#i have almost 300 stickers its so fun

[marytakespictures]

[chibalein]

Kalafina Live Report: 9+ONE @Kitakyushu - REVISITED

So, this is something I wanted to do for a long time now (almost 3 years to be exact). Back in 2017, when Kalafina was still a thing and times were good, I was lucky enough to live in Japan and able to attend various of Kalafina activities. My first proper concert was their final live of the 9+ONE tour in the city of Kitakyushu/Fukuoka prefecture, in June 2017.

My first live report was certainly different than all the others that followed, less detailed, less emotional so to say. I always wanted to update the whole thing because looking back, there were so many moments during the concert that I - for whatever reason - did not write about enough or not at all. Well, since I have been working at home for quite a while now, I feel like now is the perfect time, as this gives me an amazing reason to be lazy and productive at the same time. Here is my original live report: PART 1  /  PART 2

So, a lot of things will certainly stay the same because I just don’t remember enough of the concert, especially about the vocal performance or things the girls have said during the MCs. I will add some other details that I still remember (hopefully correctly), and describe everything a bit nicer too :)

Let’s do it! Long ass report ahead! again

Back then, I was living in Kanagawa prefecture, but I was too late for tickets of the Yokohama or Tokyo lives. I was planning to visit a friend who lived in Fukuoka city at the time and Kalafina’s Kitakyushu concert perfectly fit into my schedule. Luckily, I was able to buy a ticket via convenience store. As I was pretty late, I got a kinda bad seat in the almost very back of the upper floor.

The morning of the live I arrived in the city of Kitakyushu, which is a rather famous port city at the northern tip of Fukuoka prefecture. The historic town Kokura has a beautiful castle, which I visited as well as Moji port. (After reading Hikaru’s blog post where she said that she also went to see the castle, I was a bit disappointed that I didn’t meet her xD). There’s also TOTO Museum, a museum dedicated to the TOTO company, which is famous for inventing those high-tech toilets that Japan is so known for.

I was kind of warned beforehand that the Kalafina good’s sale would attract a ton of people, so I wanted to be there as early as possible. About two hours too early I arrived at Kitakyushu’s Harmony Cinq Soleil Hall and waited along with a handful of other people. Slowly but steadily more and more people would gather, forming an absurdly long line. Not as extreme as the 10th Anniversary good’s line, but still impressive. Luckily, I was standing in some shade, because it was so damn hot and sunny the entire weekend. When the doors finally opened, I am sure there were like 200-300 people waiting to receive those sweet sweet popcorn buckets that were sold as venue exclusive merchandise. In the end, I bought the T-shirt, the key holder, the popcorn and the clear files, but looking back I do regret not buying the notebook. I wanted the popcorn mainly because of the Kitakyushu exclusive sticker - the popcorn itself had the flavor chocolate + soda (I think?), which I remember thinking was the shittiest combo of all flavors they had. It didn’t taste as bad as I thought but I still think it was overpriced. Together with the ticket itself, I ended up spending about 100€, which I thought was a lot, especially as there were people buying the entire collection and even more... hahahaha, oh innocent, naive past me, I didn’t know what was coming to me yet.

(Photo: in front of the venue)

I do love my merch though. I still wear all my Kalafina T-shirts at home, and while in Japan I had the key holder... hold my keys, making it all dirty and bent now lol The popcorn cup is decorating my shelf to this day.

Anyway, after getting my stuff, I went on to walk around, grab something to eat and even made friends with a Japanese girl, sharing our Kalafina love. Later, when people were admitted, probably around 800-900 people were there, quite a view! I saw some foreigners as well, and even made friends with a Philippine girl as well :D

(Photo: merch table at the venue)

(Photo: the stuff I bought)

While entering, staff was handing out little goodie bags, mostly with flyers and ads for other events or the obligatory concert questionnaire. However, that bag included our very own 9+ONE Lights! I took my seat which wasn’t as far from the stage as I thought, but I still would not be able to see the girls’ expressions.

When the concert finally started, a black but transparent screen was lowered (you know it from the 9+ONE DVD) and they started to play an overture version of “Samidare ga sugita koro ni”. Meanwhile we got see a collection of Kalafina’s entire discography, where each title of their songs, even in their respective font if available, was shown and merged into a white cloud, revealing our ladies.

(Photo: stage before the concert started)

They started with “Samidare ga sugita koro ni”. I remember it being good and nice, but I was never really fond of that song, even though it has grown on me a bit. We all clapped along and had our fun.

It continued with “misterioso”, also a song that has grown on me over time. While everyone was staying seated and enjoying themselves before, all the dudes in the arena seats jumped to their feet, being an upbeat song and stuff. I was grateful for the upper floor to have stayed seated almost the entire time, because being so far away was shitty enough and I didn’t want to spend 2 hours standing.

Anyhow, this song revealed some flaws in either the acoustics of the hall or the mixing of the sound technicians (I guess the latter?). Wakana was uncomfortably loud most of the time, drowning out the other two, but especially Hikaru - in some songs more than in others and more often than not when she wasn’t in the lead too. Some of her notes simply made me cringe. Hikaru on the other hand seemed to be feeling the exhaustion of the tour. On many occasions, she sounded tired, especially when it came to hit those high or long notes. The band didn’t help either, they also drowned out many parts of the singing... Maybe it was just this venue though and luckily, the 10th Anniversary wasn’t like this. Then again, I only attended acoustic lives or lives without band after that, so who knows how they sound when there is no DVD recording going on XD

Next was “Lacrimosa”, and this time Wakana wasn’t being as cringy as before. Poor Hikaru doing nothing for most of the time. One cool moment was that short pause after their “LA-CRI-MO-SA” part, right before the final chorus. The stage turned deep red with the girls reaching out to the audience. When you don’t know that this is coming, it’s an incredibly powerful move.

I don’t remember what they said during MC#1, other than greeting the audience and the usual “We hope you have fun” stuff. I do remember Hikaru welcoming us to the Harmony Cinq Kitakyushu Soleil Hall, by saying the entire name of the hall, and then saying something along the lines of “Thank god I didn’t trip over my tongue” (it’s a lot harder to say that name in Japanese, I give it to her lol).

They proceeded to introduce “Ashita no Keshiki”, a song that is not performed often, also because it’s a song that is mainly sung by Wakana. It was a beautiful performance, which was a little bit ruined by Hikaru. If you thought that she sounds strained and tired in the 9+ONE DVD version, well, imagine her like 5 concerts after that performance. Still great though, I came to love that song a lot.

“Hikaru no senritsu” was equally ok, but Hikaru again kind of screwed up her short “ashita wo kanadete” towards the end of the song. She probably just didn’t hit the note correctly, but to me it sounded as if she screwed up the timing, because I didn’t even her the first word or so.

With “Mirai”, Kalafina finally started to move around, so far they had stayed glued to their positions. They waved and interacted with the audience, cheering us on to cheer them on. I did enjoy the performance and the overall atmosphere, although “Mirai” belongs to my most disliked of all Kalafina songs.

In MC#2, they talked about “Ashita no Keshiki” a bit, together with their first album and how this is the first time performing in Kitakyushu (and not Fukuoka city). Since this is Wakana’s home prefecture, she proceeded to talk about her favorite Udon and Ramen restaurants (I think it was also about the restaurant chain West) and other specialties of Fukuoka.

The next song was “Oblivious”, also a song I was really looking forward to. As you know, this time Hikaru decided to sing her first lines in her high head voice (probably because she just can’t do it “regularly” anymore). I thought and still think it’s lovely, as it gives the song a much more mysterious opening and it’s also quite closer to the original to be honest. Wakana and the band drowned out Keiko for most of the time, with Hikaru and her high voice coming to the party later too. The acoustics were really weird that day...

“storia” was as usual, nothing special and not a song that really stands out to me anymore.

I was more looking forward to “Gogatsu no Mahou”, which is also a song I came to appreciate more over time. I adore the bridge section after the chorus, especially Wakana’s “habataku kotori no” and that one super high moment, so I really tried to focus on that particular part of the song. It was great!

With “consolation”, finally a darker and fiercer song made its debut and while I don’t really remember the performance itself anymore, I do remember the stage production. Basically, they packed out those lights and illuminations that they have been hiding so far and blasted us with them. Hikaru was pretty quiet though. Keiko on the hand appeared to have problems with her earpiece, and at some point she was frantically waving to the technicians backstage.

Wakana took it upon herself to dominate “To the beginning” as well, but we got some action on stage at least, since the girls stayed glued to their positions most of the timea again.

In MC#3, Keiko talked about how every live performance as well as their unique harmony is important to them (quite ironic after Wakana was actively trying to make Keiko NOT be heard lol). The following song was special in a sense that there would be NO harmony. Back then, when Kalafina received the song for the first time (or before recording, not sure), they even asked Kajiura Yuki whether this is correct or even intentional.

With “Haru wo matsu” we got our obligatory ballad. While I was never really fond of the song, I think it’s sweet and yes, their missing harmony gives it quite a refreshing vibe. Keiko sounded pretty much like in the 9+ONE DVD, but it was so strange to hear her cutesy voice live and so clearly... she sounded like an entirely different person XD Hikaru, for the first time actually, could finally shine, as we could HEAR her. She didn’t deliver as good as she probably could have, but still it was a very pretty performance.

Now, we were reaching the spot on their setlist that would differ at each venue. Before the concert, I checked out all setlists from the previous lives to see whether there were any patterns or which songs were most likely to be performed (again). It seemed like they took 4-5 songs and repeated them over the course of the tour, which is why I had my hopes high for “Hikaru furu” or “Kimi no gin no niwa”. But interestingly they chose a song they hadn’t performed yet (please correct if I’m wrong here), which was “Ring your bell”.

“Ring your bell” is very high on my list of all-time disliked Kalafina songs (I just can’t seem to escape that song...). But I was pleasantly surprised to hear that they started the song as an acoustic version, very much like the performance during their Arena Live. It stayed acoustic until after the first chorus, then the band joined too. I like this half-half version over the “normal” version, because it’s an amazing moment when you don’t expect the loud and cheerful opening of “Ring your bell” to suddenly fill the stage. The overall harmony of band and singers came together again and the acoustics were finally so much cleaner and nicer. The audience rose to their feet and even some dedicated dudes on my loser floor stood up to cheer them on. However, Wakana’s final high-pitched “ring your BELL” was incredibly cringy and breathy, one of the main reasons I hate the song so much.

Anyway, Kalafina got their break to change costumes and we got an AMAZING performance by the band that played some BGM of the anime “Kubikiri Cycle”. To this day, I don’t know what exact song they played and for the love of god, please SOMEONE TELL ME. I know it was fairly uptempo and rather dark... help pls XD

So far, the stage production was pretty much boring and simple. Other than some light effects, nothing really happened, we just had that huge curtain as background. Now, we finally got ACTION. Well, at least for the eye. They lifted the curtain and revealed those huge, impressing statues of Kalafina’s silhouettes, mostly made out of their past live outfits. I could have spent a long time checking out every part of this artwork, trying to recognize what dresses from which live they used and what not. Now that I watched the DVD, I know where Kalafina was standing, but at the time I didn’t see them AT ALL. The music played the overture and suddenly Keiko was on stage with the other two following her. To me it looked like they stepped THROUGH the middle silhouette, but turns out they were just standing in front of it - they were so far away, I couldn’t differ between them and the clothes behind them lol

(Photo: Hikaru’s “silhouette” with her outfits)

Well, I think I already gave you my opinion on those new dresses... At the time, both Keiko and Wakana looked kinda cool and pretty shiny, but even though I could see jack shit from so far away, I knew that Hikaru’s outfit was a disappointment. Her fucking pants and skirt or whatever that is... XD

I was incredibly looking forward to “Märchen”, as now it became one of my all-time favorite songs. But back then I was especially amazed by the song during their release event of the single in April. I wanted to hear this live again so badly and well... I did, but it wasn’t as good as the release event. Again, Hikaru sounded tired and Keiko and Wakana were fighting about who could be louder than the band. Keiko drowned out Hikaru most of the time... During the middle section we saw their Kala-dance, which I already got to witness during the release event. However, I was pleased to see that they decided to spice things up by showing background animations. It looked like they danced in sinc with themselves, it was truly impressive and such a refreshing use of video. This, as well as the later “Magia” performance made this concert/tour truly stand out and I am glad that they could take their creativity to a new level. I wish they would have continued to do so much more later on.

So, let’s talk about “Magia”. Holy shit, what a performance. The screen from the very beginning was lowered, intro was played, forest was shown, you know it guys. In sync with their live singing, they showed this fucking amazing pre-recorded bits of Kalafina and as I didn’t see this coming, it absolutely blew my mind. It was a psychedelic wtf show with cinema feeling all over the place and for once, the acoustics were actually good. Especially the instrumental part was... I don’t know what it was, but HOLY. SHIT. Truly guys, it was so cool. If there ever was an interview on that particurly performance I would love to read it to how Kalafina thought about this one and how the creation process went. When Keiko stepped in front of the screen it just added to her overall cool demeanor. When the screen was lifted again, we got a little sneak peak of the microphone stands in back.

(Photo: Keiko’s “silhouette” with her costumes)

Which were of course used for “Kyrie”. The DVD version is truly one of my favorite performances of that song and in Kitakyushu it was pretty cool too, especially with their small but effective arm movements. Keiko’s final long-ass “kyrie” was amazing and fairly unexpected from my side. Also some fat light show and big bass sounds, which I am always appreciating.

Next up was “heavenly blue” and here they tried to interact with the crowd once more. I like this song mostly for the kajiurago bridge and I always focus especially on Wakana’s super high “so na” (or whatever), while Keiko is going low at the same time. Wakana was too loud again though, but by now their overall performance and acoustics improved quite a lot.

“One Light” once again activated the crowd, especially Hikaru went crazy here. The atmosphere was amazing and you could just feel that everyone was fired up, singing along and having fun. Everyone just screamed when Hikaru sang “boku wa yukeru”, so cool.

MC#4 was about band introduction. Konno Hitoshi and Sakurada weren’t present if I remember correctly, which was a shame... but then again, I wouldn’t know the difference lol

The last song of the block was their new single at the time, “Into the world”. It was really beautiful, Hikaru finally sang more clearly. A good performance, very similar to the ones I would see from that point on.

We got a little break again, as Kalafina traditionally fake-ended the concert. While the audience was clapping, it took about 5 minutes or so for them to return. But first, the screen was lowered again, and some text, together with the intro for “Ongaku” finally told us to switch on our 9+ONE Lights. Everyone did so and boy, what a sight! Even from so far in the back, the lights in the dark hall looked so great! While of course hundreds and hundreds of people were present, you don’t really get a sense of that sheer number when you focus on the stage the entire time. I looked around and with so many lights illuminating the hall, you truly get a feeling of how many people actually are here with you.

Kalafina returned with their plain, but nevertheless cool black outfits, wearing the little lights themselves and standing on a mini-stage. The song played out as usual, but this time, as Konno Hitoshi wasn’t present and the other violin guy played his solo different than usual. Don’t ask me how it differed, I really don’t remember, but I liked that version a lot more. We got a new cool background too.

“blaze” pretty much business as usual.

(Photo: Wakana’s “silhouette” with her outfits, sorry for the bad quality)

MC#5 was about Hikaru and her beloved sales corner, where she mainly introduced the Kalafina produced goods like Keiko’s pink dumbbell and her bath salt (I think). She talked about the 9+ONE Lights and that they do not produce new lights for each concert, but re-use them every time. That was supposed to increase to sense of unity and connection between them and the fans as well as among the fans themselves, “carrying the fire of every fan and concert to the next” or something like this. As Kalafina had upcoming concerts in Taiwan and Hong Kong, Hikaru said that they would bring the lights to international fans too, so “don’t take them home!”. Well... I guess my ten years of studying Japanese at this point must have failed me in that particular instance because I truly don’t know what she said or meant. I unfortunately ended up taking the ring home. #guiltybutnotguilty #sue me

I think this is also where they talked about the big silhouettes we have seen in the earlier block and that they used dresses from previous performances to decorate them. They then turned around, facing the wall and imitated the poses of the silhouettes - it was super funny and crowd laughed and cheered. I think they lifted the screen of this stained glass pattern to show the silhouettes for direct comparison. (Correct me if I am wrong, but I think they cut out this conversation from the DVD? Not sure, too lazy to check).

We sadly arrived the final song of the setlist, which again should differ at each venue. What song would it be? I hoped for songs like “sprinter” or “Yume no daichi”, as those were among the songs they had already performed during the tour.

Well, back then, they had announced their new single “Hyakka Ryouran”, but it wasn’t released yet (I think we only knew some bits of the chorus at the time). Funnily, I talked about that with the girls I had met prior to admittance, something like “Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if Kalafina performed Hyakka Ryouran as surprise encore?”. I mean, they were no strangers to performing songs that haven’t been officially released yet, see “Into the World” during the Arena Live. But, you know... I thought that would be unlikely, because why should they?

BUT NOT THEY ACTUALLY DID IT! Keiko was like: “Ah, which song will be the final song... Well, how about our new single?”, and the crowd LOST IT. I lost it too XD Seriously, no one could handle that. Anyway, now that I know the full version by heart, it’s hard to describe how I felt back then. Listening to a song for the first time is always an experience, but it makes it hard to remember when you can’t listen to it again and again. I tried to focus on every aspect of the song, and remember it as being “dark”, due to Keiko’s deep intro, “fast” and “rock-like”, fitting into the samurai setting of the anime with its flute elements. I still couldn’t believe my luck though and afterwards, the crowd cheered and cheered.

Now the concert should have been over, but instead they entered MC#6. They talked about the first sing of the night “Samidare ga sugita koro ni”. Apparently, they pretty much have never performed this one live, except once during a fanclub-only event. For this tour they wanted to sing this song “for everyone”, as it is such a bright and warm piece.

So, for whatever reason, Kalafina decided to perform “Samidare ga sugita koro ni” AGAIN. However, this time they emphazised that bright feeling of connected hearts and unity by making us turn on our One Lights and wave along with the rhythm. Everyone loudly sang with them, especially during the “lalala” part towards the end. It was so much fun to listen to Kalafina, to the audience around me and singing along too, all while watching this amazing light show that we were creating ourselves. It was even better and much more carefree than the first performance. Still can’t believe my luck that of all venues of the 9+ONE tour, I got to attend to most unique one.

After that, the band was introduced again, they all held hands and thanked the audience for coming. But just before they wanted to bow, Wakana suddenly sobbed (so loud that I actually heard it lol), trying to wipe away tears. Being in her home prefecture, I figured she was just so overwhelmed by her emotions. Each of the three said some final words and with that the concert and the domestic 9+ONE tour ended.

I proceeded to take photos of the stage, as we were still able to see the big silhouettes. However, staff members appeared and told everyone to stop taking pictures and get the fuck out, probably to stop people from “spoiling” the concert before the DVD release or copyright or whatever. Well, thankfully I already took like 3 photos and managed to sneakily take another one, in order to have a close shot of each silhouette (which is why the third photo of Wakana’s statue is not a close-up like the other too). I left the building, returned to Fukuoka city and 2 days later back to Kanagawa.

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

Despite the sound issues, it was truly a great live experience. 9+ONE would be, along with the 10th Anni, my only “real” Kalafina concert experience, as all the other concerts I attended would either be acoustic or without live band. I am so thankful that I managed to seize the opportunity and attend this live, especially in Wakana’s home. Writing this report again made me remember all those feelings I had back then, now they make me both happy and sad.

Anyway, I hoped you like my updated report!

[raespark]

That Allister cosplay is outstanding!! How did you make the mask and the gym symbol+endorsements? I'm planning on doing an Allister cosplay in the future myself

Thank you so much, and happy to answer! I took lots of pictures through the process so I’ll answer this in two parts.

“How did you make the gym symbol/ endorsements?”

