#i knew i had this mag but i thought it was from 2014 and post draft

[seventhrounder]

I went thru my folder with old hockey magazines I had saved from around 2011 to 2015 and came across this one and thought it could be a fun to make a post about now in hindsight.

This is Jääkiekko magazine from May 2012, they always have a section of "99 questions with ..." and in this issue they interviewed Teräväinen.

I’ve translated the questions I found interesting under the cut! It ended up being about half of the interview. (*) are my additions.

On the cover "seuraava superjokeri" means the next super joker, he played for Helsingin Jokerit so it's a word play from that. Under, on the blue print it says: "The 17-year-old forward will become a first round draft pick in the summer. The natural goal scorer can dominate in SM-Liiga as soon as next season."

In the 2nd photo the headline and lead paragraph goes:

"A post with dents* - A year ago Teuvo Teräväinen was known only within a small number of hockey insiders. Few passers-by recognize him now either but after a flashy rookie season the Jokerit sensation is on the radar of every NHL team and is a strong contender to become a first round draft pick. Next season with Jokerit the talented second line center will be one of the main talking points in the SM-Liiga."

(*references the net Teräväinen had in his backyard and into which he practiced his shooting)

3. You've been described as a magician, top scorer, wunderkind and a prodigy. What do you think of these descriptions?

TT: Heh, those are some descriptions yeah. What can I really say? Don't really wanna comment on them much.

4. How nervous are you about the Draft?

TT: I try not to be nervous as best as I can. In a way I don't have anything to be nervous about since I don't care which team picks me or at what number I go.

6. Which is stressing you more, English interviews or physical tests?

TT: Maybe both. Bench press (laughs) and English interviews can be tough.

12. How far along have you planned your career with, for example, your parents or your agent?

TT: Haven't really planned things with others but I've thought about them myself. I try to go step by step and not jump too far ahead.

14. How does it feel to be so young with all the star players in Jokerit?

TT: How to say it? I haven't felt like I was young but a part of the team instead. The team's been very good with me and they haven't been looking down at me like: "oh he's young". It's been fun to play in an experienced team.

15. Is there a generational gap between players?

TT: You can see the age difference, older players look older but we're all childish, at least with our topics.

17. What does a 17-year-old do in the sauna nights of the team?

TT: I actually haven't been in any yet. I've always been at national team's camps or something.

19. Did you get the number you wanted?

TT: I did, yeah. I could've taken #18 but Semir (Ben-Amor) has it. But i'm happy with #86, it's good.

23. What are your strengths as a player?

TT: Offensive play and with that playing with the puck, passing, IQ, power play and skill, just the usual skill - skill with hands.

24. And weaknesses?

TT: They are to do with defensive play, strength and physicality. Battles and such but I think I took a step forward last season. That's a good thing.

25. Have you ever been "pressed into a mold" or has your playing style gotten to develop naturally?

TT: As a kid the play was mostly offensive/attacking, I didn't have to think about playing defence. Up until 15 years old, I got to attack pretty freely. Playing defence became more important when I started to play in A-juniors a couple seasons ago.

26. On a scale from 1 to 10 how determined are you?

TT: Maybe 8, feels like an 8.

32. What kind of role are you planning to take with Jokerit next season?

TT: I think a pretty big one. I try to be a top player and not just take others' example but give others example myself too. So that someone in the team can take something out of the way I do things on the ice and off the ice.

35. If you could pick anyone, who would be your car driver?

TT: Nico Manelius for sure. He's been my driver this season. I've had others too, like Riku Hahl but he's not nearly at the same level. Nico’s clearly the best.

36. What are the most important qualifications to be a good driver?

TT: The car is obviously important. Hahl's car is totally awful, he takes a lot of heat for it from the guys too. I wouldn't dare driving with him. Manelius is a steady performer, never lets you down.

38. What sports did you play as a 10-year-old?

TT: Hockey and floorball, probably football (soccer) during the summers at the time too.

42. When did you decide to focus only on hockey?

TT: So when I stopped playing other sports? Three years ago, before that floorball was kind of a side thing, I played a couple of games in the regular season and playoffs.

45. Do you follow floorball or other sports? Go to games?

TT: I don't go to games but I like to watch floorball on TV, it's an interesting sport. Sometimes I watch football too but I don't follow it much. Feels like they never score there.

47. Have you ever played with a wooden stick?

TT: As a kid I did play with a wooden stick.

49. You won the hockey players' golf tournament last summer even though there were more experienced players too. Are you good with all stick games?

TT: Well, I've been pretty good in all of them. I've played golf for a long time and still play it.

50. How is your swing?

TT: Pretty bold, kind of a hockey swing. I don't really care where the ball goes - as long as it goes far.

52. What do you think of off-ice training?

TT: Let's just say it's more stupid than being on the ice but you still gotta do it to be better on the ice.

56. Which word describes your professional relationship (with his coach, Tomek Valtonen), tranquil or colorful?

TT: Colorful of course. At times we're joking around, other times it's more serious but the relationship is really good.

57. Coaching you has been described in many words: good, bad, worse. What are they?

TT: Heh, well... I won't tell them here. He (Tomek) keeps the discipline during practices but sometimes when things haven't gone to a plan I've had to jump on an exercise bike in the middle of a practice.

58. What have been the reasons?

TT: I'll quote Tomek: "when I haven't been present".

59. Have you ever tried to turn the resistance of the bike to zero?

TT: (Laughs) Of course I have and sometimes I've even succeeded.

60. Describe your diet in three words?

TT: Greasy, healthy and good!

64. Your first name is not common for people your age. How did your parents come up with it?

TT: I actually don't even know. Maybe they didn't want a usual Ville*....

(*very common name for men of all ages in Finland)

66. Which of these is the most important: skill, unexpectedness or courage?

TT: Skill!

68. Your longest video game stint?

TT: Six hours, at least. I've played a lot of War of Duty lately.

72. The dumbest thing that has made you upset in hockey?

TT: Probably if I didn't get an assist on a goal even though I should have. Or even worse is if I score and they mark it down for someone else.

79. Have you had any concussions?

TT: I haven't had any, I've managed to always dodge them.*

(*ouch, tho it's good the recent one is his only as far as i remember)

84. In 2011 Team Finland finished in the 5th place at the U-18 tournament. Why only as 5th?

TT: Because we lost to Team Russia in the quarter final, just as well we could have won that game too.

89. You didn't get to be on the ice to accept the SM-Liiga bronze medal (because of the U-18's). When and where did you get it?

TT: I actually still haven't received it, I don't know where it is.

93. What is the population of Helsinki?

TT: There's like 5 million people in Finland so maybe around 500k in Helsinki? (to be exact 596k) Did i really get it right...?

94. Who's the mayor of Helsinki?

TT: I don't know, I barely know the president.

95. Do you think the municipalities in the capital city area should merge?

TT: Luckily I don't have to decide but they probably shouldn't.

96. What do you check first in the news paper?

TT: The sports section.

97. Your favorite tv show?

TT: Putous* was pretty good, I liked a lot of the characters. The grandma was pretty good.

(*Finnish live improvisation comedy/sketch show (there are still new seasons, the latest just finished). Every actor comes up with a humor character with a catchy phrase and one of them wins. "The grandma" is Marja Tyrni and I just got such flashbacks from typing this sentence.)

98. Last book you read?

TT: I don't read many books. The last book was a study book, a Finnish book. I wrote an essay on Tiki (Esa) Tikkanen's biography. An eventful book, great career and a lot of chirps.

99. Who should we ask the 99 questions next?

TT: Riku Hahl could have good stories, he's also seen a lot of the world.

[lastsonlost]

Many of the women promoting the “cancellation” of men in comics, and demanding they post the recent empty promise known as #ComicsPledge, are in fact hypocrites.  In this article, I’m going to present evidence of lies, collusion, rumor spreading, and, in my opinion, defamation and contract interference.

I personally know that they’ve colluded for YEARS to take down men. Specifically those with conservative politics and philosophies. This is an ongoing, coordinated effort. How do I know this?

Because I obtained access to their PRIVATE FACEBOOK GROUP.

This is Part 1 of the #Hypocralypse leaks

There is simply too much to put in one leak, so I will make the following three points for now.

1. The so-called Comic Book Whisper Network, which has been dismissed as conspiracy since 2016, is real, and I have hundreds of screenshots to prove it.

2. The Whisper Network has been targeting men and trying to destroy their careers, and use their connections in the comic book media to do so.

 3. Whisper Network members have acted unprofessionally and unethically at best. At worst, they have engaged in what I believe could be illegal behavior.

MY STORY

I first heard about the Whisper Network back in mid-2016 from folks I knew at Image, DC, Marvel, and later, Valiant.  Depending on who I chatted with, sometimes the group was called ‘The Women’s Network’, other times ‘The Whisper Network’, occasionally ‘The Whisper Campaign’, and eventually there were more conspiratorial names used mockingly (a friend called them a gender-swapped 4Chan, which became ‘FemChan’ to some insiders).

Regardless of the name, it was all the same group.

The same five or six names kept popping up in conversation over and again. As time ticked on, I noticed a trend on Social Media: half a decade of rumors, false allegations, cancellation attempts , and they almost always traced back to these same five or six people.  The goal of this Whisper Network, according to industry folks, was simple: choose a target, smear them until they lose their reputation, their income, and are ultimately blacklisted – opening up job opportunities for the same people who started these smear campaigns in the first place.

 Behind the scenes these “cancellations” are painted as morally or politically motivated, but in the end it’s all financial. As time passed, the group in question seemed more and more like a reality. I saw their influence. I saw things I knew to be verifiably untrue go viral online, appearing in what I thought were legit news sources. I felt angry and helpless seeing innocent people getting attacked, but did not know what to do. 

A few years passed and by 2018 almost everyone I interacted with in the industry seemed to know about the Network, from top level editors right down to the letterers. It was an open secret, but no one was willing to speak up for fear of being targeted themselves. They knew the consequences.

And after all, this was a secret network. Without proof, there was no point in going public because members would just deny its existence, and use their media connections to smear anyone who challenged them.

 THEN THINGS GOT INTERESTING

December 16, 2018, Whisper Network member Gail Simone, who joined the Network 6 years ago (4 years before the following tweet was posted), mocks “doofuses” who speculate that a “whisper campaign” exists.

At this point in late 2018, I was still skeptical of the Whisper Network’s existence. I’d heard many stories of individuals spreading rumors and lies, and plenty of malicious behavior was going on behind closed doors. Though I wasn’t ready to believe it was a coordinated effort, or collusion was involved.  Then, certain people began openly mentioning the Whisper Network and my attitude changed.

 March 26, 2019, Heather Antos, a member herself, did not outright mention the Whisper Network or her involvement, but she made what some took as a veiled threat to those who got on her bad side.

 Heather “milkshake girl” Antos’ colorful backstory at Marvel, and later at Valiant, is notorious in the comic industry. A conversation about office rumor-spreading and bullying is never complete without someone bringing up a juicy Antos anecdote. Everyone has one.

Up until then, I still hadn’t seen ACTUAL PROOF of a larger scheme. But then, something changed in 2020.

January 8, 2020, Alex de Campi, who I would discover is one of the most active Whisper Network members, openly admits there is a Network. I have no idea if this was a slip or a brazen attempt to show off her power and influence, but this appeared.

Eventually, everything I had heard and read was confirmed beyond any shadow of a doubt after I gained access to their private Facebook group.

I WAS INSIDE THE WHISPER NETWORK!

This is the place where the Whispher Network has been colluding for years. And although their activity is not confined to just this site, from what I can tell, this was where they first met, and started their coordinated campaigns.

Members of the Secret Group called “Comic Book Women”

At present time, there are 440+ members of the secret Facebook group, called COMIC BOOK WOMEN. From what I can tell, a few are regular users, though many of them have never posted.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/comicbookwomen/ 

*unless you are a member, this will not show up in a search

Secret Facebook groups offer the same level of privacy as closed groups, but operate under a cloak of invisibility. No one can search for secret groups or even request to join them. The only way to get in one is to know someone who can invite you. Everything shared in a secret group is visible only to its members.

This secret group includes a list of members whose actions and connections speak for themselves. Members such as:

Zoe Quinn

Gail Simone

Alex de Campi

Heather Antos (aka Heather Marie)

Mags Visaggio (aka Magdalene Francis)

Mairghread Scott

And several key members of the group are women who work in the comics media and can be used to run damage control, including women like Heidi MacDonald of Comics Beat.  They have contacts outside of the secret network as well, with some male allies in both comics and the media.

Just the fact that all of these folks were secretly linked in a private network came as a shock to me, considering their reputations and the accusations that they’ve made. Immediately I began to connect the dots…

They’ve denied for YEARS that they coordinate their actions in private. And yet they always coincidentally appear on Twitter, retweeting and amplifying each other’s accusations, signal boosting one another, and helping them gain traction. And their allies in media – Bleeding Cool and CBR specifically – will turn those same tweets into stories almost instantly & with no fact-checking or verification, sometimes within the hour.

I’m going to start explaining who the key actors are, and, from my perspective, how they coordinate these attacks.

KEY ACTORS

There are too many people to focus on at once, so I will have to break this into several posts, but I will start with one of the clear group leaders IMO.

Alex de Campi is well connected, despite never being part of the Big Two (since, from what I’ve been told management is well aware of her bullying, harassment, rumor-spreading and unethical behavior that goes back years, and depending on who you talk to she’s almost as notorious as Antos or Tess Fowler).  She just wrapped up a graphic novel campaign on Kickstarter with David Bowie’s son, the Hollywood film director Duncan Jones. It grossed over $366K

All the while she makes baseless accusations while demanding transparency from everyone else.

Now, I’ll take you into their private network.

Two years ago, on May 13, 2018, De Campi launched a private campaign to target an independent creator, claiming she was using her connections to have Simon & Schuster cancel their book.

In addition to contacting the publisher, others in the Whisper Network coordinated their efforts to contact media outlets to have the narrative changed, according to the posts in this thread.  Again, in my opinion, this could end up as a defamation or tortious interference case, and has many implications regarding media bias as well.

 

The following month, on June 23, 2018, de Campi posted private text messages between herself and writer Max Bemis in what appeared to be an attempt to damage his career. Despite Bemis being mentally ill (diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2014), de Campi still posted the private messages with malicious intent IMO. According to US and UK law this is an actionable offense: posting private texts without both parties consenting.

[iampikachuhearmeroar]

y’know the wildest thing still to happen to me on this hellsite was my first experience of sexting, sans nudes, that was done in front of at least 250-500 followers because of those horny anons i had in early 2013 when i was 17. instead of being exposed to it on my phone privately with a partner at that age, it was done publicly for the internet to see lmao. i remember begging the anons to stop and “come off anon” because i was “losing followers” at the time too bc i was so insecure about my follower count lmao. and then yeah when they came off anon they were both 28 years old.

to write the responses, i just consulted cosmo mag sex pages for ideas hoping that the anons would like the options i chose. in one i detailed doing anal- a sex act i hadn’t even done yet irl- let alone every other thing i suggested in them (head, idek long, drawn out foreplay, some stupid fancy sex moves that cosmo was all like “use these moves to spice up your sex life 🔥🔥”, sex in a bath, i’m pretty sure i had some lines about tying or handcuffing them to a bed (????) etc etc etc)….

when again, i had never even done any of those above sex acts in real life. i was a naive teen who was incredibly shy in regards towards her love life because she’d “never been kissed” and had never had the “hot emo boyfriend whose in a band and is covered in tattoos” she’d always wanted, let alone even a boyfriend that she had actually fucking liked (ie clear braces boy, for like a month in year 9/2010 vs the popular boys that made fun of her, that she always had unrequited crushes on)…. hell, my blog title when i first started on here in 2011 was “the perfect epitome of being forever alone” because of these very reasons. but here she was, writing explicit sex acts to strangers like she knew what the fuck she was doing, to an audience of 250-500 people- and then to fucking grown ass men in inboxes. i was just parroting the shit i’d read in cosmo (both sex advice and sometimes excerpts of erotica/“sexy, steamy reads” they had some months) and also heard repeatedly in the porn that my high school stalker/creeper at public school loved to show (harass) me with to flirt with me, whenever we were alone together at school in 2012/2013.

like you could tell how naive i was….. because i used ridiculous lines like “like a gentleman entranced, you lead me to the bath for our next foray” and dumbass prose-y things like that. because what the fuck does that even mean 😂😅????

and this is why i think minors should be careful with their online experiences. like yeah, you could say that i wasn’t a minor anymore- more of a “young adult”- who should of made the smart decision to not engage with these anons. but i was a kid. i thought it was fun. and when the dudes came off anon, i thought to myself “it’s not like i’m ever gonna meet them if i ever go to the US or puerto rico at any point. it’s not like that they’ll ever recognise me in person or ever reach out to me again in the future. i might as well do it.” and i did eventually end up ignoring the guys in my inbox, due to my mental health kinda plummeting from the middle til the end of 2013 because of my end of high school exams and stuff… and also the puerto rican guy’s infamously inappropriate “hot PE teacher fucks HOT female high school student in the girls change room showers” fantasy which fucking disgusted me, when he full well knew that i was STILL IN high school.

and obviously again, there’s the point about using the “block” button function. but as i’ve stated several times over my years on here, back in my early days of tumblr, i never wanted to block or unfollow people (even if they were trash like these two men), because it seemed so “mean” and “final”. obvs now i have no qualms about blocking people, and actively encourage younger people on here to use the block button with reckless abandon towards creepy people or people who can hurt them in some way. but to high school teenage me, the whole “using the block button” thing seemed to go against me being a “nice girl/person” so i never used it, no matter which social media platform i was on.

this is why i’m hella scared for young teen girls on tik tok wanting to have onlyfans accounts: because it’s where they’ll be exposed to ACTUAL CREEPS AND PREDATORS incredibly quickly; all because they can make money off selling images of just their feet or eventually their body….. depending on what these creepy strangers demand from them….. and they’ll feel like they’ll have to do it…. but to do it before you even start experimenting properly with relationships and sex is even worse. like. yeah. i’ve admitted before that i originally started this tumblr to possibly post nudes, to see if i’d get the positive feedback that i so desperately wanted/craved from the boys in my year at catholic school- eg. to be called “sexy”, “hot”, “fuckable” possibly “beautiful”- like some of the so called “popular girls” got on their hella basic bikini photos back then (like i remember one girl i knew ended up with like 500 likes and a fair amount of comments on one of her bikini pics and i was INCREDIBLY BITTER because not even a pic of me with a nice outfit on, my hair done and makeup on could EVER get those numbers, let alone even break over the double digits).

but i decided posting nudes or other explicit images on here was an absolute no go, because i realised that i never wanted people that i knew digging up barely clothed/naked pics of me and sending them to me all like “hey, is this you?” and then possibly mocking me, all because i would’ve been dumb enough to put my face in them probably at the time. now when i take nudes and send them, i never show my face. because i know now, that even in relationships, your partner can use nude pics as leverage for arguments or to abuse you in such a way that they’ll upload your pics without your knowledge to god knows where on the internet probably as a way to get back at you in a horrible breakup.

this is what i sincerely hope some young girls who ever contemplate starting onlyfans accounts take some time SERIOUSLY CONSIDER. please know that if you share shit on onlyfans, it can shared and re-shared (i think idek how OF works tbh) to god knows who- and eventually end up in the hands of people you know. i don’t fucking care if it’s a “good way to make money!” or if people think that im trying to stop teen girls from being “girl bosses” and the other dumb as fuck internet memes you want to throw at me. because this shit isn’t “haha internet meme funny” material. it’s some fucking serious stuff. and also, i’m not saying “don’t become a sex worker when you’re older” or whatever either. you’re free to make that choice when you’re in your 20s (no i even mean 17-19 year olds in this post as “young teen girls”- sorry you’re basically kids to me at almost 26). just please consider where the fuck your stuff can be shared to. who it can end up being shared with or to.

this is why i was so fucking adamant with my infamous old follower mr adelaide fuckboy/MAF that i personally would NOT consider becoming a camgirl for him or just generally… because i had no idea where the fuck my images or videos would end up. and do you know the places i’d never want them to fucking be??? in the hands of my high school stalker/creeper. in the hands of those two 28yo men from 2013 (who’d now be in there late 30s or early 40s). i absolutely don’t want them in the hands the mid-to-late 20s and early 30s men that that girl i met at public school in 2012 who was pissed that i didn’t believe that were “adults” because we were finally over the legal age of consent (16) in our state of australia, and so we were apparently fine to “fuck” literal grown ass men because “just fuck them and they’ll be nice to you!!” which i knew was fucking bullshit.

i absolutely don’t fucking want explicit videos/images of me ending up in “why the fuck won’t you let me give you “sex lessons” in the back of my car as a “favour” and as payment for teaching you how to drive you stupid, stuck up & frigid, virgin bitch!?” guy’s hands from 2014 (when i was 18/19 at the time and he was 25… he ended up being the first person of many i’d EVER block on social media lol). or i don't want them in the hands of those weird early 20s dudes (one of which was trying to set me up with his friend) who hit on me at 16/17 (2012) who were angry that i didn’t like and watch porn as much as they did…. and who promptly asked me at the end of their period of harassing of me: “do you know any sluts we could add?” because i kept refusing their suggestions etc.

hell, quite frankly i don’t even want them to go to mr adelaide fuckboy/MAF either, but the very few and far between nudes that i sent on snapchat to him back in 2016 are some nudes that i’d rather forget lmao. hell. i don’t even know if MAF ever deleted my nudes or shared them somewhere else or not, after he fucking wheedled them out of me with “i’ve followed you for 4 years, don’t be a shit! you owe me nudes!” so he’d just shut the fuck up about my social life decisions and leave me the fuck alone.

i don’t want ANY ONE of the guys i mentioned above to get their hands on photos of minors either…. because i definitely know my hs stalker/creeper would… because his fave “make her jealous” tactic that he’s always used on me is that “hey…. i’m dating a *insert teenage girl’s age here*! be fucking jealous that you don’t fucking have me and feel guilty that you won’t fuck me like this girl does!!!” just like he did in 2015, when i ran into him on the home from uni… when i turned 20 the next week and he turned 20 that december. at that time it was a 14yo girl he used as an example of him “dating”/“fucking” to make me jealous. instead, i was completely and utterly fucking disgusted. like any fucking sane and normal human being would/should be at that horrible age gap. that is literally a fucking child that he was fucking grooming. and we were literal adults. back the fuck away.

just please. PLEASE CONSIDER the types of people that trawl these kinds of sites and their intentions. please consider that you are young. very fucking young. you literally DO NOT need to upload nudes to the internet because it’s apparently a “lucrative” business. fuck the jokey “boss babe” rhetoric around it all the way to fucking hell.

because if you’re a minor: i do not want you to have your first experience of sexting or sending explicit images literally in front of god knows how many total strangers for the whole world to see (okay i know only fans is like subscriber/follower based or whatever. but i don’t care)…… even when you (depending how good you are with relationships etc) haven’t reached the common supposed milestones of your “first boyfriend/girlfriend/partner” or “first kiss” or have even “lost your virginity” (which isn’t real anyway- don’t buy this fucking bullshit)…. just like i stupidly did with my exposure to sexting here on my tumblr back in 2013. these people don’t/won’t give a flying fuck about your privacy or safety. they don’t/won’t give a fuck about your boundaries either.

please don’t possibly scar yourself for life, just because you’re being told that it’s a quick & convenient way to make some money for weirdos on the depths of the internet. you will regret it in future. just like i do now with mine. it should’ve been something personal between me and and a guy i trusted and liked at the time. not to some random 250-500 random strangers on this hellsite (okay the notes on these posts were literally single digits or non-existent, but still… and also some of my irl friends who had tumblr saw these posts as well) for a show….. and then privately with two 28yo literal grown ass men…. who should’ve been fucking hitting on women their own goddamned age and in their own countries and NOT a 17yo high school KID (at the time) from australia; who, now in her 20s, needs therapy to sort this shit out lmao. mind you they both reeled me in with the “you’re so mature for your age” bullshit line…. which i fell for a little bit, even if it did make me feel kinda gross at the time, too. don’t fall for that bullshit either.

