a certain point X decided that it would be better if we brought more finished ideas to sessions and then allowed the band to appropriate them and I agreed. But in hindsight I think it was stupid to commit to this being the only viable way. While it was easy for people to play along to other people’s ideas and make a song in the process, it was slightly different when the bulk of song is done and you are required to learn their parts. or re work their parts, or rework their song. X would bring songs in their entirety and I guess it was often hard to see them as something I wanted to invest time into adapting to our own tastes. Even on the ideas that made it - usually sections got boycotted and new ones had to be created. So the writing process moved out of the rehearsal room where we each commit our own parts - into DAWs and people coming up with their own songs - only for us to delete most of that song and write new parts and sections. So did it save time? I doubt it. While there were tracks where this method worked out well, I know our former member felt like they couldn’t contribute with this writing style and I suppose I agree somewhat. The entire point of being in a band is to collaborate. I hate to think about how much time was spent collectively - working on entire songs on our own, just for the rest of the band to veto the project. In terms of batting averages, Im certain that even X had more projects that were discarded by the band than they were used. An interesting question is would these ideas have been veto’d if they were brought to the band without being “finished” by solo members. On a similar note to this is X’s prevalence in creative control. Generally I enjoyed working with X and I have no hard feelings towards him. But something that our departed member mentioned (W for now) is that the the longer X was in the band the more more control X had, the more control X had the more things turned away from making prog rock, and more into metal. And thus, W and to a certain extend myself felt alienated and that our ideas weren’t fitting with the bands image. But really it was X’s image of the band that we weren’t fitting. While we were happy to go along with his ideas, he often didn’t return the favour.  To some degree I think everyone should be able to say that they don’t like a song, and to be able to veto an idea if they really don’t like it or see its merits. But by the end of my time in the band we had so many veto’d ideas that it was ridiculous Something Y suggested was that we stop veto’ing ideas on work on songs we don’t really like that much so that we have content. To diversify the band’s style. But again X didn’t want to actually do this. I think ultimately X wanted something different out of the band than I did (and that W did). While I don’t mind doing some more metal esque songs, there has to be balance. And overall there really wasn’t. Now that I’m outside of the band, I can see that very clearly. Looking in iTunes I have the bounces where I spent time working on my own ideas that weren’t used. There was about four ideas that I worked on with Y that we liked and we wanted to use but ultimately they were shelved because they weren’t metal. And what makes this even more frustrating is that we even cited that we needed more variety in our songs in terms of mood and atmosphere. That a good set can’t all be aggressive. That actually downtime, and calmer tracks would make the more aggressive tracks stand out and be more effective. But this was never achieved. Unfortunately I do think X is largely to blame for that. If I give you a song and you don’t like that song, how can I change that song so that you do like it. Really that work has to come from you.

[kiks416]

I’m back and there’s so much to tell! I’ve already been a mother for a month and as surreal as that sounds each time I type it up, it’s been an amazing experience thus far.

So, where do I start? Let’s start at the beginning. I promise that I’ll be tying all of this back to diabetes in one way or another, because we all know, you can take the diabetes off the mind for a bit, but you can’t take it away from the body. Womp!

I was supposed to be induced on August 3 at 8 a.m. However, it seemed that the baby didn’t want to wait that long, breaking my water on the morning of August 2, starting at 6 a.m. I say starting because it began as a slow trickle, not exactly breaking until I sat in the wheel chair at the hospital. There I went, wet and embarrassed, into labor and delivery, expecting things to go as planned… but do they ever?

Before I continue, let me just say, I really wanted a vaginal birth. I don’t know why I had my heart set on it. Maybe because I wanted to do it the “right” way or because that’s how it is “supposed to be”, but I really can’t tell you why.

So they started the induction. I started having strong contractions and in they came to check my progress every 2-4 hours. I had an epidural put in on Friday night after almost a whole day of contractions and very little dilation. I was so exhausted and decided to get the epidural so I could get some rest in case baby decided to come overnight.

The day Luna was born.

Daddy and Luna on the couch.

Let me add something here. I managed my own blood sugar this whole time. On Friday, I was still allowed to eat, only because I wasn’t in active labor. During the early morning on Saturday, they told me that from then on, I could only have ice chips. No more food. Through this time, my sugars had been really good and stable. They weren’t even checking my sugar anymore, but relying on my sensor, which was pretty awesome.

The funny thing is that with each nurse, I would talk about my pump and answer questions about my sensor. They hadn’t seen this in action.

Since I wasn’t eating, my sugar started dropping on Saturday. I drank apple juice to get it back up. This happened twice before I had residents come in to tell me that if it dropped below 70 again, they’d have to give me D5 or dextrose in my IV. I didn’t want that. I didn’t care what percentage of it was sugar, I didn’t want anyone managing my diabetes besides myself. I called my endo to ask about this, to which he responded to watch my sugars. If they had to give me D5, he said to tell them to shut it off, if I saw my sugars going too high. After having that discussion, my sugars never again dropped below 70. Lucky me!

Saturday didn’t get any easier for me and my labor. On the upside, the my gynecologist that I had been seeing for years, who transferred my care over to the MFM (high risk doctor), was on call all of Saturday for a 24 hour shift. It made me feel secure to know she was there because she was going to look out for my best interests.

They started me on pitocin again (because they had stopped when they had given me a pill to thin out my cervix), so the contractions came on strong even though they weren’t giving me a high dosage like they did on Friday. I later came to find out that my doctor was upset that they weren’t giving me higher dosages to bring on active labor faster.

They came in every few hours to check my dilation; I was immobile due to the epidural at this point. That check was probably the worst thing I’ve ever felt in my life, next to getting a catheter put in. And I wasn’t progressing fast enough. They knew I wanted to have a vaginal birth — and in my head, I wanted it because I’d heal faster, it would be “normal” and I didn’t want to be a stereotype, especially after hearing, “all diabetics have c-sections.” But over the second night in pain and watching the hours go by, I told my husband, “If they come in and say that I haven’t progressed at all, let’s just do the c-section.” At this point I was going on 2 days of labor and I was ready to meet my child.

At 6 a.m. on Sunday morning, the doctors came in again and checked me out. I had progressed to six centimeters dilation, but that was as far as I’d go. Not even an hour later, my doctor came in and told me that I gave it the old college try, but it had been long enough. Even though the baby was taking the drugs and all this stuff like a champ, we were going to have to get her out via c-section. I said OK, and they prepped me for surgery.

During the surgery, I was awake the whole time. Luna was born at 8:42 a.m. on Sunday, 50 hours after my water had broken and I was so happy and relieved to have my little girl. I sobbed on the table along with my husband and I watched as they put her in his arms. She was so tiny and beautiful — I’ll never forget that moment when I first saw her.

Because I felt like I was going to vomit through the surgery, they gave me steroids, bumping up my BG to 150. The anesthesiologist said it right away when I checked my sugar wondering why I had gone up “so high.”

While I was in the hospital, it was so weird that nurses were so interested in my pump. I guess it wasn’t something that they saw very often. During my labor, one nurse told me that she had one patient with a pump years ago, so was fascinated by how technology had advanced. Another nurse asked me to see my site and how the pump was attached to me. Other just asked questions as to how it worked with the sensor and transmitter and things, but overall, I was appalled. You’d think, being in a hospital, that they’d know a little more than they did. Guess not.

After a three days in the hospital and going through tests, pill popping and lots of talks with lots of doctors, they let us go home to be a family.

The last few weeks have been surreal. I’m loving being a mother, even during those midnight feedings and diaper changes. I love washing her clothes, giving her baths and smelling her, but I’m also missing my work and hobbies, hence my desire to write this blog.

I’ve pulled out a book I bought myself to read. I’ve used my planner to organize my thoughts. I have a plan for feedings and pumping (motherly things). I have ideas on how to start writing and keeping up websites and blogs. I’ve enjoyed walks and spending a TON of time with family.