So the first thing I did is take a TON of screenshots I have almost 300 screenshots of reference images of allister and the gym league trainers and the pokejobs logos and so on to get good references for all the logos I needed.Once I was done taking all the screenshots I spent hours tracing them to the best of my ability to create these images: (Not all of these were the final versions which were modified right before printing, apologies)Gym Logo - QUAY/ Gym Logo

XXA - Sponsor (This is the logo for MC Insurance, Allisters Sponsor)

291 - Number

ASTSA - Name (This is the new pokemon language for Onion, Allister’s japanese name)

The square with the diamond - This I nicknamed the “NIKE” cause its the logo for the spotswear company in game

Galar league logo - Galar League logo (this is the logo thats the red and blue pokeball with white marks, and “galar league written underneath it)

And then I put together this ref sheet to make sure the logos looked good together color wise, and some of the colors were still altered later but it all looked pretty good

And then once the logos were all set, I printed them onto heat transfer vinyl and let me explain why I did that specifically. The fabric I used was polyester, which is the kind of fabric that sports jerseys are made of. I did that because the gym’s uniforms are based on soccer jersey’s so it felt fitting!IT WAS A HUGE PAIN I DONT RECOMMEND ITbut now because of the fact that it was polyester paint wouldnt’ work on that fabric because of how stretchy it is and the fact it doesn’t absorb moisture easily. So we printed it onto heat transfer vinyl with my cheap ink printer and then I ironed them onto my clothes! I made sure they were placed correctly by first taping them to my clothes and making a note of the location before ironing it, and then once I was happy with a placement I’d carefully iron it on. This vinyl seems kinda cheap and like the ink might come off with too much water so watch out if you choose to use it. There are also printable iron on paper for other types of fabric as well and are cheaper iirc!

Same goes for the dots, thos were all cut using a CNC/ off brand cricut (just a bunch of circles all at once) and I placed them by hand using painters tape and trimmed as needed to make the designs:

Hopefully that was helpful!

“How did you make the mask?”

So this ones a little more complicated to answer because its not complicated but its not something everyone can do.

So we started on this one before the game came out, and before I’d gotten to Allisters battle in the game but we had enough reference material to figure out the general look of Allister’s mask, so we made a 3D model of it that we planned to 3D print (my bf has a 3D printer and a CNC and helped me a TON for this project) and did a test print of a tiny mask to start to make sure we were happy with the 3D model (here is the tiny mask in my tiny hand, we affectionally nicknamed it “mini mask”)

Now after we had the 3D model we had another issue of how big does it need to be? I have a round head on my own so I didn’t need to modify the shape of the mask thankfully (one time my fat head came in handy!) But we needed to figure out how big to make the mask to make sure it “fit” correctly.

So we tried cutting out a circle with paper in a few sizes until we thought we found a good size for my face (which for me was a little over 7 inches)

went and bought a styrofoam dome from the craft store in that size to make an EVA foam dome and then checked if that fit my face (later this worked fantastic as a way to transport the mask as a protective shell around it) I don’t have a picture of this EVA foam dome but all it was used for was putting it on my face and making sure it went over my chin and such. Once we had that we were ready to start printing the final mask. 

Once the 3D model was scaled for the final mask, it was too big for my bf’s printer to print all in one go so we split it into 4 pieces. Each piece took about 9 hours to print, and a few of the prints failed and had to be redone, so after a few days of printing it looked something like this:

for those who don’t know much about 3D printing all those beams are the supports that lets the printer print raised surfaces like that and have to all be removed. So after about 2 hours of pulling plastic with pliers it looked more like this:

so we left small gaps in the edges of the mask so that we could put metal pins between each piece to help hold it together so we cut our metal pins and assembled the mask and it was starting to come together!

So from here we melted some plasitc onto the seams (plastic welding!) with a wood burner and - wow that looks gross

but trust me its better than gaps in the mask. so after a bit of sanding here we entered the rounds of priming it with spraypaint primer and sanding it for like an hour and doing that again, occasionally using bondo putty to try and even out those seams and those rounds tended to look like allister just murdered a village:

but you can see compared to the previous image that the mask is a lot smoother! This was the final round of sanding and you can tell that most of the layer lines from the printer have been sanded down! You can almost not see the seams anymore! (though now they’re also very red but they’re very smooth in comparison to the beginning trust me…I sat there sanding for many hours for this)

But after this all that needed to be done with a final priming in grey, and then painted it gray!

While the paint was drying, we prepared some masking in the design of allisters mask which if you don’t know what the full mask looks like I wanna reference this from the collectors guidebook (which I just now got my hands on today but saw these on twitter)

So we cut out a sticker sheet in that design and placed it down with some painters tape to keep that part of the mask gray and then it was painted white, and that was the painting done!

For the black in the eyes, I got a scrap of black fabric for cheap at joann’s that I picked up and pulled and it was a very soft polyester/spandex material that you’d use for pantyhose so i’m sure you could also cut up some of those for a similar effect. But when stretched you can see out of them. 

So we made small rings the same shape as the inside of the mask behind the eyes, glued the fabric using super glue to that ring (and the mouth as well) and viola:

and then the final step was to get that mask on my face, and basically we had some rings on the left and right sides of the inside of the mask that I attatched some elastic too, and then needed to glue a third strap over the top of my head. and sewed it all in place and put some craft foam along the forehead and chin inside the mask for some cushioning and it was done! 

I really hope that was helpful and I tried to make sure I took lots of photos along the way so I hope they were helpful. If you have other questions feel free to ask! Sorry for the novel but just wanted to be as detailed as I could be!

Thank you for your nice words and best of luck!! Allister is a detailed boy but he’s very fun!

[danetobelieve]

Mooseterious Circumstances || Blanche and Winston

Winston wasn’t sure why they were attending their 13th moose tour of Mooseventure tours. They had a great aunt who had once taken them here and the first tour had been genuinely interesting. But now as the blonde girl wearing a set of felt antlers that looked almost sadder then she did droned on in the same monotone that Winston had previously heard from an ecstatic and excited Pam. Winston couldn’t help that whoever she were, she could put more effort in. Turning and pressing their forehead out of the window, they gazed through their glasses and into the forest. They’d once seen two moose having sex in that exact spot they thought. The girl at the front of the bus said something bored and Winston sighed, feeling just as bored as they were. They would have to make a point of explaining to Aunt Ingrid that moosetours were only fun the first ten times you do them. Though Aunt Ingrid wouldn’t believe them. “Has the script changed in the last thirteen years?” Winston finally asked somewhat sarcastically, too bored to stay silent any longer, “Or do they make you say the same things they used to make Pam say?” 

“A fun fact about eastern moose like the ones we’re seeing tonight - “ Blanche was going to projectile herself off this bus and pray one of the moose ate her. She hated Monday night tours most of all, they were never full and now she was just desperately trying not to make awkward eye contact with Winston while she droned on and on about Moose. Luckily, the stupid Bullwinkle J. Moose records died down a bit so she could stop pretending to make jokes that always fell flat without the enthusiasm of someone who gave a shit about moose. “- lack upper front teeth, but has eight sharp incisors on its lower jaw.” She paused, finally, taking a break. The moose weren’t even out tonight. It was a bad day to watch for moose. Maybe they decided to actually go get some frigge sleep this time - but Blanche wasn’t able to pick her speech back up because Winston interrupted her. “Uh -” she glanced behind her to Stan, who seemed more concerned with driving the bus. She looked back to Winston, her face flushing slightly. Blanche knew she was a bad tour guide, but that didn’t stop Stan for making her do it. “Well, you gotta stick to the script,” she said, rubbing the back of her neck, awkwardly. “Or the moose will get mad. Or something. They don’t like change.”

Wow. That really had been a fun fact. Winston rolled their eyes and yawned before Blanche turned to face them. Glancing out the window they were almost certain that they could see a bush walking along, but they ignored it and turned back to Blanche to address her. “The moose can’t hear you and even if they could hear you then what do you think they would do? I guess it is a moosetery...” wait what the fuck. Winston’s head snapped back to the window where sure enough, a bush with antlers had just walked out of sight. “DID YOU SEE THAT?” They exclaimed! This was suddenly shaping up to be the most exciting tour that they had ever had the pleasure of going on. “There is a bush with antlers and legs that is walking along.” They were suddenly very glad that the only other people on this tour were two very old and very deaf, at least by their apparent inability to speak at less then 300 decibels about the different varieties of hard candy that they enjoyed. “Literally right there!”

Moosetery. Blanche snorted, scowling as she turned to shoot them an I heard that look, but jumped slightly when they hollered asking if she saw something. “What?” No, she hadn’t seen anything and she honestly tried not too. Moose were actually kind of terrifying. They were, like, huge. Blanche glanced to the other two patrons on the bus. They didn’t seem to be complaining that Blanche had shut up for a minute. Blanche hopped off her seat, pulling out her moose-flashlight (the one that was just a heavy duty flashlight that someone stuck stickers of Bullwinkle on), and squinted into the darkness. “A bush? With antlers? It was probably just a moose. In a bush. Trying to grab something to munch on that doesn’t have snow on it or something.” Blanche muttered, frowning. She’d seen some pretty wicked stuff on these things, especially on quieter nights. Now she really wished Granny hadn’t fucked off to find some late night White Crest gossip. Blanche chewed on her lip, glancing at Winston. “It’s fine. Probably. Besides, I don’t have any fun facts about bush antler things.” 

Just as she said that, Stan swore from the front of the bus. “Uh-oh,” Blanche muttered, and moved towards the front. “Stan, what’s uh-” there was a spluttering from the engine, and she grimaced. She knew that sound. They needed a new bus, they had for like 6 months but Stan kept insisting the engine was fine. It was not fine! They slowed to a stop, and Blanche ran a hand down her face, exasperated. “I guess we’re stuck looking at Moose here for - what the hell was that?” 

This time, Blanche did see it. The corner of her light caught it, and her eyes narrowed seeing just a glimpse of the bush antler thing disappear. She pressed her lips together. “Alright everyone, we’re just having a little bit of a pause,” she said, more to the deaf old couple than to Winston. “Um. Ignore anything bush related. Or antler related. Unless it’s a moose. Then look at the moose. I’m going to uh… What the hell was that thing.” She didn’t know, but she wanted too. 

“Your names Blanche right?” Winston replied as they read their name tag. “Bush antler things aren’t real, but that bush definitely stood up, walked a few feet and then sat back down out of sight, which is not something that moose...esss.” What was the plural of Moose? Meese? They weren’t geese. As the bus sputtered to a halt (not that it had been going fast anyway) Winston rolled their eyes. It wouldn’t take that long to walk back to town but maybe this was where they would actually step out of their comfort zone and go and investigate. Taking a deep breath they watched Blanche step off the bus and looked at the pensioners behind them. There was no way that they were staying in a stinky old tour bus with a bunch of boomers that probably didn’t even realise what a moose was. Ignorance was rife amongst the older generation and Winston was convinced that they wouldn’t make the same mistakes. “Wait, I’m coming to see this thing too! I saw it first!” They scrambled off the bus after Blanche, curious as to what the hell that was. They were sure it must have a rational explanation. After all, everything did. 

“That’s a bad idea - you should stay on the - oh, well, I guess you’re already off the bus.” Blanche said, looking at them, rubbing the back of her neck. She was technically the employee here, if anyone should be investigating it should be her. Or maybe it should be Stan, but he was probably content with calling a tow company right about now. I have triple A it’ll be fine. Blanche mentally rolled her eyes, and shook her head, instead waving Winston to follow her. “My name is Blanche,” she said, referring to their earlier question. “What’s your name again?” She should know that. Their name would have been on the list, but she hadn’t really been paying attention. Not waiting for them to answer, she continued, only pausing slightly before going off the path. This is how horror movies start, Blanche. The voice in the back of her head was warning her. The white blonde girl always bites it first. She frowned slightly, wishing Granny were here so she could go ahead and take a look.She pointed her flashlight ahead, curiously looking around as they went in the direction the bush antler thing did. Maybe some shrubbery or something had fallen onto a moose or a big deer or something.  “Ever had a moose tour up this up close and personal? If you want, I can tell you more fun facts,” she said sarcastically. 

Shrugging nonchalantly, Winston felt their shoes crunch through a branch as they stepped off at the side of the road. “Too late to go back now I guess,” they replied. The acrid smell of broken bus filled the air and Winston wrinkled their nose in displeasure. Winston wasn’t sure why they were feeling so adventurous, but literally anything was better then staying on that bus with three people who were inching closer to death at every moment. At least Blanche had something to say. “I’m Winston,” they replied with a shrug, “like Churchill, except not at all like them.” They pulled their coat closer around their body, they wished they’d dressed for an outdoor hike and not for a day on a infamously hot bus. It was worse in the summer. That’s why Winston had asked for it now. But even still, there was no need for it to be 100 degrees in there. Somehow one of the ladies had still complained that she was too hot. Winston slipped their hands into their pocket. “That sounds just delightful, is it true that the skin that dangles underneath a moose’s chin is called a bell?” they replied equally sarcastically. “I think it was over here,” Winston said stepping forward and pulling out their phone, flicking on the flashlight they peered into the darkness, searching for something, though they weren’t sure what. 

Blanche was probably the only person in the world that didn’t mind the sweltering sauna of the bus, but that was only because of her aversion to being cold. Maybe it had something to do with the bone chilling feeling that went through her everytime she passed through a spirit (and was thus recreated every time she thought about it) or maybe she just liked being toasty, but the bus wasn’t that bad. Her job already sucked enough, so maybe she would have quit by now if she couldn’t at least sit in comfort. She snorted quietly when they mentioned the dewlap under a moose’s chin. “Sure, when you see one reach out and shake it. See what happens,” she said, glancing at Winston, with a low grin. What would happen, should anyone ever be that close to a moose, was probably death. She pointed her flashlight over to where Winston has their phone flashlight, squinting slightly. “I don’t think -” Blanche didn’t get to finish saying what she didn’t think was a good idea, because something moved. And that something was big. “Uh - “ Blanche stuck her arm out, stopping in her tracks. Fuck, was it her fault if they died out here? Could Stan, like, get sued for that? However, some sort of morbid curiosity sort of propelled her forward a few more inches, raising her flashlight to see through the brush. Light from its eyes reflected back and Blanche froze again. “I found it - “ She wasn’t happy that she found it. It wasn’t a moose with a shrubbery cloak. It was, truly, a plant antler thing and it was looking right at them. Blanche backed up, and swatted Winston’s arm. “Time to go.”

“Hopefully I never get close enough to a moose to be able to do that, but even if I was, I wouldn’t. I don’t have an early death wish. Though that tour drove me to that at points, no offense, I know you just read the script right?” Winston wasn’t sure if this was necessarily the best avenue of approach, they weren’t trying to upset Blanche. They just assumed that this was a dumb job. Picking through the forest, Winston wasn’t looking exactly looking very hard. At this point they were almost certain that it had been a trick of the light or something akin to that. But then Blanche was swatting at their arm and backing towards them. Winston turned around, somewhat absent mindedly and almost dropped their phone, it slid from the grasp and they had to do an awkward juggle as they looked the plant moose thing dead in what looked to be very dead eyes. What the hell was going on with this town? One day they’re a quirky cosplay infested hotspot and the next there were rabid creatures lurking around every corner. “I agree,” they said, taking a step away from the moose and pushing Blanche forward. Flicking their flash light off they tried to move as quietly as possible, hoping and praying that they weren’t followed.

Blanche snorted. If they thought they had a death wish listening to the trash script she had to read every night, then they should listen to her inner monologue during the entire tour. She frequently wished for the sweet release of death. This was definitely not an ideal job - she missed when she was just the receptionist and gift shop attendant. At least that was easy and she could impress old people with her mental math when giving out change. But none of that was important because what in the Holy Fires of Hell was that shit. White Crest had always been a shit show. She was born and raised here, and she knew it was just weird. But, minus her being able to literally see dead people, she sort of always chalked it up to her brain being broken - not that she would ever tell Granny that. Anyway, White Crest wasn’t supposed to be a demon town it was just supposed like a Stephen King Weird Shit thing like all other Maine small towns. But, also, maybe hyper focusing on whatever was going on in her head was better than focusing on the giant plant monster moose that was behind them. Blanche had followed Winston’s approach, flicking her flashlight off as she was ushered forward as she desperately tried to keep quiet. Everyone in the surrounding area could probably hear the pounding of her heart though because she had officially crossed paths from being ‘curious’ to ‘anxious’. There was a rustling behind them that made her freeze in place for a half second, and reach back to grab their arm. She didn’t want to know  “I don’t mean to over react or anything -” She said, glancing over her shoulder. She saw the eyes of the giant plant moose monster thing. That meant it was sneakily trying to follow them. Nope nope hell nope! “But we’re running.” She tugged on their arm. “Let’s go.” Time to run, her least favorite gym class activity. 

Swallowing, Winston felt a bead of sweat form at the base of their hairline and run down the middle of their face, from the middle of their forehead and down their nose where it rested. It was beyond infuriating. Wiping it away, Winston was about to say something smart when they spotted the eyes and suddenly Blanche was dragging them headlong through the forest. Running had never really been Winston’s forte either. Being the asthmatic kid with glasses had left them jaded about physical activity of almost any variety. Except swimming. They liked swimming. “I don’t think this is an over reaction at all,” Winston replied honestly as they ducked underneath a branch before hurtling further into the night. They weren’t sure where they were going, but they were beginning to think that this wasn’t the way that they had come. Glancing behind them, Winston spotted the bush moose notice that they weren’t there anymore and decide that it was going to give chase in earnest. It was terrifyingly quick. “FUCK, fuck fuck,” Winston exclaimed, their voice full of fear, “RUN RUN RUN.” It was just behind them and Winston had no idea where they were headed. All they knew was that they had to get out of here, and straight away.

Bad, bad, bad. This was very, very bad. Helpfully, this was the only thought running through Blanche’s mind as they flew threw the forest. Her grip on their arm hadn’t loosened as they tore through the forest. They were definitely lost. Like, extra lost. But finding the bus didn’t exactly matter because Blanche was about 95% certain that a smelly bus wouldn’t protect anyone from a stupid Plant Monster. The thing was stupid fast - or maybe they were just ridiculously slow, Blanche didn’t know, but she didn’t care to find out what would happen once it caught up with them. If it caught up with them. Granny was always saying how she should be more positive, or something. Blanche took a hard left turn, finally releasing her death grip on Winston’s arm in a stupid attempt to try to confuse the thing. Winston was still swearing up a storm and she couldn’t really blame them. Run, run, run - like she had any other plan. Well, actually - as she scrambled over a log. “Do you think - we should climb?!” Climb a tree? Could the plant thing climb a tree? Could they get up a tree fast enough before it got to them? And then what did they do once they were up a tree? But maybe it would give them a second to rest and regroup. 

“Climbing a tree sounds better then running through the forest,” Winston replied, sweat gushing down the sides of their face. They could already feel their chest getting slightly tighter as they worked to keep running. Winston was doing their best to follow Blanche. But then she turned left and Winston wasn’t exactly expecting it. Doing their best to stay with her, Winston turned left after her and felt their ankle twist painfully, sending them sprawling forwards into a bush. Yelping in pain, they tried to force themselves to their feet. “Ah,” they winced at the pain of moving but wrapped their long fingers around a branch to help their journey upwards, “ow ow ow ow.” They whispered to themselves, doing their best not to draw any attention to themselves in their vulnerable state. They knew that they weren’t going to be able to just sit here and eventually walk this off. They needed to keep moving or they would get trampled to death. The turn must’ve worked partially, but Winston could tell that it wouldn’t be long before the plant moose hybrid spotted them and came after them in earnest.

The stupid moose thing must have gotten confused in the dark, but she heard Winston yelp in pain and she knew that maybe she should have shouted a warning before they turned. That was wild, this was wild - maybe she should actually focus on safety right now instead of calling everything wild. Blanche hurriedly tried to find them in the dark. The whispers of ouch were helping considerably as she hoisted herself up into the tree. Oh, going to the gym was paying off. She could climb a tree! She hadn’t climbed a tree well… ever. Because there were bugs in there and it wasn’t lady like - or so Granny said. But Granny wasn’t here. She wasn’t sure how high they needed to go to get away from the moose plant thing, but they needed safety first. Once she was certain she was high enough, she went to help Winston. It was like an airline thing - help yourself before you help anyone else. She reached out her hand towards them. “Here, come on. Before it finds us. We need to - uh - regroup. Or something.” 