[queenforanight]

Jessica Over The Years

This blog is coming up to 8 years old in February (I think?) next year. It’s not exactly a significant milestone and I only spent about 4 years actually working hard on my pictures and content, but I wanted to take a quick look back at Jessica during the past 8+ years.

As I’m sure some of you are aware, I started crossdressing long before I started the blog (another 8 years extra I think), however I didn’t start doing makeup or using wigs until shortly before the blog went live. I guess you could say I had a bit of experience, but mostly I was still a newbie to all things feminine.

2010: In The Beginning

Did I really wear that dress with those boots? AND RIPPED TIGHTS?! Eurgh...

Meet Jessica long before she even knew she was Jessica. This picture was taken a few months before I started the blog and long before I developed any kind of fashion sense or skill with makeup. I don’t think I even bothered putting foundation on...

I guess this is how a lot of us start out though. We’ll throw on a dress (that was borrowed), some feminine shoes (also borrowed), maybe some jewellery (definitely borrowed), try our hand at makeup (guess what? Borrowed) and finish it all of with a wig (NOT BORROWED! It’s actually my natural hair at the time). Some of us might get lucky and look good first time...

Or you could be like me where you look a total mess and don’t realise it until you look back 8 years on.

So what’s so important about this picture? It’s something I always look back on to remind myself of how far I’ve come.

To this day I’m still riddled with doubt and voices telling me “you’re shit at this” that I can do better. I can definitely do better, but it’s good to know that I’ve improved over the last 8 years. I’ve also put on a bit of weight but OH WELL.

2010-2012: Finding My Balance (in heels)

Who needs a dodgy wig when you’re own hair looks shit enough as it is?

Yep, still no wig. I always convinced myself that my hair was long enough to not need one (ignore the fact that it took several hours and a the heat of a volcano to get straight....), but eventually I decided that I was never going to look feminine with my own hair. Not because it doesn’t actually look feminine, but because I’m so used to seeing my hair like that anyway.

At least here I can say that everything I’m wearing in this picture is 100% mine (maybe not the hairclips...). I still wouldn’t say this is the height of fashion (please don’t look at the heels, I was poor and needed something pretty), but it’s good to see that within just a year or so I had already developed some kind of fashion conscience.

This was also when I started becoming more confident about people knowing about Jess (she still wasn’t called Jess though...). I had already told my housemates, my partner, and a few others, but I was getting more comfortable about telling complete strangers or close friends who had no real reason to know.

2012 - 2014: Gurl You Dead Or Something?

I joke, but in reality Jess was nearly dead...

This was a really hard time for me for so many reasons. I finished university in 2012 and moved back home to my parents. Pretty much everyone who knew about Jess lived nowhere near me and I no longer had the freedom to dress up whenever I wanted.

All my dresses and makeup were thrown into a box and hidden away; I rarely updated the blog because I had no new content, and for a long time I wondered whether or not I would ever see Jess again.

And that’s when Moon came along.

I actually met Moon in 2009. She was on the same course as me at uni and she was also my housemates girlfriend, and she also knew about my crossdressing hobby. After uni we still kept in touch, however after her and my previous housemate split up we drifted apart a bit.

I don’t remember whether I messaged her or vice versa, but we decided to have another dress up night. Something where we could reconnect, dress up like old times and just be bitches in general.

This is also why it’s so important to have a gal pal when it comes to dressing up. If Moon hadn’t re-entered my life, I honestly don’t know whether Jess would still be a thing. Moon not only gave me the confidence to keep the blog going, but she was also a constant source of inspiration and made me want to improve my makeup and fashion skills further and further.

This part does have a happy ending too. After just one night of dresses, wine, and the usual stupid shit we always ended up doing (there’s a video of me somewhere wearing an Alice in Wonderland outfit while singing ‘I’m a Little Teapot’. It will never reach the light of day...), we reconnected and have been great friends to this day. In two years time, I’m happy to say she’s going to be a Groom’s Maid at my wedding!

2015: Jess Is Finally Jess!

I gained a sense in fashion as well as a few stone in weight. AND MY HAIR STILL LOOKS SHIT!

Fast forward one year and I finally decide to give myself a name! I wanted to pick a name that I liked, but also wasn’t shared by any of my close friends. Eventually I narrowed my choices down to Jessica and Blaise, and decided to go with both!

It felt like a really insignificant detail at the time, but by giving myself a name I had actually committed to treating to crossdressing as more than just a hobby, it was a lifestyle.

By the end of this year I had reached over 1,000 followers on the blog, created an Instagram account and had come out to all my friends. Considering the year before I was thinking about packing it all in, this felt like a huge step.

This was also when I started to come into my own. After 5 years of trying so many different dresses and outfits, I had finally found a style that I enjoyed and could work with. All I needed now was time to practice and a bit of money to actually buy the clothes/wigs I wanted (the wig I’m wearing in that picture was binned after that night... I don’t think I need to explain why).

2016: Time To Make It Big

NEW WIG! NICE HAIR! FINALLY! Only took me 6 bloody years.

2016 was an extremely strange year for me. I think I had about 3 different jobs within the year, brought a house with my (now) fiance, and had my close friends asking about Jess. All this meant that I didn’t have too much time to spend on being Jess, but at least the option was still there for me.

However, there were 2 odd things that stood out more than anything else to me.

First of all, I somehow hit 10,000 followers at the end of the year. The year before I was gobsmacked when I hit 1,000, and I genuinely thought it would take another few years before I even reaching 2K. 

Reaching 10,000 followers made it feel like everything was worth working on, regardless of how much effort I had to put into it. It also felt like I had stopped being a learner and started being a teacher of crossdressing. I found myself asking less questions from others while answering more to people who were just like me 6 years prior.

The second weird thing was making a deal with JustFab. I already used their services for clothes and heels, however one day after tagging them in a post I was approached with a minor advertising deal.

I doubt I can legally go into what the deal was, and to be honest it wasn’t as good as it sounds, but it was such a shock to realise that I was being asked by large brands to help advertise their wares into a new market. I would never consider myself a model, but if I’ve ever felt like one, it was during that moment.

2017: Jess Goes Public

OK this specific picture was taken in my back garden, but you get the idea...

My friends had known about Jess for just over a year at this point; most of them had met her at private parties and a common questions I was asked was ‘Are we going to see Jess soon?’ I was finally in a position where I could be Jess freely without worrying about restrictions on privacy or judgement.

I could have just left it at that and stayed in my comfort zone, but I didn’t come this far by playing it safe and I wasn’t going to stop there. I decided that Jess needed to experience the world outside of her house.

The first experience was Kinky Boots, and later on in the year DragWorld UK. I’ve already written about both these experiences (and you’ve already probably read them) so I won’t bore you with the details. Suffice it to say that Jessica was met with great reception and I now wonder why I hadn’t done it sooner.

I’ve spoken to hundreds of people while out as Jess, and so far I’ve still only met one who disagreed with what I was doing. I even bumped into people who follow my blog and recognised me! Goes to show that you don’t know you’re famous(ish) until you know you’re famous(ish).

On top of that, a long term project that I had always dreamed about finally became a reality: Gender Mag. 

The magazine is still running after 3 months, which I’m taking as a good sign. It doesn’t have any near as many subscribers as I was hoping for, but we’re stable for the time being. Hopefully with a bit more hard-work, some more placement advertising, and a better platform to work off of, it might become the success I dreamed it would be for the past few years.

You Can Shut Up Now Jess

I know I know, I have a habit of making extremely long posts detailing every little thing, but I only do it to show the changes and improvements you wouldn’t normally see. A picture tells 1,000 words but 1,000 words tells a story.

I won’t go into the usual ‘why this is so important here are some bullet points blah blah blah’; you’re all smart enough to figure it out for yourselves (I’ve not exactly been subtle about it anyway...).

However, I will say one thing. I get a lot of messages from gurls saying that regardless of how much they work on their makeup they still think they look the same. 

When scrolling through this post did you notice a difference in skill from one picture to the next? Probably not. But if you look at just the first picture from 2010 and the most recent from 2017, you’ll notice a huge difference (I’m gonna put this below so you don’t have go all the way back to the top).

This kind of work doesn’t happen over night. Some people might be able to manage it months but I’ve found that it usually takes years, and even after those years you’ll always find something you could improve on. You may not notice it because the differences are so gradual, but if you looked back 8 years into the past, you’re bound to see a big change.

I’m actually going to shut up now...

- Jessica Blaise x x

[to-the-moon-and-never-back00]

My starlight✨

It still fascinates me how I found you when I thought I can't be found. You came unexpectedly, you were my miracle. Godsent. We were classmates since grade 8 (2014) 'til SHS (2019). Sa 6 years natin na magkakilala, who knew we'll fall for each other. Seriously, hanggang ngayon hindi parin ako makapaniwala. Yung taong araw araw kong nakikita sa classroom simula grade 8, siya pala yung taong hiniling ko kay Lord. Siya na pala yun. Well, the signs weren't clear until we talked again, and it was...

August 2020

I still remember that day, August 12, 2020. I just got off from work and nagpapahinga na ako hahaha the usual me; kakain and then magbabasa ng wattpad.

Out of the blue, nag message ka sakin. That was literally unexpected 'cause I don't really talk to other people. I'm socially anxious argh idk how to react properly. My first thought were "What the hell? Bakit kaya nagchat to?" Well, in my defense hindi naman talaga tayo ganun ka "close" before kaya na wirduhan talaga ako hahaha.

Pero sobrang naappreciate ko yun lalo na nung kinamusta mo ako. I rarely talk to anyone na kakilala ko and it really meant so much to me at that time. Without any doubt, nag open up ako sa'yo. I don't know, maybe naghihintay lang talaga ako ng taong magtatanong saakin kung okay lang ako kaya noong dumating ka, gumaan talaga yung loob ko. Siguro kasi kilala kita at alam kong hindi ka masamang tao and we were friends rin. Hindi man ganun ka "close" pero I consider you as one of those peeps na mapagkakatiwalaan ko.

We started talking/chatting August 12,2020. Catch up lang sa kanya kanyang buhay. I don't remember ever talking to you like an actual conversation about our lives before nung classmates pa tayo. Well, I couldn't say na nafall agad ako at that moment duh hahaha grabehan na yun. Pero lalo kitang nakilala, hindi lang yung 'Sean' na kaklase ko nung high school. Unti unti kong nakilala yung totoong ikaw, I never knew I could see you in a different light. I admired you, you're just so amazing. You made your way to my heart kahit ang ginawa mo lang naman ay makinig at kausapin ako. Parang ganun na nga, na-fall na ako.

That feeling na I'm anticipting kung kailan ka ulit magchachat hahaha. And then nag birthday na ako, August 14. You greeted me through chat. Hindi mo alam kung paano mo ko napangiti at that time. At that time narealize ko rin na lagot na talaga ahahaha nafall na ako. Shett panindigan mo koo ahahaha char. On that day, hinding hindi ko makakalimutan yung nag post ka ng cover ng "Tanan-VNCE". I was smiling the whole time. Silently hoping na para sakin yung kanta na yun hahaha napaka assumera ko rin that time lol. Birthday ko naman nun kaya hayaan mo na hahahah

We continued to talk through chat. hindi ko na nga maalala ano pinaguusapan natin at that time hahaha. But talking to you feels great. I remember sending you my cover of KLWKN-Music Hero. I don't know if I ever told you this, but while I was recording the song,ikaw yung nasa isip ko. That was literally my first move hahahha. Kaya sobrang meaningful ng kantang yun para saakin. It was my first song for you :)

16th of August, niligawan mo ako. Nung araw palang na niligawan mo ako sure na akong sasagutin kita hahahamarupok. Gusto ko sana patagalin yung ligawagan hahaha wala lang hehe. And never ko naexperience yung may nanliligaw sakin hahaha minsan gusto ko rin maging normal na babae charot pano yun. But at the same time napuno ako ng takot. Sobrang bilis kasi, it was surreal. Iniisip ko kung nasa tamang pag iisip pa ba ako hahaha maloloka ako sayo hahahaha. But I realized that life is about taking chances. I don't want to regret anything, so might as well take the risk. And so I did,, we did...

August 18, 11:12pm. Sinagot kita. I literally screamed sa sobrang saya hahaha gumulong gulong pa ako sa higaan ko sa sobrang kilig tapos na realize ko na di pa pala ako nag reply hahaha. So ayun na yung umpisa.

First photo is my screenshot.

Second and third photos are yours hahaha yung sinend mo saakin before

Fourth photo is our first (virtual) photo together throgh video call sa messenger

Naalala ko pa rin kung gaano ako kasaya nung araw na yon. I took the risk, felt like jumping off the cliff but you jumped with me. Naalala ko pa rin yung saya na naramdaman ko. Yun yung feeling na ang sarap ulit ulitin. I never thought I could be THAT happy. Gusto ko tumakbo papunta sa'yo at that time para lang mayakap ka. Sobrang thankful ko kay Lord nung time na yun.

August 20, yun yung time na nag tweet at nag story ako tungkol saatin at nayanig ang sambayanang pilipino HAHAAHHAHA. Gulat na gulat sila 'cause same. Ang saya ko nung time na yon, kahit medyo anxious pa rin ako dahil nga sa bilis ng pangyayari. We went through that phase. Yung mga assurance mo saakin kasi palagi akong nag ooverthink. yung mga kumontra saatin at first but eventually tinaggap pa rin tayo. Nalagpasan natin yun kasi were stronger than them. Their opinion will never matter. Ang importante masaya tayo.

Umpisa pa lang yon pero ang dami ko nang anxieties na hinarap kasama ka. As a professional overthinker lol, inintindi mo ako kahit di ko maintindihan sarili ko. Hindi mo ako hinayaang harapin lahat ng yon ng mag isa. You helped me be who I am right now.

Credits sayo. Sayo galing yan screenshot na yan hehe.

Naalala ko pa rin lahat ng pangako natin sa isat-isa. Those were promises of forever.

All of our promises are for the future. We promised to be together 'til were old. We promised each other na we'll grow and be matured together and be a better version of ourselves. I promised to be there on your graduation day and you'll be there when I graduate rin sa college. Sabay natin aabutin yung pangarap natin. We imagined ourself sa kasal natin and then we'll have kids, isang babae at isang lalaki. And then we'll have a stable job and we'll live comfortably and happy and punong puno ng pagmamahal. We imagined so many things that we will do sa future that we overlooked whats in front of us. Nevertheless, sobrang saya lang talaga. To look forward for the future together.

Credits ulit sayo

Remember the dream I had before? Minsan lang ako magkaroon ng panaginip. Kung meron man oftentimes I will forget about it pagkagising ko. This one is different, kasi its really weird 'cause it felt so real. As if I was really there. Sobrang weird kaya naalala ko siya pag gising ko.

I am with my boyfriend daw, nasa loob kami ng kwarto sa bahay naka higa sa higaan ko. Sa panaginip ko hindi ko talaga maaninag yung mukha nung nasa harap ko. I had no idea who he was, ang alam ko lang is mahal na mahal ko yung lalaking yun. The moment na napunta ako sa panaginip na yun, naramdam ko lahat lahat ng pagmamahal ko sa taong yun. It's so overwhelming.

I was comforting him, sa panaginip ko hindo ko alam kung bakit hahaha I just felt like it. I hugged him really tight and I kissed his temple. That moment, it felt like home and it was wonderful.

It was the feeling that I never felt before. It was true love. I was like,, Lord when kaya? Is this a sign? If yes ibigay niyo na saakin please.

Sinabi ko sayo tong panaginip na to before it really happened. Naalala ko pa yung date. November 6, It was your first time dito sa bahay to hang out. Tumambay tayo sa kwarto hehe. We talked about a lot of things while we cuddled sa higaan. And then you got emotional :< naalala ko yung sinabi mo sakin and pinanghahawakan ko yung sinabi ko na kahit dito hindi ko babanggitin yun. Naramdaman ko yung takot mo nun na baka magbago yung tingin ko sayo once sinabi mo yun. Pero never mangyayari yun, cause your past can never define who you are right now. And then you cried, that was the first time I saw you cry and my heart hurts gusto ko rin umiyak and so I hugged you nalang and gave you kisses. I wanted you to feel how much I care for you and my love for you will remain the same.

It took me a while before I realized na that was the exact same scenario na nangyari sa panaginip ko. It's really amazing noh. Noong kinuwento ko pa lang sayo yon, I already knew na ikaw yung nasa panaginip ko. Na ikaw yung hiniling ko kay Lord noon na taong mamahalin ko ng sobra. It was a sign, to let me know na I'll find my significant other soon. He's really amazing 'cause I didn't know he will let me catch a glimpse of the future. It's like he's telling me na I will be happy, soon. Trust in God's timing lang talaga. God led me to you. Ikaw yung binigay niyang sagot saakin noong mga panahong tinatanong ko siya kung kailan ako magiging masaya. I thank God I found you.

Remember the playlist that we created for each other. Both of us contributed on creating that playlist. I still remember the day you made me listen to the songs that you dedicated for me. Correct me if I'm wrong those songs were

Always- Marco Sison

I Swear - All4one

Now and Forever- Richard Marx

I'd Rather - Luther Vandross

God gave me you - Bryan White

Swear it again - Westlife

Your Love - Richard Marx

Ikaw at ako - (saxophone cover)

I think I missed a few but those were the first set of songs you sent. I still remember how I felt at that time. It was meaningful for me. Para bang lahat ng love songs ay tungkol sayo or tungkol saatin.

And then it became our thing hahaha its like we were collecting songs that reminds us of each other and then idadagdag natin sa playlist natin. I lost count kung ilan yung mga kanta doon. I already deleted the playlist I made sa spotify :< I regret doing that :< now I'm sad. Alam kong nasayo pa rin yung playlist natin. I appreciate na you still have it with kahit wala na tayo.

Theres a lot of things that reminds me of you tbh. Remember how we use to call/video call like,, everyday and then we'll play Mario Kart. No matter how busy we were, we always try to find a way to bond or play. Kasi we'll be incall during the game. Sobrang saya nun kahit lagi akong talo hahaha. Umay ka na siguro sakin nun kasi walang thrill yung laro lagi akong talo hahaha. Tapos I tried to play ML with you. I never learned how to play that game even though I tried, sayang :< It would be much better kung kaya kitang sabayan sa ML, pero wala eh siguro kasi I'm not really into that kind of game hehe. Kaya naglalaro lang ako pag kasama kita. 1v1 or Brawl hehe. Masaya na ako doon. Kahit frustrated ako sa sarili ko minsan kasi ang shunga ko hahaha. But you were really patient with me, you tried to cheer me up and then tinuturo mo saakin yung mga dapat kong gawin. Sobrang naappreciate ko yun. Those were the things I always look forward to everyday aside from chatting/talking to you.

Everything that you do for me means a lot. What I meant by everything is literally E V E R Y T H I N G.

Like, you would know what to do or what to say whenever inaatake ako ng anxiety or nag ooverthink ako. You know how to make me calm. You know how to make me smile. All your corny jokes and your cheesy pick up lines. Your sweet messages reminding me of how much you love me. You would always say na hindi mo ako iiwan :> You always say na I am your blessing and I'll say the same. Yung pag alaga mo saakin. Yung mga paalala mo sakin araw araw na alagaan ko sarili ko lalo na pag may sakit ako.

All your efforts to make a video message for me tuwing may pasok ako para I cheer up ako. I really love them, sobrang naappreaciate ko yun. It helped me a lot sa work. I did great right, All of my achievements sa work are also because of your efforts to cheer me up. You were my inspiration.

I love all those little things you do, even the bare minimum hahaha. Like updating me sa mga nangyayari kahit tulog ako or nasa work. Ang saya kaya sa feeling na gigising ako na may message ka saakin tapos ikaw yung bungad sa notif ko. And then I will do the same with you. Iuupdate kita kahit tulog ka kasi tulog ka na pag shift ko hahaha. And you'll wake up with so many notifs from me hehe. Yun yung bagay na nakasanayan ko, kaya yun yung naging struggle ko everyday tuwing may pasok. I would be sad every break ko sa work :< But thats all in the past now, I can handle myself now.

Remember the first time na nag date tayo sa labas? Sa KFC SM Sucat. Wala lang, kasi that was our first date sa labas and my first real date everr. And nilibre mo ako nun, knowing na ginastos mo yung ipon mo para sakin, sobrang naappreciate ko yun. Alam kong minsan kuripot ka hahaha at mas gugustuhin mong itabi yung pera mo. Pero pinaggastusan mo pa rin ako sa pagkain natin. At naulit pa yun ha hahahaha. I really don't mind kahit saan tayo mag date tbh. Kahit diyan lang tayo kumain sa kanto tapos bili tayo kwek kwek masaya na ako. O kaya bili tayo tinapay sa bakery tapos softdrinks. Never kong pinangarap yung mga date sa fancy restaurant eeh gastos lang yon. Kahit nga wala tayong gastusin eh. Kahit mag window shopping lang tayo sa mall hahhaha masaya na ako doon, importante nakasama kita. Priceless yun, yung time and effort mo na makipagkita saakin.

Kaya minsan di ko makita yung sinasabi mong wala kang ka effort effort saakin. Kasi I never asked you for anything. You were enough for me. Maybe because I'm not vocal enough kaya hindi mo naramdaman yun. Simple lang naman yung gusto ko sa buhay, gusto ko maging masaya and I am happy whenever I'm with you.

Our first few months were wonderful. Wala nga tayo halos pag aaway kasi kung meron man tayong di pagkakaintindihan, naayos natin agad yon. We were so happy pero hanggang ngayon tinatanong ko pa rin si Lord kung anong nangyari. I thought everything are on its right places. I thought everything is perfect. Ako lang pala yun nag iisip ng ganun. We came to the point na ako nalang pala, it felt like flying and then iniwan mong akong nakalutang doon sa ere, hindi ko na alam kung saan ako lulugar. Lahat ng kinatakutan ko noong umpisa nangyari na.