I’ve taken a short break from my CGM because it started acting up, luckily AFTER I had Luna. The instantaneous drop in insulin needs is wild. The next day I was back to normal basal rates. Although many women say that breastfeeding drops blood sugar, I wouldn’t say that it’s dropping as much as staying pretty steady. My endo told me not to neglect myself, which is very easy to do with the little one. However, my support system is awesome because not only do they help to take care of the baby, but they’ve also been here to take care of me — making sure I eat, have time to shower and time to take naps if Luna won’t let me.

It’s definitely a lot to get used to, but all in all, I wouldn’t change it for the world.

I’ve been a mom for a month! I'm back and there's so much to tell! I've already been a mother for a month and as surreal as that sounds each time I type it up, it's been an amazing experience thus far.

[muachronicle]

Female Founded: Tech & Tools

Welcome to Part IV (the finale) of the Female Founded Series!

We’ve now taken you into the lives of haircare, skincare, and makeup companies that were founded and are run by women. I am so excited to share the last installment of this series with you but I am also sad it’s over! Perhaps I’ll revisit the series when there are more female moguls in the beauty space!

The last post of the series is dedicated to the women who created beauty tools, whether hair, skin, or otherwise.

Immediately, it’s noticeable that this list has slightly less products and content than the others in this series, which I must say is disappointing to me. While makeup and skincare is highly personal and may not apply to everyone, beauty tools are universal. Whether it is a face roller to improve skin elasticity or an eyeshadow brush, everyone can find a way to incorporate beauty tools and tech into their lives. The price points of these products are also going to vary much more than the posts prior. The reason for this is that, just like a pen versus a computer, a moisturizer versus an LED device is going to have a different price point.

I have combed (pun intended) through the tools on the market to handpick those that stand on their integrity. So while they may be pricey, just know that they will give you results for years and it’s an investment that might be worth making. That being said, there are products in this post that are under $20!

Here is a highlight of female beauty tech and tool founders, their journeys, their brands, and their product darlings.

This list is by no means inflexible or exhaustive - companies are always changing leadership or new brands are being founded. If there’s a female-founded brand you love that hasn’t been mentioned, comment below!

* product photos courtesy of respective brands.

Dermaflash

Founded by: Dara Levy

Women have been shaving their faces for centuries as a form of exfoliation and a way to take off their peach fuzz. Before Dermaflash there were two options: a surgical grade blade (a scalpel) or some cheap disposable straight razors. Then came Dara Levy and now women can invest in dermatologist level results in their own home. Let’s dispel something right now - the hair on your face is vellus hair, which will not grow back thicker or darker, and the hair on your head and body is terminal hair, which will.

Dara knows this more than anyone, having started Dermaflash as the name of the dermaplaning treatment she was doing in her medspa in Chicago. She became locally know for the results she could deliver from this exfoliation treatment. When she was thinking of what her skincare line would include she realized that Dermaflash was what needed to be accessible, not another lotion or potion in an over-saturated market. She knew that she could deliver medspa levels of results in dermaplaning to everyone at home through an easy to use device.

Upon launching in the late summer of 2016, Dermaflash crushed its sales on QVC - selling 30,000 in less than 24 hours. Dara isn’t just riding the wave of her success, she is consistently reinventing her product and introducing new versions. This is the primary difference between the models - the amount of speeds that the blades utilize and the option to choose which speed you want when.

NuFace

Founded by: Carol Cole, Tera Peterson, Kim Morales

Carol was an aethetician in the Golden Door Spa in California when she kept hearing the same concerns of skin feeling saggy and tired. She began utilizing micro-current therapy in her treatments and traveling to Los Angeles to provide her services in Hollywood. In 2005 she launched the NuFace system with her daughters Tera (also an aesthetician) and Kim. The goal was to deliver the firming and revitalizing results of micro-currents to people’s homes so they could achieve these results on their own time and their own dime (aka no more derm or spa visits).

NuFace started as a device to massage the face for a more firm and lifted look to the skin. It’s the closest you can get to a facelift without the scalpels and the price tag. The brand has since expanded to a travel version, a body version, and a targeted device to attack crow’s feet and marionette lines. The brand is manufactured by the Carol Cole Company - talk about mega-boss. Tera is the currently CEO and works with her mother, sister, and ever expanding team to continue to propel NuFace into the future.

On a personal note: when I worked at Bloomingdales, the Space NK fixture on the floor got NuFace products in to sell. My friends at the counter gave me a demo with the device and the results were NO joke. I immediately saw my face lift and brighten. The price tag is a bit up there for some but if you can invest in one skincare product, this is the one I recommend. I am saving up to get it for myself.

Drybar

Founded by: Alli Webb

Alli is the only founder to appear on the list twice. She was in featured in the hair founder post but I thought it was important to feature her in the tools post, as well. That’s because she didn’t introduce a hair product to her hair tool line or a tool into her haircare line just to diversify. She created a product line that was as saturated with tools as it was with product. Her goal is to give you the complete Drybar results for you to achieve at home.

While you don’t have to use the products together with the tools, Drybar makes it easy to achieve their professional results at home. Each style in the menu allows you to book an appointment for the style, shop the products for the look, and check out tutorial videos for how to use the products and tools. Check it out here. So if you live in a city where Drybar hasn’t expanded its locations to, you can follow these guides to achieve a similar sleek or glam look whenever you need it.

While most of the products in this line are pretty special, the straightening hairbrush it the real MVP. You can use it on all different hair types for a smooth and sleek look.

Beauty Blender

Founded by: Rea Ann Silva

You may know this famous hot pink product from all of the YouTubers bouncing it on their faces regularly but Rea Ann’s story is more than just a social sensation. The Los Angeles native and Latina mogul thought she would work in fashion until a job at a makeup counter changed her trajectory. She became a TV makeup artist and was the department head on the show Girlfriends (my favorite show growing up). It was her time on sets that taught her the hacks of makeup application leading to the invention of the beautyblender.

The makeup artists on set would cut makeup sponges into little egg shapes and set the makeup with a light spritz of water. This not only gave the skin a natural looking finish (even after prosthetics) but it was easy for the artists on set to carry around and touch up the actors between takes. No muss, no fuss. Rea Ann took it to the next level by manufacturing these sponges in an already produced shape - the first of its kind on the market. By manipulating the shape slightly, she was then able to expand the range to the beautyblender Pro and Nude.

As a single mom and set makeup artist, she self-funded her business and saw the payoff from it when social media and influencer culture took the reins. It’s the philosophy of always betting on herself, regardless of haters, that has allows her brand to continue to succeed in the beauty tools arena and even expand into cosmetics (the brand launched its first foundation in 2018 and currently has 40 shades).

Real Techniques

Founded by: Samantha Chapman and Nicola Chapman

I don’t know about you but I’ve been a major fan of Sam and Nic Chapman for years. The two British makeup artists (and sisters) have been in the beauty industry for decades, working with celebrities and major players in the editorial game. Then YouTube was invented and the two sisters became the first adopters to become makeup tutorial goddesses and monetize their success. That’s why, when they were approached by a beauty brand to create a makeup brush line, they knew they had to bring their professional expertise to the beauty tool industry.

Nic was pregnant for the first round of Real Techniques brushes to be tested and created so she stepped aside to focus on self-care. She rejoined Sam to help synthesize later versions and collections in the brand. Both sisters have been very vulnerable with their mental and physical health and their family lives on their social media, bringing us behind the curtain of their brand to show us what being a founder is like.

Something that Sam and Nic were adamant about was to make professional grade beauty tools accessible to all. That’s why they are sold at retailers like Target, Ulta, Kohls, and (in the UK) Boots. You can even find their heavy hitters on Amazon for you Prime babes. Prices range from $6 (beauty sponge) to $30 (a set of three brushes and a sponge).