Honestly, Winston needed to consider taking their fitness way more seriously. If they didn’t increase their ability to run it seemed entirely possible that they would simply die from the apparently monster infected town that was now their home. Which was really great. Winston was really enjoying the three near-death encounters that they had had. Glancing up, Winston saw that Blanche had somehow managed to hoist herself into the trees. A pretty good idea. At least they would be out of the way of the plant moose hybrid that they had managed to piss off with their mere presence. “How did you-” Winston decided not to ask about a good thing, hauling themselves up, they winced as they placed their bad foot on the base of the tree and pushed themselves up towards the bottom branch. Grabbing Blanche’s hand, they climbed slowly and painfully and hoped that they would make it on time.

“Sorry, sorry, sorry -” Blanche was hyper aware that Winston was in pain, and knew climbing was bad. “I go to the gym, sometimes, that’s why I -  well, I mean, I don’t really climb stuff very often but - ah, careful, please be careful.” Blanche had two moods, and it was either a snarky mess or a panicky mess and she had officially switched over to panicking. Any rustling was automatically the giant plant moose, even if it wasn’t. But the second she got them squared away to her height she started fumbling with her flash light, debating if she wanted to turn it on. “Do you think -” Blanche didn’t need to finish her question, before she could hear the stupid thing searching for them. The noise it made sounded like a moose, but not a moose? And Blanche had heard a lot of weird ass moose noises in her life. She held her breath a moment, closing her eyes real hard. Come on, what the fuck were they going to do? Granny would have a solution. Granny always had a solution, but it wasn’t like she call up the ghost of her dead grandmother on her phone and ask. If she was going to call anyone, it should be the fire department. Or the police. Animal control? Supernatural Things of Weird Shit Organization? Blanche ran a hand down her face, panting slightly. Ugh. She was sweaty. She hated being sweaty. “Alright,” she whispered. “Okay. We can get out of this. We can get out of this. There’s gotta be a way. How - I mean, first of all, you can’t run anymore right?” 

“No, it was a good idea,” Winston said as they finally managed to tentatively settle on the tree. Holding tightly, they did their best to keep their long legs from dangling where the creature could get them, “I just wish we had thought of it before I tripped.” Tripped was a kind word for being clumsy as shit. “Do I think that this thing is still out there?” Winston asked with a raised eyebrow, before nodding, “I can hear it I think.” They peered out into the darkness, wishing now more then ever that whatever they had managed to do with their hands could be done again. Maybe that would be enough to scare this thing away. Pulling their phone out, they glanced at it before sighing. “I don’t have any signal, do you?” They couldn’t even call for help if they wanted to. What the hell was this? A horror film? Winsont wondered who died first, the black kid or the sarcastic blonde. Either way they didn’t like their chances. “I can hobble, maybe,” Winston looked around, “if we could make a crutch or something I could go faster but otherwise … y’know maybe we could just wait this thing out?” Winston had to admit that they were out of other ideas. The hand thing, well they weren’t even sure if light escaping their hands was something that had actually happened and even if it had, what good would it be? They patted their pockets, coming up with their phone, their wallet, a mostly empty packet of gum, keys, their inhaler (which they took a puff of for good measure) and some change. “I’ve not got anything that I could use, not that I can think of anyway.”

“Can’t get any ideas until someone rolls an ankle. It’s, like, a rule or something,” Blanche joked weakly. All things considered, she was actually pretty comfortable in the tree. That had to count for a win. She pulled her phone out of her pocket, thanking every God that she never followed Stan’s stupid rule of not having it on her. “I have no service too - fucking Maine, man,” she groaned quietly, leaning her head back against the tree as she glanced at them in the darkness. She shrugged off her drawstring Mooseventure bag, knowing she didn’t have a lot of shit in it. “I have a first aid kit,” she said, glumly. “If you want it. I have to carry one, Stan  - the bus driver - has the other in case of injuries. Other than that..” She didn’t have much else of use. A lighter for when she tried to be edgy and smoke cigarettes (they’re nasty and not worth it), a phone charger, and a balled up sweater. She stuffed her mooseventure flashlight back in the back with a sigh, straining to hear. She could still hear it, and she wasn’t too keen on the idea of waiting to become Plant-Moose Food. Blanche didn’t know what kind of stamina that thing had. What if it could outwait them? . She looked back at the contents of her bag, and grimaced. Plant. Well, plants didn’t do so hot against fire, did they? “Winston, I have a bad idea, and you’re not going to like it.” Blanche said, flatly. “But it involves a stick and my lighter.” 

“School must have been a very painful time for you,” Winston replied glibly, “are you a masochist or something?” A smirk dragging itself across their face despite the amount of pain that they were in. Winston tucked their good leg around the thick branch that they were perched on, hoping that their inherently clumsy nature wouldn’t rear it’s wildly inconvenient head in that very moment. After all, falling out of this tree would be painful and potentially result in a trampling. Something Winston had no desire to experience. “This is when you wish you didn’t live in the middle of buttfuck nowhere?” Winston asked quietly, “I never ever have signal when I need it.” They waved their arm around for a minute hoping to find some signal. Whilst Blanche unpacked the contents of their bag, Winston nodded. “I can at least add a splint to my ankle and that’ll help support it,” they took the first aid kit gratefully off of her and began tightly applying a splint. It was a sore experience, the ache grew as the pressure was applied before subsiding to the dull ache it had previously been at. Then Blanche was talking about a stick and her lighter, “Did you miss the smokey the bear experience?” Winston asked with a concern, “Didn’t you know that open fires in a forest is the perfect recipe for disaster?” Blanche was right, they didn’t like it at all. “I’m not agreeing to this, but what is your idea?” It might be the only way they avoided living in the woods forever.

Masochist. That made her laugh. “Yeah, I do math for fun, too.” Except that part was true. Blanche did do math for fun - it was relaxing. It was too bad she didn’t have any other talent because maybe then she wouldn’t hate her life for majoring in accounting at school. Winston was right, though. She also never had signal whenever she needed it. Too many times, she had been stranded because her car died or had a flat tire or whatever the hell happened and there was no fucking signal on her phone. It was definitely like a White Crest curse or something. She looked over at them, grimacing when they asked about Smokey the Bear. “Sure, but I’d rather not become a snack for some supernatural bullshit.” Though, starting a forest fire was a real concern. Blanche didn’t even want to touch that ethical dilemma, if only because right now she was equating being eaten by a plant moose vs a small fire. “You take my moose flashlight so we find the damn thing - because right now I honestly feel like we need the Jaws music playing - I rip a really long stick off this tree, set the end on fire, possibly use some of the rubbing alcohol from the first aid kit, cause that’s flammable, right? And then I jump down, and try to set the thing on fire. And then hopefully, it burns, without causing too much damage, and you can come down, and we can hobble to safety. And, like, I’ll probably drive you to the ER for your ankle?”

“HEY.” Winston replied with a level of indignance that could not have been faked, “Math is very fun and extremely cool.” Math just made sense to them, it worked, it followed rules and there were never exceptions to that rule. Once you knew and understood the rule, you understood the math. Winston had often wondered why Winston was such a technological dead zone. For someone who’s entire life was a revolving door of trying to discover the latest trend, trying to get their hands on the latest piece of technology, living in what was essentially the stereotypical example of rural Maine wasn’t exactly helpful. “Supernatural bullshit?” Winston replied skeptically, “I’m sure there is a very rational explanation for this, one time, I heard about a form of torture using bamboo where they grow it through your body. This is obviously just that except on a much quicker scale. If we were to try, we’d be able to pull away the surrounding shrubbage and foliage if we could get near to it without being gored.” They considered Blanche’s plan. First of all they had to spot the thing, in the dark, when it was literally covered in a natural camouflage. Secondly they would need to set the thing on fire, hope that they didn’t set the surrounding forest on fire and then they had to hope that they would be able to get away. “Honestly, that all sounds like the worst plan I’ve ever heard, but I haven’t got a better suggestion and we can’t wait up here forever. You’re the one taking all of the risk, so if you’re comfortable doing it then I won’t stop you. I’m not sure I could anyway. Just have it known that I think this is a terrible idea.”

The natural defensiveness that came out of Winston about math was surprising - everyone hated math, it seemed. Except for Blanche, of course, who was tutoring people even in the freshman year of High School. Well, now it was herself and Winston. Maybe one day she could show them her freaky side journal where she wrote down equations to solve for fun. But maybe not when they were stuck in a tree, formulating a really bad plan and lowkey debating whether the plant moose was supernatural. “Why is someone torturing a moose with bamboo? That sounds fake.” Or maybe she was just more apt to call something supernatural because she saw dead people. Regardless, it didn’t matter what it was, they had to do something or risk staying in the tree until dawn. Which was still a few hours away. “Your aversion to the plan is noted,” she said dryly. She grabbed her flashlight and handed it to them, before grabbing her lighter and putting her bag back on her back. It only took her a second to break a smaller branch off the tree, before she carefully climbed back down. Climbing down was harder than climbing up, and that had to be some bullshit if she ever heard it. “Alright,” her feet crunched as they hit the forest floor. She was certain she could still hear the damn thing, just watching and waiting. It was dawning on her that maybe they really should have just waited.

Math was fun. Winston was willing to fight over it. Besides, their ability to use mathematics well had helped them develop their coding ability. “They were torturing prisoners of war in Vietnam, not moose. I promise you it was not fake, I got told that I made an inappropriate presentation on the Vietnam war during my last year at middle school because of that. I can promise you that it isn’t fake.” As Blanche ignored their good advice, Winston looked at the flashlight that she was offering them and reluctantly took it off of her. If they were determined to get themselves killed then Winston guessed that they would be helping them get a timely death. They heard her snap a branch off of the tree and begin her climb. As they did their best to light the forest up for Blanche and spot the thing that was keeping them there, Winston couldn’t help but feel the nerves and apprehension in their stomach. But they stuck at it, before spotting what they thought was the moose maybe twenty meters away from Blanche. “Psst,” they cried out in a failed attempt to be subtle, “I think it is over there.” They pointed off in the distance, very vaguely.

Blanche hadn’t meant the torture thing was fake, she just meant that someone trying to torture a moose with bamboo was fake. But she could explain that to them after she was was done saving both of their asses. Hopefully. Unless she died. Then Winston was going to think she thought something from the Vietnam War was fake, and they were going to think she was an idiot. Bad time to be focusing on that though - something that was also a bad thing to focus on was how much she really, really didn’t want to die. Her palms were starting to sweat again, and she suddenly had that nervous, jittery energy in her knees that made her feel like they were going to buckle under her. Awesome. This was already going fan-freaking-tastically. She wondered if Winston was going to judge her if she puked. Probably. She glanced in the direction they pointed out, and she saw it. The eyes. It was always the eyes. Blanche blanched slightly. Oh sure, easy to be brave in the tree, but now she was fumbling with her lighter, trying to set the end of the tree ablaze. And then, she fucked up. The moose-plant had started walking towards her and she panicked. “Oh no -” Blanche started backing up, trying to get her lighter to spark, but her stupidass was fumbling with it like an idiot. The moose picked up the pace and so did she - and she fell. Blanche shrieked as she landed flat on her back, the lighter flying out of her hand in a horror movie moment. Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Winston watched Blanche with growing concern. It was almost as if everyone of their fears had been entirely founded and they had been completely right. Winston hated how clever they were sometimes. But they were pretty useless right now. They could only watch on concerned as their companion pulled the end of the tree close their lighter and attempted to spark it. She seemed to be struggling. Winston could only imagine the panic and terror that she was feeling and they suddenly wished that they had been firmer and insisted that she stayed there. Someone would’ve found them. Eventually. Sooner or later. They would’ve noticed that they were missing and someone would’ve come for them. But now Blanche was going to get herself hurt. Winston watched in terror as she slipped and fell, the lighter falling from their hands. Winston squirmed in terror and felt their grip on the branch disintegrate as they slid to the side, all balance failing them. There was a moment of terror where their heart sat in their mouth before they hurtled towards the ground. “Fuuuuuuuuckkkkk.” They could see Blanche and the plant moose and the ground rushing towards them at an alarming rate. Then they halted mid air and paused for a second. Winston felt out of breath and sweat beaded on their brow. The floor was literally inches away from their face. A second later and they fell the last few inches to the floor. Landing in a heap and with a mouthful of dirt they lay there for a moment, before realising that there was a giant moose trapped in a plant trying to kill them. Darting up, they winced in pain, before realising that the moose appeared to have submerged into a sinkhole. That was very convenient, but Winston wasn’t about to question a good thing. “Come on, we need to go.” They leaned down to help Blanche up, more likely to fall then actually be of any use. They suddenly felt exhausted. The adrenaline must be wearing off.

It was like a bad horror movie, and Blanche was the dumb white bitch in the horror movie that every screamed at to stop doing stupid shit. Blanche knew there was absolutely no way of rectifying this situation and terror and fear spread through her body as she realized she was going to die. Eyes shut tight to brace for whatever impact, nothing happened. Wait, what? Nothing happened. Blanche scrambled to sit up, brows knit together as she squinted in the darkness to see a fucking sink hole that the plant moose was currently trapped in. Winston was on their feet and trying to help her up, but honestly, as Blanche hurriedly pushed herself to her feet, she wasn’t really paying attention. “Let’s go before it learns it can jump 7 - 8 feet.” Blanche couldn’t even see the damn thing anymore, but she didn’t care. She grabbed a thicker big stick and handed it to Winston. “Use this as a crutch,” Blanche said, before moving forward. Blanche was jittery, the adrenaline hadn’t worn off from her yet, but she was still trying to figure out how a little sink hole just… appeared in the woods. “That was… convenient.” But, like plant-moose-monsters, she didn’t know anything about sinkholes. Maybe her very consciousness willed it to appear. Blanche snorted at the thought. “I don’t want to hear I told you so.” 

Blanche was pressing a branch into their hand and ordering them to use it as a crutch while still quoting some moose facts at them. “Yes ma’am,” Winston replied sheepishly as they continued to feel the energy drain from their body. They hadn’t felt this exhausted since the night where that weird dog thing had attacked them outside of their home that they shared with Ricky. “If you don’t mention it to the moose, maybe the moose won’t realise that it can jump that high.” Honestly, Winston was thanking their lucky stars. The chances of a sinkhole being directly in the moose’s path were infinitesimally small. But it had saved Blanche’s life and Winston wasn’t about to question a good thing. Leaning heavily on the stick, they winced with each step as a sharp pang of pain rippled from their ankle upwards. “That was very convenient, but I’m not going to complain about a good thing. But you will be hearing an I told you so, because, I told you so, and you could’ve really gotten hurt, and then I’d have to live with that guilt for the rest of my life.” 

Blanche snorted. “I’ll refrain from saying it too loudly,” Blanche said, looking at them pointedly. Focused on breathing slowly so she wouldn’t start hyperventilating, she looked down at their ankle, frowning slightly. The stick crutch can’t have been helping, but Blanche knew that there was no way in hell she was going to be able to carry them. They were too tall and she was too short. Blanche didn’t even know where they were going, and she had a feeling stumbling through the forest wasn’t a great idea. She made a face at their I told you so and shook her head. Maybe they were right and she shouldn’t have been so impulsive, but it was too late to change anything now. Besides, she got her just desserts anyway when she really thought she was going to die. “Well, luckily, I didn’t get really hurt, and both of us are still very much alive, so your heart can rest in peace. Here, let’s… stop for a second.” They probably weren’t far enough from the sink hole, but it was too dark to see it now, so out of sight out of mind. Hopefully. She pulled her phone back out. “I have 2 bars,” she said, folding up her phone. “That’ll do -” In a couple seconds she pulled up her GPS. “Alright, we need to go this way to get back to the road - c’mon, before I lose service again.”

“If there is anyway that we can avoid attack from hybridised fauna and flora then I would really appreciate that,” Winston replied glibly, shaking their head and sighing. Leaning heavily on the walking stick, Winston couldn’t help but relate to their sorcerer PC in their old D&D campaign. Their character had been in possession of an enchanted staff. But Winston was just a normal human, living in a normal world where weird things had just decided that they were going to begin happening. Walking aimlessly through the forest, Winston prayed that they wouldn’t run into anything else that might try to kill them. They also prayed that they found a road. Reaching into their pocket, they checked their phone again and was somewhat disappointed to discover that once again there was still no signal. “Fucking Maine, why do you have bars but I don’t?” they murmured with distatste at the lack of bars displaying on the OLED screen before their eyes, “maybe I should’ve gone to school on the West coast instead.” They weren’t really being serious. They had good enough grades to go to school in a lot of places. But White Crest held a special place in their heart and they knew that they didn’t want to leave just yet. Wincing as they put their foot down, Winston nodded. “Lucky you, I’m so glad that you didn’t get hurt.” At least Blanche had located the direction they were meant to be going. Gritting their teeth, they held a hand out, “Please, lead the way oh fair lady.” The sarcasm dripped from the final three words, Winston should’ve been less spiteful but when you’re in a lot of pain and feel like you’ve not eaten a good meal in weeks … well it gets harder to maintain your composure. 

“If we run into another plant moose-animal thing, I’m giving up. I had one dose of near-death-experience and I am not anxious for another any time soon,” Blanche said. The I told you so once again, and she let out a sigh. “I splurged for the iphone 8+ a few months ago.” Some old lady had come one the stupid moose tour 4 times in a row and had absolutely overtipped her. It was a good investment, too, because it was a lot better than the iphone 5 she had been using before. Still, she saw the signal drop down to one bar and she glowered at it. Don’t you dare, she thought. She glanced at Winston, feeling the sarcasm coming off them in waves. Well, if she had a series of unfortunate events that started with a stupid mooseventure tour that lead them to scrambling through the woods, she’d probably be pretty pissed off too. “How chivalrous,” Blanche commented flatly, glancing back at them with a raised eyebrow, before continuing forward. It wasn’t much of a path, but at least it was pretty level and there weren’t a ton of fallen branches or logs that they would have to climb over. And, they were pretty close to the road too. “Once we get to the road, we’ll call a car. I was serious about the trip to the emergency room.” 

“I’m sure it’s just a moose who’s managed to get itself wrapped up in some brambles which are agitating it, or something like that. There’s no such thing as a plant moose. Not in the way that we think.” Winston had a perfectly rational explanation for everything, but especially this. “Ah well you should’ve gotten a phone that’s actually worth the extortionate amount of money that I’m sure that you inevitably paid for that thing,” they knew their tech and there was so much wrong with apple products that they didn’t know where to start. That was fact not opinion. They winced bitterly as they limped along. Right now they were tired, in a lot of pain and not exactly enjoying themselves. “I don’t know if a trip to the emergency room is really necessary,” Winston complained bitterly, “I’m honestly completely fine, you don’t need to worry about me, I’ll just walk it off.” They audibly winced as their foot made contact with the uneven surface of a root. “I’m fine, just fine...”

“Did you look at it in it’s freaky glowing eyes? Because you should have.” Blanche said, dryly. They were probably right, though, no matter what she thought she had seen in the woods. Then again, things were never as they seemed so who the fuck knew anything? Blanche glanced at them, snorting when they roasted her cell phone, and shook her head. “We’re not having the apple vs. andriod conversation in the middle of the woods - though, the extortionate price is worth it right now at this moment in time because I have service.” There was an implied and you don’t. Still, regardless of disagreements and them complaining that they were just fine and that there was no need to go to the emergency room, she looked at them doubtfully. “I dunno,” she said, a frown on her face. “You look and sound like you’re in a lot of pain. You need to get it scanned and looked at by someone who know what they’re doing.”

“Unfortunately I did look it in it’s freaky glowing eyes…” Winston swallowed, “as it was sinking into the .. well the ground. They kind of locked eyes with me.” They weren’t sure what the hell was going on. Raising an eyebrow, Winston shrugged. “My phone still has a headphone jack,” they replied with a shake of their head, “but I won’t subject you to that humiliation after the humiliation that we’ve both suffered today.” They winced as they walked a bit further. “But your service comes from your provider, not your phone.” They had to be right. It was pathological. They were just so smart that they had to always be correct. They couldn’t help it. “I probably just rolled my ankle and sprained it a little, I’m sure that it is completely fine.” They were sure of none of those things.