Everything is falling apart but I'm trying to fix it sa lahat ng paraang alam ko. I stayed with you, kahit alam kong hindi na dapat. Hindi ko na kasi inisip yung sarili ko eh, all I want is for you to be okay. I want to fix you, I tried to help you. Like what you did to me before. Ikaw yung naging lakas ko kaya gusto ko ganun ka rin saakin. I know you did your best to hold on. I know na hindi ka na sigurado at that time, kahit sobrang sakit saakin nun pinilit kong harapin yun kasi may tiwala akong ako parin naman pipiliin mo hanggang sa huli. Kasi ako yung nandito para sa'yo, why would you choose the other.

We even celebrated Christmas and New Year together with both of our families. Sobrang naappreciate ko yun, kasi pinagbigyan mo yung gusto ni mama at that time. Seriously, even though di masyado naging maganda yung New year ko, I had fun being with you and your family. I really felt like I was part of your family too. I'm forever grateful sa kabutihan nila. I didn't know na yun na pala yung huling araw na tayo pa. I shouldve stayed longer. Sana inenjoy ko yung moment at hindi ako nagpaapekto sa emosyon ko that day. I should've hugged you tight or kissed you for the last time. I didnt know yun na pala yung huli.

I managed to be strong for you. Kasi alam kong maayos pa natin kung ano man yung naging gusot. I fought my own battles while I try to fight with you. Napaka martir ko sa part na hinayaan ko sarili kong mahalin ka kahit sobrang sakit na. Sobrang tanga na nun pero yung dahilan ko lagi? Mahal na mahal kita at ayos lang na masaktan ako kaysa mawala ka saakin. Di ko kakayanin yun kaya kumapit ako ng maghigpit sayo. Kahit nararamdaman ko na ako nalang yung nakakapit, sinubukan ko pa rin. Sinubukan natin, pero dumating parin tayo doon na sa punto na kailangan nating bumitaw.

January 3, sinabi mo saakin na mas okay na maghiwalay na tayo and I agreed. Naaalala ko yung time na yun, nagrant ako sayo and I was expecting na you'll comfort me. Na you'll come up to something para mag ayos tayo pero hindi eh :< you decided to end our relationship. At nagkaroon ako ng realization nung araw na yun. Siguro napagod ka na rin. Ako kasi kahit pagod na I would still fight for us. Ganun kita kamahal. Narealize ko rin how shallow your love is, kasi wala ka nang ibang dahilan para mag stay. Kasi if you really want me, if you really do. You'll do everything para magstay. Hinayaan mo akong bumitaw.

At that time I knew na game over na talaga. Kaya di na ako kumontra at hinayaan na kita. Siguro kasi hindi naman talaga ako yung kailangan mo nung time na yun. I was never enough. I felt sorry na I had to let you go. Pero nakita ko rin naman kasi na masaya ka nung wala nq ako eh and then I thought na maybe we made the right decision. Medyo gumaan yung pakiramdam ko doon, and you made it easier for me to move on. Masakit pa rin tbh. Ramdam ko pa rin lahat. Ang pinagkaiba lang kasi, I already learned my lesson and I learned how to handle the pain.

Di ko rin makakalimutan yung time na nagkita ulit tayo nung January. Kasi I have a lot of things to say lol. You don't know how much I want to comeback. Pumunta ako sainyo na may dalang pag asa, baka sakali lang naman. But I was so so wrong. It felt like a slap. Literal na nasampal ako ng realidad na hindi na ako yung pipiliin mo. Fckkkjgs I can still feel the pain ugh damn u.

Naalala mo ba yung araw na yun, halos ipamukha mo saakin kung gaano mo kamahal si Nyka at kinuwento mo pa yung kagustuhan mong makasama siya sa future mo. Gustong gusto kitang murahin at sampalin nung araw na yun. Wala akong ibang nagawa kundi makinig, matulala at umiyak sa harap mo. Nagalit ako sayo nun. Umiiyak ako sa lungkot, sa sakit at galit. And you had the nerve to keep a straight face ughb kainis. And then sinabi ko sayo na "Mahal mo talaga siya noh?" it sound so bitter. At that time, i wish I was her. Mas masakit pala pag harap harapan na. Gusto ko mag walk out nun, gusto ko na umuwi kasi sobrang sakit. Tangina kasi talaga Sean Gabriel, yun na ata yung pinaka masakit na nagawa mo. The whole time that you were with me, may kahati pala ako sa puso mo? Sa mga kwento mo para bang hindi ako dumating sa buhay mo. Parang wala lang ako. Binalewala. Yun yung naramdaman ko noon.

Ewan ko kung anong nangyari, pero sa sobra sobrang emosyon na naramdaman ko, umabot na ako sa sukdulan. I gave up. Para bang namatay yung kung ano man yung nasa puso ko. Nawala na yung 'hope' na baon ko. At that moment, unti unti ko nang naabsorb lahat. Natanggap ko na. You helped me do that at yun na yung naging closure ko. I remember laughing after nagsink in lahat ng nangyari. I forgave you. Inalis ko agad lahat ng galit ko and then I felt numb. I even helped you with your problem kay Nyka. At that time I really want to help you kasi napaka shunga mo na. Without any hidden agenda of getting back with you kasi at that moment I am done. Pero kaibigan parin kita kaya lets keep it that way.

Siguro yung nangyari after that, that was my lingering feelings for you na hindi mawala wala. It was 'love' without 'hope'. Kuntento na ako kung ano man meron saatin ngayon. Atleast I still have you pero hindi na kagaya ng dati.

I just want you to know that despite everything that happened between us. I'm still thankful for everything. I thank God kasi hinayaan niya akong maging masaya with you kahit saglit lang. You are my greatest everything. Greatest love, greatest heartbreak. Greatest lesson I needed to learn. I still hope for the best, for you and me. I don't mind if we go separate ways sa future. You know you have me as your number one supporter and rant person right??

It would be better kung ikaw pa rin hanggang sa huli. In another lifetime maybe? Sa perfect universe baka pwede pa.

Sa ngayon, I don't want to promise anything yet. But I'm not going anywhere. Ayoko na rin mag expect ng kahit ano. Go with the flow muna. I love you, always.

• I love you to the moon and never back. I'll love you always and my love will stay

I know our story doesnt end here.

Maniniwala pa rin ako na we'll have the chance we deserve sa tamang pagkakataon. Like for part 2 charouut hHAHa

yours for eternity,

Laila

[shelivesbetweenthepages]

So may kwento ako. Hahahaha. This is actually like an appreciation post sa isang guy na I’m friends with for almost four and a half years! Nakakatuwa lang kasi sya talaga. Eto na ehem.

This guy liked me when I was in my sophomore year in high school. Sya naman junior. Ayun. He was the first guy who gave me chocolates tapos halos lahat ng friends ko at friends nya gustong gusto sya for me kasi tbh he was really kind. Kaso kaibigan lang tingin ko e. Di sya nanligaw pero yun nga nagbabalak sya pag junior na ko so ayun may pag-antay na naganap. Then junior year came. Wala akong feelings sakanya but then that rainy day, wala akong pakialam kung mabasa ako ng ulan when he surprisingly covered me up with his umbrella saying “Ayoko magkasakit ka jusko.” Natawa ako sakanya and at the same time, kinilig ako. Harot ba? Hahahahaahah. Kaso biglang I fell for someone else and he also fell sa iba din. Di naman ako nanghinayang though kasi kinilig lang naman ako sa ginawa nya before and I have thoughts na magustuhan sya kaso ayun napunta ang puso ko sa iba hahahahaha.

But that guy broke my heart so bad. I was staring at that damn guy from afar sa third floor ng school namin nang biglang sumulpot sya. Pinunasan ko agad luha ko non. Di sya nag-hi or what kasi bigla nya ko tinanong, “Bakit sya pa? ” Nagulat ako sa sinabi nya I mean he looked so hurt e may girlfriend naman siya. Hanggang sa naiyak ako kasi feel ko sobrang mag-isa ako when he offered his presence saying na sama ako sakanila ng girlfriend nya minsan. E diba ang awkward non? Everyone knows he used to like me! But sabi nya his gf won’t mind. Pero damn, nung sinubukan ko sumama nga sakanila he told me together sa harap ng gf nya na I will always be special. Buti na lang di nagalit si gf…Yet.

Syempre di ako sumama ng sumama sakanila. Pero thankful naman ako pag sinusubukan nila na isama ako minsan kasi daw para di ako masyadong mapagisa hahahahahaha. Kaso summer of 2014, his gf broke his heart. She cheated sakanya. He was so heartbroken na nababalitaan ko na lang sa mutual friends namin na malayo na loob nya sa lahat. Pero he approached me. Sakin sya nag-open. Hanggang sa ayun, nagstart na ko mag-open sakanya. Naging super close kami yung tipong magugulat ako pupunta sya sa bahay namin ng gabi para lang mag-chika sakin HHAHAHAHAHA. Kala mo babae makachika. Kaso yun nga sa friendship namin, nagselos si ex-gf. Inaway pa ko non. Nagexplain naman ako buti na lang naintindihan nya jusko. Hahahahaha. Tapos non, he asked me if worthy pa ba balikan si ex-gf kasi nga mahal na mahal niya. Sabi ko kung san sya masaya like that. Edi ayun, nagkabalikan ang dalawa. He was happy again!

But then, 2015 came by they broke up again. Nakalimutan ko yung reason but I guess things didn’t really work out. Sakin sya halos nagdrama non jusko hahahahhaha. Tapos by that time graduate na ko sa high school sya naman syempre college na. Okay naman na communication namin at mas naging close pa kami kasi around summer ng same year, bigla na lang magdadala ng SB sa bahay ng friend ko kung san ako magsleepover kasi he read my tweet na I’m craving for Starbucks. Spoiled ako! HAHAHAHAHA. Tapos nagawa pa namin pumunta sa Seaside around 3-4 am. Wala lang. Para magpahangin at magusap. He opened up a lot pero ako nakikinig lang ako. Dami nyang kwento mga hinanakit nya and everything. Tapos he asked, “Pwede payakap?” Pumayag ako. Then from that day on, I knew he saw me as one of his true friends. Narealized nya na mas better na magkaibigan kami kesa umasa na mafall ako sakanya. Di man kami nagkausap again for almost two years pero pag nagkamustahan kami (which is kanina lang) parang walang taon na lumipas. He treated me hindi lang kaibigan e, kapatid na talaga. His youngest sister. He cares for me so bad na inamin nya na he’s still checking up on me through social media. I was really touched kasi kakasabi lang nya kanina na he never had a friend like me parang wala pa din naka-agaw ng trono ko! Hahahahhahaha. He appreciated me as a person so much and I can never be more thankful to have him in my life. From his “crush” to one of his true friends is a one weird process lalo na’t na-fall sya sakin. He thanked me kasi from the start, kaibigan lang ang pinakita kong motibo at walang paasang naganap. Di ko daw sya dinedma, instead I appreciated everything about him. I am just really lucky enough to have someone like him as a good friend. He’s already considered a blessing to me. So, this sums up my appreciation post for my very very first Kuya! He will never see this but I don’t care hahahahaha ok byeee

[illustratedtapes]

Illustrated Tapes ✕ Shake Bristol Curated by Max Kemp 1 February 2019

➔ spoti.fi/2S0fnwd Listening in order recommended

Shake Bristol is some kinda ‘art fair’ and magazine based in... well you guessed it, Bristol! We linked up with head honcho and illustrator Max Kemp in our first special edition.

What’s up Max! At the end of last year we asked you to put together a mixtape using tracks selected by each of December’s Shake exhibitors -  how’d you get on?

I’ve loved it! It was a bit tougher than the usual playlist as I asked each of the December event’s artists to put forward a few songs each, which i then trawled through, choose one from everyone and then put together a playlist. The eclectic mix represents Shake well i think!

What’s the story behind Shake?

I grew up in Cornwall, but i don’t drink and I’m not hugely into the very British idea of getting drunk to make friends and meet people (there’s not much to do in Cornwall during winter). So i decided to try and make a platform for people like me, that wanted to be creative and make things. The kind of people who tend to spend a lot of time at their desks, in their rooms or studios. Basically a way to get all kinds of likeminded creative people together in person. The result was the Baby Teeth: Art Fair & Gathering, which ran for like two years, and built a good community with a solid local following. But when i moved to Bristol back in 2013 i decided i wanted to work on a better version, and make something which was entirely illustration based with a focus on community, accessibility and personality, and not just some people sitting behind tables in a room selling things. After being in Bristol for a year I made a list of all of the southwest illustrators I knew and reached out, explaining the idea. The first Shake happened in July 2014 above the Stag & Hounds pub in a small function room using whatever tables we had. Lize from Sad Ghost Club was a part of Shake at the beginning too, so it was a result of us both putting our heads together. It went down well, we did a few more together, but Sad Ghost Club picked up and turned into a full time job for her! 

Since then I’ve tried to create exciting events and projects with Shake, as well as using it to try to nurture the creative scene and help out people as best I can! I really like community, and consider everyone involved with every event or publication to be a part of Shake.

What’s the creative scene like on the westside?

A huge part of why i moved is due to Bristol was that it’s an exciting and inspiring place for creativity. The fact that it’s location is pretty central, it has an airport with good connections and has a great university with really good creative courses is a saving grace for constant change and new creative people constantly coming through. I’m constantly finding artists that inspire me through Shake, both local and from further afield.

Shake seems to have a great community vibe and is very organic and down-to-earth, which isn’t the case for all art fairs, do you think the location has a part to play in that?

I think you’re right! I Try my very best to make sure everything is thought of and everyone is ok in the build-up, during and after the event. But I think the main reason it’s like this is due to the general good vibe from most Bristol creatives. There’s a huge student population, and a whole lot of lovely humble people that i’m constantly grateful for being surrounded by. 

Be it stalling, helping me with posters, doing a social media post, coming along on the day and spending their last tenner, or even just liking a picture on Instagram. I like to try and get stallers who will be fun and get what Shake’s about, and I even go as far as to carefully sit people next to each other who i think might get along! But what I think has made shake what it is, is the southwests attitude, comfort, respect, and community.

Do you have any plans for 2019?

For 2019 there’s the February 10th and April 7th illustration fairs at Rough Trade, and April’s will be the last until October. But there’ll hopefully be a collaboration event in may with BRICKS magazine also. I also really want to start putting on the ‘Shake Social’ again, which is a drink and draw event. Basically it’s Shake without the tables, so everyone can just meet and do some drawing together.

I might start working on the next issue of the magazine later in the year too! The last one was so much work for me and my friend matt (he helps with the mag layout and graphic design side) that I decided to give it a while before the next. Also the Shaketober stuff went down well, so I’ll be doing that again for sure.

I might even work on some kind of online Shake drawing club kinda thing as after Shaketober - I kept getting requests to make it more regular. I’d like to do some more events outside of bristol again sometime too!

And do you have any idea about where you want to Shake to go long term? Or are you playing it by ear?

I’ve got a bunch of ideas, but it’s all about natural progression for me. I like to plan the events and then slowly work on all of the other little ideas and projects in the gaps.

Bristol seems to have a great music scene as well. Do you find a lot of overlap between the two communities?

There tends to be a lot of musicians, promoters, and venue staff that stall or come down to Shake! Adrian from Rough Trade and Spectres has always been a huge help and always super encouraging too, so shout out to him!

We love the illustrations you produce for the Shake branding. How did you go about the artwork for the mixtape?

Thanks - stoked you’re into it! For this piece I was freakin’ out, as I find it easy to work with commissions or the random Shake stuff, but with this I was like “ITS GOTTA BE SHAKE, BUT SOMETHING A BIT DIFFERENT!” I guess in a similar way to when I work on each event poster, it has to be obviously Shake but then I dont want any poster to be too similar! So I’ve kinda done it like a comic strip panel with a close up of a guy wired from drawing, haha. Side note: I was listening to the playlist as I worked on this!

What’s your favourite arty spot in Bristol?

I mostly watch movies, skate and draw at home when I’m not working either job or doing Shake stuff, so most spots I go to are dark rooms or concrete areas haha, so this is a tough one to be honest! Bristol’s a place covered in graffiti, and I like looking out for solid colour and type. A few people I keep my eyes open for are: Mr Penfold, RICHT, 45RPM and Kid Crayon. So yeah, My favourite arty spot is just a few underpasses and some walls here and there.

Favourite place to hang out? In the cinema with my phone turned off!

And your favourite Bristol munchies?

Oowee Vegan for their Cluckin Fries, Marling for the vegan Chinese, Fi Real for Caribbean food and Dangun for Korean food. I like to eat basically.

What’s happening in your own creative world at the moment?

I do posters for shows at The Hope & Ruin, Sticky Mike’s Frog Bar in Brighton and Elsewhere in Margate. Most of my creative energy and time goes into making all of the shake branding and planning but I’m trying to work on my sketchbook most days too to keep it going. I grew up doing show posters so that’s the thing I mostly love to do! Oh I just did a tee for BRIGHTR recently too, he’s great and we’ve worked together for a while now on his merch and record covers.

Thanks Max, looking forward to more Shakey stuff in 2019!

Cheers for chattin to me, this has been a fun little project and I like what you’re doing! P.S. thanks to all of the artists who put in songs for the playlist!

Where can we find you?

shakebristol.co.uk instagram.com/shakebristol twitter.com/shakebristol facebook.com/shakebristol maxkdesign.co.uk instagram.com/maxkdesign 

[artie-fice-blog]

Woman At The Window - Duarte, CA

Cynthia May Hernandez North American Missing Persons Network http://www.nampn.org/cases/hernandez_cynthia.html

Originally posted January 19th, 2016  on The Artie Fice Life and Times of a Spiritual Intuitive on Blog.com http://theartiefice.blog.com/2016/01/19/woman-at-the-window/

*UPDATE This morning of April 3, 2016, I awoke out of my sleep. It was 3:03 a.m. and I was wide awake. I decided to get on the computer. I logged on to Facebook and as scrolled down, I saw a photo of Cindy May Hernandez. I stared at her photo for a moment and realized that the photo is from the same photo session but a different angle and closer resembles how she appeared to me that night.

* Up until recently as I was editing this blog post and the information started processing. I noticed that its two different photo sessions. Apparently she liked pink. 03/22/207

I am happy to know that there is now a suspect in custody and I hope justice will be served in this case. If the family of Cindy May Hernandez is reading this article by any chance, my sincere condolences and deepest sympathy go out to you. I wish you and your family many blessings. You and Cynthia are in my prayers. I have no idea about the information regarding this case except for what has been released to the public. I hope there is some kind of relief in your hearts knowing that there is a suspect in custody. This is an experience that I also find to be a very sensitive matter. It’s so sensitive that I contemplated whether or not to write about this experience. May God be with you.

San Bernardino County DA’s Office Announces Arrest In 1976 Cold Case Murder

January 19, 2016

One cold night in January of 2014, I was working the graveyard shift at a factory located in the city of Duarte, California. My nightly duties were to patrol inside and outside of the facility every couple of hours and then stay posted at the front lobby security desk monitoring the security cameras. Located in a small industrial area the neighborhood was very quiet at night and during the early mornings. I was on my computer when I began to hear creaks and thumps coming from the offices above me. I sat on my seat listening for any more noises, I began feeling uneasy. No one was supposed to be in the building until 5 or 6 am and especially in the offices upstairs. I had to go see what the noise was. I proceeded to walk through the hallway and then up the stairs to the offices. I reached the top of the stairs with my pocket knife in hand. I stood at the entryway to the office floor. I began to think about the possibilities of actually finding someone who might become combative out of fear of getting caught. I began thinking, what if it was a burglar or someone hiding upstairs? I was standing there for approximately five minutes looking in watching for any movement and listening for any noise. I didn’t see or hear anything. I went back to the security desk and listened out for anything unusual. I didn’t hear anything for the rest of my shift.

A couple of nights later, again I was at the security desk on the computer and monitoring the video cameras. This time, I heard what sounded like footsteps upstairs. I got up right away I proceeded upstairs to the office floor. I entered with caution and armed only with a 16-inch Mag-Lite, I covered the whole floor and restrooms, there was no one there. I wondered if it could have been a raccoon, possum or even a mountain lion that could have been responsible for the noises that I heard. The facility was close to the foothills so there were always wild animals roaming around the property usually no bigger than a medium size dog. The guard that trained me mentioned that he had once seen a young mountain lion roaming the property and that I should consider carrying a can of mace and flashlight while patrolling the exterior. The thought of ghosts did cross my mind but I had been working that post for a few months already and figured if it were ghost activity I would have probably noticed some kind activity sooner. After that night, I never heard any noises coming from upstairs again.

Having had many supernatural experiences in my life, this one experience that you are about to read of is one of the most mind boggling and most intense experiences that I have had to date.

About a week after I had investigated the noises from the upstairs offices, once again was sitting at the security desk on the computer and it was a little after 4 am. The front lobby desk faces the lobby entrance, which is double glass doors with a big window on each side, allowing anyone who is in the lobby to see everything clearly outside the front of the building. I remember I was on Facebook and I looked up and outside the glass doors, I saw a man standing outside with one hand in his pocket and the other hand carrying what looked like a cup of coffee. His shoulders were raised as if he was blocking the cold from his neck. It was a little early for employees to be checking in to enter the facility but not unusual. I got up to open the doors for him. As I approached the double glass doors and looking out, he wasn’t there anymore. I told myself “Oh, you’re trippin.” I walked back to the desk and sat down, I look up again and out the glass doors and there he was standing in the exact same position I saw him the first time. This time I got back up then slowly walked to the end of the security desk and looked out the glass, he was still standing there. I continued to walk slowly around the desk and towards the doors and again, he wasn’t there. I stopped in my tracks and slowly walked backward behind the desk while looking out the window and he appeared. I slowly walked toward the doors and he was gone. It seemed like he was inside the glass. It wasn’t a reflection either. Whenever I would go beyond the front desk he would disappear. I went back to my seat and sat down without taking my eyes off of him. I sat there looking at him and thinking “This is actually happening” He was standing there looking off into the distance with one hand in his pocket another one holding a coffee cup and not paying any attention to me sitting there watching him. Then off to the right appeared a woman carrying a baby who looked to be about 2 years old. The woman was standing there looking like she was thinking and not concentrating or staring at anything specific. I remember the baby looking into the window. Before I knew it, there was the man, the woman, the baby, and approximately 3-4 teenaged girls dancing right in front of the glass doors. There was also a girl just standing there in a pink summer dress with white flowers. She was standing there as if she was sad and pondering, paying no attention to me staring at her. Then there was the young Latina woman wearing what looked to be a pink hoodie and jeans, with her hair pushed back in a ponytail.