Nurse Jamie

Founded by: Jamie Sherrill

Jamie has been a medspa expert for over two decades in two of the most glamorous cities in the world. She is the owner of Beauty Park Medical Spa in Los Angeles and Abu Dhabi. She is the go to for injectables and treatments to so many celebrities. She was featured on Huda Boss Season 1 for her expertise as a beauty founder as well as other TV programming (ahem - The Simple Life). If you aren’t able to get into one of her medspas or you are unsure about treatments that include needles, Nurse Jamie has given you a whole product range to get lifted and firm skin at home.

Her goal is always to educate and help people feel like their best selves - she’s the one that will tell you when enough filler really is enough. That’s why her products are meant to help with a variety of concerns when it comes to keeping skin firm and elastic. While skincare products may need to be tailored per person, skincare tools can pay off for everyone. This product line can transform your bathroom into a medspa.

Something to note is that some of these products will feel awkward to use at first. The oddly shaped Beauty Bear pillow is unlike anything on the market. It will take some getting used to but its purpose is to help you sleep in positions that won’t cause prolonged wrinkling to your skin. This pillow is designed for both the sleeping beauty and the toss-and-turn type sleeper with it’s multiple edges to keep your face rested in any position. Check out more info on how to use it here.

The Beachwaver

Founded by: Sarah Potempa, Emily Potempa, and Erin Potempa Wall

I’m not saying that the Potempa sisters are solely responsible for the effortless cool girl waves that have become a signature hairstyle for millions of women but I will say their brand revolutionized how we think about achieving that style.

The brand launched in 2010. Their first product was a rotating waving iron that launched in 2012. Essentially the original Beachwaver took the arm twirling out of the equation so that you could curl your hair and not your biceps. We’ve all gotten halfway through doing our hair and had to rest our weak limbs right? Just me? Well since then, the sisters have introduced various sizes of the tool and added hair accessories and products to their range.

This summer the brand has expanded their line to include six new hair products and one fragrance. Above all, The Beachwaver founders want to build a brand that’s conscientious and transparent. That’s why their products are vegan and feature phthalate-free, curbside recyclable bottles to promote and practice sustainability in the beauty industry. They are also advocates for equal pay. The Beachwaver Co. is a sponsor for the last leg of the World Surf League, who announced that starting in the 2019 season, they’ll award equal prize money in men’s and women’s competitions. With this, they have become the first United States-based global sport to make this change.

If you need any more reasons to love them, just know that these tools were responsible for the Angel waves at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show for two straight years.

Thanks for tuning in to the Female Founded series!

Let me know what other content you’d like to see.

Cover photo by Content Pixie.

[ciathyzareposts]

Game 111: Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch (1992) – Introduction

Written by Reiko

The last game I played through for the blog was Dune (let’s pretend Rome never happened), which was more or less based on the famous science fiction novel, and before that was Gateway. Up next, I have the opportunity to present another game based on a famous science fiction novel: Ringworld, by Larry Niven. I’m seeing a theme here.

Front cover of the original release.

Ringworld: Revenge of the Patriarch was released right at the end of 1992 by Tsunami Games, early in their career (they’d only just been founded in 1991 by designers originally from Sierra, according to both Wikipedia and Mobygames). One name that appears a lot in its credits is Chris Hoyt. Listed for both game design and programming, he’d already had a lot of experience before this by programming for King’s Quest IV and V and Police Quest 2 and 3, among others. Another big name was Ken Allen, who wrote the score for Ringworld’s music, after having also composed for a number of Sierra games.

So there was some talent involved with this game, which shows in its colorful graphics and detailed character and setting designs. The graphic design actually reminds me somewhat of the 1994 strategy/adventure game Alien Legacy, but it’s possible that it’s just the level of the tools available at that time.

Front cover of the CD-ROM release.

Sometime in the next year, a CD-ROM version was released (the original was on floppies), but I haven’t found much information about the differences. The CD-ROM was supposed to contain several tracks of music, but the archive.org description indicates that the tracks didn’t seem to exist on the disk, or were written in a non-standard format.

As with the other games based on science fiction novels, adapting the setting and concept to a game format meant changing the plot and characters, often significantly, or taking a completely different perspective on the plot. I haven’t read much of the original novel, but some copies of the game shipped with the book, which seems to be implying that it might be a good idea to read it. Ringworld ties in with Niven’s “Known Space” setting, in which he wrote several other books and stories, so the setting is well-developed and complex. I read up on it in preparing for this game.

Artist’s concept of the Ringworld

At any rate, I was already familiar with the concept of a “ringworld,” since that has been carried over into other science fiction settings since then, including multiple 4X space games like Stellaris. A ringworld is a huge ring-shaped structure built along an entire orbit around a star. Instead of a planet orbiting around the star, the whole structure just rotates around it.

It’s a cool concept for an alien structure in theory, but in practice, it’s completely silly. I have no idea where you’d get enough physical material to even build that large of a framework, never mind all the organic material needed to make it habitable. Niven’s Ringworld was supposedly large enough to have the surface area of millions of Earths. Even Jupiter only has the mass of 318 Earths, and quite a lot of that is gaseous, so even if you (somehow??) spread it out relatively thinly into a flat ring structure, I’m not sure you’d have enough. But “aliens did it” and that’s all you need to know, apparently. It’s the science fiction equivalent of “wizards did it.”

Title screen

After the title screen displays, we get the option to see the introduction or just start the game. The introduction starts with a credits listing, including an official credit to Larry Niven. Then we get a cutscene introducing the main conflict. So far, this game is rather plot-heavy, so I’ll do my best to summarize. Also, it feels like a sequel to an existing story, which doesn’t help. Actually, I noticed the back cover mentions Larry Niven himself saying that it’s a sequel to the first two books. So I guess we’re jumping into the middle of the story. Whee!

Back cover of the box

Let me start with the characters. The introductory cut-scene is between the Kzinti king, or Patriarch, and his trusted centurion Shachra. The Kzinti are a violent race of male-dominated felinoid aliens. Niven’s setting involves several wars between humans and Kzinti, although I don’t know exactly where in the timeline the game is set. I suspect it’s fairly late, because the first thing the Patriarch says is that he wants to destroy the Puppeteers for their audacity in using the Kzinti in a breeding experiment. Hence, “Revenge of the Patriarch.”

The Puppeteers are a very strange race which I’ll describe more later if they show up on screen, but they’re highly technologically advanced, very focused on the safety and preservation of themselves and their race, and like to meddle in other races’ social and genetic development. So the Kzinti want to destroy them because the Puppeteers deliberately instigated the wars between humans and Kzinti in order to kill off the more aggressive side of Kzinti society. (The experiment didn’t extend as far as the Patriarch yet, I guess.)

The throne room decorations look rather Aztec to me, appropriate for an aggressive race.

In the Ringworld novel, the main characters are Louis Wu and the Kzinti Speaker-to-Animals, also called Chmeee, who end up on a mission to Ringworld at the request of the Puppeteers. But the game starts off with Louis Wu’s mercenary friend Quinn and Chmeee’s son Iacch-Captain, who must find out what happened to Louis Wu and Chmeee after they mysteriously disappeared. The Patriarch mentions Louis Wu and “the traitor Chmeee” as having acquired a new and improved hyperdrive (which in the novel is a reward from the Puppeteers for escaping Ringworld), which the human government immediately used to construct a fancy new exploration vessel. I assume Chmeee is considered a traitor by the Patriarch for working together with a human.

So the Kzinti (at least the Patriarch’s faction) want to destroy the Puppeteers and strike a blow at humans as well. Somehow they’ve managed to duplicate the human exploration vessel. The Patriarch expects his centurion to captain this duplicate and accomplish three tasks: kill everyone at the Chmeee family home, find and destroy the entire Puppeteer homeworld, and take over the human ship. I had to wonder very briefly if we were supposed to be controlling this centurion, but no, I’m sure we’ll have to thwart these plans, so it’s important that the player knows about them.