[yespolkadotkitty]

Swords, Sarcasm & Starlight, pt 4

Part 3 here

The burgers were insane, Darcy thought again as she and Geralt found a bench and sat down, digging in. He’d ordered a steak burger with everything on it, in her hands she held a classic burger with a bacon and maple syrup glaze that should have been illegal.

The noise of the fayre swirled and clamoured around them as they ate side by side. When Darcy had finished, she balled her wrapper in her palm. “Always the sign of a good food stand. When no one talks during the eating.”

“Hmm,” Geralt said, which Darcy took as agreement.

Plenty of women - and men - eyed Geralt in passing, and Darcy mulled over his previous words. No way there hadn’t been a queue of ready people of both genders just lining up to play She-Ra to his He Man. No fucking way.

Unless he was hiding a load of skeletons in his closet. It would just be her luck.

“So… how’d you get into the sword making business?” she asked, rolling the curled-up wrapper between her palms. 

Geralt finished his own burger and smoothed out the wrapper meticulously. Darcy had once read in Cosmo that men who did that were very attentive in bed. Her toes curled and she made herself look away from his hands. Get a grip, Darce.

“I’ve always had a knack for metalwork, stuff with my hands. I went to Blacksmith summer school as a teenager - seemed more fun than getting a summer job, and I loved it, loved the fire, the clang of metal, the sheer magic of creating something so solid.” He blinked, then shook his head slightly as if he’d gone to another world, and maybe he had. “And what about you, your art?”

Darcy stared out at the expanse of field around them. In the distance, a few guys on horseback held standards bearing family crests, real or fictional, it didn’t matter one bit somewhere like this. At a ren fayre it was impossible to tell real aristocrats from cosplayers, and that was just the way she liked it. “My parents used to listen to The Sky at Night on the BBC World Service when I was little,” she began, smiling at the memory of it. “Patrick Moore’s voice as he waxed lyrical about the stars was like a lullaby to me. I started drawing stars almost before I could properly write my own name.”

Geralt smiled, his lips curving at the left corner of his mouth first, and Darcy wondered how he’d taste, coffee and the sweetness of the relish in his burger… and what else? Warm, broad man? 

She shook the thought off. Just because his insanely gorgeous friend wanted to set him up, did not mean he wanted to be set up. Maybe, like Darcy, he had really had no motivation other than being really, really hungry.

“Hey, um…” Darcy stopped abruptly, suddenly uncharacteristically shy. “Are you going to that concert tonight? Jaskier and the Dandelions?”

“Maybe.” He met her gaze, his warm, his amber eyes dancing with mischief, and for a frozen moment Darcy was totally poleaxed by how gorgeous he was, pale hair fluttering in the sunshine, his broad shoulders filling out his tunic perfectly. “Are you asking me on a date?”

Nerves warred with pleasure in Darcy’s stomach. “If I was, would you say yes? If not, then, no, I am definitely only asking out of sheer curiosity about whether you can dance a medieval jig.”

Geralt laughed, the sound throaty and definitely more than a little bit sexy. “If you were asking me on a date, then theoretically, I would say yes.”

Darcy aimed at a nearby trash can - garbed ridiculously in papery medieval flag material (an actual bin was more attractive and handy than a cesspit after all) - and then tossed her balled up burger wrapper, scoring a perfect hit. “Then it’s a date.”

****

A few hours later, the stalls were starting to wrap up, and Darcy decided to drive to her (budget) hotel to freshen up before the concert later. The clock struck six p.m as she packed up her stuff, leaving only the faire-provided lockbox with the bare minimum inside it. She pulled the huge bag over her shoulder, thankful as she usually was at these gigs that canvas and paintbrushes weighed so little.

Yennefer stood on duty next door. Geralt had gone about a half hour ago, to settle Roach in the nearby stable, and, she assumed, to freshen up at his own hotel or tent. She couldn’t imagine him as a 300-threadcount sheet kind of guy, but you never knew.

He’d sent her a loaded smile as he’d prepared to leave, and a little frisson of excitement had skated down her spine. Maybe barbarians are my type after all.

“Have fun tonight,” Yennefer grinned as Darcy went to bid her goodbye. “I hear Jaskier’s brilliant. Very romantic.”

“As romantic as possible, I guess, given the amount of meat and, by that time, the amount of costumes and wigs that are askew.”

Yennefer laughed, startled, and then smiled warmly. “I do like you, Darcy. Try and loosen Geralt up a little, would you?”

My pleasure,  Darcy thought privately as she saluted the other woman and made her way to her little car, unharmed thanks to Geralt’s intervention earlier. A lot of the other cars had cleared out already, and she easily packed her things, winding the windows down and setting the radio on loud. She sang along with the Chainsmokers as she sped down the road, the sun beginning its slow descent into the horizon.

Darcy parked up, smiling absently at the other cars in the hotel lot with ren fayre stickers on the trunk and bumpers, along with roleplayer slogan stickers like I BRAKE FOR KOBOLDS and KEEP CALM AND LARP ON.

A group of ren fayre goers sat on the benches by the hotel entrance, smoking, one of them playing what looked like an actual lute, a feathered cap perched on his head and a parrot on his shoulder. Darcy grinned as she passed them. There was nothing quite like a ren fayre to bring out everything America had to offer.

At the desk, she dropped her bag on the floor and gave the clerk her details. It took a while. After five minutes, Darcy tried to lean over the high counter. “Is there a problem?”

The clerk bit her lip, tapping away at the keyboard nervously. “I’m sure it’s just some administrative error. I’ll get it sorted.”

Another five minutes passed. Quite the queue had formed behind her, and Darcy’s stomach growled. She leaned over again. “I’m sorry to put the pressure on, but, can you just tell me what’s up?”

The clerk met her gaze miserably. “I’m sorry ma’am, it seems like your room has been overbooked and it’s already occupied.”

“What? By who?” Darcy asked incredulously.

Tagging: @asifbyemagik​ @hopelessromanticspoonie​ @emmalouise663

[elizabethjournals]

I know, I know, its May and I am just now posting my 2017 overview… I have no excuse, but here it is! Here is an overview of each month’s bullet journal layout in 2017 cover to cover!

This post may contain affiliate links

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    Introductory Pages

These are the pages I put at the beginning of the 2017 section in my notebook.

    January

January and February’s layouts were in a different notebook than the rest of the year, they were also created before I began blogging about my bullet journal. These layouts are incredibly simple and nearly identical.

  January Tools

Essential Gridline Notebook, A5 size

Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens, Tropical & Assorted Colors

    February

At the end of February I had decided to switch notebooks, February is almost identical to January.

  February Tools

Essential Gridline Notebook, A5 size

Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens, Tropical & Assorted Colors

    New Notebook Intro Pages

I decided to go crazy with my new notebook, and in addition to transferring over old introductory layouts, I added some trackers and a title page!

    March

March is the first month I began writing about my bullet journals on Jihi Elephant. I decided to splurge and get myself a new notebook! I was so inspired by the research I did for my Simple Bullet Journal Page Ideas post that I had to re-do the design was using before March. For this journal, I also invested in some new pens.

  March Tools

Essential Gridline Notebook, A5 size

Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens, Tropical & Assorted Colors

Tombow Dual Brush Pens (# 885, 346, 158, 177, 977, 993, 475, N15)

    April

For my bullet journal in the month of April, I decided to make some changes that were much-needed. In March’s spread, I talked about some things that I needed to change and add for April. I listened to myself and made those changes.

  April Tools

Essential Gridline Notebook, A5 size

Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens, Tropical & Assorted Colors

Tombow Dual Brush Pens (# 885, 346, 158, 177, 977, 993, 475, 565, 679, 847, N15)

    May

May’s bullet journal was very similar to that of April. It is simple, short, and organized.

  May Tools

Essential Gridline Notebook, A5 size

Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens, Tropical & Assorted Colors

Tombow Dual Brush Pens (# 885, 346, 158, 177, 977, 993, 475, 925, 847, 992, N15)

    June

There are quite a few aesthetic changes to my bullet journal spreads from May to June. While I was doing my pages for this month, I decided that I enjoyed their functionality but had become bored with the way they looked. So, for June, I got fun and funky with fonts and ever so slightly crazy with colors.

  June Tools

Essential Gridline Notebook, A5 size

Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens, Tropical & Assorted Colors

Tombow Dual Brush Pens (# 885, 346, 158, 177, 977, 993, 475, 925, 847, 679, 992, 603, N15)

    July

July was a crazy month for me with my move to North Carolina taking place and everything that goes down with such a drastic move. Because of this, I had placed a very specific list, and tracking pages smack dab in the middle of my weekly pages. I was also inspired by some bullet journal pages on Instagram and decided to get artsy. I broke out my Tombow Pens and went to work!

  July Tools

Essential Gridline Notebook, A5 size

Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens, Tropical & Assorted Colors

Tombow Dual Brush Pens (# 847, 565, 925, 158, 346, 885, 977, 993, 475, 177, 679, 603, N15)

    August

August’s bullet journal spread was entirely different from the creative, artsy look of July’s spread. For August, I decided to keep it classic and clean looking. I did not stray from color or creativity, I just kept it incredibly simple and functional. With this being the first month in North Carolina, and with it being the month both work and school started, the layouts had very much changed.

  August Tools

Essential Gridline Notebook, A5 size

Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens, Tropical & Assorted Colors

Tombow Dual Brush Pens (# 847, 925, 158, 346, 885, 992, 993, 177, 679, 603, N15)

    September

When I created September’s spread, my goal was to leave a lot of white space and keep it minimalistic. I had just got new fine tip pens and wanted to put them to use. I am not sure that I loved having SO much white space. I definitely improved from here.

  September Tools

Essential Gridline Notebook, A5 size

Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens, Tropical & Assorted Colors

Tombow Dual Brush Pens (# 925, 346, 885, 993, 177, 679, N15)

Paper Mate InkJoy Gel Pens, Fine Point

    October

For October’s bullet journal, I chose to take a completely new approach. Until this point I had not really used tools like stickers or washi tape, I also had not utilized welcome or title pages. However, for October I created a title page that I absolutely love. I also decided to use houseplant stickers, cactus washi tape, and succulent washi tape, as well as houseplant doodles to add personality and color to my weekly layouts. I also decided to add a ton of list pages, check it out!

  October Tools

Essential Gridline Notebook, A5 size

Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens, Tropical & Assorted Colors

Tombow Dual Brush Pens (# 925, 346, 993,158, 177, 977, 847, N15)

Floral Washi Tape

Paper Mate InkJoy Gel Pens, Fine Point

Houseplant stickers

Cacti & Succulent washi tape

    November

For November’s Bullet Journal planning spread, I did an experiment! I bought some letter and number stamps and tried to implement them tastefully. I really like the turnout! The stamps gave it a newspaper feel if you ask me. The theme for November’s spread (other than using stamps), was fall colors so you will see a lot of red, orange, yellow, and brown. Let’s get started!

  November Tools

Essential Gridline Notebook, A5 size

Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens, Tropical & Assorted Colors

Tombow Dual Brush Pens (# 925, 847, 885, 997, N15)

Paper Mate InkJoy Gel Pens, Fine Point

Estone Number Alphabet Letter Wood Rubber Stamp

Washi tape

    December

December’s layout has a central theme: CHRISTMAS! I tried to stick with red, green, and gold. I found this beautiful hello December inspiration (with minor modifications and my own touch of course). This is the simplest and least sparkly page I created for December, featuring a reindeer!

  December Tools

Essential Gridline Notebook, A5 size

Paper Mate Flair Felt Tip Pens, Tropical & Assorted Colors

Tombow Dual Brush Pens (# 847, 158, 177, N15)

Arteza Real Brush Pens Watercolor Markers

Garage sale stamps

Silver & Gold washi tape

Floral Gold washi tape

Pilot Gold and Silver Metallic Permanent Paint Markers

    Want to keep up with my bullet journal daily? Follow my Instagram!!

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  2017 Bullet Journal Cover to Cover I know, I know, its May and I am just now posting my 2017 overview… I have no excuse, but here it is!

[cutiecrates]

Cutie Reviews: Gacha Gacha Crate Nov 19

I’m actually working on this sooner than I had planned for once :P I wanted to go and visit my mom at the Hospital today (her port for kemo had to be removed because it gave her a bad infection), but I woke up sick and feverish, and on top of that I’ve been having “leg issues” due to a cramp I got yesterday. I think I’m better off spending today in bed.

With that in mind I just ate lunch (caramel apple walnut pie slice and apple juice), and now I’m ready to work!

Later, I will be doing a smaller post regarding some news related to the various boxes/brands I’m subscribed to, so be sure to check that out when you get a chance!

Calico Critters Doll Set

Calico Critters (in Japan they are known as "Sylvanian Families”) are very popular and cutely flocked human-like animals who come in all sorts of species, each with its own special name, outfit, and information.

For this months box, we could get 1 of 5 various sets, each including its own character, items, a baby bottle, and changeable background piece. I know this looks big in the picture, but its actually really small, being about... not even half the size of my juice box. Each costs 200 yen, and besides my bunny piano set, there was also:

Bear and rocking toy

bunny and bed

squirrel or chipmunk and a car

kitty and a slide (this would have been perfect for my set)

The details of this piece are really nice, especially the backgrounds (which are actually from the toy sets), and the crisp and clean animal figure. The house piece has a detailed roof but otherwise no defined traits (which isn’t bad for display purposes), while the pieces with the animal are very “flat”, for example, the baby bottles are single colored and have no details. The bigger pieces are single colored (with the exception of the piano keys, which are white. I can’t tell if its a sticker or painted) with a lot of molded detail you need to look really close at to see.

I think this is a really cute little toy. I’m not sure its really the best thing to play with due to its tiny size, but it’s perfect as a display piece, for figures, re-ment sets. I’ll be giving it to my Tuxedo Cat family daughters (and their adopted bunny sister).

Pokemon Figurine

This is one of those popular “Gacha in its own head build it yourself“ pieces. I had two other Pokemon versions of these, so I assume they have a bunch of series. But they seem to be mainly based on the original generation.

Meanwhile... can you guess Who That Pokemon is?!

I’ll give you a hint, it’s not Eevee~

It’s Flareon!

Besides Flareon, we could also get Jolteon, Vaporean, Eeevee, and Pikachu!

As usual, these figures are very easy to assemble and seem to be “chibified”. All the pieces come inside and you just pop the head pieces on, then slide in the ears. They paint quality is spot-on in accuracy and detail- but I did notice my Flareon has a "mark” on its nose. I’m not sure if its supposed to be a shine on it, or if its a scratch in the paint.

I will mention that these are a bit fragile. Not in the sense the pieces will break as they are plastic, but they seem to “fall apart“ if dropped or moved too roughly. I barely jostled my box after assembling this and when I opened it again I found the head piece was separated and the ears fell off.

Super Mario Bros

I love getting these cute mini-game based Gachapon, and this one is MARIO themed! I love Mario x3 (and Sonic too, I grew up with both series). This series included 6 variations, either coming in yellow or red, with gold or red coins. The various characters besides this one I got was the Mario Bros, Peach, and Toad. I really wish i got one with Princess Peach, she’s my favorite~

The game is pretty self-explanatory. All you do is insert the coins on one side and guide them to the other.

When not playing with it, you take off the plastic pieces and put them together, put the coins inside, and store them in the slot on the back. It’s very handy and makes this a fun little piece you could bring with you.

I’ll admit, the game gets boring after a few minutes and there isn’t much to it at all; but it’s really cute- and if you’re someone who likes Mario or video games as a whole, I think that adds a special layer to it. It could also be really fun if you play it with multiple people.

Onigiri & Tako Rabbits

Next up is this cute little keychain series featuring Piske and Usagi, by Kanahei, featuring various rice recipes (and a tako Piske). Ironically, I probably got the one I’d not want to eat all all; I don’t like anything but white rice, and I especially hate peas.

However, I’m not eating this and I think this is a very cute charm. It has pieces on both the top and bottom, so you have plenty of options as to what to use this for- but they’re so small, I feel like bigger fingers would have difficulty using them.

Quality wise, these charms are great. The one I have is made from heavy-duty plastic and is very detailed, featuring unique textures on each section (Piske, the rice, the omelet wrap), and the painting job is a solid 9.9 out of 10. I noticed a very small amount of white bleeding into the rice, but its not hugely noticeable.

Fruits Basket Rubber Charm

This item is perfect for any Fruits Basket fans out there new or old, and this was made in time to celebrate the end of the updated series’ first season. There was 8 possible characters in the form of a chibified rubber charm, and from what little I do know, I got Ayame Soma.

While the theme of the series appeals to me, I’ve never entirely got into Fruits Basket. I just know basics, and the stuff my friend (who does like the series) tells me.

These charms are very detailed, with a smooth backing and ball chain... that’s pretty much all I have to say about it. I’m sorry but rubber keychains are almost all the same quality wise regardless of the series. It’s very cute and I like it, but I may pass it on to my friend because I feel like she would appreciate it more. 

Onigiri Rings

Our final item of the box is an adorable Onigiri replica :D

Inside the onigiri is this adorable ring, based on the various food items ones might eat in rice, on rice, or with rice. For example... I think mine is sesame seeds and seaweed, or some kind of pickled vegetable. There was also a piece of grilled tuna or salmon, a pickled plum, a raw piece of tuna or salmon, and fish eggs.

Each one costs 300 yen a piece, and honestly I think besides the one I got, I’d like to have gotten the fish eggs (I like how pretty they look), or the pickled plum (because it reminds me of one of my favorite PriPara characters).

The ring is a big, silver loop. I did originally take pictures of my finger with it on, but due to limitations I had to cut back <_< But I will say it fit on each of my fingers and didn’t feel overly tight, so I feel like many hand sizes/types could fit these, which I really like and appreciate. I don’t often wear rings, but just for the cute/weirdness factor, I could see wearing this one.

(Also, does anyone play A3? It’s a new visual novel male actors game. As soon as I got this, the whole thing reminded me of Misumi. With his onigiri and triangle obsession).

--------

All and all, I liked this box :D it was pretty fun and cute and I think in terms of the included items, it was about the same as the prior box, or maybe a little better in my opinion. I didn’t dislike anything, and I can’t wait to get my next one~

As I said on top, I’ll be making another post very soon. Initially I planned on doing it right after this one, but I’m beginning to feel sick again and it’s wearing me down. I think I’ll be doing it later after I get some more rest.

[perksofwifi]

2019 Mini Cooper Hardtop Oxford Edition First Test: Not Easy Being Green

I’m the target audience for the Mini Cooper Hardtop Oxford Edition. My automotive tastes line up well with the Mini ethos; I’m all about compact dimensions, light weight, and motorsport heritage. I’ve always liked the styling and “kart-like” handling of these cars, even if driving this Mini is nothing like driving a go-kart. But there’s one little detail about my life that makes me the ideal customer for this particular Mini. I just graduated from college.

The Mini Hardtop Oxford Edition is something of a popular equipment package, combining some of the model’s best available options in one trim level and selling it at a lower price. Sort of like a Porsche 911 T. But pricing for the Oxford Edition actually sits below that of the optionless base model; a Mini Hardtop 4 Door starts at $23,750, but our optioned-up Oxford tester stickers at just $21,600. What’s the catch? Only a very limited demographic is eligible to buy one.

To be more specific, fine print reads that the Oxford Edition is available to “eligible current full- or part-time students of any two- or four-year accredited college or university, recent college graduates who are within 12 months of their graduation, as well as students enrolled in post-bachelor’s degree programs, such as graduate school, law school, or medical school,” plus “Active Duty members of the United States Military and its recent retirees.”