SPIRITS AT THE WINDOW / DUARTE, CALIFORNIA 

 ARTIE FICE © CERVANTES 2017

At this point I wasn’t fearful, for a moment, it was kind of amusing watching these young girls dancing. I remember thinking “What is going on?, Why is this happening? I can’t remember the exact sequence of events but I remember I was observing each and every ghost that was in front of the window. I was in front of my computer and I was typing about what I was experiencing. A friend of mines posted a message saying “Take a picture.” An idea that didn’t even cross my mind. I took out my cell phone and snapped some photos. Eventually, I was looking at the young woman in the pink hooded sweatshirt. She was staring directly at me through the glass. She was young, I would have guessed in her early 20s, short in height, hair combed back, and wearing a pink sweatshirt with a hood. She is the only spirit that stood out the most and that was because she was staring right at me. I recall getting up from my seat and walking to the end of the lobby desk to see if she was in going to disappear like the first spirit I saw of the man holding the cup of coffee. She didn’t, I was able to see her at any angle that I was standing in. As a matter of fact when I walked to the other side of the desk none of them disappeared I was able to see them clear as day. The young woman with the pink sweatshirt was staring directly at me. Her eyes were following me as she slowly leaned into the glass. I felt the feeling of seriousness and importance, I knew that she wanted to communicate with me. In my mind, I thought “If you have any messages, you can tell me.” I stared at her and began to tune in telepathically. I heard a voice of a girl saying the name of a person that I know. As soon as I heard the name I became startled so I stopped concentrating on the voice and it kind just blurred out or dissipated. I tuned out and the only thing that I heard was the name of a person that I know. That was enough for me to have a good idea about what she was trying to tell me. I didn’t hear anything that had to do with what happened to herself. All I heard was her trying to tell me about an issue I was having in my life at the time. I was having lots of problems with a troublemaking woman and I still do up to this day. Eventually, I saw a thick fog rolling in and they all vanished. It was like a scene from a suspense movie and It was surreal. As I was trying to think back to that night, I began to recall more detail with the help of those posts that I made on Facebook while it was happening. There were four names that I heard that night in total. Two of the names were people that I knew so I excluded those names as possibly being the names of the spirits I was seeing. I remember the name Cindy and the other name I recalled is Ashley with the help of my posts on Facebook that I created while it was happening. I think Ashley may have been associated with the young girl in the pink flower dress with white floral print.

This is an illustration of Ashley that I drew from Memory with some help from Spirit.

After I finished the illustration I was organizing some files and I came across the orginal unedit photo I took that night. I noticed it had more detail than before. I did some enhancements and to my surprise I see her image. No doubt Ashley was a victim of predators who are possibly Satan Worshipers. She did not look like this when I seen her at the window.

It wasn’t until I created this blog that I actually re-visited the whole experience. I also decided to re-enhance the photos that I took that night on a better computer. There were only two distinct images that I was able to see without any photo enhancement and that is the image of the baby looking in through the glass and a side profile of the man just to the left of the baby’s face. I was able to make out other specific spirits in the photo. Although the detail wasn’t so good due to the graininess of the photo, I was able to see gestures of what I saw that night in the photo I took. Below is the original photo with no manipulation or enhancements. As time went by the photo began to develop more features than when I first took the photo. You can actually see some of the spirits that I mentioned.

Original photo no manipulation  Duarte, CA Artie Fice 2017

I painted this illustration of this girl I call Ashley, I came across the original photo and did some enhancements. I really could believe how much it resembled her. I was watching her. The energy that manifested was that of her standing in front of the window, one hand over the other in front of her, shoulders kind shrugged upwards, staring at  the ground daydreaming. I felt bad, I knew she was sad. The sight was so surreal. Really ghostly, you can see how to slowly swayed side to side and her hair looked to be blowing from the wind. It was such a beautiful sight. I really hadn’t given it any thought as to how she passed away. I was guessing the obvious, she was kidnapped and murdered. I know that it was a long terrible nightmare she experienced. In the most evil and cruel way.  In this photo I was able to bring some vividness to the photo. An image that will give you a good idea of what may have happened.

A Beautiful Lamb Amongst The Wolves #Awareness Artie Fice © Cervantes 2017

I began thinking back to that night and recalling the moment I saw the spirit of this young woman with the pink sweatshirt staring at me the window. Then it hit me. The spirits that I was looking at that night had to of passed on at very young ages. The majority of them were really young girls in their mid to late teens. The strange part was if their spirits were there on that property than most likely that was the location of their demise. How can that be possible I thought? This facility is under 24-hour surveillance, it couldn’t have happened anytime in the present. I began to wonder if these spirits that I saw that night passed in the neighboring homes located just across the street from the facility. The thought of it happening decades ago came to mind. It could have happened back in the late 70′s when there were multiple serial killers, serial killer copycats or just individuals who took advantage of the simplicity of being secretive in a time where there wasn’t any surveillance, cell phones, or GPS. I decided to do a search online for missing persons. I was scrolling along Google Images and I couldn’t believe what I saw. It was the young woman who was wearing the pink, hooded sweatshirt. I clicked on the link and it took me to a forum. I had to click through several text links for a bit and eventually I found her.

Map of the time and distance from Theater to approximate area of sighting

I found missing persons information of a young woman by the name of Cynthia May Hernandez. She went by the name Cindy. She lived in the City of Glendora and disappeared from a theater located in the nearby city of West Covina. Cindy was the spirit that I saw and communicated with in a semi-secluded area of Duarte, CA. I have no doubt that Cindy is the young woman I seen that night. Before I actually found her online, I heard the name Cindy but I thought of another person I know by that name whom I met after the fact. I sat on my chair and I began to hear a voice saying “It’s Cindy.” I didn’t get nervous. I listened carefully and I heard her finish saying what she was trying to tell me that night. I got the message. It’s a personal issue of mine that she was addressing. Again, she said nothing that had to do with her or her disappearance, except for her name. God Bless Cindy and may her spirit find peace and may she Rest in Light.

Cynthia ‘Cindy’ May Hernandez https://t.co/CwhjeshBFV  I realize in the description of her clothing it states she was wearing a rust-colored sweater. I saw her wearing a pink sweater (hoodie). I think it may have been for a good reason. Maybe so I would be able to  associate her with the photo that I found on line.  God Bless You Cindy may you Rest in Light.

Here is an article about Cynthia that I found published by San Gabriel Valley Tribune in 2006 http://www.sgvtribune.com/general-news/20120512/womans-disappearance-still-unsolved …

HERE IS A 15 MINUTE VIDEO I TOOK PREVIOUS TO THIS EXPERIENCE DUARTE, CA

[yuli-ban]

Anarchy in Prague/Belle Grand-Mär Megapost

See, now this is a megapost. The goth one was only about two unique pictures. This one has three.

Current theme song for Anarchy in Prague. Harkens back to the days when it was described as a “Stoner Rock Scott Pilgrim”. 

Drawn by @dalf

She’s 27 at the time the story starts. She is literally on the edge of being a Millennial (I’m one of those who thinks the cut-off between Millennials/Generation Y and iGeneration/Generation Z should be 2001, but some say it’s actually 1996).

Drawn by @alouissever 

If two people share a 1-Up, how would that work? Also, you can tell they’re getting close to 30 just by how stoned they look when, in fact, they’re trying to stay awake for New Year’s. I love this aspect of Anarchie, rambling about how Millennials are growing old and are no longer the dominant youth generation. In 2024 (which is 7 years away), there will be 40-something Millennials. I’ll be 30, holy fucking mother of fathers.

Drawn by @dalf

Muriel and Malfiore. Pan’s goth “girls”. Muriel’s, like, 28. However, Malfiore/Marie is 37. She’s still a Millennial, yo. 2024-37=1987. She’s a fucking ‘90s kid and she’s already growing some grays and finding the protoforms of what will one day become wrinkles.

Drawn by @alouissever

Arthur and his sister, Daria (yes, I know it was Darya; deal with it). Daria’s nonplussed about how childish Venus remains.

Drawn by @alouissever

I actually couldn’t find the bottom image for the longest time, so I think this is the first time I’ve posted it to Tumblr. See? It’s not all reposts. I kinda like how Venus looks like a ghost in the second picture, but Dalf forgot about the Saint Vitus logo! And yes, that’s a Pepper robot. I imagined that they might gain a bit more utility between now and 2024. Also, funny thing about Venus being a “hipster”. She’s actually not. She’s more of a moddie than a hipster. But since Arthur’s a hipster, she sometimes tries to be one ironically.

Drawn by @dalf

Arthur Tartakovsky, Venus’s ultra-hipster boyfriend. This was before he gained his ironic mustache. He used to be in an indie pop band in an earlier draft, but nowadays he’s still in an indie pop band. The actual change was his other hobby: before, he was a comic artist. Now he’s an indie game dev specializing in retro games and VR cyberpunk. The world of indie game devs can get hectic, especially in a tight job market. He has to deal with rival devs sabotaging each other and himself sometimes, which is why he developed electrokinetic powers.

Early sketches of the original trio. Only Venus has really changed visually. She was much less notable.

Drawn by @dalf

I already did the posts where @pan-pizza gets his nuts crushed. I see no reason why I should post them again other than to goad Pan into reblogging this megapost. Pan, do not  reblog this.

Drawn by @alouissever

Drawn/animated by @spookyfishcakes

Drawn by @nicolas-px-art

Early form of Malfiore. She always wears Ed’s clothes (a la Ed Edd n Eddy), but it was much more faithful in the earliest sketches. Just ask Alouisse-Ver. Also, she used to have Daria’s hairstyle.

Muriel’s first sketch, back before she had her top hat. I created her as a loveletter to Pan Pizza and his gothosexual tendencies; Malfiore was always going to be a part of the story.

Drawn by @alouissever

Anarchie’s still got a lotta stoner rock in it (Venus’s band and their scene mates are all either stoner rock or heavy rock), but even back in 2014 when I first created the story, I left some room for indie rock. Nowadays, they both take up an equal amount of space. If it ever becomes a movie or a cartoon, it’ll probably be the only one in history where the OST consists of Nebula, Kyuss, Radio Moscow, and Orange Goblin right alongside The Pillows, Kodaline, Arctic Monkeys, and Porno Mags. Radiohead one second, Pentagram the next.

And, for now, that’s all for Anarchie. I’ve yet to commission pictures of Kalo, Syd, Adamski, or Azura Meco, but those are coming. I’m just actually working on the story. Shocker, I know. Even I’m surprised. I just did a 30,000 word outline in about 10 days; the real rough draft should be finished by April.

And now for BGM, which is basically “Anarchie + Cyberdelic Pharmaceuticals”. The early posts here don’t show that off well, but the world will know...

Title card still pending.... I made that 3 yea— holy fuck, I made that three years ago?! How is it 2017 already? 

Pure stardream. It sounds like dreamrock, honestly. The moment I heard this, I knew I had found BGM’s BGM. No pun intended. It was either this or Stand Up. 

Belle. Belle Grand-Mär. British moddie, real name “Indira Elizabeth Jones”, elective mute, severe and antisocial, freeskating and freerunning traceause, yadayadayada. If Venus was a female Scott Pilgrim fused with Murdoc Niccals, Belle is Ramona Flowers + Haruko Haruhara + Ryuko Matoi + Garnet + a mime + Neku Sakuraba + a silent cartoon character. I’m glad I’m a writer. Try creating a silent character! You’d better have mastered visual emotion.

Aurora. Real name “Farideh Moradi”, Persian-Briton moddie, freerunning traceuse, Belle’s closest friend and whatnot. She literally got her name from the reference to the Aurora Borealis in A Flock of Seagull’s uber-80′s hit “I Ran (So Far Away)”. The 2020′s are basically the ‘80s with more cyberdelia, after all.

Bomb. Real name “Madeleine Violetta Dumont”, French moddie, actually dead and works as a psychokinetic grim reaper whenever she feels like it. Also Belle’s rival and foil. Freeskating traceuse. She was created in 2009 as the lead character in a story that was literally “JSRF: Jet Set Radio Future + The World Ends With You”. This is why she seems like someone badly took a character from each of those games and fused them together.

Drawn by @alouissever

Parov Stelar’s beautiful little electroswing track. It’s so 2020′s.  BGM has much more of a stardream atmosphere than the down-to-earth feel of Anarchie. There’s a lot more chiptune, dreamier rock, electrofunk, and whatnot. If you took the soundtrack to Super Mario Galaxy and Steven Universe, mixed it with the soundtrack to Jet Set Radio Future, and made it thrice as eclectic, you’d get something like BGM’s presumed BGM.

You may have noticed that all the characters for BGM thus far are moddies. That’s no mistake or coincidence— it’s a moddie story. It has a stronger character than Anarchie, to the point I can even call it when aspects of Anarchie “seem like something out of BGM”.  Moddies are already getting started, though no one’s yet calling them moddies. But you see how vaporwave’s gotten so big? How neon and pixel art is dominating Tumblr? Seapunk and dyed hair are everywhere, everyone loves hallucinogenics, and everyone loves the ‘80s once more. Major Lazer, for the fucking win. Right now, we say that these are signs of hipsterdom. But in the 2020s, we’re going to look back and realize what it really was— the birth of the moddies. We’ve not yet reached the moddies— we still need a Transhuman Be-In, cheaper OLEDs, and a Sgt. Pepper moment for electronic music (where people stop seeing it as purely dance music). And I don’t see anyone who owns a robot like Pepper or ASIMO yet either. And while luminescent hair is definitely a thing, it’s not yet become a common thing. Nor has leaving up Christmas lights all year, or being obsessed with bright primary colors.

But we’re getting there. And the thing that will trigger the final separation between post-hipsters and moddies isn’t a Transhuman Be-In, but simply time: us Millennials are indeed growing older. I was born in ‘94, and I’m 22 going on 23. Millennials brought back hipsterdom, but ‘10s hipsters suffered a brutal blow due to the loss of Bernie Sanders and the rise of Donald Trump. Our whole zeitgeist became fragile. Hence why people are looking for harder music instead of the previously comfortably twee indie pop and nu-folk. Being vintage and authentic hasn’t helped us one bit, and the kids— those younger than ourselves— don’t believe in our ideals. They just see a blizzard.  Some may mock the hair colors, but they secretly love it. They want something more than what Millennials are offering. They are loving several aspects of what’s big— aforementioned things like vaporwave, electronic music, dyed hair, cyberpunk revivalism, ‘80s and ‘90s love, etc.— but other aspects, they are eager to discard. There’s a strain of neo-futurism in the iGeneration, which isn’t surprising considering they were raised as something of a proto-cyborg generation.

And that’s the moddies in a nutshell. Kids who recognize they live in “The Future™” and wish to own it. They don’t just listen to electronic music because it’s cool; it also aids that whole sense of living in years that previous generations thought were purely sci-fi. They don’t see electronic music as just dance club/background music. They want electronic versions of prog rock and conscious hip hop. They’re more than happy to drop acid and fuck robots. They don’t love the obsession with a minimalist future with sterile colors— they want neon. Neon lights, neon paint, and a cyberdelic attitude. If that means making cities look like one giant rave, so be it. Because ha ha, they live in the Future.

You can forgive them for their incredible optimism; they’re just kids. And they want you to know it.

[thejustinmarshall]

Forest Woodward On His Wandering Path To Adventure Photography

NOTE: In 2018, I started recording interviews with creatives (writers, filmmakers, podcasters, photographers, editors, etc.) in the adventure world. I’m publishing the highlights of those interviews monthly in 2019.

In early 2014, Forest Woodward and I sat in the front window of a Lower East Side coffee shop, flipping through a scrapbook he had made during our 28-day Grand Canyon raft trip a few months earlier. It was only three months old at that point, but already had the look of something you’d find in a dead relative’s attic: bulging at the spine, Instax instant photos and pieces of the river map with notes scrawled on them glued to the pages, and scenes from each day written in the leftover space. Forest had mentioned wanting to do something with the material, plus the stills and video he had shot during the trip—maybe a web story, incorporating all the visual and written elements, in time for Father’s Day as a gift for his dad, Doug, who was 77 at the time of the trip, when he was returning to the Grand Canyon after his first trip there 40+ years ago.

Forest never did get around to making that web story. But he did end up making a film called “The Important Places” with friends at American Rivers and Gnarly Bay. I helped a little bit, too, if you count refusing to write the script and telling Forest he should write it himself, and offering a couple small pieces of advice along the way. The film is probably the best-known single piece of Forest’s work—it won the Best Short Mountain Film Award at the 2015 Banff Mountain Film Festival, toured with the festival, showed at dozens of other film festivals, and appeared in a slightly edited form on Oprah’s SuperSoul TV.

The film follows the trajectory of Forest’s life, growing up very close to the wilderness in the mountains of North Carolina and Washington, getting away from the outdoors for a few years in college and New York City, and then returning to the mountains, desert, and rivers, where he started making a living as an adventure photographer just before I met him, in 2012. Almost exactly seven years ago, a mutual friend, Darin, introduced Forest and me via a charity climb of Mt. Whitney, telling me, “You should meet my friend Forest—I think you’d like him.” People say that all the time, but Darin really nailed it. Since that climb, Forest and I have collaborated on magazine work, several films, and a book project that will be coming out in spring 2020.

Forest’s photos have been published in Alpinist, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, VICE, The Atlantic, Climbing, Rock & Ice, Australian Geographic Outdoor, Surfer Mag, Afar, Men’s Health, Forbes, The Guardian, and on the cover of Adventure Journal multiple times. He’s now one of my closest friends and one of my favorite creative collaborators, and I can’t pretend to be objective about him as a person or a photographer. But since we’ve had such enriching conversations about life and creative work—in the front seats of cars driving in more than a dozen states, at diners and coffee shops, at belays, on dozens of trails and campsites—I thought I’d ask him to sit down and talk a little bit about how he became a photographer and his evolution as a creative. Here’s our conversation from January, edited for length.

ON GROWING UP EXPERIENTIALLY HOMESCHOOLED AND CLOSE TO THE OUTDOORS I grew up in Western North Carolina, in the mountains just south of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 10 miles as the crow flies off the Appalachian Trail. My folks built a house out in the woods on 160 acres of mountainside in rural Appalachia, and that’s where we grew up for the first 12 years of my life. We did a lot of whitewater canoeing and kayaking in that area. What drew them to that area was the rivers and the water. They homeschooled us, and oriented our lives around the idea of experiential education, both in our backyard and in our daily lives. Part of homeschooling was being sent outside and told to come back when it gets dark, which I don’t know if that was really part of homeschooling or just Mom needing some time to herself.

A lot of my memories are of my dad’s back or my mom’s back, being on a backpack or a bike trailer. I remember Dad had this kiddie cart that they pulled behind the bike that my sister and I would sit in. We would do a lot of family overnight bike tours. I remember just seeing the world, the landscape always through this scuffed up plastic window. I think those were some of the earliest memories, just bouncing along in that cart. You could see Dad’s back up ahead, legs churning along, and then you look out the little plastic window, and stuff’s moving along, and I’m just a little sponge, soaking it all in, wondering when the snacks were going to come.

Those were the early years growing up in Western North Carolina. Then we moved to Stehekin, Washington, another rural part of the country up in the North Cascades. A little community at the head of Lake Chelan, surrounded on all sides by the North Cascades National Park. There were about 100 year-round residents. We lived there for five years, and that was another very interesting, distinct chapter in growing up. I was 12 to 17 growing up in a very small community, and learning how to live and interact within that was pretty neat. A good place to be a free range kid. Chopped a lot of wood, boot packed a half mile through the snow from the end of the driveway to the house in winter. There was no cell service in the valley, no internet yet, so if you wanted to see your friends you just got on your bicycle and started riding up and down the valley road, checking the usual spots – the bakery, the swimming holes, the river resort, pirate island. All through my growing up years in North Carolina and then later in Washington, there was no TV or Nintendo and we didn’t have a lot of the things that “normal kids” had. I thought, “This is not idyllic. This is hell,” but with time and space, and as I’ve come to reflect on it, it was absolutely was idyllic. We had the woods and the mountains and the rivers and a lot of freedom to make our own fun.

ON HIS FIRST CAMERA I got a camera for Christmas when I was 10. We took trips as a family, oftentimes once or twice a year. We would do trips out of the country. I think in that time we were headed to Guatemala. Mom and Dad knew I was interested in photography, because I think I had used Dad’s cameras before. They gave me my own camera, which was this little point-and-shoot 35-millimeter. I think I got one roll of film for a six-week trip or something, because it was expensive to develop it. That was my allotted share, and it was a big deal. I remember having a lot of fun with that on the trip. That was my way of interacting with the landscape, and the culture, and the people that we were meeting, and oftentimes thinking about if it was worth one of my one of 36 shots.

Then Dad gave me one of his old cameras when I was 12, his old Canon AE-1. That was when we began developing and processing black-and-white film together in the darkroom in the basement, and it sparked a deeper sense of connection to the craft, and a deeper understanding of it. Dad and a lot of the old-school black-and-white photographers come at picture making from a very engineering minded, scientific sort of background. As I became immersed in that, I started to take more pride in what I was doing. It was less of a pressing the button and being curious what came out, and it was more of a tactile, hands-on sort of thing. I became fascinated with light and without really knowing it I think, I began to study it everyday.

All of the kids in the family were encouraged to explore arts in some way. I always resisted the idea of being an artist or being creative. I was like, “I do sports.” I wanted to be the sports kid. For me, the camera was a creative outlet, but it was like I could pretend that it wasn’t. I could pretend I was a tough 12-year-old who just liked sports, but was secretly falling in love with photography.

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  A post shared by Forest Woodward (@forestwoodward) on Apr 14, 2018 at 9:58am PDT

ON EARLY DAYS IN THE DARKROOM WITH HIS DAD, DOUG My earliest introduction to photography before I ever took a picture was I remember standing outside the door of the darkroom in the basement, and knocking on it, and Dad being like, “Just a minute,” and waiting for one of his prints to get into the fixer. Then he’d open the door, and let me come in, and turn the lights off again. We’d be there in the orange glow of the safelight. He’d perch me up on this tall wicker stool, and let me rock the developer tray. That’s my earliest memory of photography. It definitely was a connection between me and Dad, and seeing what he did, and getting to spend time with him.

It seemed like magic, even just the glow and the hum of the safe light, and the enlarger. Then the images slowly appearing on blank paper, taking shape, becoming real through some alchemy I didn’t grasp but which captivated me. It was a mysterious and entrancing place, the darkroom. For some reason they made the fixer chemicals smell like vanilla, which I think is sketchy in retrospect for kids. Also, there were wild beasts. There were copperheads that would crawl in through the dehumidifier, and so the first thing we would do when we went down to the darkroom was check for the copperheads, and oftentimes they would be there back under far enough that we couldn’t get to them. You would see one peering out at you from under the dehumidifier. It became scary once I started doing it on my own, and wasn’t with Dad. I would check for the copperheads by myself. Eventually we developed some sort of truce I guess.

ON HIS EARLY STUDIES AT THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN SCHOOL OF PHOTOGRAPHY Before college, I had started going out to the Rocky Mountain School of Photography in Missoula. I rode a Greyhound bus with my sister from Spokane to Missoula when I was 12, and she was 14. We took our first black-and-white printing workshop there together.