I should mention that the backstory of the human-Kzinti wars isn’t all explained in this introduction. If you’re familiar with the setting, you’ll likely know it, but if not, I think it would be rather confusing being dumped into the middle of this conflict. It’s not very clear to me, either, especially when it comes to what Louis Wu and Chmeee have already done before the game even started.

Quinn’s motivation for being here

Gameplay begins at the Chmeee family home with Louis Wu’s mercenary friend Quinn, who is over 200 years old, thanks to something called “boosterspice” (presumably no connection to Dune’s spice), which halts aging for a period of years. Louis Wu was 200 at the beginning of the original Ringworld novel, too. Quinn muses briefly about how Louis Wu is the only one who would have the foresight to send a “just in case I disappear” message before he actually disappears. Convenient, that. So Louis Wu has disappeared and Quinn has to track him down.

Now I have to pause for a minute to show the interface. It’s more or less a tidy reskin of the familiar Sierra interface, with a few subtle differences that make it slightly more awkward to use. The right-click button will bring up the menu in a compact triangular-ish design right on screen, rather than in a menu bar at the top. The top button is the look action; the next two are move/walk and use/touch. Bottom left is talk, bottom middle is inventory, and bottom right brings up the utility menu, including save and quit.

Interface with initial inventory

It’s all pretty standard for adventure games of this era, really. Very intuitive. Except that, with the exception of look (and move), the other actions (touch, talk, and using an inventory item) all shift back to the default move cursor after you click on something. That means that, as far as I can tell, you can’t try using multiple things on-screen in a row without going through the menu every time. And you can’t try using an inventory item in multiple places without bringing up the item again every time.

In Sierra games, the cursor would stay on a particular mode until you shifted it with the right mouse button or clicked on a menu item. Here, the right mouse button shows you the whole menu. And the clicks aren’t as responsive as I might like. Sometimes the right-click doesn’t work right away, and sometimes I right-click and end up with the wrong menu option selected.

The entrance to the Chmeee family home

I mention these interface difficulties because I’m a little worried that there might be a bit of pixel-hunting. The first gameplay screen shows Quinn outside the front doorway of the Chmeee family home. The door is blocked with a laser doorbell system. The laser is only a couple of pixel-widths high. It took me an embarrassingly long time to determine that to proceed, all I had to do was touch the laser to block it, which basically rang the doorbell and alerted the family that they had a visitor.

Quinn’s inventory starts out with three items: a stunner weapon, some kind of scanner, and a signet ring from Louis Wu. I spent far too long trying to scan that laser before I figured out how to trigger it.

I’ll pause here, with Quinn having gotten the attention of the Kzinti in the home. Next time, the plot will thicken and we’ll have to make a run for it.

Ringworld can be played from archive.org or downloaded and played through DOSBox if you’d like to play along with me.

Note Regarding Spoilers and Companion Assist Points: There’s a set of rules regarding spoilers and companion assist points. Please read it here before making any comments that could be considered a spoiler in any way. The short of it is that no CAPs will be given for hints or spoilers given in advance of me requiring one. As this is an introduction post, it’s an opportunity for readers to bet 10 CAPs (only if they already have them) that I won’t be able to solve a puzzle without putting in an official Request for Assistance: remember to use ROT13 for betting. If you get it right, you will be rewarded with X CAPs in return. It’s also your chance to predict what the final rating will be for the game. Voters can predict whatever score they want, regardless of whether someone else has already chosen it. All correct (or nearest) votes will go into a draw.

source http://reposts.ciathyza.com/game-111-ringworld-revenge-of-the-patriarch-1992-introduction/

[phawareglobal]

Maleen Fischer - phaware® interview 191

At the age of three, Maleen Fischer was diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension and, as there was no treatment for this fatal disease at the time in Austria, doctors sent her home. Her life expectancy was only a few years. Now, 20 years later, Maleen discusses early diagnosis, the joy of graduating college and the importance of global awareness.

My name is Maleen Fischer. I'm from Vienna, Austria. When I was very little, my mom, early on, she noticed when she was breastfeeding me - she just described it as thinking that I was out of breath, and she kind of from the get go, after I was born, she knew something was up. We hurried from doctor to doctor until I was diagnosed (with idiopathic pulmonary hypertension) when I was around three years old.

Back in Vienna, at that time, nobody really knew what to do with somebody with that diagnosis, and so they would just kind of say, “Well, you would have to see how it goes,” but they did not give me a very long life expectancy. My father, as determined as he is, and was specifically at that time, he found a very good hospital in New York that was working on treating pulmonary hypertension, and we went there, and we met with a wonderful doctor (Robyn J. Barst, MD) that has since passed away, unfortunately. She put me on an IV treatment that I'm still on to this day.

Now I'm 23 years old, my birthday was in May. I'm doing very well, so I can be very thankful for my family who really didn't want to give up. Now, when I still think back to New York, it's a very hate/love kind of relationship to just think back to that time.  On one hand, it's a beautiful city, and I was always so impressed with everything. My parents, obviously, also tried to make it a great time, always. And, on the other hand, having the doctor's visits, being put on a pump, on an IV system, and I just remember when we were picking out the first bags and backpacks to put the pump in. This kind of journey, to kind of adapt to a whole new lifestyle.

I find myself, in this situation, very lucky that I was diagnosed so early on, so I could get used to this lifestyle for many years. I would assume it's very difficult to be diagnosed at a much later age. I must say I'm very lucky, I've always had friends that were really respecting and accepting of the whole situation. My neighbor, we kind of grew up together, and she knew me even before the pump, as little babies.

I did not go to Kindergarten. I was homeschooled throughout those years and then all the way to high school. And then, what I did in high school was I went, for the first time, into a real school, because with pulmonary hypertension we take into account how many steps we walk during school, and also how young the children are and how understanding they are of not ripping away a backpack. When high school time came around we said, ��Okay, this would be the time where we could try out to actually go to a school." I went to a very small school in Florida, and it was completely flat, so no stairs and a very small amount of students. This was the first time I was actually in high school and experiencing other teenagers. It was kind of funny because it really incorporated all the high school drama, first boyfriend love story, whatever, in a very short amount of time. I actually felt very normal during that time, I have to say.

When I was diagnosed, this disease was not known, and so my dad and I, we really did a lot of awareness work; and it started just right after I was put on that pump. We did all types of newspaper reports on it, or documentations. Always my goal was to really get the word out there about this disease, because during our time of working in awareness, we've had so many stories of people coming to us saying, “Because of you, because I saw this show, or because I saw this report, or this news article, I went to the doctor and I actually have pulmonary hypertension”.

When I went into my teenage years I thought, “What can I really do to kind of emphasize that even more? What could give people hope at the same time as kind of give other people a perspective of what pulmonary hypertension really means, and what it does to a life?” From the good parts to the bad parts. That, in the end, was essentially how I ended up writing a book. It really also shows my journey as a person, because the book changed drastically when a few certain situations happened within those, let's say two and a half to three years I was working on it. When it started out, I was speaking about how it was like to go to New York, being put on this medication, living with this medication, going through high school with this medication.

I believe it was in my last year of high school, I had an extremely bad case of an appendicitis and it was overlooked. I can't really figure out, or can't remember the medical term for it, but I had an abnormal appendix so you could not see it on an X-ray and I was sent home with antibiotics, and a day later my appendix ruptured. I was intubated, which we all know is really bad for pulmonary hypertension patients, anybody but specifically us. I was just doing really bad. I barely remember that time, to be honest. I had a sepsis, of course, multiple blood transfusions. This was a time where, of course, throughout my lifetime there was always a lot of uncertainty; but at this point you could really feel, “Okay, I am definitely not invincible, and things happen and things can get really bad.”