A Semi-British Bargain

So ,what do these students and military folks get for a shade over $21k? The entry-level Mini Hardtop plus premium paint, 17-inch wheels (up from 15s), heated seats, and a panoramic sunroof. The optional automatic transmission—usually a $1,250 upcharge—is also included with the Oxford, if that’s your thing. This student-or-soldier special saves up to $6,900 compared with a similarly equipped Cooper Hardtop. And let’s recall, the entry-level car is not a bad place to start. It retains the brand’s iconic styling without looking dated, both powertrain options are strong and torquey, and they finally moved the speedometer to a visible spot behind the steering wheel from its awkward home directly in the center of the dash.

Back up a sec; let’s talk powertrain for a moment. Our test car was powered by a turbocharged 1.5-liter three-cylinder engine. Just a tiny little thing, but it makes 134 hp and 162 lb-ft of torque—or 169 lb-ft on temporary overboost. That’s a good bit of torque for a car under 3,000 pounds, and it comes in just off idle at 1,250 rpm. Our Oxford scooted to 60 mph in 7.6 seconds, which was legitimate hot hatch territory not long ago. There’s more than enough grunt to get up to speed, and we had no difficulty passing above 70 mph. Yes, the little three-pot struggles with noise, vibration, and harshness at low RPM, and sure, it makes an almost diesel-like clatter at idle. But it’s enthusiastic in character and a fun driving companion, especially for a base engine.

Read More 7 Ways the Honda Civic Type R Is a Performance Star Hyundai Elantra GT N Line: Why I’d Buy It – Alex Nishimoto Mini Cooper JCW GP Will Make More Than 300 HP

Inside, the standard synthetic leather upholstery is nice enough, and we appreciate this generation’s more conventional interior touches. Window switches have migrated to the doors from their old spot in the center console, and the aforementioned speedometer relocation means it was much easier to tell how fast I was driving. Remember, quirky aesthetics are all well and good but making quirky ergonomic decisions is just poor design. Perfect example: There’s a dramatically red starter switch in the middle of the center stack, and its color and shape make it the first bit of switchgear you see when you slide behind the wheel. It’s a well-executed detail that I appreciated at the start and finish of every drive.

Another ergonomic mishap concerns the 6.5-inch infotainment screen running a Mini-branded version of BMW’s iDrive system. It’s relatively intuitive, but operating the control dial requires a wrist angle that can’t be comfortable for anyone with normal human bone structure. It also scrolls differently than I’d expect; turn left to scroll down, right to scroll up.

Quibbles and Complaints

The backup camera is of decent resolution, but the lack of any guidelines on screen make parking harder than it needs to be. Notably missing here is the inclusion of Apple CarPlay or Android Auto compatibility. Combined with the lack of navigation, drivers in need of directions must resort to propping up phones in a poor-visibility cupholder or biting the bullet and buying a mount. (Pro tip: There are more affordable options than Mini’s Click & Drive with Universal Holder, available for “just” $245.) Bluetooth pairing works well, and the standard audio setup is on the better side of adequate, if a little heavy on midrange bass and weak at the low end. The panoramic sunroof included with the Oxford is large and pleasant, making the relatively tight cabin feel downright airy.

Although quibbles about wind and tire noise can be masked by said audio setup, what cannot be covered up is the Mini’s ride quality. The suspension on this car is pretty stiff—more so than necessary for the standard Hardtop—and that translates to a choppy, bouncy ride that can border on unpleasant.

It also means good body control and little roll when the going gets twisty, something at which the Mini excels. Steering feels quick, and the car is small enough to pick your line through a series of corners without crossing the double yellow. Power is good as long as you keep the three-pot on boil. This would be easier if you could swap gears with paddles behind the steering wheel, but the automatic’s manual gate works in the correct direction (down is up, up is down) and it does the job just fine. The optional six-speed manual ’box would also do the trick. The limiting reactant in the handling equation is understeer, no surprise given the Mini’s poorly rated Hankook Optimo all-season tires. Despite a firm brake pedal with strong initial bite, the rubber’s limited grip is also to blame for a mediocre 126-foot 60–0 mph braking distance.

Perhaps the best way to summarize my disappointment in this car is by talking about its paint. Let me be clear, the color rocks. It’s Mini’s B22-code British Racing Green metallic, and it looks fabulous on this little four-door. I’m a strong believer that any English (even German-owned English) car with even the slightest hint of motorsport history should be ordered in British Racing Green. Bentleys, Jags, Minis, the lot. Heck, I’d be on board if they went Henry Ford–style and decided every Mini is available in any color you like, as long as it’s British Racing Green.

But access to this perfect pigment is even more limited than that of the Oxford Edition and its sizeable discount. Mini tells us that BRG code B22 was developed for the 60th Anniversary Edition car, and it was offered as an option for early-production Oxfords but discontinued in April 2019. As of our writing, it cannot be ordered on any model Mini makes. And that’s our issue with the Cooper Oxford Edition. It’s the quick, character-filled, enthusiastic Mini we love, and it’s genuinely affordable to the people. We just wish more folks could actually buy one.

2019 Mini Cooper Hardtop 4-Door (Oxford Edition) BASE PRICE $23,750 PRICE AS TESTED $21,600 VEHICLE LAYOUT Front-engine, FWD, 5-pass, 4-door hatchback ENGINE 1.5L/134-hp/162-lb-ft turbo DOHC 12-valve I-3 TRANSMISSION 6-speed automatic CURB WEIGHT (F/R DIST) 2,854 lb (62/38%) WHEELBASE 101.1 in LENGTH x WIDTH x HEIGHT 157.4 x 68.0 x 56.1 in 0-60 MPH 7.6 sec QUARTER MILE 16.0 sec @ 85.4 mph BRAKING, 60-0 MPH 126 ft LATERAL ACCELERATION 0.83 g (avg) MT FIGURE EIGHT 27.6 sec @ 0.60 g (avg) REAL MPG, CITY/HWY/COMB 25.5/42.1/31.0 mpg EPA CITY/HWY/COMB FUEL ECON 27/35/30 mpg ENERGY CONS, CITY/HWY 125/96 kW-hrs/100 miles CO2 EMISSIONS, COMB 0.64 lb/mile

The post 2019 Mini Cooper Hardtop Oxford Edition First Test: Not Easy Being Green appeared first on MotorTrend.

https://www.motortrend.com/cars/mini/hardtop/2019/2019-mini-cooper-hardtop-oxford-edition-first-test-review/ visto antes em https://www.motortrend.com

[zhangsan111111]

Disney The Little Mermaid Flip Flops For Kids

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From renting to owning – and reluctantly back to renting

I’ve been an airplane nut practically all my life. I grew up on a cotton farm, and one of the highlights of my youth was watching the ag planes as they sprayed our fields and those of our neighbors. One of our neighbors had a field positioned such that the plane, an early Air Tractor with a big old radial in the nose, would make his turn right over our house.

I always hoped he would get lots of bugs in his cotton. No matter what I was doing, much to the consternation of my dad and brothers, if an airplane flew overhead, work stopped until I had spotted the plane and it was out of sight. My feet may have been in the cotton patch, but my mind was in the clouds. The guy who sprayed our fields bought an old Tri-Pacer and gave us a ride once, and the dream having become reality, I knew that was something I wanted to be able to do myself.

We were poor, but I managed to come up with a little money in college to start taking flying lessons. Over a couple of years, I managed to log enough time to almost be ready for the checkride, but that final hurdle eluded me. A wife then came into the picture, and priorities were diverted for a while, but after a 10-year hiatus, I decided it was time to pursue the dream again.

The Viking is a fun airplane to fly, but there is a learning curve.

Four of us bought an old Cessna 150 for $6,000. We kept it a year, finished our licenses, and sold it for $5,800. It was then on to bigger and better things. The group bought a 1964 Bellanca Viking. Going from a 150 with a top speed of 100 mph to a Bellanca with an approach speed of 100 mph was a stretch, and probably not a wise one, but I managed to survive long enough to learn to handle the speed and power of the Viking. Partners came and went in the group, but I was always around.

During that period, I managed to use the plane quite a bit for work. I had a number of clients who lived in a small town that was a one-hour flight and a four-hour drive, and this being the good old days when gas was only $2.00 a gallon, I could make the flight for a hundred bucks. There was a courtesy car at the airport, and I made that run about once a month. It made sense, and the plane actually had a practical purpose. I could leave at 7:30 am, get my work done, and be back by early afternoon. It beat eight hours in the car.

As time went on, though, I found myself going there less. There were some other business trips, but not many. Most of the other trips I made were 100 miles, and the practical side of me got in the way. By the time you go to the airport, get the plane ready to go, make the flight, get a car, and drive to town, you could drive the whole trip in the same time, and with avgas having gone to $5.00 instead of $2.00, it was certainly cheaper to drive.

I found my use of the plane went down significantly. Sure, I could use it any time I wanted to, but it was hard to force myself to just go bore a hole in the sky for no reason. By this time I had two kids in college, so funds were not as free as they had been. I realized that I no longer had a rational reason to be in the partnership. For the time I was flying, I could have rented far cheaper. But I really liked the guys who were my partners, and there was just something about being able to go to the hangar and open the door and think, “That’s mine.” Even if I wasn’t flying it, I knew I could. I would fly enough to keep current, sort of.

A few times I went past the 90 days, but when I went out to do my landings to get legal, I always felt competent. By this time we had upgraded the Bellanca to a 1974 Super Viking which was much nicer. As nice as it was, though, when I got the $50 gas bill for just making three landings, it took a lot of the fun out of using it.

The Super Viking aged, as all things do, and it was needing some work. The ECI cylinder AD note hit us, and with 1600 hours on the engine, it didn’t make sense to not do a major, which would have been 30 grand. We needed some radio upgrades, which would have been another 20 grand. In addition, it really needed to be painted, which would have been another $20,000 or so. We would have invested $70,000 in an airplane that probably wouldn’t have been worth that much. We decided it was time to punt.

We found a gentleman willing to give us $29,000 for the Bellanca. He wasn’t planning on overhauling the engine, just replacing the cylinders. It wasn’t what I would have done, but then it wasn’t my airplane anymore. We found a nice, well-quipped Mooney 201 for right at $100,000. Using the proceeds from the Bellanca sale, we were still out $70,000, but that was no more than we would have been out had we kept the Bellanca. The Mooney was better equipped and gave the same speed on less gas.

Even though the Mooney was cheaper to operate, I still found myself reluctant to play with it. Truth be known, I really never got that comfortable with it. Just a few months after we bought it, my wife and I made a decision to move to Tennessee to be closer to our children and grandson. My partners bought me out. I had a little money, but for the first time in over 30 years, I didn’t have an airplane that I could look at and say, “That’s mine.”

It’s painful, but sometimes you have to say goodbye.

I’ve been in Tennessee for about 9 months, and haven’t touched a yoke yet. I do have a valid excuse. Things were a little hectic getting settled, and about the time we did get everything put up and organized, I had my left shoulder replaced. It’s a little hard to manipulate the controls with a bum left arm. But now that’s over, and my excuses have just about run out. My plan all along was to rent. There hadn’t been justification for owning a plane for years, if there ever was. I’ve been there, done that. I’ve identified where I’m going rent. I just haven’t taken the plunge.

The first step will be to get renters insurance. I thought that was going to run about $300, but I’m getting sticker shock in actually looking at it. Then I have to pick which plane I’m going to fly. The flight school has a Cherokee and a 172. I have a fair amount of Cherokee time, so that makes the most sense, but if I’m going to be sightseeing, which will probably be the main thrust of my flying out here, the high wing makes sense too. I have very little 172 time, so it would take longer to get comfortable. Either plane is going to be a step down after what I have most of my time in. It’s probably going to set me back $500 or so just to get the insurance and a checkout. And that’s just to get started. Of course, I was paying more than that a month in debt service and fixed costs for the Mooney.

You can say what you want to about renting versus owning. I fully understand the fact that if you’re not going to use a plane regularly, you can’t justify owning one, even in a partnership. I’ve known for years that I could have been flying more for less money if I just rented. But now that I’m faced with renting, the reality of scheduling and not having a fast, capable airplane to fly is staring me in the face.

Even though I can appreciate better than most renters what it really costs to operate an airplane, it’s still going to be hard to bring myself to pay over $2.00 a minute to rent one. Of course, on the other side of the coin, the Mooney just got out of its annual inspection, and for the first time in over 30 years, I didn’t have that sinking feeling in the bottom of my stomach when I saw the envelope with the bill for that in my mail, wondering how bad it was this year. I don’t have to wonder which thousand dollar item is going to break on it this year, in addition to the annual. In fact, I just got an email from my brother, who is still in the partnership, with a picture of the broken compression ring on the number two cylinder. Owning an airplane has its rewards, but sometimes it’s anything but fun.

So I will get it done. It’s time to give up ownership. I know that, and I’m resigned to it. Once I get checked out, I’ll arrange to go out either with my son or some friends and enjoy the Smoky Mountains from above. There will be new airports to fly into to add to my logbook. I’ll make friends with a new plane. When I was flying Cherokees before, they seemed really fast. Since I’m trying to slow my life down anyway, maybe the Cherokee will be just the right speed after all.

The post From renting to owning – and reluctantly back to renting appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2019/03/from-renting-to-owning-and-reluctantly-back-to-renting/

[smartwebhostingblog]

Apple Silly Season Is Upon Us

New Post has been published on https://rwamztech.com/apple-silly-season-is-upon-us/

Apple Silly Season Is Upon Us

Silly Season Is Upon Us

That feeling when graffiti makes more sense than floor traders. By cogdogblog – Good Advice, CC0, Bring a towel, too. (2535543334).jpg

Apple (AAPL) is always subject to Silly Season in their Q1 (Christmas quarter). Q4 has 1-3 weeks of new iPhone sales, but the motherlode is Q1, so speculation is rampant. Apple is the most secretive company in the world, which allows the speculation to shape-shift into fact.

Apple is also the most written-about company in the world, and the best way to get clicks in the tech press is claim-chowder headlines about Apple’s days being numbered. One day, they will be right. But this past decade, how many times have they been wrong? Answer: many. Here’s a fun example from April of this year, long after everyone should have known better:

The iPhone X, Apple’s new flagship phone and heir apparent to the universal design of a smartphone, only accounted for 16% of the company’s smartphone sales so far in 2018, according to estimates from analyst Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. The share of all new iPhones sold in the first quarter of 2018 has slid to 60%, down from 78% in 2015, the report stated. The new models include the iPhone X and the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus—meaning the old versions of iPhone are selling almost as well as their updated counterparts.

Apple’s introduction of the iPhone X, and its elevated $1,000 price, indicated Apple had confidence that people would be willing spend more than ever on a new phone to get cutting-edge technology—but a 11-point slide year over year in sales might indicate that confidence is misplaced…

We’ll know soon enough what the quarter looked like for Apple, as the company reports its earnings May 1.

How’d that work out?

AAPL Revenue (Quarterly YoY Growth) data by YCharts

Oh, right. I wonder if Dave ever wrote a headline, “Boy, Was I Wrong About the iPhone X!”

This year, Silly Season is even bigger. If this past week wasn’t The Bear and The Bull engaged in thermonuclear war, I don’t know what was. The Animal Spirits are out. The headlines are flying fast and furious. Analysts are downgrading Apple left and right, focused on iPhone units instead of profit for some reason. Anytime someone reminds me that the iPhone has a small market share, I try and remind them they also take about 80% of ALL smartphone profits every quarter.

Anyway, not to pick on Peter Cohan specifically, but there’s been a lot of this:

Apple has been producing new iPhone versions and raising its prices on them. But its high price is not holding for the latest version, the iPhone X, so as Bloomberg reported, Apple is offering customers a 40 percent discount.

How so? On December 2, Apple added a new banner to the top of its website advertising the iPhone XR for $449, $300 less than its official sticker price. The deal, noted with an asterisk and described at the bottom of the page, requires customers to trade in an iPhone 7 Plus, a high-end handset from two years ago.

O how mighty Apple has fallen!

To put it in perspective, the plunge in the iPhone gross margin has been precipitous. As I mentioned, In 2012, the iPhone had a 71 percent gross margin. Before the 40 percent discount, the iPhone X had a much lower gross margin of 48 percent — its price was $749 and the cost of the parts was $390, according to IHS Markit.

By discounting the price to $449, the iPhone gross margin drops to 13 percent.

Bonus points for “O how mighty Apple has fallen!”

He is correct that Steve Jobs loved high gross margins so much that his wife was probably jealous of their relationship. But, unfortunately, arithmetic and common sense are Cohan’s nemeses here.

So What’s Wrong Here?

The first thing is plain common sense. Cohan and others weirdly assume that Apple is going to just chuck these trade-ins into the trash and call it a day. Does that sound like Apple to you? Does that sound like something any company would do? Of course, Apple refurbishes them, and sells them in its online store.

Secondly, as I will show below, Apple is most most likely increasing profits here, not decreasing them.

The Apple Trade-In Program

You wouldn’t know it from these articles, but Apple has had a trade-in program for years now. Two things have changed:

They raised the trade-in value for December. More so on the older phones.

They promoted the heck out of it for Christmas.

Here are the changes in trade-in value:

Device

Old Credit

New Credit

Change

iPhone 6

$75

$150

100%

iPhone 6 Plus

$100

$200

100%

iPhone 6s

$100

$200

100%

iPhone 6s Plus

$150

$250

67%

iPhone 7

$175

$250

43%

iPhone 7 Plus

$250

$300

20%

iPhone 8

$275

$300

9%

So I believe two things are going on here. Apple sees that the upgrade cycle is lengthening, and badly wants to get those people with very old phones into a new one. The extra credit only applies if you are buying a 2018-year phone (Apple also sells new previous year phones as a budget option). As we have learned many times in the past, this does not necessarily mean iPhone units are down, though I suspect they are anyway.

To me, the only units that matter are US dollars, to paraphrase Johnny Rotten.

Source: AZQutoes

The second thing I think is going on has to do with the iPhone 7 Plus, which I believe to be Apple’s focus here. This is pure speculation, so take it with a grain of salt, but in analyzing how they’ve set up the promotion, it just looks like to me that, while they’re taking all comers, they are particularly interested in that model. Apple is deliberate about every single detail of everything, and it can’t be an accident. Why?

First, let’s look at the economics of this transaction.

The Only Units

US dollars! Aren’t they the best? Completely fungible global reserve currency, and the easiest way to keep score. How odd it is that analysts insist on using phone units to keep score when dollars are just sitting right there.

Someone buys an iPhone XR for $449 plus an iPhone 7 Plus in “good” condition. There’s a lot of wiggle room between those two quotation marks, but Apple’s definition of “good” is “anything where the refurb cost is low enough that we can still make an acceptable profit.”

I looked on eBay to get a sense of where the market for used iPhone 7 Pluses stood as of today. I cataloged the last 100 completed transactions that fulfilled the following qualifications:

32GB

Described as good or better. Minor scratches and dings OK.

All components in good working order

No third-party screen replacement or any other third-party major component replacement.

Unlocked in all ways

No accessories required, just the phone

Also, there were a couple that were suspect, like the one that sold for $1100 to someone 10 miles away from the seller (LOL, money-laundering), so I omitted those.

I think this comes pretty close to what Apple is looking for. The last 100 phones sold in this category averaged in price $347.54.1 Apple could just turn around these phones that they are purchasing for $300, and make a 13.7% profit on them the same day. And remember, that’s the least expensive of the iPhone 7 Pluses. The 128GB and 256GB versions fetch about $60 and $120 more on eBay, respectively. Apple pays $300 regardless.

But they don’t sell them on eBay, of course. They send it back to Hon Hai, where they are rubbed and scrubbed and sold in the Apple refurb store, for $479, $569 and $649, depending on storage. Remember, that $649 version still cost Apple only $300. Let’s be super-conservative and say the average sale price is $500 because of heavy mix towards the 32GB phone. That means Apple’s profit here is $200 minus the cost of refurb.

Here’s the tricky part, because Apple is the most secretive company in the world, it’s impossible to know what that refurb cost is. Since they could just get $348 on the open market without the refurb, I would imagine the profit is much higher than that $48. I would guess much closer to $148 to $48, but that’s pure speculation. Let’s just call it $100. So instead of getting $749 for this iPhone XR, Apple got $849 ($449+$500-$100).