My dad was friends with Neil and Jeanne Chaput, who started the school in Atlanta when my dad was living there. I think back then they had three students, and Dad was one of them. He and Neil became friends, so when Neil and Jeanne moved the school out to Montana they kept in touch. They always kept the door open for my parents, if they ever wanted to send any of their kids. It was not something that our family could afford, but they let me come for free and stay in their guest bedroom. I was amazingly supported by the folks at the school from an early age.

That opened my eyes to this bigger world of photography where my teachers were people I looked up to a lot, like Neil and Tim Cooper and David Marx. Neil, who founded the school, had studied under Ansel Adams. He did large-scale black-and-white fine art printing. I saw that as the path to being a photographer, and didn’t know that much else about different ways to make a living in photography. I thought you had to take really good black-and-white landscape photos, and then figure out how to get them into galleries. So up until college, that had been my focus. Once a year, I’d go out there for a week and learn from those guys.

I don’t know if I would send a 12-year-old on a Greyhound bus now, but whatever. It worked out. Maybe it was different back then. But that was my first workshop. Whatever formal education I had around photography, besides what came from Dad, came from those weeklong visits to the school in Missoula. I had really positive interactions with the teachers there, and with other students. Everyone was just really encouraging. It was a lot of older folks. They thought it was pretty neat to see a 12-year-old or a 16-year-old who was that interested in the craft, and in learning the details of fine art printing, and large format photography and all that.

Every summer during college, I went back to Missoula. The first year, I took their summer intensive course, a 12-week crash course in everything from studio lighting, to photojournalism, to fine art printing. The next three summers, I went back and assisted with the program, working in the darkroom helping folks with printing. I can’t imagine a better place to develop a foundation and appreciation for the art of photography and I look back on those years as some of the most formative for me as an artist.

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  A post shared by Forest Woodward (@forestwoodward) on Sep 27, 2018 at 4:41pm PDT

ON MAYBE, MAYBE NOT WANTING TO BE A PHOTOGRAPHER As I got into my later teen years and was looking at college, I came to realize that maybe that wasn’t that cool. I was still investigating “normal.” I was like maybe being in a darkroom all day, and smelling like chemicals, maybe I’m turning into one of those artist nerds. I’m not the sports guy I wanted to be, or whatever.

I went to UNC in Chapel Hill. I took one photography class while I was there. I majored in sociology and Spanish. I had heard growing up the encouragement of people saying, “You’re good at photography. You’re making beautiful photos.” But that would also be accompanied with, “It’s really hard to make a living as a photographer though.” I always kept that in the back of my mind. Since I want to make a living, I decided I was going to go to college and study other things. People forgot to tell me that it was going to be hard to make a living with sociology and Spanish too, which I started to realize at the end of college.

I figured if I was going to do something that was hard to make a living with, I might as well do something I really liked and really cared about. So after taking the college years away from photography, except for in the summers when I would go Montana, I came back to it at the end of my junior and senior year and started shooting more seriously.

ON HIS FIRST PHOTO SALE AT AGE 14 I sold my first black-and-white print at the little craft shop in Stehekin. In the winters there, I could use the darkroom in the one-room schoolhouse, and use the chemicals there, and print my own stuff. I was printing landscapes of the North Cascades. Then I’d cut the matts and Krazy Glue them in, and put them in these little plastic sleeves, and take them down to the craft store when it opened in the summer. Part of the deal was if you put stuff in there you had to work behind the desk a few days.

I think I was probably 14, and I was working there the day that my first black-and-white print sold to these two lovely older ladies from Seattle. They said, “You’re the artist? We’re going to buy one.” It was a really neat feeling. I mean, I put these here, but I didn’t really think anyone was going to buy them. It was $12 for the print. They found out it was the first print I’d ever sold, and they got so excited and were like, “You take this dollar bill, and you put it somewhere special, because this is going to mean something.” I don’t remember exactly which photo it was. I want to say it was of a waterfall, Horseshoe Falls maybe. Just a photo from a hike up the valley. That was $12. I think the craft store kept 15 percent or something, but I was psyched. That was enough for multiple cinnamon rolls at the bakery.

You start doing the math as a kid and you’re like okay, that’s three hours of dish washing, or hours of mowing the lawn or splitting firewood. But this was fun. I was doing something I liked. I kept selling prints there in the craft shop, and then I stopped when we moved away when I was 17.

HOW SELLING STOCK PHOTOS STARTED HIS CAREER There had been a teacher in Missoula who did commercial photography in New York, and mentioned that there were these big agencies that kept libraries of photographs, and would license them. If you got your photos in these libraries, then you could potentially sell one sometime and get money. So as a college student, I thought that sounded like a pretty interesting thing.

I had a bunch of photos, so I started reaching out to these different stock houses like Getty. I got turned down by all of them. At the same time, there were some small startup companies, micro-stock agencies like iStock, and they accepted me. I don’t remember the first sale, but it was probably under a dollar for a photo of some carrots or something like that. But then it started selling every day, and then 10 times a day. It was this new model for how to license imagery to meet the growing needs of the internet. It really took off three or four years after I got into it.

I realized I had access to things that a lot of other people who were shooting photos for these stock sites didn’t have access to. I just started photographing things that I was doing with my friends, like trips and stuff we’d do outside, and stuff around campus. I remember the first week pretty early on when I broke $40. That was enough to buy beer all week.

Right as I was getting ready to graduate college, I decided to take an extra semester to finish my Spanish degree, and move to Sevilla, Spain, and spend six months there. That was a whole new landscape and culture, and was much more visually inspiring than walking the same 10 blocks to campus.

I think I was breaking $1,000 a month. My plan was to just keep shooting all this stuff in Spain with my friends. If I just keep doing interesting things with my friends, and uploading all these photos, and working hard, I might not have to worry about getting a job when I leave college. That just lit a fire under me. I poured everything into creating images, and exploring that stock world after that. Things took off to the point that it was sustainable by the time I graduated, and financed all of my trips, and gave me a lot of freedom.

It felt like cheating. It felt too good to be true. I think I still keep that mentality from those early days, when a photo would sell and then stop selling, and you were always at the whim of the algorithms that were changing. I always thought “Well, another good month. Maybe I’ll get another.” Never took it for granted. Keep working hard and make it while you can, because it’s not gonna last forever. Whatever it’s been now, 12 years later, I’m like well, keep going. I’m not doing the stock stuff anymore. I haven’t done that for six years, but I have that same mentality: I’m incredibly lucky. Enjoy every day of it and work hard, and don’t take it for granted.

ON HIS FIRST PUBLISHED PHOTO A friend was studying abroad in Spain, and he told me, “Man, I just picked up a magazine, and I found this photo of you in it.” I thought, “Wow, awesome. I’ve made it. I’ve got a photo in print now.” I knew that these stock photos had been selling online, but I didn’t know where they went or how they were being used. I asked him to send me a copy.

A month later, this manila envelope arrives from Spain. I’m going, “Oh man, this is exciting.” I open it up and pull out this glossy, high-quality print magazine called Gay Barcelona. OK, all right. He’s got the page dogeared, and I open it up. It’s a double-truck spread, this intro to an article with me sitting there shirtless on my laptop, typing. He’s translated it for me because it’s in Catalan, and he’s written, “It says gay men who meet their partners online are 10 times more likely to contract STDs.”

I slipped the magazine back in the envelope and thought, “I think I’m going to wait for the next one to show my mom that I’ve got some published photos.” Four or five months later a copy of National Geographic came, and the opening double truck of it was an ad with one of my photos for renewable batteries or something.

ON OTHER CAREER OPTIONS I’ve never made a resumé. I can’t believe I have made it to 32 and can say that. I think I had enough of an inkling of what my other options were. I mean my first business endeavor was at the age of 10, when I started a lawn mowing company. My main client was Marty Siminski, and I mowed his lawn once a month, and got $20 and a free soda. It was awesome. That was my first sense of the entrepreneurial spirit—that if I could do things on my own terms, it was going to be better. I liked that freedom.

I worked in a bakery in Stehekin for four years. I remember at the age of 12 going up to knock on the bakery owner’s door. It’s all women in their 20s and 30s and 40s working in this bakery, and I’m this 12-year-old kid who wants to bake too. Robbie Courtney, the owner, told me, “Wash dishes for summer, and I’ll start teaching you to bake when you get done with the dishes each morning.” She let me do that. She was the best boss I ever had and I really enjoyed it. The next summers I started baking, and then in when we moved back to North Carolina I spent a couple summers working as a line cook in a resort. That was when the luster of being a cook or a baker started to wear off. I was working double shifts in this mountain resort where the other cooks were dealing opioids out of the back door, and deep frying hot dogs. I got pretty sick of it after that. It was enough understanding of some of my other options to drive me towards the thing that was really fun.

ON HIS START AS AN ADVENTURE PHOTOGRAPHER The summer after I graduated college I was driving through Denver, and Blake Herrington, one of the kids I had gone to school with in Stehekin, was living in Denver. We hadn’t really seen each other much in the last 10 years, but he reached out and invited me to stop in and stay with him and his wife and go rock climbing, and I could shoot photos. We went up to Lumpy Ridge. He’s a writer, and ended up getting some of the photos published. We started taking climbing trips together where he would write articles, and I would shoot the photos, even though I really had no business climbing or taking climbing photos by most standards.

Growing up in North Carolina, we were pretty heavily tied to the outdoors, whether it was family bike trips, or rafting or backpacking. It was a big part of my childhood. When I went to school in Chapel Hill, I got away from that lifestyle. That return to the outdoors through climbing showed me that maybe I could use this skill set and my camera to get back to doing more of the outdoors stuff. I had this inkling of this whole realm of adventure photography, and that sounds more like what I want to be doing, more than taking pictures of carrots, or the farmers market, and rolls of $20 bills and keyboards, or whatever silly stock images I had been doing.

ON ‘THE LIFELONG STUDY OF LIGHT’ Technically speaking, photography for me is absolutely the lifelong study of light, and relation to light. It’s a way of seeing and interacting with the world that I can’t turn off. I’m always looking at light. What makes a good photograph is partly that study of light—just an appreciation of it, and a willingness to pay attention, and patience. Everything I do is with available light, I don’t light anything myself. I’m never shaping or controlling light in the way that many people do beautifully with photography. For me, it’s a study. It’s a relationship that is based in patience.

The photographs I get excited about these days are when it’s a confluence of light and elements that are beyond my control, and I get to witness something that maybe happens only once ever. When that confluence of elements happens, it’s rare. I take a lot of photographs, a lot, a lot, a lot of photographs where that is not the case. But a really great photograph? All these elements click together. You can feel it.

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  A post shared by Forest Woodward (@forestwoodward) on Oct 21, 2018 at 2:28pm PDT

ON HOW A GREAT PHOTO IS OFTEN A GREAT MOMENT I would say, to me, the other big part of what makes a great photograph is the experience behind taking it. I have found that to hold true in all of my work. I don’t have any photographs that I think are great photographs where I feel that what went into making it didn’t come from a good place, or was not something I value. I can’t look at a photograph that I don’t like the story behind and say that’s a great photograph for me. To me, a lot of it is the interaction with a landscape, and with nature, or with people. It’s always the experience that I have of making it. If those things don’t feel good, and don’t feel honest, then the photograph won’t be great.

As I’ve shot more and more lifestyle stuff, interactions with people, you can feel what the connection is between the photographer and the person photographed. While I admire and look up to some of the classic street photographers, and went through a phase of wanting to do that, I realize that’s not for me—stealing moments that leave someone feeling uncomfortable. That’s not how I work. The taking of the photo and that interaction matters to me. Hopefully everyone feels good from it. I think that’s what I hope comes across in a great photograph is that shared joy of life.

I don’t find that those moments happen very much when you try to force them, or are constantly trying to produce them. It’s more of this patience and appreciation of having the space to actually see how many of those moments exist around us each day. To connect with people or a landscape or the soul of whatever it is you’re searching for in an image.

There’s a photo that I posted on Instagram a couple months ago, of my friend Duke putting on his jacket after a day of running bison up the chutes on his ranch in Colorado, and to me that photo, that moment, holds a lot. You don’t see his face. I’m not even saying it’s a great photo, but for me there’s so many stories in the grip of his hand, and the surrounding environment where we spent days just existing on this ranch, not shooting a lot of times. There’s a lot of time and a lot more below the surface that goes into developing the trust and connection to be able to stand that close to another human. At that point, the sun’s dipping through the clouds, and he’s finishing up a day with the bison. It was just a brief moment but it encapsulated a lot of things that were special to me. For me at least, it speaks to a lifetime.

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  A post shared by Forest Woodward (@forestwoodward) on Nov 20, 2018 at 7:37am PST

I think it’s a good litmus test for me, and what I’m doing too. If I can’t exist in the space, and be engaged, and learning and interested in it, then maybe I shouldn’t be there photographing it. Less and less do I differentiate between my lifestyle photography of other people and my own lifestyle. It’s different for everyone, but for me, to be able to exist in the space in a way that is really meaningful beyond just capturing something and running off with it. I value the relationships in my work and the experiences – whether I capture them or not.

I think about that all the time with Instagram in particular. I know that people are missing the experience because they’re obsessed with the end product of an Instagram, or sharing it in some way. I’ve had times in my life where I’ve felt the same, and in the last few years I’ve found that it can be worth it to me not to take the photo, and appreciate the experience instead. If you can do both that’s great, but if I have to choose, more and more I try and choose the experience.

ON WORK-LIFE BALANCE I had the realization in the last year that no kid says, “When I grow up, I want to be busy.” You could have the best career in the world, but if the way that you feel about it, and interact with it and describe it to other people is, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been busy,” that’s not what I dreamed of when I was a kid. With all of the opportunity that I’ve been afforded in my career to choose, and create the lifestyle and the career as a freelancer that I want to have, there’s been a shift for me around realizing there is a limit to what is enough.

When you start out as a freelancer, I think you spend a lot of time constantly in fear of when the next job is coming. Am I going to be able to eat or pay rent? That mentality can carry forward in a way that can become unhealthy. I block out time. I hold time for clients all the time. Clients say, hold this week, or hold these weeks for a possible job. I’m always doing that for these people who oftentimes are friends that I love working with, but I’m doing this for people for schedules, for marketing schedules.

The idea shift in my head has been: I can do that for myself. Forest, hold this month for doing things with your friends, and your family and the people you love. Block out this year or this month for the things that are important, because it’s easy to not do that. We have a culture that seems to validate business and financial success over personal health, and taking care of yourself and your relationships.

I’ve been working like a madman for the last six years. Even when I’m not working hard, I’m still working. You have to be brave to say no to work, and prioritize the things that really matter when this is all said and done. As much as I love my career, and love the things I get to do and call work still, I think I’ve been working on getting better at taking time for the important people, and projects, and prioritizing that more than prioritizing moving up the next rung or whatever.

My friend Stefan Hunt shared this quote with me a few weeks ago as we were talking about this, something like, “Until you decide what is enough, there’s never enough.” What is enough work? What is enough money? What is enough prestige? What is enough social recognition? If I don’t address that for myself, I’ll always be striving for more. More isn’t better.

ADVICE TO NEW PHOTOGRAPHERS If you’re living life the way that you want to live it, it’s going to show in your work. That means figuring out what feels true to you, and what matters to you, and not trying to be someone else. I think that’s important more than ever with Instagram and social media. It’s so easy. I get sucked up in it. Scrolling through Instagram, you see 100 people you admire, and you want to be all of them.

The only person you can be is who you are. There’s so much to distract from that. None of those things are a roadmap for how you get to where you need to be. That comes from really honoring who you are as an individual, and leaning into that, because your greatest work, your greatest strength, is your individuality. I think the greatest work that comes out of any artist is digging into their soul, and sharing that with the world through whatever their medium is.

That takes time, and that takes work. There may be a phase of emulating people along the way, or jumping through the hoops to learn things. That’s fine, but at some point, you have to follow your own path, and you have to have guts to do that. Surround yourself with good people. Take care of your community. Take care of your friends. Take care of yourself. Even if things don’t work out in a career sense, you’ll still be building a good life. Which is success in the most fundamental way. And if you’re going to make a career out of anything, you need that foundation to step off of.

Every relationship you make along the way as a young photographer matters. Take care of those people. There’s no job or relationship too big or too small, so take care of the people you work with. That all adds up over a career. Be good to the people you work with, whether it’s people you’re hiring, or people you meet along the way, or your clients. You have to love what you’re doing enough that working hard doesn’t feel like hard work all the time. Sometimes it has to flow. If you have that, chances are you’re on the right track, and things will unfold as they should.

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Forest Woodward On His Wandering Path To Adventure Photography

NOTE: In 2018, I started recording interviews with creatives (writers, filmmakers, podcasters, photographers, editors, etc.) in the adventure world. I’m publishing the highlights of those interviews monthly in 2019.

In early 2014, Forest Woodward and I sat in the front window of a Lower East Side coffee shop, flipping through a scrapbook he had made during our 28-day Grand Canyon raft trip a few months earlier. It was only three months old at that point, but already had the look of something you’d find in a dead relative’s attic: bulging at the spine, Instax instant photos and pieces of the river map with notes scrawled on them glued to the pages, and scenes from each day written in the leftover space. Forest had mentioned wanting to do something with the material, plus the stills and video he had shot during the trip—maybe a web story, incorporating all the visual and written elements, in time for Father’s Day as a gift for his dad, Doug, who was 77 at the time of the trip, when he was returning to the Grand Canyon after his first trip there 40+ years ago.

Forest never did get around to making that web story. But he did end up making a film called “The Important Places” with friends at American Rivers and Gnarly Bay. I helped a little bit, too, if you count refusing to write the script and telling Forest he should write it himself, and offering a couple small pieces of advice along the way. The film is probably the best-known single piece of Forest’s work—it won the Best Short Mountain Film Award at the 2015 Banff Mountain Film Festival, toured with the festival, showed at dozens of other film festivals, and appeared in a slightly edited form on Oprah’s SuperSoul TV.

The film follows the trajectory of Forest’s life, growing up very close to the wilderness in the mountains of North Carolina and Washington, getting away from the outdoors for a few years in college and New York City, and then returning to the mountains, desert, and rivers, where he started making a living as an adventure photographer just before I met him, in 2012. Almost exactly seven years ago, a mutual friend, Darin, introduced Forest and me via a charity climb of Mt. Whitney, telling me, “You should meet my friend Forest—I think you’d like him.” People say that all the time, but Darin really nailed it. Since that climb, Forest and I have collaborated on magazine work, several films, and a book project that will be coming out in spring 2020.

Forest’s photos have been published in Alpinist, Outside, National Geographic Adventure, VICE, The Atlantic, Climbing, Rock & Ice, Australian Geographic Outdoor, Surfer Mag, Afar, Men’s Health, Forbes, The Guardian, and on the cover of Adventure Journal multiple times. He’s now one of my closest friends and one of my favorite creative collaborators, and I can’t pretend to be objective about him as a person or a photographer. But since we’ve had such enriching conversations about life and creative work—in the front seats of cars driving in more than a dozen states, at diners and coffee shops, at belays, on dozens of trails and campsites—I thought I’d ask him to sit down and talk a little bit about how he became a photographer and his evolution as a creative. Here’s our conversation from January, edited for length.

ON GROWING UP EXPERIENTIALLY HOMESCHOOLED AND CLOSE TO THE OUTDOORS I grew up in Western North Carolina, in the mountains just south of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park, 10 miles as the crow flies off the Appalachian Trail. My folks built a house out in the woods on 160 acres of mountainside in rural Appalachia, and that’s where we grew up for the first 12 years of my life. We did a lot of whitewater canoeing and kayaking in that area. What drew them to that area was the rivers and the water. They homeschooled us, and oriented our lives around the idea of experiential education, both in our backyard and in our daily lives. Part of homeschooling was being sent outside and told to come back when it gets dark, which I don’t know if that was really part of homeschooling or just Mom needing some time to herself.

A lot of my memories are of my dad’s back or my mom’s back, being on a backpack or a bike trailer. I remember Dad had this kiddie cart that they pulled behind the bike that my sister and I would sit in. We would do a lot of family overnight bike tours. I remember just seeing the world, the landscape always through this scuffed up plastic window. I think those were some of the earliest memories, just bouncing along in that cart. You could see Dad’s back up ahead, legs churning along, and then you look out the little plastic window, and stuff’s moving along, and I’m just a little sponge, soaking it all in, wondering when the snacks were going to come.

Those were the early years growing up in Western North Carolina. Then we moved to Stehekin, Washington, another rural part of the country up in the North Cascades. A little community at the head of Lake Chelan, surrounded on all sides by the North Cascades National Park. There were about 100 year-round residents. We lived there for five years, and that was another very interesting, distinct chapter in growing up. I was 12 to 17 growing up in a very small community, and learning how to live and interact within that was pretty neat. A good place to be a free range kid. Chopped a lot of wood, boot packed a half mile through the snow from the end of the driveway to the house in winter. There was no cell service in the valley, no internet yet, so if you wanted to see your friends you just got on your bicycle and started riding up and down the valley road, checking the usual spots – the bakery, the swimming holes, the river resort, pirate island. All through my growing up years in North Carolina and then later in Washington, there was no TV or Nintendo and we didn’t have a lot of the things that “normal kids” had. I thought, “This is not idyllic. This is hell,” but with time and space, and as I’ve come to reflect on it, it was absolutely was idyllic. We had the woods and the mountains and the rivers and a lot of freedom to make our own fun.

ON HIS FIRST CAMERA I got a camera for Christmas when I was 10. We took trips as a family, oftentimes once or twice a year. We would do trips out of the country. I think in that time we were headed to Guatemala. Mom and Dad knew I was interested in photography, because I think I had used Dad’s cameras before. They gave me my own camera, which was this little point-and-shoot 35-millimeter. I think I got one roll of film for a six-week trip or something, because it was expensive to develop it. That was my allotted share, and it was a big deal. I remember having a lot of fun with that on the trip. That was my way of interacting with the landscape, and the culture, and the people that we were meeting, and oftentimes thinking about if it was worth one of my one of 36 shots.

Then Dad gave me one of his old cameras when I was 12, his old Canon AE-1. That was when we began developing and processing black-and-white film together in the darkroom in the basement, and it sparked a deeper sense of connection to the craft, and a deeper understanding of it. Dad and a lot of the old-school black-and-white photographers come at picture making from a very engineering minded, scientific sort of background. As I became immersed in that, I started to take more pride in what I was doing. It was less of a pressing the button and being curious what came out, and it was more of a tactile, hands-on sort of thing. I became fascinated with light and without really knowing it I think, I began to study it everyday.

All of the kids in the family were encouraged to explore arts in some way. I always resisted the idea of being an artist or being creative. I was like, “I do sports.” I wanted to be the sports kid. For me, the camera was a creative outlet, but it was like I could pretend that it wasn’t. I could pretend I was a tough 12-year-old who just liked sports, but was secretly falling in love with photography.