I somehow recovered from that, and then, what you have afterwards, the effects, trying to bring your saturation up again, trying to be able to breathe comfortably and with enough saturation, without oxygen masks and the compression masks. And this was really the turning point where I figured, “Okay, this is where I add on to the book, and this is also my way of coping.”

After I finished high school in Florida, and I also did my tests and certifications in Austria, then I looked at colleges. I looked at options that I had, and I wanted to stay in Vienna just because I had a good net of doctors here, and I felt very comfortable here also with my friends and family, and so I found a great college here. This was also the first time that I was a little more detached from my parents. It felt very nice. I know a lot of people say that college is the best time of your life. I don't know about that exactly, but it certainly was a wonderful time and I met so many great people.

It had the same effect to me as high school did, a little bit. It made me feel very normal. In between that, I had some issues with my condition and with the pump, all sorts of things, random things you can think about; but then I also had normal problems like studying for tests, or just mundane things that you really appreciate more, I feel like.

In May, I had my graduation. I was very happy I could graduate with a lot of my friends, actually. My best friend that I had known also still before the pump, and she has a very similar name as mine, it's Marlene, and mine is Maleen, so people would always just call us “M&Ms” instead of having to say the whole name. It was very nice because we would joke around as kids that we would graduate from the same college, and we did. We ended up doing that, and it never even seemed like that was an option.

I worked very hard for those four years, I was very ambitious, and I figured, “If you go on this journey, you're going to college, you might as well just try your best.” Generally, I have this type of personality that I just need to at least try as much as I can in order to feel like, “Okay, if I give it my all if it doesn't work out then I guess it wasn't meant to be.” Luckily, it was good. I graduated with high honors and we had just a great time graduating all together and it was a really, really nice experience. I smile back just thinking about it, and I'm really also just going to miss the whole experience, but I think grad school is definitely going to be a new chapter. Also, at one point, I want to hopefully be working more. I'm looking forward to that.

The advice I would have for somebody that would be newly diagnosed, walking out of a doctor's office, I would say sometimes not everything that doctors tell you has to be taken exactly word for word. Prove them wrong, and so if you get a bad diagnosis you don't have to take it as it is. Don't put your life to a complete stop. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't take the time a little bit to figure out what to do next, but keep going with the things that you want to do. Not everything might still be an option for you, but there are things that you can still do.

Everybody has so many choices in life. That's a beautiful thing about life. You have so many choices, and if one thing doesn't work out, it doesn't mean that that is the only thing you need to limit yourself to. You can find an alternative. Just go for it, and do it, because even if you feel bad sometimes, that success, or sometimes just doing something that makes you happy, it will make you feel better.

It's always so important to create awareness, and awareness does not need to be going on national television or doing crazy things. You can just simply, honestly tell people that you meet about this disease. Bring it to the attention of other people, and that can already make a difference. That will also make it easier for them to understand, because people are just naturally curious.

And, the second thing would be, if you find yourself in a hole or you think that something's wrong with you because you're just super depressed and other people that you see are coping with the disease so well... It's like Instagram, honestly, most of the time you see really positive things about other people, and even people that have been diagnosed will maybe just tell you the positive things, or tell you that they're coping well.  If people feel like they're not doing well just because sometimes they're depressed or sometimes they don't really know what to do anymore because of the disease, I think everybody feels like that every now and then. Just never feel like an outsider because of that.

My name is Maleen Fischer, and I'm aware that I'm rare. 

Learn more about pulmonary hypertension at www.phaware365.global. Never miss an episode with the phaware® podcast app. Follow us @phaware on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube & Linkedin Engage for a cure: www.phaware.global/donate #phaware 

Listen and View more on the official phaware™ podcast site

[iyarpage]

tvOS Apprentice Updated for Swift 4 and tvOS 11

Happy Monday – it’s book release day during the iOS 11 Launch Party!

This Monday’s book release is the tvOS Apprentice, Third Edition.

The tvOS Apprentice teaches you everything you need to know to develop great apps for the Apple TV – whether you’re a seasoned iOS pro, or a web developer looking to leverage your skills to a new platform.

The book team has been working hard to bring this book fully up to date for Swift 4 and tvOS 11.

This will be a free update for existing tvOS Apprentice PDF customers — our way to say “thanks” to our readers for their support!

Don’t own the tvOS Apprentice yet? Read on to see how you can get a copy!

What is the tvOS Apprentice?

The book covers both of the ways you can make tvOS apps:

TVML apps: The first way to make apps is via TVML and TVJS – a new markup language and programming language created specifically for tvOS apps. Web developers will rejoice, and even native iOS developers will discover this is quite powerful, and can save a lot of development time.

Traditional apps: The second way to make apps is the traditional approach – coding apps in Swift or Objective-C, using frameworks from iOS like UIKit, AVFoundation, StoreKit, and more. iOS developers will discover this leverages your existing expertise and code, and allows you to make a fully custom user interface.

This book is a whopping 27 chapters and 536 pages, covering all aspects of tvOS development from beginner to advanced. Here’s what’s inside.

Section I: Architecture

This section contains just one chapter, designed to give you a birds-eye view of how tvOS works and help you decide what to read next.

Chapter 1, Architecture: The architecture chapter is the introduction to the technology behind Apple TV apps. This chapter will be your guide to help you decide your path through the rest of the book.

Section II: TVML Apps

This section covers the basics for creating an app via the TVML approach. From the basics of Hello World through a real world example, by the end of this section you’ll know everything you need to create client / server apps for Apple TV.

Chapter 2, Hello, TVML: Shows you how to set up a basic Hello World app using TVML and Javascript.

Chapter 3, Beginning TVML: You’ll use basic TVML templates to manipulate the UI in a simple application.

Chapter 4, Intermediate TVML: Building off of chapter 3, you’ll learn more complicated interfaces and templates.

Chapter 5, TVJS: Start working in Javascript and learn to manipulate the TVML DOM.

Chapter 6, Exploiting Native Functionality from TVML: Learn how to take advantage of native libraries and integrate them with your TVML app.

Section III: Traditional Apps

This section covers the basics for creating apps via the traditional approach. You’ll learn the new libraries created for Apple TV, and how the ported libraries from iOS can be used.

Chapter 7, Hello, Traditional App: Learn how to set up a basic “Hello World” app using native libraries in Swift.

Chapter 8, Basic Controls: Learn the basic controls your users can use to interact with your apps.

Chapter 9, Stack Views: Stack Views are the backbone to the layout of your app – learn how to use them here.

Chapter 10, Collection Views: See how easy it is to display a list of items in an engaging layout.

Chapter 11, Navigation: Learn how to set up different forms of screen to screen navigation.

Chapter 12, Focus: Apple TV uses a whole new Focus paradigm to show the user what control is currently selected – learn how this works and what it means for your apps.

Chapter 13, Animation: Get ready to add some delightful animation to your tvOS apps.

Section IV: Advanced Frameworks

This section covers some of the more advanced frameworks you’ll need for many TV app use cases. Whether you took the TVML approach or the Traditional approach, these frameworks will be important to understand to make your app stand out.

Chapter 14, User Input and the Controller: Learn how your app can interact with the new Apple TV remote.

Chapter 15, Beginning Video Playback: One of the most common requirements for Apple TV apps will be to play video – learn how to do that here.

Chapter 16, Advanced Video Playback: Learn about some of the more advanced topics in playing videos.

Chapter 17, On Demand Resources: Learn how to use Apple’s easy to use storage system, so your app can download assets on the fly.

Chapter 18, Beginning CloudKit: Learn how to use CloudKit on tvOS to store your app’s data.

Chapter 19, Advanced CloudKit: Go further in depth with CloudKit with user specific storage and error handling.