Apple does not give anything away. Ever. They like to put on a soft, PC face, but they are also the greediest company out there, because Steve Jobs understood that the scorecard was all in dollar signs, not phone units.

I think this is another brilliant lever-pull by Tim Cook, that no one else even saw, won’t understand until the May conference call, and maybe never. Or, I’m just completely wrong. Isn’t following Apple fun and exhausting?

I Think They’re Headed to Asia

Again, we’re into purely speculative territory here, but this is based on a few things:

Bigger phones tend to be popular in Asia. According to Device Atlas, in South Korea, home of Samsung (OTC:SSNLF), the most popular phone in 2018 is the iPhone 7 Plus with 11% share. The top Android phone is the Galaxy Note 8, also a large phone. It’s not true in every Asian country, but sales of larger phones tend to be better there, where it is often a person’s only device.

Right now, the dollar is strong and a good way for Apple to boost profits is selling abroad. The $749 iPhoneXR costs 990,000 Korean Won, or $887 in today’s exchange on xe.com. A brand new iPhone 7 Plus is $569 in the US, and $681 in Korea. Also, this income and profit gets funneled through their Irish “subsidiary” and they pay no US taxes on it.

Notice I didn’t tell you the price of a refurb iPhone 7 Plus in the Korean Apple Store? That’s because there are no iPhones there, or anywhere else in Asia that I looked. Like I said, Apple is very deliberate about things, and they may have a Very Good Reason why there are none. Or, they could be lacking in supply, and that’s what this is all about: getting supply of used inventory to sell in Asia.

But Wouldn’t This Cut Into New iPhone Sales?

Yes. Probably. I don’t care. More to the point, neither does Apple. The margins on the refurbs are high, it increases their user base in the fastest growing part of the world, and juicing foreign sales, where the profits are much higher, will make up for some of the reduced units on the top-line phones. Analysts may care where the dollars come from, but Apple does not.2 They are the only units that matter.

Implications for Apple Stock

As I write this, Apple sits at 156.23. It’s TTM PE is 13.15. Their cash-net-debt is about $22/share (probably more now, since the share count is likely lower than it was in September). So minus the cash, the market is currently valuing Apple at $134 with a PE of 11.30. That is, other than the cash, the entire rest of Apple is worth $636 billion. Other assets besides cash are $166 billion. So the non-asset value of the entire company is $470 billion. Come on, now.

But there is an old saying that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. The Bull and The Bear are out, fighting for supremacy, with one fear trade on top of another. Say whatever you want about trade, the Fed, liquidity, whatever. We are into pure Animal Spirits and none of it matters until one of them wins.

So under these conditions, I can’t say that Apple stock won’t go even lower; you may even be able to get it as low as $100 if The Bear wins. But I also think that the price for Apple now is absurdly low, and a year from now will be a lot higher. I took another taste at $150, even though I am a big Fat Bear right now. If it goes to $100, I will probably buy more. That’s how I do Apple, I only buy, never sell. It’s working so far, until it doesn’t.

Conclusions: Who Knows?

Pictured L-R: Eddie Cue, Ho Chi Minh, Nikita Khrushchev, Phil Schiller, Leonid Brezhnev, Tim Cook and Jeff Williams. Scott Forestall was airbrushed out of that empty spot in the middle between Khrushchev and Schiller. Source: US Navy Public Archives

During the Cold War, solid data about the Soviet Union was very hard to come by. Frustrated political scientists came up with the field of “Sovietology,” which was more art than science. They would pour over articles and photos in Pravda looking for any clue into new policy or inner-circle machinations from article verbiage, and photo composition and airbrushing. You will probably be unsurprised to learn that, lacking data, their predictions were not very good.

Covering Apple is kind of similar and equally as frustrating. They are almost as secretive as the Soviets between SEC filings, and so we have to engage in a little educated guessing, and hope our record is better than the Sovietologists. Anyone from outside of Apple who tells you they know what is happening at Apple is a liar. Heck, most of the people inside Apple don’t know what’s going on beyond their own small world there.

As always, the speculation about this quarter will end with their 10-Q, and maybe we will get a couple of days’ break before the speculation on Q2 begins. Until then, speculate away!

Sadly…

My policy with heavily-followed companies like Apple is to not read or respond to comments, as they seem to attract a large amount of FUD and trolling. Feel free to send me a private message if you have a question or comment directed at me. If you are polite and respectful, you will almost certainly get a response that is also polite and respectful.

Endnotes

1 I included shipping for two reasons. 1. This is the full cost of what the buyer was willing to pay. 2. Low price + high shipping cost is the oldest trick in the book.

2 When the iPhone was first released, some analysts complained that it would cut into iPod sales and was therefore a bad idea. Seriously.

Disclosure: I am/we are long AAPL. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Additional disclosure: Forever, and ever

Editor’s Note: This article discusses one or more securities that do not trade on a major U.S. exchange. Please be aware of the risks associated with these stocks.

[awesomecolorfulcollectorwombat]

Apple Silly Season Is Upon Us

New Post has been published on https://rwamztech.com/apple-silly-season-is-upon-us/

Apple Silly Season Is Upon Us

Silly Season Is Upon Us

That feeling when graffiti makes more sense than floor traders. By cogdogblog – Good Advice, CC0, Bring a towel, too. (2535543334).jpg

Apple (AAPL) is always subject to Silly Season in their Q1 (Christmas quarter). Q4 has 1-3 weeks of new iPhone sales, but the motherlode is Q1, so speculation is rampant. Apple is the most secretive company in the world, which allows the speculation to shape-shift into fact.

Apple is also the most written-about company in the world, and the best way to get clicks in the tech press is claim-chowder headlines about Apple’s days being numbered. One day, they will be right. But this past decade, how many times have they been wrong? Answer: many. Here’s a fun example from April of this year, long after everyone should have known better:

The iPhone X, Apple’s new flagship phone and heir apparent to the universal design of a smartphone, only accounted for 16% of the company’s smartphone sales so far in 2018, according to estimates from analyst Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. The share of all new iPhones sold in the first quarter of 2018 has slid to 60%, down from 78% in 2015, the report stated. The new models include the iPhone X and the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus—meaning the old versions of iPhone are selling almost as well as their updated counterparts.

Apple’s introduction of the iPhone X, and its elevated $1,000 price, indicated Apple had confidence that people would be willing spend more than ever on a new phone to get cutting-edge technology—but a 11-point slide year over year in sales might indicate that confidence is misplaced…

We’ll know soon enough what the quarter looked like for Apple, as the company reports its earnings May 1.

How’d that work out?

AAPL Revenue (Quarterly YoY Growth) data by YCharts

Oh, right. I wonder if Dave ever wrote a headline, “Boy, Was I Wrong About the iPhone X!”

This year, Silly Season is even bigger. If this past week wasn’t The Bear and The Bull engaged in thermonuclear war, I don’t know what was. The Animal Spirits are out. The headlines are flying fast and furious. Analysts are downgrading Apple left and right, focused on iPhone units instead of profit for some reason. Anytime someone reminds me that the iPhone has a small market share, I try and remind them they also take about 80% of ALL smartphone profits every quarter.

Anyway, not to pick on Peter Cohan specifically, but there’s been a lot of this:

Apple has been producing new iPhone versions and raising its prices on them. But its high price is not holding for the latest version, the iPhone X, so as Bloomberg reported, Apple is offering customers a 40 percent discount.

How so? On December 2, Apple added a new banner to the top of its website advertising the iPhone XR for $449, $300 less than its official sticker price. The deal, noted with an asterisk and described at the bottom of the page, requires customers to trade in an iPhone 7 Plus, a high-end handset from two years ago.

O how mighty Apple has fallen!

To put it in perspective, the plunge in the iPhone gross margin has been precipitous. As I mentioned, In 2012, the iPhone had a 71 percent gross margin. Before the 40 percent discount, the iPhone X had a much lower gross margin of 48 percent — its price was $749 and the cost of the parts was $390, according to IHS Markit.

By discounting the price to $449, the iPhone gross margin drops to 13 percent.

Bonus points for “O how mighty Apple has fallen!”

He is correct that Steve Jobs loved high gross margins so much that his wife was probably jealous of their relationship. But, unfortunately, arithmetic and common sense are Cohan’s nemeses here.

So What’s Wrong Here?

The first thing is plain common sense. Cohan and others weirdly assume that Apple is going to just chuck these trade-ins into the trash and call it a day. Does that sound like Apple to you? Does that sound like something any company would do? Of course, Apple refurbishes them, and sells them in its online store.

Secondly, as I will show below, Apple is most most likely increasing profits here, not decreasing them.

The Apple Trade-In Program

You wouldn’t know it from these articles, but Apple has had a trade-in program for years now. Two things have changed:

They raised the trade-in value for December. More so on the older phones.

They promoted the heck out of it for Christmas.

Here are the changes in trade-in value:

Device

Old Credit

New Credit

Change

iPhone 6

$75

$150

100%

iPhone 6 Plus

$100

$200

100%

iPhone 6s

$100

$200

100%

iPhone 6s Plus

$150

$250

67%

iPhone 7

$175

$250

43%

iPhone 7 Plus

$250

$300

20%

iPhone 8

$275

$300

9%

So I believe two things are going on here. Apple sees that the upgrade cycle is lengthening, and badly wants to get those people with very old phones into a new one. The extra credit only applies if you are buying a 2018-year phone (Apple also sells new previous year phones as a budget option). As we have learned many times in the past, this does not necessarily mean iPhone units are down, though I suspect they are anyway.

To me, the only units that matter are US dollars, to paraphrase Johnny Rotten.

Source: AZQutoes

The second thing I think is going on has to do with the iPhone 7 Plus, which I believe to be Apple’s focus here. This is pure speculation, so take it with a grain of salt, but in analyzing how they’ve set up the promotion, it just looks like to me that, while they’re taking all comers, they are particularly interested in that model. Apple is deliberate about every single detail of everything, and it can’t be an accident. Why?

First, let’s look at the economics of this transaction.

The Only Units

US dollars! Aren’t they the best? Completely fungible global reserve currency, and the easiest way to keep score. How odd it is that analysts insist on using phone units to keep score when dollars are just sitting right there.

Someone buys an iPhone XR for $449 plus an iPhone 7 Plus in “good” condition. There’s a lot of wiggle room between those two quotation marks, but Apple’s definition of “good” is “anything where the refurb cost is low enough that we can still make an acceptable profit.”

I looked on eBay to get a sense of where the market for used iPhone 7 Pluses stood as of today. I cataloged the last 100 completed transactions that fulfilled the following qualifications:

32GB

Described as good or better. Minor scratches and dings OK.

All components in good working order

No third-party screen replacement or any other third-party major component replacement.

Unlocked in all ways

No accessories required, just the phone

Also, there were a couple that were suspect, like the one that sold for $1100 to someone 10 miles away from the seller (LOL, money-laundering), so I omitted those.

I think this comes pretty close to what Apple is looking for. The last 100 phones sold in this category averaged in price $347.54.1 Apple could just turn around these phones that they are purchasing for $300, and make a 13.7% profit on them the same day. And remember, that’s the least expensive of the iPhone 7 Pluses. The 128GB and 256GB versions fetch about $60 and $120 more on eBay, respectively. Apple pays $300 regardless.

But they don’t sell them on eBay, of course. They send it back to Hon Hai, where they are rubbed and scrubbed and sold in the Apple refurb store, for $479, $569 and $649, depending on storage. Remember, that $649 version still cost Apple only $300. Let’s be super-conservative and say the average sale price is $500 because of heavy mix towards the 32GB phone. That means Apple’s profit here is $200 minus the cost of refurb.

Here’s the tricky part, because Apple is the most secretive company in the world, it’s impossible to know what that refurb cost is. Since they could just get $348 on the open market without the refurb, I would imagine the profit is much higher than that $48. I would guess much closer to $148 to $48, but that’s pure speculation. Let’s just call it $100. So instead of getting $749 for this iPhone XR, Apple got $849 ($449+$500-$100).

Apple does not give anything away. Ever. They like to put on a soft, PC face, but they are also the greediest company out there, because Steve Jobs understood that the scorecard was all in dollar signs, not phone units.

I think this is another brilliant lever-pull by Tim Cook, that no one else even saw, won’t understand until the May conference call, and maybe never. Or, I’m just completely wrong. Isn’t following Apple fun and exhausting?

I Think They’re Headed to Asia

Again, we’re into purely speculative territory here, but this is based on a few things:

Bigger phones tend to be popular in Asia. According to Device Atlas, in South Korea, home of Samsung (OTC:SSNLF), the most popular phone in 2018 is the iPhone 7 Plus with 11% share. The top Android phone is the Galaxy Note 8, also a large phone. It’s not true in every Asian country, but sales of larger phones tend to be better there, where it is often a person’s only device.

Right now, the dollar is strong and a good way for Apple to boost profits is selling abroad. The $749 iPhoneXR costs 990,000 Korean Won, or $887 in today’s exchange on xe.com. A brand new iPhone 7 Plus is $569 in the US, and $681 in Korea. Also, this income and profit gets funneled through their Irish “subsidiary” and they pay no US taxes on it.

Notice I didn’t tell you the price of a refurb iPhone 7 Plus in the Korean Apple Store? That’s because there are no iPhones there, or anywhere else in Asia that I looked. Like I said, Apple is very deliberate about things, and they may have a Very Good Reason why there are none. Or, they could be lacking in supply, and that’s what this is all about: getting supply of used inventory to sell in Asia.

But Wouldn’t This Cut Into New iPhone Sales?

Yes. Probably. I don’t care. More to the point, neither does Apple. The margins on the refurbs are high, it increases their user base in the fastest growing part of the world, and juicing foreign sales, where the profits are much higher, will make up for some of the reduced units on the top-line phones. Analysts may care where the dollars come from, but Apple does not.2 They are the only units that matter.

Implications for Apple Stock

As I write this, Apple sits at 156.23. It’s TTM PE is 13.15. Their cash-net-debt is about $22/share (probably more now, since the share count is likely lower than it was in September). So minus the cash, the market is currently valuing Apple at $134 with a PE of 11.30. That is, other than the cash, the entire rest of Apple is worth $636 billion. Other assets besides cash are $166 billion. So the non-asset value of the entire company is $470 billion. Come on, now.

But there is an old saying that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. The Bull and The Bear are out, fighting for supremacy, with one fear trade on top of another. Say whatever you want about trade, the Fed, liquidity, whatever. We are into pure Animal Spirits and none of it matters until one of them wins.

So under these conditions, I can’t say that Apple stock won’t go even lower; you may even be able to get it as low as $100 if The Bear wins. But I also think that the price for Apple now is absurdly low, and a year from now will be a lot higher. I took another taste at $150, even though I am a big Fat Bear right now. If it goes to $100, I will probably buy more. That’s how I do Apple, I only buy, never sell. It’s working so far, until it doesn’t.

Conclusions: Who Knows?

Pictured L-R: Eddie Cue, Ho Chi Minh, Nikita Khrushchev, Phil Schiller, Leonid Brezhnev, Tim Cook and Jeff Williams. Scott Forestall was airbrushed out of that empty spot in the middle between Khrushchev and Schiller. Source: US Navy Public Archives

During the Cold War, solid data about the Soviet Union was very hard to come by. Frustrated political scientists came up with the field of “Sovietology,” which was more art than science. They would pour over articles and photos in Pravda looking for any clue into new policy or inner-circle machinations from article verbiage, and photo composition and airbrushing. You will probably be unsurprised to learn that, lacking data, their predictions were not very good.

Covering Apple is kind of similar and equally as frustrating. They are almost as secretive as the Soviets between SEC filings, and so we have to engage in a little educated guessing, and hope our record is better than the Sovietologists. Anyone from outside of Apple who tells you they know what is happening at Apple is a liar. Heck, most of the people inside Apple don’t know what’s going on beyond their own small world there.

As always, the speculation about this quarter will end with their 10-Q, and maybe we will get a couple of days’ break before the speculation on Q2 begins. Until then, speculate away!

Sadly…

My policy with heavily-followed companies like Apple is to not read or respond to comments, as they seem to attract a large amount of FUD and trolling. Feel free to send me a private message if you have a question or comment directed at me. If you are polite and respectful, you will almost certainly get a response that is also polite and respectful.

Endnotes

1 I included shipping for two reasons. 1. This is the full cost of what the buyer was willing to pay. 2. Low price + high shipping cost is the oldest trick in the book.

2 When the iPhone was first released, some analysts complained that it would cut into iPod sales and was therefore a bad idea. Seriously.

Disclosure: I am/we are long AAPL. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Additional disclosure: Forever, and ever

Editor’s Note: This article discusses one or more securities that do not trade on a major U.S. exchange. Please be aware of the risks associated with these stocks.

[lazilysillyprince]

Apple Silly Season Is Upon Us

New Post has been published on https://rwamztech.com/apple-silly-season-is-upon-us/

Apple Silly Season Is Upon Us

Silly Season Is Upon Us

That feeling when graffiti makes more sense than floor traders. By cogdogblog – Good Advice, CC0, Bring a towel, too. (2535543334).jpg

Apple (AAPL) is always subject to Silly Season in their Q1 (Christmas quarter). Q4 has 1-3 weeks of new iPhone sales, but the motherlode is Q1, so speculation is rampant. Apple is the most secretive company in the world, which allows the speculation to shape-shift into fact.

Apple is also the most written-about company in the world, and the best way to get clicks in the tech press is claim-chowder headlines about Apple’s days being numbered. One day, they will be right. But this past decade, how many times have they been wrong? Answer: many. Here’s a fun example from April of this year, long after everyone should have known better:

The iPhone X, Apple’s new flagship phone and heir apparent to the universal design of a smartphone, only accounted for 16% of the company’s smartphone sales so far in 2018, according to estimates from analyst Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. The share of all new iPhones sold in the first quarter of 2018 has slid to 60%, down from 78% in 2015, the report stated. The new models include the iPhone X and the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus—meaning the old versions of iPhone are selling almost as well as their updated counterparts.

Apple’s introduction of the iPhone X, and its elevated $1,000 price, indicated Apple had confidence that people would be willing spend more than ever on a new phone to get cutting-edge technology—but a 11-point slide year over year in sales might indicate that confidence is misplaced…

We’ll know soon enough what the quarter looked like for Apple, as the company reports its earnings May 1.

How’d that work out?

AAPL Revenue (Quarterly YoY Growth) data by YCharts

Oh, right. I wonder if Dave ever wrote a headline, “Boy, Was I Wrong About the iPhone X!”

This year, Silly Season is even bigger. If this past week wasn’t The Bear and The Bull engaged in thermonuclear war, I don’t know what was. The Animal Spirits are out. The headlines are flying fast and furious. Analysts are downgrading Apple left and right, focused on iPhone units instead of profit for some reason. Anytime someone reminds me that the iPhone has a small market share, I try and remind them they also take about 80% of ALL smartphone profits every quarter.

Anyway, not to pick on Peter Cohan specifically, but there’s been a lot of this:

Apple has been producing new iPhone versions and raising its prices on them. But its high price is not holding for the latest version, the iPhone X, so as Bloomberg reported, Apple is offering customers a 40 percent discount.

How so? On December 2, Apple added a new banner to the top of its website advertising the iPhone XR for $449, $300 less than its official sticker price. The deal, noted with an asterisk and described at the bottom of the page, requires customers to trade in an iPhone 7 Plus, a high-end handset from two years ago.

O how mighty Apple has fallen!

To put it in perspective, the plunge in the iPhone gross margin has been precipitous. As I mentioned, In 2012, the iPhone had a 71 percent gross margin. Before the 40 percent discount, the iPhone X had a much lower gross margin of 48 percent — its price was $749 and the cost of the parts was $390, according to IHS Markit.

By discounting the price to $449, the iPhone gross margin drops to 13 percent.

Bonus points for “O how mighty Apple has fallen!”

He is correct that Steve Jobs loved high gross margins so much that his wife was probably jealous of their relationship. But, unfortunately, arithmetic and common sense are Cohan’s nemeses here.

So What’s Wrong Here?