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  A post shared by Forest Woodward (@forestwoodward) on Apr 14, 2018 at 9:58am PDT

ON EARLY DAYS IN THE DARKROOM WITH HIS DAD, DOUG My earliest introduction to photography before I ever took a picture was I remember standing outside the door of the darkroom in the basement, and knocking on it, and Dad being like, “Just a minute,” and waiting for one of his prints to get into the fixer. Then he’d open the door, and let me come in, and turn the lights off again. We’d be there in the orange glow of the safelight. He’d perch me up on this tall wicker stool, and let me rock the developer tray. That’s my earliest memory of photography. It definitely was a connection between me and Dad, and seeing what he did, and getting to spend time with him.

It seemed like magic, even just the glow and the hum of the safe light, and the enlarger. Then the images slowly appearing on blank paper, taking shape, becoming real through some alchemy I didn’t grasp but which captivated me. It was a mysterious and entrancing place, the darkroom. For some reason they made the fixer chemicals smell like vanilla, which I think is sketchy in retrospect for kids. Also, there were wild beasts. There were copperheads that would crawl in through the dehumidifier, and so the first thing we would do when we went down to the darkroom was check for the copperheads, and oftentimes they would be there back under far enough that we couldn’t get to them. You would see one peering out at you from under the dehumidifier. It became scary once I started doing it on my own, and wasn’t with Dad. I would check for the copperheads by myself. Eventually we developed some sort of truce I guess.

ON HIS EARLY STUDIES AT THE ROCKY MOUNTAIN SCHOOL OF PHOTOGRAPHY Before college, I had started going out to the Rocky Mountain School of Photography in Missoula. I rode a Greyhound bus with my sister from Spokane to Missoula when I was 12, and she was 14. We took our first black-and-white printing workshop there together.

My dad was friends with Neil and Jeanne Chaput, who started the school in Atlanta when my dad was living there. I think back then they had three students, and Dad was one of them. He and Neil became friends, so when Neil and Jeanne moved the school out to Montana they kept in touch. They always kept the door open for my parents, if they ever wanted to send any of their kids. It was not something that our family could afford, but they let me come for free and stay in their guest bedroom. I was amazingly supported by the folks at the school from an early age.

That opened my eyes to this bigger world of photography where my teachers were people I looked up to a lot, like Neil and Tim Cooper and David Marx. Neil, who founded the school, had studied under Ansel Adams. He did large-scale black-and-white fine art printing. I saw that as the path to being a photographer, and didn’t know that much else about different ways to make a living in photography. I thought you had to take really good black-and-white landscape photos, and then figure out how to get them into galleries. So up until college, that had been my focus. Once a year, I’d go out there for a week and learn from those guys.

I don’t know if I would send a 12-year-old on a Greyhound bus now, but whatever. It worked out. Maybe it was different back then. But that was my first workshop. Whatever formal education I had around photography, besides what came from Dad, came from those weeklong visits to the school in Missoula. I had really positive interactions with the teachers there, and with other students. Everyone was just really encouraging. It was a lot of older folks. They thought it was pretty neat to see a 12-year-old or a 16-year-old who was that interested in the craft, and in learning the details of fine art printing, and large format photography and all that.

Every summer during college, I went back to Missoula. The first year, I took their summer intensive course, a 12-week crash course in everything from studio lighting, to photojournalism, to fine art printing. The next three summers, I went back and assisted with the program, working in the darkroom helping folks with printing. I can’t imagine a better place to develop a foundation and appreciation for the art of photography and I look back on those years as some of the most formative for me as an artist.

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ON MAYBE, MAYBE NOT WANTING TO BE A PHOTOGRAPHER As I got into my later teen years and was looking at college, I came to realize that maybe that wasn’t that cool. I was still investigating “normal.” I was like maybe being in a darkroom all day, and smelling like chemicals, maybe I’m turning into one of those artist nerds. I’m not the sports guy I wanted to be, or whatever.

I went to UNC in Chapel Hill. I took one photography class while I was there. I majored in sociology and Spanish. I had heard growing up the encouragement of people saying, “You’re good at photography. You’re making beautiful photos.” But that would also be accompanied with, “It’s really hard to make a living as a photographer though.” I always kept that in the back of my mind. Since I want to make a living, I decided I was going to go to college and study other things. People forgot to tell me that it was going to be hard to make a living with sociology and Spanish too, which I started to realize at the end of college.

I figured if I was going to do something that was hard to make a living with, I might as well do something I really liked and really cared about. So after taking the college years away from photography, except for in the summers when I would go Montana, I came back to it at the end of my junior and senior year and started shooting more seriously.

ON HIS FIRST PHOTO SALE AT AGE 14 I sold my first black-and-white print at the little craft shop in Stehekin. In the winters there, I could use the darkroom in the one-room schoolhouse, and use the chemicals there, and print my own stuff. I was printing landscapes of the North Cascades. Then I’d cut the matts and Krazy Glue them in, and put them in these little plastic sleeves, and take them down to the craft store when it opened in the summer. Part of the deal was if you put stuff in there you had to work behind the desk a few days.

I think I was probably 14, and I was working there the day that my first black-and-white print sold to these two lovely older ladies from Seattle. They said, “You’re the artist? We’re going to buy one.” It was a really neat feeling. I mean, I put these here, but I didn’t really think anyone was going to buy them. It was $12 for the print. They found out it was the first print I’d ever sold, and they got so excited and were like, “You take this dollar bill, and you put it somewhere special, because this is going to mean something.” I don’t remember exactly which photo it was. I want to say it was of a waterfall, Horseshoe Falls maybe. Just a photo from a hike up the valley. That was $12. I think the craft store kept 15 percent or something, but I was psyched. That was enough for multiple cinnamon rolls at the bakery.

You start doing the math as a kid and you’re like okay, that’s three hours of dish washing, or hours of mowing the lawn or splitting firewood. But this was fun. I was doing something I liked. I kept selling prints there in the craft shop, and then I stopped when we moved away when I was 17.

HOW SELLING STOCK PHOTOS STARTED HIS CAREER There had been a teacher in Missoula who did commercial photography in New York, and mentioned that there were these big agencies that kept libraries of photographs, and would license them. If you got your photos in these libraries, then you could potentially sell one sometime and get money. So as a college student, I thought that sounded like a pretty interesting thing.

I had a bunch of photos, so I started reaching out to these different stock houses like Getty. I got turned down by all of them. At the same time, there were some small startup companies, micro-stock agencies like iStock, and they accepted me. I don’t remember the first sale, but it was probably under a dollar for a photo of some carrots or something like that. But then it started selling every day, and then 10 times a day. It was this new model for how to license imagery to meet the growing needs of the internet. It really took off three or four years after I got into it.

I realized I had access to things that a lot of other people who were shooting photos for these stock sites didn’t have access to. I just started photographing things that I was doing with my friends, like trips and stuff we’d do outside, and stuff around campus. I remember the first week pretty early on when I broke $40. That was enough to buy beer all week.

Right as I was getting ready to graduate college, I decided to take an extra semester to finish my Spanish degree, and move to Sevilla, Spain, and spend six months there. That was a whole new landscape and culture, and was much more visually inspiring than walking the same 10 blocks to campus.

I think I was breaking $1,000 a month. My plan was to just keep shooting all this stuff in Spain with my friends. If I just keep doing interesting things with my friends, and uploading all these photos, and working hard, I might not have to worry about getting a job when I leave college. That just lit a fire under me. I poured everything into creating images, and exploring that stock world after that. Things took off to the point that it was sustainable by the time I graduated, and financed all of my trips, and gave me a lot of freedom.

It felt like cheating. It felt too good to be true. I think I still keep that mentality from those early days, when a photo would sell and then stop selling, and you were always at the whim of the algorithms that were changing. I always thought “Well, another good month. Maybe I’ll get another.” Never took it for granted. Keep working hard and make it while you can, because it’s not gonna last forever. Whatever it’s been now, 12 years later, I’m like well, keep going. I’m not doing the stock stuff anymore. I haven’t done that for six years, but I have that same mentality: I’m incredibly lucky. Enjoy every day of it and work hard, and don’t take it for granted.

ON HIS FIRST PUBLISHED PHOTO A friend was studying abroad in Spain, and he told me, “Man, I just picked up a magazine, and I found this photo of you in it.” I thought, “Wow, awesome. I’ve made it. I’ve got a photo in print now.” I knew that these stock photos had been selling online, but I didn’t know where they went or how they were being used. I asked him to send me a copy.

A month later, this manila envelope arrives from Spain. I’m going, “Oh man, this is exciting.” I open it up and pull out this glossy, high-quality print magazine called Gay Barcelona. OK, all right. He’s got the page dogeared, and I open it up. It’s a double-truck spread, this intro to an article with me sitting there shirtless on my laptop, typing. He’s translated it for me because it’s in Catalan, and he’s written, “It says gay men who meet their partners online are 10 times more likely to contract STDs.”

I slipped the magazine back in the envelope and thought, “I think I’m going to wait for the next one to show my mom that I’ve got some published photos.” Four or five months later a copy of National Geographic came, and the opening double truck of it was an ad with one of my photos for renewable batteries or something.

ON OTHER CAREER OPTIONS I’ve never made a resumé. I can’t believe I have made it to 32 and can say that. I think I had enough of an inkling of what my other options were. I mean my first business endeavor was at the age of 10, when I started a lawn mowing company. My main client was Marty Siminski, and I mowed his lawn once a month, and got $20 and a free soda. It was awesome. That was my first sense of the entrepreneurial spirit—that if I could do things on my own terms, it was going to be better. I liked that freedom.

I worked in a bakery in Stehekin for four years. I remember at the age of 12 going up to knock on the bakery owner’s door. It’s all women in their 20s and 30s and 40s working in this bakery, and I’m this 12-year-old kid who wants to bake too. Robbie Courtney, the owner, told me, “Wash dishes for summer, and I’ll start teaching you to bake when you get done with the dishes each morning.” She let me do that. She was the best boss I ever had and I really enjoyed it. The next summers I started baking, and then in when we moved back to North Carolina I spent a couple summers working as a line cook in a resort. That was when the luster of being a cook or a baker started to wear off. I was working double shifts in this mountain resort where the other cooks were dealing opioids out of the back door, and deep frying hot dogs. I got pretty sick of it after that. It was enough understanding of some of my other options to drive me towards the thing that was really fun.

ON HIS START AS AN ADVENTURE PHOTOGRAPHER The summer after I graduated college I was driving through Denver, and Blake Herrington, one of the kids I had gone to school with in Stehekin, was living in Denver. We hadn’t really seen each other much in the last 10 years, but he reached out and invited me to stop in and stay with him and his wife and go rock climbing, and I could shoot photos. We went up to Lumpy Ridge. He’s a writer, and ended up getting some of the photos published. We started taking climbing trips together where he would write articles, and I would shoot the photos, even though I really had no business climbing or taking climbing photos by most standards.

Growing up in North Carolina, we were pretty heavily tied to the outdoors, whether it was family bike trips, or rafting or backpacking. It was a big part of my childhood. When I went to school in Chapel Hill, I got away from that lifestyle. That return to the outdoors through climbing showed me that maybe I could use this skill set and my camera to get back to doing more of the outdoors stuff. I had this inkling of this whole realm of adventure photography, and that sounds more like what I want to be doing, more than taking pictures of carrots, or the farmers market, and rolls of $20 bills and keyboards, or whatever silly stock images I had been doing.

ON ‘THE LIFELONG STUDY OF LIGHT’ Technically speaking, photography for me is absolutely the lifelong study of light, and relation to light. It’s a way of seeing and interacting with the world that I can’t turn off. I’m always looking at light. What makes a good photograph is partly that study of light—just an appreciation of it, and a willingness to pay attention, and patience. Everything I do is with available light, I don’t light anything myself. I’m never shaping or controlling light in the way that many people do beautifully with photography. For me, it’s a study. It’s a relationship that is based in patience.

The photographs I get excited about these days are when it’s a confluence of light and elements that are beyond my control, and I get to witness something that maybe happens only once ever. When that confluence of elements happens, it’s rare. I take a lot of photographs, a lot, a lot, a lot of photographs where that is not the case. But a really great photograph? All these elements click together. You can feel it.

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  A post shared by Forest Woodward (@forestwoodward) on Oct 21, 2018 at 2:28pm PDT

ON HOW A GREAT PHOTO IS OFTEN A GREAT MOMENT I would say, to me, the other big part of what makes a great photograph is the experience behind taking it. I have found that to hold true in all of my work. I don’t have any photographs that I think are great photographs where I feel that what went into making it didn’t come from a good place, or was not something I value. I can’t look at a photograph that I don’t like the story behind and say that’s a great photograph for me. To me, a lot of it is the interaction with a landscape, and with nature, or with people. It’s always the experience that I have of making it. If those things don’t feel good, and don’t feel honest, then the photograph won’t be great.

As I’ve shot more and more lifestyle stuff, interactions with people, you can feel what the connection is between the photographer and the person photographed. While I admire and look up to some of the classic street photographers, and went through a phase of wanting to do that, I realize that’s not for me—stealing moments that leave someone feeling uncomfortable. That’s not how I work. The taking of the photo and that interaction matters to me. Hopefully everyone feels good from it. I think that’s what I hope comes across in a great photograph is that shared joy of life.

I don’t find that those moments happen very much when you try to force them, or are constantly trying to produce them. It’s more of this patience and appreciation of having the space to actually see how many of those moments exist around us each day. To connect with people or a landscape or the soul of whatever it is you’re searching for in an image.

There’s a photo that I posted on Instagram a couple months ago, of my friend Duke putting on his jacket after a day of running bison up the chutes on his ranch in Colorado, and to me that photo, that moment, holds a lot. You don’t see his face. I’m not even saying it’s a great photo, but for me there’s so many stories in the grip of his hand, and the surrounding environment where we spent days just existing on this ranch, not shooting a lot of times. There’s a lot of time and a lot more below the surface that goes into developing the trust and connection to be able to stand that close to another human. At that point, the sun’s dipping through the clouds, and he’s finishing up a day with the bison. It was just a brief moment but it encapsulated a lot of things that were special to me. For me at least, it speaks to a lifetime.

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  A post shared by Forest Woodward (@forestwoodward) on Nov 20, 2018 at 7:37am PST

I think it’s a good litmus test for me, and what I’m doing too. If I can’t exist in the space, and be engaged, and learning and interested in it, then maybe I shouldn’t be there photographing it. Less and less do I differentiate between my lifestyle photography of other people and my own lifestyle. It’s different for everyone, but for me, to be able to exist in the space in a way that is really meaningful beyond just capturing something and running off with it. I value the relationships in my work and the experiences – whether I capture them or not.

I think about that all the time with Instagram in particular. I know that people are missing the experience because they’re obsessed with the end product of an Instagram, or sharing it in some way. I’ve had times in my life where I’ve felt the same, and in the last few years I’ve found that it can be worth it to me not to take the photo, and appreciate the experience instead. If you can do both that’s great, but if I have to choose, more and more I try and choose the experience.

ON WORK-LIFE BALANCE I had the realization in the last year that no kid says, “When I grow up, I want to be busy.” You could have the best career in the world, but if the way that you feel about it, and interact with it and describe it to other people is, “Oh, yeah, I’ve been busy,” that’s not what I dreamed of when I was a kid. With all of the opportunity that I’ve been afforded in my career to choose, and create the lifestyle and the career as a freelancer that I want to have, there’s been a shift for me around realizing there is a limit to what is enough.

When you start out as a freelancer, I think you spend a lot of time constantly in fear of when the next job is coming. Am I going to be able to eat or pay rent? That mentality can carry forward in a way that can become unhealthy. I block out time. I hold time for clients all the time. Clients say, hold this week, or hold these weeks for a possible job. I’m always doing that for these people who oftentimes are friends that I love working with, but I’m doing this for people for schedules, for marketing schedules.

The idea shift in my head has been: I can do that for myself. Forest, hold this month for doing things with your friends, and your family and the people you love. Block out this year or this month for the things that are important, because it’s easy to not do that. We have a culture that seems to validate business and financial success over personal health, and taking care of yourself and your relationships.

I’ve been working like a madman for the last six years. Even when I’m not working hard, I’m still working. You have to be brave to say no to work, and prioritize the things that really matter when this is all said and done. As much as I love my career, and love the things I get to do and call work still, I think I’ve been working on getting better at taking time for the important people, and projects, and prioritizing that more than prioritizing moving up the next rung or whatever.

My friend Stefan Hunt shared this quote with me a few weeks ago as we were talking about this, something like, “Until you decide what is enough, there’s never enough.” What is enough work? What is enough money? What is enough prestige? What is enough social recognition? If I don’t address that for myself, I’ll always be striving for more. More isn’t better.

ADVICE TO NEW PHOTOGRAPHERS If you’re living life the way that you want to live it, it’s going to show in your work. That means figuring out what feels true to you, and what matters to you, and not trying to be someone else. I think that’s important more than ever with Instagram and social media. It’s so easy. I get sucked up in it. Scrolling through Instagram, you see 100 people you admire, and you want to be all of them.

The only person you can be is who you are. There’s so much to distract from that. None of those things are a roadmap for how you get to where you need to be. That comes from really honoring who you are as an individual, and leaning into that, because your greatest work, your greatest strength, is your individuality. I think the greatest work that comes out of any artist is digging into their soul, and sharing that with the world through whatever their medium is.

That takes time, and that takes work. There may be a phase of emulating people along the way, or jumping through the hoops to learn things. That’s fine, but at some point, you have to follow your own path, and you have to have guts to do that. Surround yourself with good people. Take care of your community. Take care of your friends. Take care of yourself. Even if things don’t work out in a career sense, you’ll still be building a good life. Which is success in the most fundamental way. And if you’re going to make a career out of anything, you need that foundation to step off of.

Every relationship you make along the way as a young photographer matters. Take care of those people. There’s no job or relationship too big or too small, so take care of the people you work with. That all adds up over a career. Be good to the people you work with, whether it’s people you’re hiring, or people you meet along the way, or your clients. You have to love what you’re doing enough that working hard doesn’t feel like hard work all the time. Sometimes it has to flow. If you have that, chances are you’re on the right track, and things will unfold as they should.

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  A post shared by Forest Woodward (@forestwoodward) on Aug 20, 2018 at 5:46pm PDT

The post Forest Woodward On His Wandering Path To Adventure Photography appeared first on semi-rad.com.

[wikipress01]

The HIV-positive man who stopped thousands getting the virus

Greg Owen wished a brand new drug, not accessible via the NHS, that will cease him changing into HIV-positive. But it was too late – he already had the virus. Despite this, he and a good friend labored on an bold plan to assist thousands of others get the new remedy.

“You know when you do one thing… when your whole life changes? Pressing that send on Facebook was actually the moment my whole life changed.”

Greg Owen grew up in Belfast, the eldest of six youngsters. It was the 1980s, the peak of the Troubles, and he was, as he places it, “very gay”.

Fast-forward to London in 2015. Greg is working in bars and golf equipment, sleeping on pals’ sofas.

There is not any signal of what’s to return – that Greg goes to assist save thousands of lives and alter the method the NHS thinks about homosexual males having intercourse.

Then, Greg met Alex Craddock.

“He was cute, a little bit sassy. And I fancied him a little bit,” says Greg.

Alex had simply come again from New York. He had one thing Greg wished very a lot. He was on Prep, a comparatively new drug seen as a game-changer in the battle in opposition to HIV an infection.

If you might be on Prep and have intercourse with somebody with HIV, the drug will cease you changing into HIV constructive – even in case you are not sporting a condom.

Greg was intrigued. “I was trying to get Prep. And Alex was already on it. He’d got in the States.” Alex instructed him it was straightforward to get in New York. But Alex’s provide was about to expire. Here in the UK, it wasn’t accessible.

“I’d been given this amazing new thing and then it had been taken away from me,” Alex says. “That’s when I first met Greg.”

At the time, HIV diagnoses for top danger teams in the UK have been going up. One in eight homosexual males in London had HIV.

Short for pre-exposure prophylaxis, Prep is a tablet you’re taking earlier than penetrative intercourse.

Some customers take it every day – whereas others take it “on demand”, in the days earlier than and after intercourse.

If a condom just isn’t worn, and also you come into contact with HIV, the drug stops the virus from getting into the bloodstream completely. Prep is prevention not remedy.

But earlier than you possibly can take Prep, it’s important to ensure you do not have already got HIV.

Greg had managed to pay money for a small quantity of the drug – and so he went for a check.

He wasn’t too frightened as he’d gone for sexually transmitted an infection (STI) checks pretty often. He was watching the physician. He knew the way it labored. The testing package would present one dot for unfavourable, and two for constructive. Suddenly, in a heartbeat, every little thing modified.

“Literally, ‘Boom,’ like two dots so [the doctor] didn’t even have to say anything, I saw it because it was sitting in-between us.”

Greg felt numb, trapped and alone. “I was seeing people go past me and I felt like I was in like a bubble – like there was a something separating me from the rest of the world.”

And that is when he made the choice that modified his life and perhaps that of thousands of different homosexual males.

He determined to disclose this large secret to the world. So, he posted on Facebook that he was HIV constructive. And he talked about Prep – this drug few knew a lot about, which might have stopped him getting HIV.

His telephone “just lit up”, he says.

“First of all, people couldn’t believe I’d done that. And then there was, ‘What is all this Prep stuff?’ Why would Prep have kept you HIV negative?’ So, I could tell people what Prep was and I could tell people how it worked. And then obviously the next question was, ‘How do I get Prep?'”

Watch Greg and Alex’s story

The People vs The NHS: Who Gets the Drugs? was first broadcast on BBC Two.

It is now accessible on the BBC iPlayer together with extra programmes about the NHS at 70.

And that was Greg and Alex’s subsequent transfer.

“We don’t even need the government right now,” Alex recollects them saying. “We can do it ourselves. We’ll tell everyone to order pharmaceutical drugs on the internet and start taking them.”

From Alex’s bed room, they began constructing an internet site.

First, got here all the medical data folks wanted to know. And then, the bit everybody wished – the alternative to “click to buy”. “We didn’t want to make any money ourselves. We were just linking up buyers to sellers,” Greg says.

It was a easy, radical thought.

“I’m not going to wait for the NHS to come and save me,” Alex recollects. “I want Prep now and this is how I’m going to get it.”

So, they referred to as the web site I Want Prep Now. It launched in October 2015.

They obtained 400 hits in the first 24 hours and it mushroomed from there.

Then, the medical career took an curiosity.

Mags Portman, an NHS advisor on HIV and sexual well being, emailed Greg asking if she might meet. Will Nutland, an activist at Prepster, an internet site giving details about Prep, additionally turned concerned.

Will even turned a guinea pig.

He took Prep capsules from new suppliers after which had his blood examined at Portman’s sexual well being clinic. It examined greater than 300 batches and located no fakes.

At the identical time, the UK Medical Research Council was operating the Proud examine, evaluating homosexual males on Prep in opposition to non-users.

The outcome was so clear-cut – an 86% fall in new HIV infections amongst in Prep customers – that the examine was ended early and people on the examine not taking Prep have been instantly provided it.

So the place was NHS England?

At the finish of 2014, it had begun a course of to resolve whether or not Prep must be made accessible. Time handed, nothing occurred.