Chapter 20, In App Purchase: Monetize your app by allowing users to purchase digital goods.

(New!) Chapter 21, Photos Framework: Integrate with the user’s Photo Library and Videos.

(New!) Chapter 22, Multipeer Connectivity: Enable your Apple TV to communicate with other pieces of Apple hardware.

Chapter 23, Native UI in TVML Apps: Learn how to augment the TVML-to-UIKit engine to create custom resources, TVML tags, and styling properties.

Section V: Design

This chapter covers new design concepts introduced in tvOS. For your app to stand apart from the rest, you’ll need to understand these new design concepts well.

Chapter 24, tvOS Design: Learn how to design your apps to fit in well with the tvOS ecosystem.

Chapter 25, Creating Layered Images: Shows how to create a new kind of image specifically for the TV.

Chapter 26, The Top Shelf: The Top Shelf is a new design concept that allows your app to show off specific content – learn how to use this in your apps.

Bonus Chapter

And that’s not all – on top of the above, we have a bonus chapter for you!

Chapter 27, Javascript Crash Course: Developing TVML apps for tvOS requires some Javascript knowledge. If you’re new to Javascript, check here for a quick crash course.

About the Authors

Of course, our book would be nothing without our team of experienced and dedicated authors:

Christine Abernathy is a Developer Advocate on the Open Source team at Facebook, with previous Developer Advocacy roles with Parse and Facebook Platform. Christine has a passion for developers and mobile technologies. Prior to Facebook, Christine headed up engineering at Mshift, a mobile banking software provider, delivering Android, iOS and mobile browser-based products.

Jawwad Ahmad is an author and a technical editor of this book. Jawwad is a freelance iOS Developer that dove into Swift head first and has not looked back. He enjoys mentoring and teaching and was the original founder of the NYC iOS Study Group Meetup and later on the Atlanta iOS Study Group Meetup. He’s worked for companies as large as The New York Times, and as small as GateGuru, a 6 person startup.

Chris Belanger is the Book Team Lead and Lead Editor for raywenderlich.com. He was a developer for nearly 20 years in various fields from e-health to aerial surveillance to industrial controls. If there are words to wrangle or a paragraph to ponder, he‘s on the case. When he kicks back, you can usually find Chris with guitar in hand, looking for the nearest beach. Twitter: @crispytwit.

Eric Cerney is an author of this book. Eric is an iOS Software Engineer in San Francisco. After being acquired by Capital One, he likes to spend his days at work hanging out with Samuel L. Jackson and asking everyone “What’s in your wallet?”. Lately, his main focuses have been on Swift, gaining a deeper knowledge of programming languages at the core, and of course, the Apple TV. You can find him hiding in the shadows on Twitter at @ecerney.

Joshua Greene is an author of this book. Joshua is a passionate iOS developer who loves creating elegant apps. When he’s not slinging code, he enjoys martial arts, Netflix, and spending time with his wonderful wife and daughter. You can reach him on Twitter at @jrg_developer.

Michael Katz is an author of this book. Michael envisions a world where mobile apps always work, respect users’ privacy, and integrate well with their users’ life. When not coding, he can be found with his family playing board games, brewing, gardening, and watching the Yankees.

Kelvin Lau is an author of this book. Kelvin is a physicist turned Swift iOS Developer. While he’s currently entrenched with iOS development, he often reminisces of his aspirations to be part of the efforts in space exploration. Outside of programming work, he’s an aspiring entrepreneur and musician.

Adrian Strahan is an author and a technical editor of this book. Adrian is a freelance iOS developer, Product Owner and Scrum Master. He’s worked with iOS since 2010 and specializes in mobile- and web-based application development. He lives in the South West of England and spends what little spare time he has building with Lego.

Free tvOS Chapters this Week

To help celebrate the launch, we’re going to open up the book and share three free chapters with you this week! This will give you a chance to check out the book — we’re confident you’ll love it! :]

Now Available in ePub!

And as another exciting announcement, by popular request, tvOS Apprentice is now available in ePub format. Take it on the go with you on your iPad, iPhone or other digital reader and enjoy all the mobile reading benefits that ePub has to offer!

Where To Go From Here?

The tvOS Apprentice, Third Edition is now 100% complete, fully updated for Swift 4 and tvOS 11 and available today.

If you’ve already bought the tvOS Apprentice PDF, you can download the new book immediately on the store page for the book.

If you don’t have the tvOS Apprentice yet, you can grab your own copy in our online store.

And to help sweeten the deal, the digital edition of the book is on sale for $49.99! But don’t wait — this sale price is only available for a limited time.

Speaking of sweet deals, be sure to check out the great prizes we’re giving away this year with the iOS 11 Launch Party, including over $9,000 in giveaways!

To enter, simply retweet this post using the #ios11launchparty hashtag by using the button below:

Tweet !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)?'http':'https';if(!d.getElementById(id)){js=d.createElement(s);js.id=id;js.src=p+'://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js';fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js,fjs);}}(document, 'script', 'twitter-wjs');

We hope you enjoy this free update, and stay tuned for more book releases and updates coming soon!

The post tvOS Apprentice Updated for Swift 4 and tvOS 11 appeared first on Ray Wenderlich.

tvOS Apprentice Updated for Swift 4 and tvOS 11 published first on http://ift.tt/2fA8nUr

[allenmendezsr]

Over $150 Per Customer: Life Coaching Audio & Video Package

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Over $150 Per Customer: Life Coaching Audio & Video Package

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    Antoine de Saint-Exupery: “Behind all seen things lies something vaster, everything is but a path, a portal, or a window opening on to something other than itself.” 

Albert Einstein: “The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious… He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. The sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our mind cannot grasp and whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly and as feeble reflection, this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all that there is.”

The Buddha: “Both delusion and enlightenment originate within the mind, and every phenomenon arises from the functions of the mind, just as different things appear from the sleeve of a magician.”

Joseph Campbell: “When you follow your bliss… doors will open where you would not have thought there would be doors; and where there wouldn’t be a door for anyone else.”

In this course you will experience a system that combines perennial spiritual wisdom, cutting-edge scientific discoveries, and professional psycho-therapeutic insights to completely redefine your reality and your everyday life, effortlessly and easily…

Since 2005, over one hundred thousand lives  have changed in over 90+ countries through this free Foundation Course. It’s time to upgrade your life today. It’s time to redefine your reality.  Sign Up Below!

In 7 Days They Experienced Extraordinary Results!

Dear Shafin:

I am so grateful for all of your insight you have shared with your 7 day foundation course and the additional information and tools such as the

1 hour meditation you are providing to all of the members. 

This information has assisted in my personal development and the application of this information has improved my well being. 

Thank you for sharing this with the world. Bright blessings and best wishes always.

Janice Scarinci Ph.D. Associate Professor & Department Chair Hotel, Restaurant & Resort Management Northwood University, Florida, USA

    Dear Shafin,

Your course has been a one on one conversation where l not only learned valuable lessons but also got to know my teacher.  This gave me the added advantage of having a role model: warm, kind and also tough and matter of fact when needed. You are wise, generous and inspiring. Thank you.

Alfred D. Herger Ph. D. Psychologist

Dearest Shafin,

I cannot express in words how grateful I am of all the stuff you have sent me. I cannot wait to share it with all my friends and families. It’s a life changing experience! You helped me reshape my values and thinking system, I find myself more confident, in control, wiser, a clearer vision of my future and the courage to pursuit it.

I think that everyone and every living form on this planet is special, we all have a mission, a purpose to have come to this world. Until we find out what the mission entails we are just a scattered energy floating about, and feeling something is missing without knowing what exactly it is. I am so grateful that you entered into my life. It’s one of the best things happened to me! You are absolutely brilliant!