The first thing is plain common sense. Cohan and others weirdly assume that Apple is going to just chuck these trade-ins into the trash and call it a day. Does that sound like Apple to you? Does that sound like something any company would do? Of course, Apple refurbishes them, and sells them in its online store.

Secondly, as I will show below, Apple is most most likely increasing profits here, not decreasing them.

The Apple Trade-In Program

You wouldn’t know it from these articles, but Apple has had a trade-in program for years now. Two things have changed:

They raised the trade-in value for December. More so on the older phones.

They promoted the heck out of it for Christmas.

Here are the changes in trade-in value:

Device

Old Credit

New Credit

Change

iPhone 6

$75

$150

100%

iPhone 6 Plus

$100

$200

100%

iPhone 6s

$100

$200

100%

iPhone 6s Plus

$150

$250

67%

iPhone 7

$175

$250

43%

iPhone 7 Plus

$250

$300

20%

iPhone 8

$275

$300

9%

So I believe two things are going on here. Apple sees that the upgrade cycle is lengthening, and badly wants to get those people with very old phones into a new one. The extra credit only applies if you are buying a 2018-year phone (Apple also sells new previous year phones as a budget option). As we have learned many times in the past, this does not necessarily mean iPhone units are down, though I suspect they are anyway.

To me, the only units that matter are US dollars, to paraphrase Johnny Rotten.

Source: AZQutoes

The second thing I think is going on has to do with the iPhone 7 Plus, which I believe to be Apple’s focus here. This is pure speculation, so take it with a grain of salt, but in analyzing how they’ve set up the promotion, it just looks like to me that, while they’re taking all comers, they are particularly interested in that model. Apple is deliberate about every single detail of everything, and it can’t be an accident. Why?

First, let’s look at the economics of this transaction.

The Only Units

US dollars! Aren’t they the best? Completely fungible global reserve currency, and the easiest way to keep score. How odd it is that analysts insist on using phone units to keep score when dollars are just sitting right there.

Someone buys an iPhone XR for $449 plus an iPhone 7 Plus in “good” condition. There’s a lot of wiggle room between those two quotation marks, but Apple’s definition of “good” is “anything where the refurb cost is low enough that we can still make an acceptable profit.”

I looked on eBay to get a sense of where the market for used iPhone 7 Pluses stood as of today. I cataloged the last 100 completed transactions that fulfilled the following qualifications:

32GB

Described as good or better. Minor scratches and dings OK.

All components in good working order

No third-party screen replacement or any other third-party major component replacement.

Unlocked in all ways

No accessories required, just the phone

Also, there were a couple that were suspect, like the one that sold for $1100 to someone 10 miles away from the seller (LOL, money-laundering), so I omitted those.

I think this comes pretty close to what Apple is looking for. The last 100 phones sold in this category averaged in price $347.54.1 Apple could just turn around these phones that they are purchasing for $300, and make a 13.7% profit on them the same day. And remember, that’s the least expensive of the iPhone 7 Pluses. The 128GB and 256GB versions fetch about $60 and $120 more on eBay, respectively. Apple pays $300 regardless.

But they don’t sell them on eBay, of course. They send it back to Hon Hai, where they are rubbed and scrubbed and sold in the Apple refurb store, for $479, $569 and $649, depending on storage. Remember, that $649 version still cost Apple only $300. Let’s be super-conservative and say the average sale price is $500 because of heavy mix towards the 32GB phone. That means Apple’s profit here is $200 minus the cost of refurb.

Here’s the tricky part, because Apple is the most secretive company in the world, it’s impossible to know what that refurb cost is. Since they could just get $348 on the open market without the refurb, I would imagine the profit is much higher than that $48. I would guess much closer to $148 to $48, but that’s pure speculation. Let’s just call it $100. So instead of getting $749 for this iPhone XR, Apple got $849 ($449+$500-$100).

Apple does not give anything away. Ever. They like to put on a soft, PC face, but they are also the greediest company out there, because Steve Jobs understood that the scorecard was all in dollar signs, not phone units.

I think this is another brilliant lever-pull by Tim Cook, that no one else even saw, won’t understand until the May conference call, and maybe never. Or, I’m just completely wrong. Isn’t following Apple fun and exhausting?

I Think They’re Headed to Asia

Again, we’re into purely speculative territory here, but this is based on a few things:

Bigger phones tend to be popular in Asia. According to Device Atlas, in South Korea, home of Samsung (OTC:SSNLF), the most popular phone in 2018 is the iPhone 7 Plus with 11% share. The top Android phone is the Galaxy Note 8, also a large phone. It’s not true in every Asian country, but sales of larger phones tend to be better there, where it is often a person’s only device.

Right now, the dollar is strong and a good way for Apple to boost profits is selling abroad. The $749 iPhoneXR costs 990,000 Korean Won, or $887 in today’s exchange on xe.com. A brand new iPhone 7 Plus is $569 in the US, and $681 in Korea. Also, this income and profit gets funneled through their Irish “subsidiary” and they pay no US taxes on it.

Notice I didn’t tell you the price of a refurb iPhone 7 Plus in the Korean Apple Store? That’s because there are no iPhones there, or anywhere else in Asia that I looked. Like I said, Apple is very deliberate about things, and they may have a Very Good Reason why there are none. Or, they could be lacking in supply, and that’s what this is all about: getting supply of used inventory to sell in Asia.

But Wouldn’t This Cut Into New iPhone Sales?

Yes. Probably. I don’t care. More to the point, neither does Apple. The margins on the refurbs are high, it increases their user base in the fastest growing part of the world, and juicing foreign sales, where the profits are much higher, will make up for some of the reduced units on the top-line phones. Analysts may care where the dollars come from, but Apple does not.2 They are the only units that matter.

Implications for Apple Stock

As I write this, Apple sits at 156.23. It’s TTM PE is 13.15. Their cash-net-debt is about $22/share (probably more now, since the share count is likely lower than it was in September). So minus the cash, the market is currently valuing Apple at $134 with a PE of 11.30. That is, other than the cash, the entire rest of Apple is worth $636 billion. Other assets besides cash are $166 billion. So the non-asset value of the entire company is $470 billion. Come on, now.

But there is an old saying that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. The Bull and The Bear are out, fighting for supremacy, with one fear trade on top of another. Say whatever you want about trade, the Fed, liquidity, whatever. We are into pure Animal Spirits and none of it matters until one of them wins.

So under these conditions, I can’t say that Apple stock won’t go even lower; you may even be able to get it as low as $100 if The Bear wins. But I also think that the price for Apple now is absurdly low, and a year from now will be a lot higher. I took another taste at $150, even though I am a big Fat Bear right now. If it goes to $100, I will probably buy more. That’s how I do Apple, I only buy, never sell. It’s working so far, until it doesn’t.

Conclusions: Who Knows?

Pictured L-R: Eddie Cue, Ho Chi Minh, Nikita Khrushchev, Phil Schiller, Leonid Brezhnev, Tim Cook and Jeff Williams. Scott Forestall was airbrushed out of that empty spot in the middle between Khrushchev and Schiller. Source: US Navy Public Archives

During the Cold War, solid data about the Soviet Union was very hard to come by. Frustrated political scientists came up with the field of “Sovietology,” which was more art than science. They would pour over articles and photos in Pravda looking for any clue into new policy or inner-circle machinations from article verbiage, and photo composition and airbrushing. You will probably be unsurprised to learn that, lacking data, their predictions were not very good.

Covering Apple is kind of similar and equally as frustrating. They are almost as secretive as the Soviets between SEC filings, and so we have to engage in a little educated guessing, and hope our record is better than the Sovietologists. Anyone from outside of Apple who tells you they know what is happening at Apple is a liar. Heck, most of the people inside Apple don’t know what’s going on beyond their own small world there.

As always, the speculation about this quarter will end with their 10-Q, and maybe we will get a couple of days’ break before the speculation on Q2 begins. Until then, speculate away!

Sadly…

My policy with heavily-followed companies like Apple is to not read or respond to comments, as they seem to attract a large amount of FUD and trolling. Feel free to send me a private message if you have a question or comment directed at me. If you are polite and respectful, you will almost certainly get a response that is also polite and respectful.

Endnotes

1 I included shipping for two reasons. 1. This is the full cost of what the buyer was willing to pay. 2. Low price + high shipping cost is the oldest trick in the book.

2 When the iPhone was first released, some analysts complained that it would cut into iPod sales and was therefore a bad idea. Seriously.

Disclosure: I am/we are long AAPL. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Additional disclosure: Forever, and ever

Editor’s Note: This article discusses one or more securities that do not trade on a major U.S. exchange. Please be aware of the risks associated with these stocks.

[hostingnewsfeed]

Apple Silly Season Is Upon Us

New Post has been published on https://rwamztech.com/apple-silly-season-is-upon-us/

Apple Silly Season Is Upon Us

Silly Season Is Upon Us

That feeling when graffiti makes more sense than floor traders. By cogdogblog – Good Advice, CC0, Bring a towel, too. (2535543334).jpg

Apple (AAPL) is always subject to Silly Season in their Q1 (Christmas quarter). Q4 has 1-3 weeks of new iPhone sales, but the motherlode is Q1, so speculation is rampant. Apple is the most secretive company in the world, which allows the speculation to shape-shift into fact.

Apple is also the most written-about company in the world, and the best way to get clicks in the tech press is claim-chowder headlines about Apple’s days being numbered. One day, they will be right. But this past decade, how many times have they been wrong? Answer: many. Here’s a fun example from April of this year, long after everyone should have known better:

The iPhone X, Apple’s new flagship phone and heir apparent to the universal design of a smartphone, only accounted for 16% of the company’s smartphone sales so far in 2018, according to estimates from analyst Consumer Intelligence Research Partners. The share of all new iPhones sold in the first quarter of 2018 has slid to 60%, down from 78% in 2015, the report stated. The new models include the iPhone X and the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus—meaning the old versions of iPhone are selling almost as well as their updated counterparts.

Apple’s introduction of the iPhone X, and its elevated $1,000 price, indicated Apple had confidence that people would be willing spend more than ever on a new phone to get cutting-edge technology—but a 11-point slide year over year in sales might indicate that confidence is misplaced…

We’ll know soon enough what the quarter looked like for Apple, as the company reports its earnings May 1.

How’d that work out?

AAPL Revenue (Quarterly YoY Growth) data by YCharts

Oh, right. I wonder if Dave ever wrote a headline, “Boy, Was I Wrong About the iPhone X!”

This year, Silly Season is even bigger. If this past week wasn’t The Bear and The Bull engaged in thermonuclear war, I don’t know what was. The Animal Spirits are out. The headlines are flying fast and furious. Analysts are downgrading Apple left and right, focused on iPhone units instead of profit for some reason. Anytime someone reminds me that the iPhone has a small market share, I try and remind them they also take about 80% of ALL smartphone profits every quarter.

Anyway, not to pick on Peter Cohan specifically, but there’s been a lot of this:

Apple has been producing new iPhone versions and raising its prices on them. But its high price is not holding for the latest version, the iPhone X, so as Bloomberg reported, Apple is offering customers a 40 percent discount.

How so? On December 2, Apple added a new banner to the top of its website advertising the iPhone XR for $449, $300 less than its official sticker price. The deal, noted with an asterisk and described at the bottom of the page, requires customers to trade in an iPhone 7 Plus, a high-end handset from two years ago.

O how mighty Apple has fallen!

To put it in perspective, the plunge in the iPhone gross margin has been precipitous. As I mentioned, In 2012, the iPhone had a 71 percent gross margin. Before the 40 percent discount, the iPhone X had a much lower gross margin of 48 percent — its price was $749 and the cost of the parts was $390, according to IHS Markit.

By discounting the price to $449, the iPhone gross margin drops to 13 percent.

Bonus points for “O how mighty Apple has fallen!”

He is correct that Steve Jobs loved high gross margins so much that his wife was probably jealous of their relationship. But, unfortunately, arithmetic and common sense are Cohan’s nemeses here.

So What’s Wrong Here?

The first thing is plain common sense. Cohan and others weirdly assume that Apple is going to just chuck these trade-ins into the trash and call it a day. Does that sound like Apple to you? Does that sound like something any company would do? Of course, Apple refurbishes them, and sells them in its online store.

Secondly, as I will show below, Apple is most most likely increasing profits here, not decreasing them.

The Apple Trade-In Program

You wouldn’t know it from these articles, but Apple has had a trade-in program for years now. Two things have changed:

They raised the trade-in value for December. More so on the older phones.

They promoted the heck out of it for Christmas.

Here are the changes in trade-in value:

Device

Old Credit

New Credit

Change

iPhone 6

$75

$150

100%

iPhone 6 Plus

$100

$200

100%

iPhone 6s

$100

$200

100%

iPhone 6s Plus

$150

$250

67%

iPhone 7

$175

$250

43%

iPhone 7 Plus

$250

$300

20%

iPhone 8

$275

$300

9%

So I believe two things are going on here. Apple sees that the upgrade cycle is lengthening, and badly wants to get those people with very old phones into a new one. The extra credit only applies if you are buying a 2018-year phone (Apple also sells new previous year phones as a budget option). As we have learned many times in the past, this does not necessarily mean iPhone units are down, though I suspect they are anyway.

To me, the only units that matter are US dollars, to paraphrase Johnny Rotten.

Source: AZQutoes

The second thing I think is going on has to do with the iPhone 7 Plus, which I believe to be Apple’s focus here. This is pure speculation, so take it with a grain of salt, but in analyzing how they’ve set up the promotion, it just looks like to me that, while they’re taking all comers, they are particularly interested in that model. Apple is deliberate about every single detail of everything, and it can’t be an accident. Why?

First, let’s look at the economics of this transaction.

The Only Units

US dollars! Aren’t they the best? Completely fungible global reserve currency, and the easiest way to keep score. How odd it is that analysts insist on using phone units to keep score when dollars are just sitting right there.

Someone buys an iPhone XR for $449 plus an iPhone 7 Plus in “good” condition. There’s a lot of wiggle room between those two quotation marks, but Apple’s definition of “good” is “anything where the refurb cost is low enough that we can still make an acceptable profit.”

I looked on eBay to get a sense of where the market for used iPhone 7 Pluses stood as of today. I cataloged the last 100 completed transactions that fulfilled the following qualifications:

32GB

Described as good or better. Minor scratches and dings OK.

All components in good working order

No third-party screen replacement or any other third-party major component replacement.

Unlocked in all ways

No accessories required, just the phone

Also, there were a couple that were suspect, like the one that sold for $1100 to someone 10 miles away from the seller (LOL, money-laundering), so I omitted those.

I think this comes pretty close to what Apple is looking for. The last 100 phones sold in this category averaged in price $347.54.1 Apple could just turn around these phones that they are purchasing for $300, and make a 13.7% profit on them the same day. And remember, that’s the least expensive of the iPhone 7 Pluses. The 128GB and 256GB versions fetch about $60 and $120 more on eBay, respectively. Apple pays $300 regardless.

But they don’t sell them on eBay, of course. They send it back to Hon Hai, where they are rubbed and scrubbed and sold in the Apple refurb store, for $479, $569 and $649, depending on storage. Remember, that $649 version still cost Apple only $300. Let’s be super-conservative and say the average sale price is $500 because of heavy mix towards the 32GB phone. That means Apple’s profit here is $200 minus the cost of refurb.

Here’s the tricky part, because Apple is the most secretive company in the world, it’s impossible to know what that refurb cost is. Since they could just get $348 on the open market without the refurb, I would imagine the profit is much higher than that $48. I would guess much closer to $148 to $48, but that’s pure speculation. Let’s just call it $100. So instead of getting $749 for this iPhone XR, Apple got $849 ($449+$500-$100).

Apple does not give anything away. Ever. They like to put on a soft, PC face, but they are also the greediest company out there, because Steve Jobs understood that the scorecard was all in dollar signs, not phone units.

I think this is another brilliant lever-pull by Tim Cook, that no one else even saw, won’t understand until the May conference call, and maybe never. Or, I’m just completely wrong. Isn’t following Apple fun and exhausting?

I Think They’re Headed to Asia

Again, we’re into purely speculative territory here, but this is based on a few things:

Bigger phones tend to be popular in Asia. According to Device Atlas, in South Korea, home of Samsung (OTC:SSNLF), the most popular phone in 2018 is the iPhone 7 Plus with 11% share. The top Android phone is the Galaxy Note 8, also a large phone. It’s not true in every Asian country, but sales of larger phones tend to be better there, where it is often a person’s only device.

Right now, the dollar is strong and a good way for Apple to boost profits is selling abroad. The $749 iPhoneXR costs 990,000 Korean Won, or $887 in today’s exchange on xe.com. A brand new iPhone 7 Plus is $569 in the US, and $681 in Korea. Also, this income and profit gets funneled through their Irish “subsidiary” and they pay no US taxes on it.

Notice I didn’t tell you the price of a refurb iPhone 7 Plus in the Korean Apple Store? That’s because there are no iPhones there, or anywhere else in Asia that I looked. Like I said, Apple is very deliberate about things, and they may have a Very Good Reason why there are none. Or, they could be lacking in supply, and that’s what this is all about: getting supply of used inventory to sell in Asia.

But Wouldn’t This Cut Into New iPhone Sales?

Yes. Probably. I don’t care. More to the point, neither does Apple. The margins on the refurbs are high, it increases their user base in the fastest growing part of the world, and juicing foreign sales, where the profits are much higher, will make up for some of the reduced units on the top-line phones. Analysts may care where the dollars come from, but Apple does not.2 They are the only units that matter.

Implications for Apple Stock

As I write this, Apple sits at 156.23. It’s TTM PE is 13.15. Their cash-net-debt is about $22/share (probably more now, since the share count is likely lower than it was in September). So minus the cash, the market is currently valuing Apple at $134 with a PE of 11.30. That is, other than the cash, the entire rest of Apple is worth $636 billion. Other assets besides cash are $166 billion. So the non-asset value of the entire company is $470 billion. Come on, now.

But there is an old saying that the market can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent. The Bull and The Bear are out, fighting for supremacy, with one fear trade on top of another. Say whatever you want about trade, the Fed, liquidity, whatever. We are into pure Animal Spirits and none of it matters until one of them wins.

So under these conditions, I can’t say that Apple stock won’t go even lower; you may even be able to get it as low as $100 if The Bear wins. But I also think that the price for Apple now is absurdly low, and a year from now will be a lot higher. I took another taste at $150, even though I am a big Fat Bear right now. If it goes to $100, I will probably buy more. That’s how I do Apple, I only buy, never sell. It’s working so far, until it doesn’t.

Conclusions: Who Knows?

Pictured L-R: Eddie Cue, Ho Chi Minh, Nikita Khrushchev, Phil Schiller, Leonid Brezhnev, Tim Cook and Jeff Williams. Scott Forestall was airbrushed out of that empty spot in the middle between Khrushchev and Schiller. Source: US Navy Public Archives

During the Cold War, solid data about the Soviet Union was very hard to come by. Frustrated political scientists came up with the field of “Sovietology,” which was more art than science. They would pour over articles and photos in Pravda looking for any clue into new policy or inner-circle machinations from article verbiage, and photo composition and airbrushing. You will probably be unsurprised to learn that, lacking data, their predictions were not very good.

Covering Apple is kind of similar and equally as frustrating. They are almost as secretive as the Soviets between SEC filings, and so we have to engage in a little educated guessing, and hope our record is better than the Sovietologists. Anyone from outside of Apple who tells you they know what is happening at Apple is a liar. Heck, most of the people inside Apple don’t know what’s going on beyond their own small world there.

As always, the speculation about this quarter will end with their 10-Q, and maybe we will get a couple of days’ break before the speculation on Q2 begins. Until then, speculate away!

Sadly…

My policy with heavily-followed companies like Apple is to not read or respond to comments, as they seem to attract a large amount of FUD and trolling. Feel free to send me a private message if you have a question or comment directed at me. If you are polite and respectful, you will almost certainly get a response that is also polite and respectful.

Endnotes

1 I included shipping for two reasons. 1. This is the full cost of what the buyer was willing to pay. 2. Low price + high shipping cost is the oldest trick in the book.