“It was very, very difficult and frustrating as a clinician to know that this HIV prevention tool was out there,” says Mags.

“We couldn’t access it and we couldn’t prescribe it and we were seeing people that we knew were at risk and then coming back with HIV.”

By 2016, the NHS was nonetheless debating the matter. And then it mentioned no.

“I was gobsmacked,” says Sheena McCormack, professor of medical epidemiology, who ran the Proud trial.

“Oh, my goodness, it was absolutely horrifying,” says Mags.

But what started in a bed room ended up going to the High Court.

The National Aids Trust, a charity, took NHS England to courtroom. They wished Prep to be checked out based on the identical guidelines as another new treatment can be.

The stakes have been excessive. The Terrence Higgins Trust – one other main HIV/Aids charity – despatched a letter to the Times, saying that on daily basis Prep was delayed no less than 17 folks have been changing into contaminated with HIV.

The authorized case was advanced. The NHS mentioned it wasn’t legally required to fund prevention. That was the job of native authorities, it mentioned.

The NHS was dealing with one among the largest funding crises in its seven-decade historical past. It was not a superb time to be taking up new funding duties. Today, regardless of file ranges of funding, there are nonetheless funding gaps.

The case additionally revealed one thing else – society’s view of what homosexual males have been entitled to.

The journalist and broadcaster Andrew Pierce, who is homosexual himself, is in opposition to Prep being funded by the state.

“I don’t think the NHS can afford £450 per month to a homosexual,” he says.

“Because this is what it is about – indulging gay men who don’t want to use a condom. Well, that is outrageous – why should the taxpayer subsidise a reckless sex life?”

But for Greg, “gay guys have the right to fear-free, guilt-free, disease-free sex”. For too lengthy, he says, there was an excessive amount of self-loathing.

“We are ultimately conditioned to believe that love, particularly sex between two men, always has to come at a price. And it doesn’t.”

In courtroom, the NHS’s argument unravelled. It turned out it did fund prevention – statins, for instance, which assist to decrease dangerous ldl cholesterol. The choose discovered unequivocally in favour of the National Aids Trust.

But NHS England mentioned it could attraction and despatched out a press launch that Ian Green, chief govt of the Terrence Higgins Trust, remembers all too effectively. “They said the decision had been taken for high risk men who have condomless sex, with multiple sexual partners – it was condemnatory.”

For Greg, it was hurtful. “It just felt, that felt really vicious actually. It felt like sour grapes.”

Suddenly the NHS’s decision-making was below the microscope at nearly a philosophical stage.

“It’s interesting, this question of personal responsibility and on what role it plays in the NHS’s decisions – officially it doesn’t play any role at all,” says Sean Sinclair, a medical ethicist at the University of Leeds. “Unofficially, you can see it playing a role.”

The matter was settled in November 2016. The NHS misplaced its authorized attraction and must take duty for Prep.

Greg, by now again in Northern Ireland, was working in a pub. “I was literally crying. Serving pints of beer to this poor Belfast boy who probably thought I was absolutely off my rocker.”

So what’s occurred since then?

By summer time final 12 months, eight clinics in London, and several other outdoors the capital, had taken half in a trial to offer Prep. And many extra males purchase the drug privately resulting from higher consciousness. In August 2017, the NHS in England introduced it could give Prep to 10,000 folks in a £10m trial lasting three years.

In Wales, the drug is offered from chosen NHS sexual well being clinics as a part of an analogous trial. Prep just isn’t presently accessible from the NHS in Northern Ireland. Scotland is the solely a part of the UK to supply full Prep provision via the NHS.

For the first time lately, the HIV analysis fee in homosexual males is down. From 2015 to 2016, it was down by about 20% nationwide. But in sure clinics in London it fell by 40%.

“That was the first moment when we were able to take a step back and actually be quite shocked at how effective all of this was,” says Alex.

Opponents say Prep could undermine safe-sex messages. They level to a four-year Australian examine in the Lancet, suggesting that as Prep use grows, condom use falls. And males not on the drug, due to this fact not benefiting from it, have been additionally having extra condomless intercourse, the researchers say.

But for Sheena McCormack, who ran the Proud trial, Prep continues to be a game-changer.

“We in all probability had carried out as a lot as we presumably might in the method of frequent testing, early analysis and early remedy.

“The piece that was lacking was the HIV-negative people who have been catching HIV in-between their HIV assessments. That’s the place Prep fills the hole.”

Prep can also save the NHS cash.

Scientists at University College London who studied its cost-effectiveness mentioned it could value cash for the first few a long time however after 40 years it could start to avoid wasting the NHS money.

And after 80 years it could save the UK about £1bn, they predicted.

Greg typically tears up when he thinks about the place they have to.

He remembers one telephone name particularly that made him cry. Sheena McCormack was on the line. It was Christmas 2016, a number of weeks after the Appeal Court victory.

She instructed him that with out his web site, the one arrange by him and Alex, there would have been solely tiny numbers of individuals on Prep.

“Sheena was like, ‘I want you to strip it back, think about the people, of the thousands of people walking around now HIV negative because of something that you did.'”

Looking again, Greg says there was no grand plan. “I had a humble objective. I just wanted one person to remain HIV negative on the back of my diagnosis. That way it’s HIV equal. If we prevent a second person, then I have won – my HIV status didn’t cost anything.”

It’s truthful to say, he received large.

Image copyright:

BBC, Getty Images, Greg Owen, Claire McGeown and Alex Craddock.

Source hyperlink from http://www.wikipress.co.uk/health/the-hiv-positive-man-who-stopped-thousands-getting-the-virus/

[ellahmacdermott]

Sidechains: Why These Researchers Think They Solved a Key Piece of the Puzzle

New blockchains are born all the time. Bitcoin was the lone blockchain for years, but now there are hundreds. The problem is, if you want to use the features offered on another blockchain, you have to buy the tokens for that other blockchain.

But all that may soon change. One developing technology called sidechains promises to make it easier to move tokens across blockchains and, as a result, open the doors to a world of possibilities, including building bridges to the legacy financial systems of banks.

In October 2017, Aggelos Kiayias, professor at the University of Edinburgh and chief scientist at blockchain research and development company IOHK; Andrew Miller, professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; and Dionysis Zindros, researcher at the University of Athens, released the paper “Non-Interactive Proofs of Proof-of-Work” (NiPoPoW), introducing a critical piece to the sidechains puzzle that had been missing for three years. This is the story of how they got there.

But, first, what exactly is a sidechain?    

Same Coin, Different Blockchain

A sidechain is a technology that allows you to move your tokens from one blockchain to another, use them on that other blockchain and then move them back at a later point in time, without the need for a third party.  

In the past, the parent blockchain has typically been Bitcoin, but a parent chain could be any blockchain. Also, when a token moves to another blockchain, it should maintain its same value. In other words, a bitcoin on an Ethereum sidechain would remain a bitcoin.  

The biggest advantage of sidechains is that they would allow users to access a host of new services. For instance, you could move bitcoin to another blockchain to take advantage of privacy features, faster transaction speeds and smart contracts.  

Sidechains have other uses, too. A sidechain could offer a more secure way to upgrade a protocol, or it could serve as a type of security firewall, so that in the event of a catastrophic disaster on a sidechain, the main chain would remain unaffected. “It is a kind of limited liability,” said Zindros in a video explaining how the technology works.

Finally, if banks were to create their own private blockchain networks, sidechains could enable communications with those networks, allowing users to issue and track shares, bonds and other assets.

Early Conversations

Early dialogue about sidechains first appeared in Bitcoin chat rooms around 2012, when Bitcoin Core developers were thinking of ways to safely upgrade the Bitcoin protocol.

One idea was for a “one-way peg,” where users could move bitcoin to a separate blockchain to test out a new client; however, once those assets were moved, they could not be moved back to the main chain.  

“I was thinking of this as a software engineering tool that could be used to make widespread changes,” Adam Back, now CEO at blockchain development company Blockstream, said in an interview with Bitcoin Magazine. “You could say, we are going to make a new version [of Bitcoin], and we think it will be ready in a year, but in the meantime, you can opt in early and test it.”

According to Back, sometime in the following year, on the Bitcoin IRC channel, Bitcoin Core developer Greg Maxwell suggested an idea for a “two-way peg,” where value could be transferred to the alternative chain and then back to Bitcoin at a later point.

A two-way peg addressed another growing concern at the time. Alternative coins, like Litecoin and Namecoin, were becoming increasingly popular. The fear was these “altcoins” would dilute the value of bitcoin. It made sense, Bitcoin Core developers thought, to keep bitcoin as a type of reserve currency, and relegate new features to sidechains. That way, “if you wanted to use a different feature, you wouldn’t have to buy a speculative asset,” said Back.

To turn the concept of sidechains into a reality, Back along with Maxwell and a few other Bitcoin Core developers formed Blockstream in 2014. In October that year, the group released “Enabling Blockchain Innovations with Pegged Sidechains,” a paper describing sidechains at a high level. Miller appears as a co-author on that paper as well.

How Sidechains Work

One important component of sidechains is a simplified payment verification (SPV) proof that shows that tokens have been locked up on one chain so validators can safely unlock an equivalent value on the alternative chain. But to work for sidechains, an SPV proof has to be small enough to fit into a single coinbase transaction, the transaction that rewards a miner with new coins. (Not to be confused with the company Coinbase.)

At the time the Blockstream researchers released their paper, they knew they needed a compressed SPV proof to get sidechains to work, but they had not yet developed the cryptography behind it. So they outlined general, high-level ideas.

The Blockstream paper describes two types of two-way pegs: a symmetric two-way peg, where both chains are independent with their own mining; and an asymmetric two-way peg, where sidechain miners are full validators of the parent chain.

In a symmetric two-way peg, a user sends her bitcoins to a special address. Doing so locks up the funds on the Bitcoin blockchain. That output remains locked for a contest period of maybe six blocks (one hour) to confirm the transaction has gone through, and then an SPV proof is created to send to the sidechain.

At that point, a corresponding transaction appears on the sidechain with the SPV proof, verifying that money has been locked up on the Bitcoin blockchain, and then coins with the same value of account are unlocked on the sidechain.

Coins are spent and change hands and, at a later point, are sent back to the main chain. When the coins are returned to the main chain, the process repeats. They are sent to a locked output on the sidechain, a waiting period goes by, and an SPV proof is created and sent back to the main blockchain to unlock coins on the main chain.  

In an asymmetric two-way peg, the process is slightly different. The transfer from the parent chain to the sidechain does not require an SPV proof, because validators on the sidechain are also aware of the state of the parent chain. An SPV proof is still needed, however, when the coins are returned to the parent chain.

The Search for a Compact Proof

In a sidechain, a compact SPV proof needs to contain a compressed version of all the block headers in the chain where funds are locked up from the genesis block through the contest period, as well as transaction data and some other data. In this way, an SPV proof can also be thought of as a “proof of proof-of-work” for a particular output.

Inspiration for the compact SPV proof comes from a linked-list-like structure known as a “skip list” developed 25 years ago. In applying this structure to a compact SPV proof, the trick was in finding a way to skip block headers while still maintaining a high level of security so that an adversary would not be able to fake a proof.

In working through the problem, Blockstream showed an early draft of its sidechains paper to Miller, who had been mulling over compact SPVs for a few years already.

In August 2012, in a post on a BitcoinTalk forum titled “The High-Value-Hash Highway,” Miller described an idea for a “merkle skip list” that a Bitcoin light client could use to quickly determine the longest chain and begin using it. In that post, he described the significance of the data structure as “absolutely staggering.”

When Miller read through the Blockstream draft, he spotted a vulnerability in the compact SPV proof described in the paper. Discussions ensued, but they “couldn’t find a way to solve that problem without compromising efficiency,” Miller said.

Miller’s non-trivial contributions to the Blockstream paper ended up being a few paragraphs in Appendix B that describe the challenges in creating a compact SPV proof.

It should “be possible to greatly compress a list of headers while still proving the same amount of work,” the section reads, but “optimising these tradeoffs and formalising the security guarantees is out of scope for this paper and the topic of ongoing work.”

That ongoing work remained stuck for three years.

Compact SPV

During that ensuing time, researchers at IOHK began taking a more serious interest in sidechains. Plans were taking shape for Cardano, a new proof-of-stake blockchain that IOHK had been contracted to build.

Cardano would consist of two layers: a settlement layer, launched in September 2017, where the money supply would be kept, and a smart contract layer. Those two layers would be two sidechain-enabled blockchains. In this way, the settlement could remain simple and secure from any attacks that might occur on the smart contract layer. But if IOHK was to get Cardano to work as intended, it needed to solve sidechains.

In February 2016, Kiayias, then a professor at the University of Athens, and two of his students, Nikolaos Lamprou and Aikaterini-Panagiota Stouka, released “Proofs of Proofs of Work with Sublinear Complexity” (PoPoW).

The paper was the first to formally address a compact SPV proof. Only, the proof described in the paper was interactive; whereas, to work for sidechains, it needed to be non-interactive.

In an interactive proof, the prover and the verifier enter into a back-and-forth conversation, meaning there could be more than one round of messaging. In contrast, a non-interactive proof would be a simple, short string of text that would fit neatly into a single transaction on the blockchain.

The PoPoW paper was presented at BITCOIN’16, a workshop affiliated with the International Financial Cryptography Association’s (IFCA) Financial Cryptography and Data Security conference. Miller, who was at the conference, approached Kiayias and shared an idea for making the protocol non-interactive.

It was a “nice observation,” Kiayias told Bitcoin Magazine, but making the proof secure was “not obvious at all” and would require significant work.

Zindros, who had just started working on his PhD under Kiayias, was also at the conference, and he needed a topic for his thesis. Kiayias saw a good fit, “so we pressed on, the three of us, and adapted the PoPoW protocol and its proof of security to the non-interactive setting,” Kiayias said.

In October 2016, Kiayias officially joined IOHK, and a year later, Kiayias, Miller and Zindros released “Non-Interactive Proofs of Proof-of-Work,” introducing a compact SPV proof five years after sidechains had first been talked about on Bitcoin forums.

“If it were interactive, I don’t know if it would have worked; with a non-interactive proof, it is really smooth,” Zindros told Bitcoin Magazine.

More Work to Be Done

Even with NiPoPoW, sidechains are still not fully specified. Several questions remain, including, how small can the proofs be made? After a transaction is locked up on one chain, how much time needs to pass before it can be spent on the other? And, will it be possible to move a token from a sidechain directly to another sidechain?

“A lot of theory still needs to be defined,” IOHK CEO Charles Hoskinson said in speaking to Bitcoin Magazine.

Also, while NiPoPoW is designed to work for proof-of-work blockchains, some believe that if blockchains are to take their place in the world on a grand scale, the future rests in proof-of-stake protocols like Ouroboros, Algorand or Snow White, which promise to be more energy-efficient than Bitcoin.

In particular, if Cardano, which is based on Ouroboros, is to work according to plan, IOHK researchers still need to discover a non-interactive proof of proof-of-stake (NiPoPoS).

Hoskinson is confident. “We can definitely do that,” he said. “We can definitely have a NiPoPoS. The question is how many megabytes or kilobytes is it going to be? Can we bring it down to 100 KB? That is really the question.”

This article originally appeared on Bitcoin Magazine.

from InvestmentOpportunityInCryptocurrencies via Ella Macdermott on Inoreader https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/sidechains-why-these-researchers-think-they-solved-key-piece-puzzle/

[lydiamarshall92]

There and Back Again: Global growth lessons from a Kiwi startup

1Above Chief Executive Stephen Smith

Achieving success in the travel market with a world-first flight recovery drink, Kiwi startup company 1Above is taking on the big names of the beverage industry by broadening their promise to the daily consumer. Chief Executive Stephen Smith shares his journey of achieving sky high success on the ground.

Stephen your background was in the corporate world – can you tell us how you got involved with a small New Zealand startup?

I wanted a new challenge and was offered the opportunity to take over the reins of 1Above in late 2014, when the company had been operating for four years with relatively good success. Coming from New Zealand’s largest alcohol company with a leading portfolio of beer, wine and spirit brands with a solid history of quality and heritage, I saw massive potential in 1Above’s unique travel recovery product. You don’t have to search very hard to find people’s opinion of our product.

I was approached to join 1Above from Lion when the company was going through a particularly difficult time, to make the hard decisions and grow the business from its startup status. While we had an extremely strong product position, the business was experiencing challenges around its focus and financial situation.

Can you describe some of the challenges when you took over?

Our small team was just trying to do too much, like opening two new kiosks simultaneously in the Australian market via Melbourne and Sydney airports. We had achieved great success in the travel sector through the airport channel in New Zealand, so there was no reason, we thought, we couldn’t achieve the same in Australia. After all, no one was offering what we were; a recovery drink specifically designed to prevent jetlag and fatigue, associated with flying. We hold exclusive rights to the key ingredient, Pycnogenol; the most clinically studied bark extract in the world, with more than 300 studies on its widespread health benefits. We have something no one else can offer in Australasia.

But what we found is while New Zealand’s domestic market is extremely supportive of ‘made in New Zealand’ and Kiwi startups, the international market is significantly more challenging. In Australia, our kiosk performance was measured against revenue generated per square metre, while being situated next to global luxury brands proving a difficult battle to win without the retail experience. We also suffered from a low priority status when the airports were experiencing extensive renovations and were moved around constantly, never good for business continuity.

I had to make a call, and pulled the plug on Australia.

What did you do next to solve the problem but also grow the business?

A change of approach led us to partnering with French giant Lagedere, with airport retailers all over the world, and UK giants WHSmith, both of whom we had established relationships with in New Zealand and Australia. While global relationships have been helpful, they do not guarantee success with local markets. Like every startup, we arrived at the ‘what next’ moment, on how to provide a return for our investors by achieving scale. While we had established a presence in global markets, achieving scale with one product in one channel was proving too difficult. The only real market which could provide genuine scale was the United States; a two-year battle for us, and counting.

When you’re forced into a position where things you’re trying aren’t responding as you’d hope, and you find yourself too reliant on external markets for success, you must be prepared to shake things up. We revisited our overall vision which was helping people to ‘fly well and arrive ready’, which proved constricting for where we wanted to be as a company.

How did you go about trying to solve this challenge?

We leveraged the success of 1Above’s travel recovery drink, which for many people is an infrequent occasion, to create a product with the same proven benefits for daily consumption. This would give us the scale we needed. As a New Zealand brand, we have been fortunate to receive widespread retailer support and have achieved more than 350 outlets to date. Everyone had heard about us in New Zealand, and showed interest. We took on a sales and merchandising partner to ensure we had customer-level representation. It began with Foodstuffs North and South Island, followed by Caltex, BP, Z Energy and Mobil. Without this level of support, we’d have to reassess and restrategise our position, which may not have been that attractive for our future.

What are your goals for the business and how will you achieve them?

Our plan is to double the size of the business every year for the next three years. As we’d found ourselves in a highly competitive market against serious players such as Frucor, Redbull, and Powerade, the importance of our product’s key point of difference really came to the forefront.

Next, it was imperative to listen to our stakeholders. We knew what our customers are saying. So, we work hard to listen to our retailers and understand their unique needs and requirements. We recognise that we don’t do what they do, therefore lack their experience, and do not share the same challenges. They are the experts within their industry and we’re happy to take their advice on the best approach. We have had to demonstrate our plans for the future, further innovation and our next move, all to provide business confidence.

Also, for a tiny team, it is critical to ensure a high level of staff engagement. Employee buy-in is crucial for alignment with wider business strategy, implementation and ultimately business success, as a small operator like us. Our investors are always kept in the loop with future plans, next steps and how we are tracking against projections.

What would you tell other businesses trying to do the same thing?

If you’re thinking about expanding your business, think long and hard about where your resources and collective energy will be spent.

Start with opting for a brutal approach to choosing your team. The team will make or break your business and ensuring you have the right one will determine much of your success. Take the time required to establish a lean, capable, and highly driven team, as your team will essentially be your eyes, ears, arms and legs. If one doesn’t work, the rest can’t function optimally.

Break even as quickly as you can, however you can. Get there, yesterday. It’s harder than it seems and we are yet to achieve it but it has to happen. We are constantly modeling to work it out.

Before even think about venturing outside of your home market, determine whether you really need to do it and whether it can be done locally. We have learned harsh lessons about venturing outside our home market and now know that even Australia is a graveyard to too many Kiwi brands who venture out in good will. More often than not, you can achieve scale right here at home with the right product or service.

Stephen Smith is CEO at 1Above.

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The post There and Back Again: Global growth lessons from a Kiwi startup appeared first on NZ Entrepreneur Magazine.

Read the original here: There and Back Again: Global growth lessons from a Kiwi startup

[thejustinmarshall]

Lessons From Eight Years Of Writing An Adventure Blog

One afternoon last August, a delivery truck rolled up outside my house in Denver. Two men got out, dollied a large box through the front door, unpacked a 6-foot long wooden workbench top and gave it a once-over to see if it had been damaged in shipping. I signed for the delivery, carried the wood and accompanying metal legs back to a 10-foot by 10-foot room at the back of our duplex, and put it all together.

A few minutes later, I dusted off my hands and stood in front of it: the first real desk of my outdoor writing career.

I’d been trying to be an adventure writer since 2004, been trying at it full-time since 2012—and I’d never had a place to set my laptop, pile up notebooks, stick post-it notes, or leave a printer plugged into a wall outlet. I’d typed in coffee shops, at friends’ kitchen tables, in the back of a van, at my own kitchen table, at airports, laundromats, anywhere I could when I had to. But now. A desk, in its own room. I must be a real writer now, right?

It’s funny how your definition of “real” changes.

—

In the spring of 2004, I had decided I was going to be an adventure writer. Not immediately, but someday. I had discovered Mark Jenkins’ columns in Outside, read Daniel Duane’s El Capitan book (despite never having climbed or seen El Cap), and tore through Jon Krakauer’s Eiger Dreams and Into the Wild. The model I understood from those writings—going on big adventures and writing stories about them—seemed like a dream job, although I had no idea if it was an actual job, or how a person could get that job. I did my master’s thesis at the University of Montana School of Journalism on peak bagging, and as a requirement for my magazine writing class, I had gotten published—an article in IDAHO Magazine about a road trip I’d taken the previous summer. The check for the article was for $40, or would have been, had I not asked the editor to please send me $40 worth of copies of the magazine instead, because I was so excited to have been published. It was a start, I thought. A slow one, but a start nonetheless. At $40 per article, I’d have had to write 233 articles each year just to crest the poverty line in 2004.

So I needed a real job, too. I applied at newspapers with no luck, so I got a job on the sales floor at the Phoenix REI to work while I sent out resumes and made calls to prospective journalism employers. I finally got a full-time editor/reporter/copy editor job at a small suburban weekly newspaper, and stayed on working part-time at REI.

In my spare time, I pitched every outdoor magazine I knew of, writing query letters that almost without fail resulted in rejection letters sent back to me weeks or months later. It was like walking up to a sport climbing crag, trying a route, falling after clipping the first bolt, failing to climb any higher, and moving on to the next route and repeating the process, with nothing to show for it. For months.