Sincerely yours,

Lena Ramsay

Hello Shafin

I can’t believe how your 7 day coaching has changed my life. It’s truly amazing. Here’s my story:

In 2003 I was diagnosed with “Major Depression” and was told I would have to take mediation for the rest of my life. When I was first diagnosed I was started on the lowest dosage of antidepressants, over the years my doctors kept increasing my mediation and I was taken 4 times the amount of medication I initially started with. The side-effects were awful and I still was not feeling 100%. Over the years I started abusing drugs, starting with pot and working my up to heroin. I kept thinking to my self this is not the way I want to live my life, life cant be this difficult, why is my life such a mess, nothing was going the way I wanted it to, I was surviving life, not living life, I felt I was just going down hill, FAST.

I then came across your web site and took part in your 7-Day E-course. The shifting in my personality has been life changing; I don’t even have the words to describe how it has changed my life. My thinking has taken a completely new direction. I haven’t touched drugs or anti-depressants for the past 3 weeks now, it may not seem allot to some people, but to me it means the world. From living the past 8 years taking pills and drugs on a daily basis to now not taken anything is truly a miracle for me. It’s as if I have been blind but now I can see. The sounds I hear are louder, the colors are brighter, the tastes are tastier and the feelings, well I now know what it is like to feel love from people; my entire perspective on life has changed.

I now know my life will be different, I still can’t believe it; it’s like I have been reborn to live life again. I am so grateful to you.

I have even gone back to college and iv decided to study Electrical engineering, something I never in my wildest dreams thought I would be able to do. I have gone from thinking, “I can’t, its impossible, it wont happen to me” to “I AM, I CAN, I WILL!” My family can’t believe how my personality has changed. Thank-you so much, you have changed my life!!!

I have been telling everyone I know about you and how my life has changed. You have given me a reason to live again, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Yours truly,

Dean Jacobsen South Africa, Durban

  Sign Up for the Adventure That Changed Lives Of Many Thousands Before You (Oh Yes, It’s Free!)

Note: This is NOT some self serving promotional newsletter that will just nag you to buy some products. This is a real eCourse conducted by Shafin de Zane, the author of Redefine Your Reality. In this Foundation Course your participation will be expected. Do NOT signup unless you are ready to actively learn and bring about profound changes in your life. It is completely free to join. No obligation whatsoever. You will receive each part of the course every day for the next 7 days only after you personally verify your registration. If you do not receive your verification email from us in the next 10 minutes, check your spam folder. If you find our email there, mark it as not spam. This will allow smooth delivery of all your lessons.

Day 1: Get Out of Your Reality

Day 2: You And Your Personality

Day 3: What Creates DANGEROUS Attraction

Day 4: Deeper Into Your Belief System  

Day 5: Deadly Mistakes We Make Part I

Day 6: Deadly Mistakes We Make Part II

Day 7: Design of a meaningful life…

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Hi Shafin,

Thanks for the wonderful coaching course and free books, have learnt so much in such a short time, so many questions answered, makes you light up inside when you start to understand finally.

Looking forward to more of your work, just overjoyed that finally been able to take those first steps on my own journey and understand why i have been holding myself back.

Thanks again. Your teachings are so enlightening!

Patrick, USA

  Hello, My name is Filis and I am from Canada.

I would like to say thank you to Shafin. The 7 day course has been very helpful to me. Not only is it inspirational, I am beginning to see life in a whole new light.

The daily exercises work and if one is persistent with them, you will begin to experience life differently.

I believe in myself much more now than I ever did before. Thank you.

Filis B, Canada

      Hi Shafin,

Greetings with love. Its always good to receive your mail, I always wanted to have your mail in my Inbox everyday so I can start my day with great views or things. I have highly benefited from your 7 days course and mails. I now have perfect faith that my dreams will soon realized in perfect ways. Thanks for your guidance and you are such an amazing person that you wanted to lead others also to their dreams. Thanks for realizing me with my inner source that I am the only responsible for all my dreams.

Love & Regards,

Hashmita Jadeja, India

  Hi Shafin,

I’ve tried to quit smoking several times with no success. I was so used to the idea that I smoke, that when I quitted I started smoking again after a day or two.. just because I thought that I can’t quit. On day 1 of the coaching course you told me that reality is what I create it to be, and on day 4 you told me that I am what I believe I am, so I said to my self: “I believe I can quit smoking”.

It’s been three weeks now, and I haven’t even thought of smoking ever again. And I believe this is just the beginning of change. Thank you for inspiring me! Best wishes,

Plamen Peev, Bulgaria

Thank you Shafin de Zane! Thanks to God that you are in this world.

I have too much to say but I will be short here. You showed me the key to understand this world and to be happy. You gave the answer of the question “why?” that I have searching my entire life. I realized that all my life I was exercising to control my body, and my behaviour. I was trying to control the results.

You explained how mind is working, what are the feelings. You showed the Source. Now I’m learning from your course to create these results. Now as never before I can’t stop. I want to go on, I want more. This 7 Day

Course does miracles. I’m beginner but already feel much calmer and happier. I’m on the way to buy Redefine Your Reality Package.

Keep creating, keep making miracles with us!

Lilit, Armenia

Dear Shafin,

My warmest greetings to you! I almost feel as though I know you! I really wish I did! I would love to have you as my neighbour! You have definitely impacted my life and I truly thank you from my heart.

To a large extent, I have put my life on hold for the past 7 days! I’ve been scanning my inbox searching for your next email eCourse! It couldn’t have come at a better time!!!

The exercises helped me focus my awareness on taking the next step towards defining my own personal success. Made me aware that we are the creators of our own adventures and destiny and that we need to take responsibility for defining our own course in life. That has to be in some ways one of the most difficult things to do.

I truly thank you for helping me find my way. You really make the world a better place. I admire your dedication to helping so many people in finding their way.

Hope the new year will bring you lots of joy and continued success!

Marcia Turley, Copenhagen, Denmark

Dear Shafin:

My Name is Pierre Zidor and I am from Haiti.

Before I took your 7 day life coaching course, my brother and I used to read the Book “The secret” and also watched the video.

One of our wants was to get something that would confirm what we learned from the secret. I meditated on that want, and one day while I was checking my email on Gmail, I saw this banner crossing through my screen with “Redefine your reality”: I quickly took advantage of it for I think it should be related to what I just learned.

And here we are, not only your e-course confirmed what we knew, but the way you explained things and the exercises you gave were just proper, and did a good job in getting me to start looking from within.

Thanks Shafin for this initiative and sacrifice you’re making to help others; this should be praised and recognized around the world. I will write you about the successes I will soon be experiencing

Thanks,

Pierre Zidor, Haiti

Shafin.   My name is Aaron Chidlow, i have spent the last week or so being inspired by your words in your life coaching course. For a long time now i have felt deep inside of me that there is so much more to the life we see in front of us and your words have given me so much more than just knowledge,   i really feel you have opened my eyes to a better place that “lives” inside all of us. Now i really can “GO MAKE THE WORLD A BETTER PLACE”. Thank you!   Aaron Chidlow

Hello Shafin, 

Thank you for your 7 day life coaching. Your lessons and the questions you posed inspired me to not just read the material , but to live it, play with it and prove it to myself.  The mission statement is still on the paper I wrote it on, but it’s also in my heart and mind.

Things that used to be big issues, aren’t so big anymore.  I have been able to be more direct and decisive as a result. Thank you!

Terresa Rempel, Canada www.terresa.herbalcoach.com

Hi Shafin

I am David Fritz, living on a small holding near Benoni, Johannesburg, South Africa.

I am so excited about this course… From the first words i read of yours I was intrigued, because they “felt right”. It was said of Jesus that he taught with authority, different to the way the Pharisees taught, and I felt that same “conviction”, knowing”, “this is it” in your discourse.