2 When the iPhone was first released, some analysts complained that it would cut into iPod sales and was therefore a bad idea. Seriously.

Disclosure: I am/we are long AAPL. I wrote this article myself, and it expresses my own opinions. I am not receiving compensation for it (other than from Seeking Alpha). I have no business relationship with any company whose stock is mentioned in this article.

Additional disclosure: Forever, and ever

Editor’s Note: This article discusses one or more securities that do not trade on a major U.S. exchange. Please be aware of the risks associated with these stocks.

[itsworn]

Best of Both Worlds: 1964 Chrysler 300K

The Chrysler letter car story is well known to the readers of Mopar Muscle. Starting in 1955 with the introduction of the C-300, through to the 300L in 1965, the last of the famed letter cars.

For 1963, the entire Chrysler lineup received extensively restyled exterior sheet metal and on the inside, gone was the electro-luminescent AstroDome instrument cluster, replaced with a much more traditional flat instrument panel. While most Chryslers rode on a 126-inch wheelbase, the two door models of the 300 letter and non-letter cars had a wheelbase that was four inches shorter at 122 inches. The biggest news for Chrysler in 1963 was the introduction of the 5 year/50,000-mile warranty, a move that set Chrysler apart from its competitors.

All the 300J hardtops (the letter “I” was skipped due in part to in that it might be confused with the numeral 1) were equipped the 413-cubic-inch V-8 featuring ram induction, producing 310 horsepower. Top speed was reported to be 142 miles per hour making it one of the fastest production cars in America, in spite of a curb weight exceeding 4,000 pounds. Sales were comparably poor for 1963 with just 400 cars produced as sales of the non-letter 300s continued to grow.

For 1964 the convertible returned to the 300K lineup but the cross-ram 413 became an option, a 300K exclusive not offered on other 1964 Chryslers and the leather interior became an extra-cost option. These moves allowed Chrysler to reduce the base price of the 300K by over $1,000. The results were an eight-fold increase in sale to 3,647 units (3,022 hardtops, 625 convertibles), the largest total in the history of the 300 letter car series.

The car you see here, a 1964 Chrysler 300K two-door hardtop, owned by Michael Laiserin, one of those 3,022 hardtops produced for the 1964 model year, the last of the sixth generation.

Michael marks the start of his car enthusiasm in 1971 when he was just four years old, vividly remembering his Dad shopping for a new Chrysler when he planned to trade in the family sedan, a 1964 Newport he bought new, to his mom who was just learning to drive. “I remember a big blue fuselage-bodied Chrysler on the showroom floor with a white vinyl top and interior, fancy wheels and hidden headlamps,” recalls Michael. “Looking back now I’m sure it was a 300 and kept telling my Dad ‘let’s get that one.’ Being ever so practical Dad insisted on another economical sedan and the salesman took us out into the lot and showed us a Burnished Red Metallic Newport. I didn’t like it and told Dad the wheels were ugly – back then the wheel covers were in the trunk until the cars were prepped – and this car was broken because the left front tire was flat. I remember noticing the unusual, dual-pinstripe whitewalls but remained unimpressed. ‘Dad, let’s get the blue one.’ Of course, we came home with the red one.”

For Michael, the 1964 Newport became somewhat of a plaything as he asked. “Hey Dad, if we still have this car when I’m old enough to drive can I have it?” To which his dad replied, laughing, “Sure why not.”

“Little did he know the path he set me on,” says Michael more than four decades later. “As I got older I learned to tinker on that car, changing oil, brakes, ignition points and more. By the time I was sixteen although the car was still around, I came across a big block ’1970 Charger project. Dad wasn’t a car guy and looked at the basket case with the engine in pieces and figured I couldn’t get into any trouble. He knew he was wrong the first time a cop woke him up in the middle of the night and asked if he wanted me locked up and the car impounded or if he wanted to get dressed and come to get me instead. That ended my street racing activities for the summer and I was headed off to college anyway.”

After college, Michael took the Charger off the road with plans to restore it and while he was collecting parts, came across a 1964 Chrysler 300K convertible. I had never seen a 413 cross-ram engine before and he had to have it. He did the best restoration a 23-year-old could back in 1990 and drove that car to every show he could attend. Soon after he replaced his 383 automatic Charger for a legit, numbers-matching 1970 RT/SE four-speed Charger. Once completed, he packed up his cars and headed west figuring Arizona was the place to be as he could drive his cars year-round and they’d never rust again. As the years went by, he didn’t just add a wife and kids, like so many other car nuts, he added and completed projects that included a 1970 Road Runner with a Gen III Hemi, a 1969 Charger 500, and this 1964 300K hardtop.

“I came across this car sitting on a trailer in the swap section of the Spring Fling in Van Nuys, California,” said Michael. “It was a complete, but rough looking, unrestored car. It was pretty devoid of options as far as luxury cars go, even radio and side view mirror delete. The original window sticker was in a box full of paperwork dating back to before the original owner even purchased the car. There were handwritten notes comparing prices from different dealerships and shows he traded in a Renault to order this “bankers hotrod.” He checked off very few options, just leather trim, a Sure-Grip differential, and the ‘300K special package’ which included the dual four-barrel, cross-ram equipped engine. The paper trail on the car spanned nearly 25 years with receipts for warranty work at the dealership, car washes, and even custom tuning at the famous Granatelli Automotive. I struck a deal for it and the seller trailered it to my my place in Phoenix.”

While I’ve driven it to Mopars at the Strip in Vegas and the Spring Fling in California my favorite trip was attending one of the Chrysler 300 Club International’s events which was held in Monterey, California. The show host arranged for an afternoon gathering at Laguna Seca Raceway where they allowed us all to do some exhibition runs around the course. Not going to miss the chance, with the wife and my three kids (the youngest 10 months old and in a car seat) securely fastened we hit the track for a few laps. I’m confident my girls will be able to say they’re likely the only little girls to have experienced the famous corkscrew in the family show car. Not even Disneyland can compete with that.

“I figured that this car was going to be the bookend to my 300K convertible, only with a modern twist,” explains Michael. “Having owned my ram engine ragtop for over 20 years, I know that even when tuned properly, you’ve got to have a feel for how to drive the dual quads. These were built for the open road and they weren’t exactly civil for cruising around town. The decision was made to retain the ram induction but to add EFI for driveability. A manual trans with overdrive would make cruising fun and overcome the 4.10 gear needed to launch this heavy beast. A hydraulic roller cam would maximize power and alleviate the need to regularly remove the intakes to adjust the valves. Yards and yards of Dynamat lined the floors, roof, firewall and doors to keep things quiet so the kiddies in the car seats could nap on long trips. The original KK1 Silver Turquoise paint color was retained as was the black leather interior. I needed to upgrade the wheels as there was no way 14” tires were up to the task of maintaining adhesion with the road considering all the weight and power involved here. I settled on 18-inch Centerline Boulevard wheels custom-ordered with unpolished centers and they were reminiscent of the 1950s and 1960s kidney-bean-style wheels. Overall I achieved the look I wanted with the car.”

Michael explains that the original Chrysler 300 letter car series helped to spawn the horsepower races of the 1950s and 1960’s. Not classified as muscle cars (defined as a big engine installed in an intermediate or compact car), the big, bruising Chryslers are muscular cars. “Many are restored to stock as owners feel that protects not only their heritage but value also,” says Michael. “Mine is tastefully modified with subtle improvements that don’t get the purists too upset but make mine a helluva lot more fun to drive.” One of these modifications, the stealth infotainment system concealed behind a movable panel of the dash, is almost as comprehensive as the uConnect package you would find in a contemporary Chrysler 300.

The cross-ram fuel-injection setup is a unique, one-off design. From Imagine Injection in Phoenix, Arizona. It was this unusual EFI set up that caught our eye many years ago when caravanning from Phoenix to Las Vegas for that year’s Mopars at the Strip (when it was still called Mopars at the Strip). Lifting the hood at a gas stop in Wickenburg, Arizona, we saw that the expected carburetors were missing, replaced by a state-of-the-art fuel-injection set up. Michael explained that not only did fuel injection improve driveability, but in conjunction with the overdrive fifth gear, it substantially improved fuel mileage. It’s almost as if it was engineered by Chrysler’s engineers in Highland Park back in the 1960s (remember that Corvette offered fuel injection since 1957).

Over the years Michael has joined many Mopar clubs including the Chrysler 300 Club International, the Chrysler 300 Club Inc., AZLX Modern Mopar Muscle, and the 602 (area code) Mopars. He’s participated in the Silver State Classic Challenge and the Nevada Open Road Challenge

Michael notes that he doesn’t drive the 300K as much as he might like. “I drive my projects a little bit after completing them before parking them and getting involved in my next project. It’s a mixed blessing. I’ve been fortunate to be able to build quite a few Mopars but when I’m into a current build that consumes all my time, I don’t enjoy the finished cars as often as I hoped to. One thing I love is that my family is actively involved in the hobby and I have aspirations that my three daughters will get the car bug as they approach driving age in a few years.”

“I love my vintage Mopars, but as I’ve gotten older, and the cars have gotten older I enjoy them differently than I used to,” say Michael with a smile. “I don’t abuse them like I used to, I have the modern Mopars for that. If I hurt one of the new cars the local dealership delivers the new parts to my shop the next day and I’m well on the way to being back on the road. I had a customer who wrecked his vintage Challenger and although the insurance took care of the bill, the car was down nearly a year for the rebuild. I think that’s got to be a collector’s worst nightmare.”

Concluding our conversation, Michael noted that both the 1964 and 1971 Newports that started it all for him are still in the family. This, as well as the cars he’s built since then, remain in his custody. Unlike many of us, he’s had space and never has been forced to sell any of his Mopar legacy.

ENGINE Type V8 Wedge Bore x stroke 4.36-inch x 4.15-inch Block 440 Rotating assembly: Mopar Cylinder heads: Edelbrock Compression: 10.4:1 Camshaft: Muscle Motors spec’d, Comp Cams ground Hydraulic Roller Cam Valve train: Hughes Engines 1.6 Roller Rockers Induction: Original “Short” cross-ram fitted with EFI Oiling system: OEM Fuel system: EFI by Imagine Injection Phoenix, AZ Exhaust: Factory Cast Iron “headers” into 2.5-inch pipes through Impco Imperial-style stock mufflers Ignition: Direct Connection electronic replacing the factory dual point Cooling OE Engine built by: Shortblock by Speedomotive,

DRIVETRAIN Transmission: Five-speed Tremec TKO600 Shifter: Tremec with Hurst Handle Steering: Stock power steering Front brakes: AAJ Disc brake conversion using GM calipers Rear brakes: Dr. Diff Disc brake conversion using Mustang Cobra calipers Rear Axle: 8-3/4 sure grip with 4.10 gear

WHEELS & TIRES Wheels: 18×8 Centerline Boulevard wheels with as-cast centers instead of polished Tires: Michelin MXV4, front 235-50-18, Rear 255-55-18

INTERIOR Seats: OEM leather by Legendary Auto Interiors Instruments: OEM and vintage-style Autometer short sweep tach mounted on the steering column Hidden Navigation radio

The post Best of Both Worlds: 1964 Chrysler 300K appeared first on Hot Rod Network.

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[catbush3-blog]

2 Argumentative Essay Examples Help You To Start Writing You Essay



Argumentative Essay Examples

How do you write a good argumentative essay? Whether you’re writing an essay for school, work, or for fun, an argumentative essay needs to persuade your readers into believing that your standpoint on an issue is their best possible option. Many people tend to write weak arguments because they don’t understand how to write a compelling argument. You need to use a professional tone that states not only your point of view but refutes the other remaining points of views using credible facts. A weak argument lacking facts can drive your potential supporters to another side, thus making your essay useless. Argumentative essay examples are used in this guide to help you understand how to write one.

What is an Argumentative Essay?

The argumentative essay is a persuasive essay in which you will try and convince your readers to accept the argument that you’re making and convince them to switch to your side. You will need to use facts to back up your stance and get your readers to agree with you through drawing conclusions and connections to backup your argument. The very first thing you’re going to need to do is to select a topic that has more than one clear side. If your topic only has one side, then it should not be used for an argumentative essay. You will then need to approach the topic by gathering, generating, and evaluating credible sources to support your evidence. Every argumentative essay has four main parts to the body section of the paper. A compelling argument, a clear stance on the subject, evidence supporting its claims, and a solid and unbiased counter-argument. Our examples of argumentative essays can help demonstrated what one looks like.

Every argumentative essay should be based on a topic that can be debated. If you can’t debate your topic, then you’re going to need to choose a different topic. You can find a list of popular argumentative essay topics online, but we highly suggest that you come up with your own. Pay attention to news outlets, media, and debates that are going on online and through the TV. Keep in mind that many debates on TV tend to not fact check their sources. For your debate to be a strong one you should always double check to see if there are enough data and information to help back up your viewpoint.

Your Stance

The most important element aside from the topic is staying on point when it comes to your argument. You need to constantly stay with your viewpoint. Many students are tempted to switch back and forth between viewpoints and use facts to backup their claims. The issue with this is that it sends a message to your audience that you’re unsure of your stance, and can weaken your overall viewpoint. A great tip we can offer you to stay on one point is to be on either the stronger or more evident side of the argument. The more credible information about one side of the argument, the easier it will be for you to stay on track. To get a better idea of this, check out our argumentative essay example.

One major area that students tend to get stumped on is how to provide evidence to support their claims. An argument needs to be based on facts or else the argument loses its convincing elements. A good persuasive argument will use the most recent data and information from verified sources. Always reference your sources at the end of your essay and stick to APA or MLA format. Sources like Wikipedia, forums, and ask websites are not viable sources for your argument. The information provided on these websites are often opinions and not facts.

Counter Argument

Not only will you be coming up from argument for your side of the arguments but you will also be coming up with refuting arguments that you can use against your opponent. You want to make your side look like the winning side, and to do that you’re going to have to try your hardest to get accurate information that backs up your claims. Thus, making you more credible than the others. The more credible you are to the opposing side, the better your chances when it comes to convincing readers to join your side or agree with you.

Conclusion

Always end with a strong thesis in the conclusion of the paper. This can ensure your audience that you’re keeping on track. A great conclusion will summarize all data that has happened in the article and use it to give one last reason why you should join our side. This should where your main these should go, except change it to represent your side of the argument.

research papers for sale of Argumentative Essays

Argumentative essays can be complicated to write, but you have to know what you’re doing. One of the major flaws of every argumentative essay is that the students who believe that they are here just to persuade the other side to our side then they are wrong. You’re writing should represent your ability to want to share with your readers why they should consider both options. We’ve listed two argumentative essay examples to help you write your essay. The first was on fast food needs a warning sign or something when you consume it and our other topic is should students switch to only electronic textbooks while in school. You can use them as a guide later for your own argumentative essay.

Argumentative Essay Example #1

Should Fast Food Come With a Warning like Drugs?

You can get fast food on almost any street nowadays. Fast food and junk food are everywhere you look, and the world is only creating more fast food shops around the globe. Fast food is more accessible than other food sources; it is also one of the most popular ways to get dinner. Business workers are ordering in either for lunch or dinner, and this is usually from fast food places with drive-throughs. Fast food companies use chemicals in their food that aren’t exactly healthy for the human to consume on a regular basis. So, why should fast food companies be allowed to hide all the chemicals and ingredients in their foods as well as hide any of the side effects that come with eating that food?

The issue is that fast food isn’t healthy. Healthy foods don’t contain many of the chemicals that fast foods do, they don’t affect the body in the same way. Healthy foods come from wholesome ingredients and don’t have preservatives or other pesticides or growth hormones in them. We all know that that’s food ingredients are in exactly healthy, but many of us failed to read the list of ingredients for our favorite menu items. Because of this many of us lack the billet he to understand how bad the first food we consume is.

Will you believe that fast food you come with a warning just like any other product you purchased? You want to know exactly what’s going to happen to your body and you have the right to know that information. It should not be hidden from you, and it should not be kept away as some company secret. Every person has the right to understand how that food will affect their body. From then on they can make their choices if they want to eat it or not.

If you’ve looked at documentaries such as the McDonald’s documentary and other fast food documentaries you probably noticed that fast food as a long-term effect on a human’s health. Fast food isn’t bad as long as you eat it every once in a while, but many people choose to eat fast food every single day. This is not a healthy way of living and can end up causing you permanent damage to your body because of the chemicals you were introduced into your body every time you eat at fast food meal.

There are many of people who don’t want to know what’s in their food. But that’s only a small population. Every person has a right to know how a product will affect them. Just as you see on labels such as pills, medications, and even products such as workout equipment for scans. All of these come with a warning on what could go wrong when you’re using it or consuming it. So why should fast food be any different? Just because a small population of people doesn’t want to know what’s in their food doesn’t mean that the rest of the population shouldn’t at least have a warning sticker.

As you can see, everyone has the right to know what chemicals and products go onto their food. I don’t know me that, but they also deserve to know by consuming the fast food what kind of effects they should expect on their body. Many people think that fast food will only affect their calorie intake for the day, this is not true. Fast food can affect a person’s Brain, psyche, and body. This is why we believe the fast foods should come with a warning.

Argumentative Essay Example #2

Should Schools Switch to Electronic Textbooks to Save Money & Paper?

If you noticed many students in college are getting their textbooks from either Amazon or another website which has their textbook listed online. Real textbooks are made up of multiple hundreds of pages of information, but this information is being written on paper. Writing A textbook on all paper takes so many pages that it can be harmful to the environment and cost more money. Which would you rather be using? Would you rather be using a textbook that is online or a textbook that has been printed into a real book?

The issue here is that it takes so many pieces of paper to write just one textbook. A regular class of college students has at least 50 to 100 students in that class. If the average textbook takes around 300 to 400 pages or more, you can see how this can be damaging to the environment and end up costing a lot more money. Some students have a ready learned that by buying textbooks online through Amazon, Chega, Kindle and other websites you can save almost half the money you would originally be spending on a real textbook.

We are advocating for all textbooks to be switched to being electronic textbooks. Not only will the switch help reduce the cost of textbooks, but it will also be saving the environment by reducing waste and reducing the amount of paper used. The only concern we have is some teachers refuse to allow their students to use textbooks online instead of real life textbooks. This is unfair and is only hurting the environment and the student’s wallet. What side would you be on? Do you support textbooks? Or do you support electronic textbooks?

For every textbook that is bought and in stores you are essentially supporting at least 600 pages on average to be wasted. Many textbooks can only be used for that year as they are constantly being upgraded to new versions. All the old tax end up just going in the trash or are recycled, however, if you take a closer look at electronics textbooks they almost have zero waste and are quite affordable. So, why wouldn’t you want to make the switch? Electronic textbooks give you instant access to all of the same information, and you can even highlight, search, and bookmark any pages that you would a normal book.

Many institutions argue that standard textbooks are still the way to go. One of the reasons for this is because many colleges make their income based off of their textbooks. So it only makes sense that they would want to continue selling their textbooks to you. But times are changing, and these institutions need to change their mind and want to comes to electronic textbooks. Sure they won’t be making as much money, but they can save money by not shipping those books and having them in print, or by keeping them in stock in their bookstores. Think about how much money they waste shipping in all of those textbooks and making sure that they are up to date and have all the information that you need to graduate.

In conclusion, electronic tech books are the better option when it comes to learning. They save the environment and our eco-friendly. They are less expensive than traditional textbooks. And they do not cost as much money as regular textbooks. Not only they have all these benefits, but they also give you instant access to all the information you need. Perform searches, highlight, copy and paste all the information you need from your textbook into any other document to write your notes. This is why we believe electronic textbooks are the best way to go when it comes to purchasing textbooks.

Conclusion

As long as you have a topic, a strong stance on the topic, evidence to back up your claims, and can use facts to refute your opponent’s viewpoint, then you’ll be able to write a convincing argument. Always remember to write a strong thesis, include an introduction, the four main body sections of your essay, and a concluding paragraph. By using our examples as a guide to writing your essays, you’ll be sure to do well on your argumentative essay. Remember to backup all of your claims with facts and sources, or else your argument will appear to look weak. If you are having trouble, refer back to our argumentative essay example.