In my second year of pitching stories, I made $75 from one article. I moved to Denver to work at a small newspaper—but on the side, I kept pitching any outdoor publication I thought might pay. Almost all of them sent me rejections. In late 2006, John Fayhee at the Mountain Gazette liked a story I sent him enough to publish it and pay me $100. In mid-2007, I got a part-time job writing funny 100-word blogs for an outdoors website, at 15 cents a word, 2 to 3 blogs per week.

I kept working day jobs, first at the newspaper and then at a nonprofit that took urban teens on wilderness trips. After work, I obsessed over rock climbing routes, logistics of road trips I could take during my time off or over three-day weekends, read adventure books and magazines, and checked out guidebooks from the public library. I kept writing and trying to get published, chipping away at that idea of becoming a real writer.

I finally got a small assignment from a big magazine. I would interview a guy named Fitz Cahall, who had a podcast called “The Dirtbag Diaries.” I did the interview, wrote the 400-word story, sent it in, and … months later, I hadn’t heard from the editor. I checked back a couple times, and somehow the story had gotten lost in the editor’s spam folder. It never ran.

From the interview with Fitz Cahall, I held on to one part of his story: Fitz had wanted to become a magazine writer and had some success at it, but magazines weren’t interested in what he thought were his best story ideas. So he wrote them anyway, recorded them, and made them into a podcast—his own thing.

I ended up writing and recording an episode for The Dirtbag Diaries in mid-2008, starting a years-long relationship with Fitz and Becca Cahall. And, in late 2010, I followed Fitz’s thinking and took my rejected ideas (or ideas that were so ridiculous I’d never even pitched them) and started my own blog. In December 2010, I paid $12.17 for the URL Semi-Rad.com, and started writing short blog posts. I published the first four of them on February 2, 2011, and shared one of the posts with my few hundred Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

The first month, I published four blog posts, one every Thursday. My friend Josh Barker had told me that a regular publishing schedule would keep readers interested, so I decided to write one blog every week until something happened or I got sick of it. The first month, my blog got 646 page views. Not exactly setting the internet on fire.

The next month, I got 1,810 page views. The next month, still posting every week, 2,085 views, and then 1,506 views the month after that. It went like that for a while. I wrote about pumping your fist out the window of your car at the start of a road trip, about the amount of beer you should pay your friends back with after they did a favor for you (like letting you borrow gear or digging you out of an avalanche). I wrote about not buying new gear just because you can. Steve Casimiro from Adventure Journal reached out and asked if I would be interested in him re-posting some of my stories on his website and referring traffic back to me? Fuck yes I would. In October, I had more than 12,000 views. That December, Patagonia took out a full-page ad in the New York Times asking consumers to not buy Patagonia jackets if they didn’t need them, so I made a few knock-offs of their design, around other environmental issues. It took off, and that month, I had almost 30,000 page views. More importantly, I had survived 11 months of writing one blog post every week. So I kept going.

—

After almost six years of trying, I started getting magazine assignments, starting in early 2011 with a story I’d been pitching and had written for Climbing Magazine. I started writing more stories for them, and eventually a monthly column—which was titled Semi-Rad, like my blog. Over the course of the next few years, I wrote short and long pieces for almost every magazine I’d wanted to—a gear review here, a short piece in the front of the book there, the occasional feature story. Sometimes I loved the result, sometimes the magazine and I had different goals, and once my name actually got spelled wrong in my byline (not in an outdoor mag, but a men’s magazine doing some outdoor stuff). In mid-2013, I was working on an assignment for an outdoor magazine, and the editor said that when I was writing the feature story we were discussing, I should “imagine if you were writing about it for your blog.”

By the time I’d gotten to write for a few of the outdoor publications I’d always wanted to, I started to realize things were changing, for me and for everyone. In 2004, I’d wanted to write magazine feature stories, Jon Krakauer- and Daniel Duane-style—but in 2014, lots of magazines were shifting resources to online content, and often (but not always) decreasing resources devoted to publishing long features. Gone were the days (that I never experienced) of travel budgets and high-four-figure/five-figure story payouts—the kinds of things that “real writers” had. But the internet, which made life hell for lots of newspapers and magazines, was fantastic for people like me, who could hand-draw a flowchart about pooping in the woods or write a half-serious blog post about how much I hate (but kind of love) running and potentially reach thousands of people—or sometimes, only a few dozen, which happened lots of Thursdays. At the beginning of 2013, I landed a sponsor, Outdoor Research, whose support cosigned my efforts and made sure I had what I needed to keep it going.

—

In June 2014, I was driving around Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs doing research for a rock climbing guidebook I was co-authoring. The year before, I had put large “Semi-Rad.com” decals on either side of my Astrovan, which I was living in, thinking I needed to do that in order to deduct mileage on my taxes.

A car started tailgating me around the scenic loop, flashing its headlights. I wondered, “did I just cut that guy off? Is the van on fire?” I pulled over at the next pullout. The car pulled over, a guy got out, and introduced himself. His name was Willie Bailey, and he was a firefighter and photographer from Tennessee. He had been reading my blog for a couple years, and he had just read the road trip book I had self-published and got inspired to take a road trip himself—which he was on. Right now. We chatted a little bit, took a quick photo, and I got back in my van to drive away, thinking that was a pretty heartwarming side effect of writing a blog post every week for three and a half years.

This would happen more times over the next few years, and it’s not something they teach you in journalism school or creative writing classes: if you put a little bit of yourself out there and people can relate to it, sometimes you get to meet people you’d otherwise never meet, and hear a little bit of their story. And you don’t get that in every job.

—

There’s no monetary reward to having people you don’t know talk about some goofy thing you wrote, and it’s not a Pulitzer or National Magazine Award. But it was something I hadn’t considered when I started writing—that the weird shit I posted on my blog, which falls flat sometimes and makes it a little way around the internet some other times, could also become a piece of dialogue between friends. That not only do they laugh at the joke—which is all you hope for when you’re trying to be funny—but they laugh again later when they say it to a friend.

In late 2014, my friend Jim Harris wrote me an email from a bed and breakfast in Punta Arenas, Chile. He had been sitting on a couch around a wood stove with a group of people who were on their way to Torres del Paine when one of the group “started quoting your ‘Obsessive Campfire Adjustment Syndrome’ piece and the rest of the group filled in other memorable lines. I think they’ve memorized in a way I can only claim for a few Monty Python bits. Even 10,000 miles from home, the world’s a smallish place.”

—

Late last Monday night, I sat in my kitchen hand-writing thank-you postcards to the folks who support my creative efforts on Patreon, and realized my blog at Semi-Rad.com had turned 8 years old a few days before. I turned 40 last month, which means I’ve been writing Semi-Rad posts every week for a fifth of my life. If each blog was 500 words long, that’s well over 200,000 words written.

Since I started eight years ago, I’ve been able to successfully explore other ways to make a living besides writing a blog—public speaking, directing short films, writing books, drawing cartoons, and of course, writing for other publications. Some weeks I wondered if I should keep doing the blog, and some weeks it felt like no one read the blog at all.

But I had a place to write where no one told me what I could do and couldn’t do, for better (often) or for worse (hopefully not quite as often). I had a place to write an obituary for my friend Mick, who wasn’t a famous adventure athlete, but who I still quote to this day. I had a place to write about my mom, who climbs at a gym in Iowa, and my dad, who doesn’t climb at all, and about my friend Abi when she finally summited Mt. Shasta last summer. I wrote a story about my friend Nick’s rabid obsession with getting himself an old Trek 970 back in 2010, something he’d forgotten about until I reminded him last week. I don’t know if those stories would ever have gone anywhere if I hadn’t just done them myself, without caring whether 100 people or 100,000 people read them. (And let’s be honest—it was a little closer to 100).

Every once in a while someone asks what the word “Semi-Rad” means, and I explain that when I started the blog, I thought there was already plenty of outdoor media coverage of elite climbers, skiers, runners, and other record-breakers. I wanted to focus on the rest of us who love the outdoors—the things we have in common. I think those things are valuable too, and often ridiculous and worth laughing at.

If you ask any writer how to get started, I think you’ll get countless variations on one piece of common advice: Start writing. You just make yourself do it, even if you’re not sure if it’s any good at first. Writing is a lot like digging a hole in the ground: You only make progress after you actually start.

The one thing I’ve learned from making myself write something every week is this: You can’t hit a home run every week. Maybe you can’t hit a home run every month. But if you keep writing, sometimes you bunt, sometimes you strike out, and sometimes you get a walk. But if you get to first base, there’s someone out there who might need whatever it is you wrote, on that day. Even if the rest of the internet doesn’t seem to notice.

In mid-2017, Jonah Ogles, then an editor at Outside, reached out and asked if I’d be interested in having my Semi-Rad blog posts published as a weekly column on OutsideOnline.com. It was an unexpected, but welcome, honor for a blog born out of the fatigue of trying to get my stuff printed on someone else’s platform.

It was a totally different path than my adventure writing heroes, like Mark Jenkins, took, but making a living as a writer has never been straightforward, maybe less straightforward now than ever. If you had told me in 2008 that it was possible to get a book deal by writing really good Instagram captions, I would have said, “What the hell is Instagram?” in the same way if you’d told Mark Jenkins in 1998 that you could get a book deal by writing a blog, he probably would have said, “What the hell is a blog?” We’re all trying to figure it out as we go, whether you’re a publication like Outside or a hopeful somebody who just wants a few people to read your stories, in whatever format.

I don’t pretend to speak for all writers, but I think if you’re a writer and you’re honest with yourself, the thing you want most for your writing isn’t money or some sort of fame, but readers. You want a genuine connection with a few people. I don’t know if I’d say everything has turned out like I thought it would, but I’m grateful I found a small community of people who read some of my stories about all the things we love to do outside. I may not be filing dispatches from a base camp in the Karakoram or anything like the legendary writers I read, but I’ve had a great time trying to make sense of all the weird stuff we do out there—getting cold, exhausted, scared, stormed on, wondering why we do it until we get back home and immediately want to do it all again.

Eight years after starting a blog, and picking up that metaphorical shovel every week to keep digging that metaphorical hole, I still can’t say I know what a “real writer” is.

I do have a desk now, though. So I might as well stick with this writing thing.

—Brendan

The post Lessons From Eight Years Of Writing An Adventure Blog appeared first on semi-rad.com.

from Explore https://semi-rad.com/2019/02/lessons-from-eight-years-of-writing-an-adventure-blog/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[olivereliott]

Lessons From Eight Years Of Writing An Adventure Blog

One afternoon last August, a delivery truck rolled up outside my house in Denver. Two men got out, dollied a large box through the front door, unpacked a 6-foot long wooden workbench top and gave it a once-over to see if it had been damaged in shipping. I signed for the delivery, carried the wood and accompanying metal legs back to a 10-foot by 10-foot room at the back of our duplex, and put it all together.

A few minutes later, I dusted off my hands and stood in front of it: the first real desk of my outdoor writing career.

I’d been trying to be an adventure writer since 2004, been trying at it full-time since 2012—and I’d never had a place to set my laptop, pile up notebooks, stick post-it notes, or leave a printer plugged into a wall outlet. I’d typed in coffee shops, at friends’ kitchen tables, in the back of a van, at my own kitchen table, at airports, laundromats, anywhere I could when I had to. But now. A desk, in its own room. I must be a real writer now, right?

It’s funny how your definition of “real” changes.

—

In the spring of 2004, I had decided I was going to be an adventure writer. Not immediately, but someday. I had discovered Mark Jenkins’ columns in Outside, read Daniel Duane’s El Capitan book (despite never having climbed or seen El Cap), and tore through Jon Krakauer’s Eiger Dreams and Into the Wild. The model I understood from those writings—going on big adventures and writing stories about them—seemed like a dream job, although I had no idea if it was an actual job, or how a person could get that job. I did my master’s thesis at the University of Montana School of Journalism on peak bagging, and as a requirement for my magazine writing class, I had gotten published—an article in IDAHO Magazine about a road trip I’d taken the previous summer. The check for the article was for $40, or would have been, had I not asked the editor to please send me $40 worth of copies of the magazine instead, because I was so excited to have been published. It was a start, I thought. A slow one, but a start nonetheless. At $40 per article, I’d have had to write 233 articles each year just to crest the poverty line in 2004.

So I needed a real job, too. I applied at newspapers with no luck, so I got a job on the sales floor at the Phoenix REI to work while I sent out resumes and made calls to prospective journalism employers. I finally got a full-time editor/reporter/copy editor job at a small suburban weekly newspaper, and stayed on working part-time at REI.

In my spare time, I pitched every outdoor magazine I knew of, writing query letters that almost without fail resulted in rejection letters sent back to me weeks or months later. It was like walking up to a sport climbing crag, trying a route, falling after clipping the first bolt, failing to climb any higher, and moving on to the next route and repeating the process, with nothing to show for it. For months.

In my second year of pitching stories, I made $75 from one article. I moved to Denver to work at a small newspaper—but on the side, I kept pitching any outdoor publication I thought might pay. Almost all of them sent me rejections. In late 2006, John Fayhee at the Mountain Gazette liked a story I sent him enough to publish it and pay me $100. In mid-2007, I got a part-time job writing funny 100-word blogs for an outdoors website, at 15 cents a word, 2 to 3 blogs per week.

I kept working day jobs, first at the newspaper and then at a nonprofit that took urban teens on wilderness trips. After work, I obsessed over rock climbing routes, logistics of road trips I could take during my time off or over three-day weekends, read adventure books and magazines, and checked out guidebooks from the public library. I kept writing and trying to get published, chipping away at that idea of becoming a real writer.

I finally got a small assignment from a big magazine. I would interview a guy named Fitz Cahall, who had a podcast called “The Dirtbag Diaries.” I did the interview, wrote the 400-word story, sent it in, and … months later, I hadn’t heard from the editor. I checked back a couple times, and somehow the story had gotten lost in the editor’s spam folder. It never ran.

From the interview with Fitz Cahall, I held on to one part of his story: Fitz had wanted to become a magazine writer and had some success at it, but magazines weren’t interested in what he thought were his best story ideas. So he wrote them anyway, recorded them, and made them into a podcast—his own thing.

I ended up writing and recording an episode for The Dirtbag Diaries in mid-2008, starting a years-long relationship with Fitz and Becca Cahall. And, in late 2010, I followed Fitz’s thinking and took my rejected ideas (or ideas that were so ridiculous I’d never even pitched them) and started my own blog. In December 2010, I paid $12.17 for the URL Semi-Rad.com, and started writing short blog posts. I published the first four of them on February 2, 2011, and shared one of the posts with my few hundred Facebook friends and Twitter followers.

The first month, I published four blog posts, one every Thursday. My friend Josh Barker had told me that a regular publishing schedule would keep readers interested, so I decided to write one blog every week until something happened or I got sick of it. The first month, my blog got 646 page views. Not exactly setting the internet on fire.

The next month, I got 1,810 page views. The next month, still posting every week, 2,085 views, and then 1,506 views the month after that. It went like that for a while. I wrote about pumping your fist out the window of your car at the start of a road trip, about the amount of beer you should pay your friends back with after they did a favor for you (like letting you borrow gear or digging you out of an avalanche). I wrote about not buying new gear just because you can. Steve Casimiro from Adventure Journal reached out and asked if I would be interested in him re-posting some of my stories on his website and referring traffic back to me? Fuck yes I would. In October, I had more than 12,000 views. That December, Patagonia took out a full-page ad in the New York Times asking consumers to not buy Patagonia jackets if they didn’t need them, so I made a few knock-offs of their design, around other environmental issues. It took off, and that month, I had almost 30,000 page views. More importantly, I had survived 11 months of writing one blog post every week. So I kept going.

—

After almost six years of trying, I started getting magazine assignments, starting in early 2011 with a story I’d been pitching and had written for Climbing Magazine. I started writing more stories for them, and eventually a monthly column—which was titled Semi-Rad, like my blog. Over the course of the next few years, I wrote short and long pieces for almost every magazine I’d wanted to—a gear review here, a short piece in the front of the book there, the occasional feature story. Sometimes I loved the result, sometimes the magazine and I had different goals, and once my name actually got spelled wrong in my byline (not in an outdoor mag, but a men’s magazine doing some outdoor stuff). In mid-2013, I was working on an assignment for an outdoor magazine, and the editor said that when I was writing the feature story we were discussing, I should “imagine if you were writing about it for your blog.”

By the time I’d gotten to write for a few of the outdoor publications I’d always wanted to, I started to realize things were changing, for me and for everyone. In 2004, I’d wanted to write magazine feature stories, Jon Krakauer- and Daniel Duane-style—but in 2014, lots of magazines were shifting resources to online content, and often (but not always) decreasing resources devoted to publishing long features. Gone were the days (that I never experienced) of travel budgets and high-four-figure/five-figure story payouts—the kinds of things that “real writers” had. But the internet, which made life hell for lots of newspapers and magazines, was fantastic for people like me, who could hand-draw a flowchart about pooping in the woods or write a half-serious blog post about how much I hate (but kind of love) running and potentially reach thousands of people—or sometimes, only a few dozen, which happened lots of Thursdays. At the beginning of 2013, I landed a sponsor, Outdoor Research, whose support cosigned my efforts and made sure I had what I needed to keep it going.

—

In June 2014, I was driving around Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs doing research for a rock climbing guidebook I was co-authoring. The year before, I had put large “Semi-Rad.com” decals on either side of my Astrovan, which I was living in, thinking I needed to do that in order to deduct mileage on my taxes.

A car started tailgating me around the scenic loop, flashing its headlights. I wondered, “did I just cut that guy off? Is the van on fire?” I pulled over at the next pullout. The car pulled over, a guy got out, and introduced himself. His name was Willie Bailey, and he was a firefighter and photographer from Tennessee. He had been reading my blog for a couple years, and he had just read the road trip book I had self-published and got inspired to take a road trip himself—which he was on. Right now. We chatted a little bit, took a quick photo, and I got back in my van to drive away, thinking that was a pretty heartwarming side effect of writing a blog post every week for three and a half years.

This would happen more times over the next few years, and it’s not something they teach you in journalism school or creative writing classes: if you put a little bit of yourself out there and people can relate to it, sometimes you get to meet people you’d otherwise never meet, and hear a little bit of their story. And you don’t get that in every job.

—

There’s no monetary reward to having people you don’t know talk about some goofy thing you wrote, and it’s not a Pulitzer or National Magazine Award. But it was something I hadn’t considered when I started writing—that the weird shit I posted on my blog, which falls flat sometimes and makes it a little way around the internet some other times, could also become a piece of dialogue between friends. That not only do they laugh at the joke—which is all you hope for when you’re trying to be funny—but they laugh again later when they say it to a friend.

In late 2014, my friend Jim Harris wrote me an email from a bed and breakfast in Punta Arenas, Chile. He had been sitting on a couch around a wood stove with a group of people who were on their way to Torres del Paine when one of the group “started quoting your ‘Obsessive Campfire Adjustment Syndrome’ piece and the rest of the group filled in other memorable lines. I think they’ve memorized in a way I can only claim for a few Monty Python bits. Even 10,000 miles from home, the world’s a smallish place.”

—

Late last Monday night, I sat in my kitchen hand-writing thank-you postcards to the folks who support my creative efforts on Patreon, and realized my blog at Semi-Rad.com had turned 8 years old a few days before. I turned 40 last month, which means I’ve been writing Semi-Rad posts every week for a fifth of my life. If each blog was 500 words long, that’s well over 200,000 words written.

Since I started eight years ago, I’ve been able to successfully explore other ways to make a living besides writing a blog—public speaking, directing short films, writing books, drawing cartoons, and of course, writing for other publications. Some weeks I wondered if I should keep doing the blog, and some weeks it felt like no one read the blog at all.

But I had a place to write where no one told me what I could do and couldn’t do, for better (often) or for worse (hopefully not quite as often). I had a place to write an obituary for my friend Mick, who wasn’t a famous adventure athlete, but who I still quote to this day. I had a place to write about my mom, who climbs at a gym in Iowa, and my dad, who doesn’t climb at all, and about my friend Abi when she finally summited Mt. Shasta last summer. I wrote a story about my friend Nick’s rabid obsession with getting himself an old Trek 970 back in 2010, something he’d forgotten about until I reminded him last week. I don’t know if those stories would ever have gone anywhere if I hadn’t just done them myself, without caring whether 100 people or 100,000 people read them. (And let’s be honest—it was a little closer to 100).

Every once in a while someone asks what the word “Semi-Rad” means, and I explain that when I started the blog, I thought there was already plenty of outdoor media coverage of elite climbers, skiers, runners, and other record-breakers. I wanted to focus on the rest of us who love the outdoors—the things we have in common. I think those things are valuable too, and often ridiculous and worth laughing at.

If you ask any writer how to get started, I think you’ll get countless variations on one piece of common advice: Start writing. You just make yourself do it, even if you’re not sure if it’s any good at first. Writing is a lot like digging a hole in the ground: You only make progress after you actually start.

The one thing I’ve learned from making myself write something every week is this: You can’t hit a home run every week. Maybe you can’t hit a home run every month. But if you keep writing, sometimes you bunt, sometimes you strike out, and sometimes you get a walk. But if you get to first base, there’s someone out there who might need whatever it is you wrote, on that day. Even if the rest of the internet doesn’t seem to notice.

In mid-2017, Jonah Ogles, then an editor at Outside, reached out and asked if I’d be interested in having my Semi-Rad blog posts published as a weekly column on OutsideOnline.com. It was an unexpected, but welcome, honor for a blog born out of the fatigue of trying to get my stuff printed on someone else’s platform.

It was a totally different path than my adventure writing heroes, like Mark Jenkins, took, but making a living as a writer has never been straightforward, maybe less straightforward now than ever. If you had told me in 2008 that it was possible to get a book deal by writing really good Instagram captions, I would have said, “What the hell is Instagram?” in the same way if you’d told Mark Jenkins in 1998 that you could get a book deal by writing a blog, he probably would have said, “What the hell is a blog?” We’re all trying to figure it out as we go, whether you’re a publication like Outside or a hopeful somebody who just wants a few people to read your stories, in whatever format.

I don’t pretend to speak for all writers, but I think if you’re a writer and you’re honest with yourself, the thing you want most for your writing isn’t money or some sort of fame, but readers. You want a genuine connection with a few people. I don’t know if I’d say everything has turned out like I thought it would, but I’m grateful I found a small community of people who read some of my stories about all the things we love to do outside. I may not be filing dispatches from a base camp in the Karakoram or anything like the legendary writers I read, but I’ve had a great time trying to make sense of all the weird stuff we do out there—getting cold, exhausted, scared, stormed on, wondering why we do it until we get back home and immediately want to do it all again.

Eight years after starting a blog, and picking up that metaphorical shovel every week to keep digging that metaphorical hole, I still can’t say I know what a “real writer” is.

I do have a desk now, though. So I might as well stick with this writing thing.

—Brendan

The post Lessons From Eight Years Of Writing An Adventure Blog appeared first on semi-rad.com.