Since December 2008, about 7 months ago, I have decided to be a lightworker, bringing healing and comfort to as many as i can, using my music talent, and all other talents, gifts and experience and knowledge that I have gained through the years. Your course gave me a shove in the right direction: I have wanted to use meditation as the basis of healing myself and grounding myself, then healing others, but till now had just read about meditation and said “sure, will do one day”.

Now, with the exercise in your course, I have started this practice regularly and cannot wait to extend into with the guided meditation. I found it very fascinating to find lessons on male and female attraction in this course and it testifies to your holistic knowledge and approach.

I look forward to a long and mutually edifying relationship.

David Fritz, Johannesburg, South Africa Mr Music, Music with impact… www.mr-music.co.za

Shafin, 

I find your regular emails like breaths of fresh air, in the pace of everyday life, I stop and take a deep breath because each time I find something new and always, a moment to meditate. And miracles happen, small and big.

Makes me realize that while we are constantly reminded that terrible things that happen in a moment – miracles too happen in a moment. Thank You. 

Beverly, United Kingdom

Hi, it hasn’t been long since I found out about you. I want to thank you for being there for us, for helping us awaken little by little with your teachings.

I have learnt and remembered so many things, that now I feel less stressed. There is one thing I have to continue working with, perseverance. Thanks again for everything you do.

May you have the greatest of holidays.

Patricia Gabriela

Dearest Shafin, First of all, i have fallen in love with u since i enrolled with this amazing 7 day course and helped me to change my life. I never felt so strong and confident from inside. Starting from the 1st day course till 7 day course, every single article made me change my thoughts, made me change my life. I must congratulate to those people who chose this e-course and would suggest all the people (who can not believe that miracles can happen in your life, if u really want it to happen) to enroll for this e-course. I always used to think that i am loser since i lost the love of my life, i lost my mother. But now i am so confident and happy, that i can make other people happy too. It all happened because of u Shafin. Thank u so much for bringing this miracle to my life.

Debarati Sen Roy, India

  First I want to introduce myself. I am Etienne Jacobs, I was confused, and had one hundred million questions as to why is it that other people have what I can only dream of and never seemed to be able to reach or get. Yes I was the classic LOSER. Then by chance I stumbled across Shafin’s Website and enrolled for the 7 day E-Course, I thought it would be more mumbo-jumbo like all the other “So Called Self Help” stuff. But I was WRONG!!! OH SO WRONG!!! Shafin! This is for you: Thanks so much for opening my eyes and showing me the way where I can find the answers! Thanks for letting me discover what my real potential is! And that I am in control of my reality! You said something about Millionaires. Well I am going to be one of them! I am going to make it HAPPEN! I can, I will! Thanks again, Etienne Jacobs, South-Africa

Dear Shafin, 

Repeating every joyful comment like the ones you are used to receiving would be the least I can do to express my satisfaction for your guidance through the course. Although I live on one of the most blessed and beautiful spots on the planet, I feel unfortunate that you don’t visit Greece giving lectures and seminars. But I feel very fortunate about my fluent English so that I will be able to read your work as soon as I obtain it (something I plan to do real soon ). I really want to be able to put into  practice what I have recently learnt from you and other teacher-writers, stuff I have all alone looked for, without any guidance or recommendation.  Maybe it’s the Call or the right time.

Thanks again. I remain your true friend.  I will try to convey to my teenage kids your views. My daughter needs self reassurance as she will face very competitive exams on June and she is the easy part. My 20 year old son resists a lot but I will give a try.

Natassa  Papazaharia, Athens,Greece

Dear Shafin,

The title Redefine Your Reality says it all. I have been reading and practicing a few meditation and self-development books. Your message in eCourse and in eBook is very powerful. Your insights validate the truth: the connectedness of all beings and our ability to create our own universe.

I ‘stumbled upon’ this course just when I was going through a painful situation (the universe always plans it that way); the eCourse and the eBook ground me to go inward and do a profound practice.

Thank you for your wonderful service to the world.

Chandira Kumar, USA

Hi Shafin,

Well, I got introduced to the concept of consciousness around 6 yrs ago. However, I have been efforts to walk the path for a little more than a year now. So, at the outset I would say that what I saw in the 7 day ecourse wasn’t all new.  

However, I must say one thing; It very strongly drove home the point that “I can do it”!!!! I have been mulling over the idea of quitting my job so that I can dedicate more time to helping people and also dedicate more time to ‘realizing’ by direct experience all that was put in words in the 7 day ecourse. Reading all material in that and the subsequent mails made me feel stronger in a sense that nothing can touch the real me! I am a child of the universe and if there is something that I really really want to do, the universe will conspire that it happens!

I loved the mail where you mentioned about how we will be tested. Since then, I have been able to observe the distractions that pop up in front of me and am consciously able to witness the events that occur in my life, more than being a part of them!!

Thanks so much. When I was wondering if I was doing the right thing or not, I stumbled upon your work and it has erased the doubts and strengthened my conviction in what I should be doing!!!

Jayanth Ganapathy, India

My name is Biljana and I live in Greece.

You’ve helped me determine ONE course in my life which is the only course worth following.

I still have a long long way ahead of me, but for me there is no way I’m giving up on myself. This feeling- to dive into the silence within you! Everything I do to achieve it is worth doing.

~Biljana, Greece

Hi Shafin,

My Name is Roxanne Robinson and I want to tell you that your E-course has been one of the most informative courses I have ever gotten on the Internet.  My girlfriends have been using the buddy system to keep us on track. Your exercises have helped us stay focused and have brought more abundance into our lives then ever before. You truly rock!

I repeat your words every morning and evening and for me that is truly a miracle, you do have a special way of explaining the way life is working and how we can redefine it. I truly believe you have opened new avenues for us and I thank you for that.

I have always believed in the idea that we create our own life,  you have just helped me to confirm my beliefs.  Life is just too short for everyone not to have everything they have every dreamed of and you are one of the special individuals that can really bring people around to believing in themselves.  Thank you again for your words of wisdom.

Roxanne Robinson www.attitudeadjustment101.com

Hi Shafin, The 7 day life coaching Course is the beginning of an enlightening journey and the experience was way beyond my expectations. I have bought the Redefine Your Reality ebook, this has somehow opened my eyes and given me a deeper understanding of myself.

It has changed my life for the better as it brings more peace and happiness within and I feel more energetic and focused. This is a great experience for anyone who is ready to change and is looking for a guiding light to realize the true powers within. Thank you very much Shafin.

Peter from New Zealand

Dear Shafin:

First, wanted to thank you for spreading your teachings and for sharing your valuable knowledge with us. God Bless You!

Your teaching just further confirmed my commitment to meditate and to look for the answers inside and not outside of myself… It is so clear now that what is real is our inside world and that the outside world is just the result of what is inside, so powerful!!! 

I wish for people to be happier and happier:)

Thank you!

Madina, USA 

Hi Shafin,

I’m Grazvydas from Lithuania. Maybe you know, that the Index of Happiness in my country is one of the lowest in the whole world. But thanks to you it has increased this month because I have received the Course.

There are great inspiring message in Day 2: I am not the events of my life. I am my consciousness, I am my creation among my creations. Cogito ergo sum.

So there is not reason to be unhappy. Well done, Shafin. The world stay better. You really guide people from darkness to light, like me in the attached picture. Thank you

Grazvydas, Lithuania

Hi Shafin,

I have just finished your

coaching course and all I can say that this one is really different and of great value.

I have been interested in this “law of attraction” stuff for quite some time now, even before “The Secret”, and I have received e-courses from lots of different teachers. But this is a real eye-opener, as it brings quite a few insights that may be unpopular at first view, such as your lessons about the way that attraction works and the common mistakes most of us make in our relationships. But we have to face this and deal with it!

Thanks a lot for this information!

Antje Usula Seebohm, Malta www.reiki-in-malta.webs.com

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