#is worth compensating for with a write off large enough to mean the practice would lose money on her services

[cognitiveleague]

Cut for work venting / length / sleep deprived ADHD run-on sentences. Basically just using Tumblr as a journal for stress relief since I’m awake

Goddddd it’s past 3 AM on a damn Saturday and I’m trying so hard not to spend half the weekend trying figure out any response to an upset client’s most recent email other than like.

“Hon, I think you may have mistaken my polite tone and commitment to engaging with you in good faith with decency and transparency for some kind of inclination to bend over backwards if a client is not happy for any reason? But I think my colleague and I have both been pretty straightforward with you about what kind of help we can and can’t offer in this situation and Karen-ing about it at this stage isn’t going to change that, especially since we have legal obligations to your insurance company to actually charge you what they have put toward your deductible costs for this year, so instead of stamping your feet about not being happy with the cost (which I *understand* is a lot and we’re all broke and tired and it hurts, and which I fundamentally believe a just world shouldn’t place on the patient, but we live in the world and the country we live in for now and you are older than my thoroughly grown ass so we are both going to have to be adults and deal with that part) please fucking work with me here so Incan at least give you all the patience you need and the assurance that your credit won’t be affected as long as you stick to some type of payment plan or at least keep in communication with us about any issues with the plan, or it WILL become my job to send your case to a collections agency, which exists to try and get your money without giving any kind of a fuck and will ABSOLUTELY both add 20% to your already difficult to bear balance and immediately report the debt to credit agencies without batting one goddamn eyelash, and under no circumstances do I want to have to do that any more than you want me to so please help me have another choice in the matter”

Or, less charitably, “oh my god I’m so sorry, I thought you told my coworker you were upset to receive a bill for [pre-expected write off amount] because you were confused, but if you ‘already know how to read a statement and know the actual balance is [much smaller amount] and that’s what [you’re] upset about’ then you must just have been trying to intimidate the entry-level worker with the wrong number on purpose to see if you could guilt her into doing her job wrong and getting in trouble for you, my bad!” or “look, it sucks, but management is not going to view the one mistake that was made on our end as one on the scale where it would be appropriate to respond by lowering the balance significantly, like if I stuck my neck out even further than I already have for you there’s a slim chance I could get you a small courtesy write off but it’s not too damn likely and would be small enough to feel like more of a slap in the face than just saying ‘no, the balance is correct and I’m afraid it isn’t something that’s negotiable at this point’ , and since you’ve been sort of a dick to my colleague and me so far (because you seem like the kind of person who thinks it’s appropriate to throw a fit at underpaid employees until someone kisses your ass and pretends the client is always right, but unfortunately for you my instinctive reaction to rudeness is not to kiss ass, it’s ‘oh that’s how you want to play? Let’s fucking dance, then, asshole’), I’m not sure why I should waste more of my limited time and annoy my bosses for the slim chance of a small change that would still leave you furious and dissatisfied anyway”

or “I think there may be some kind of error on the alleged list of practices your surgeon gave you for the mental health clearance, because if the other practices can actually provide this evaluation at the out of pocket price point you insist were on that list, I will eat my fucking hat. Like at this point it’s cost our practice more than that much to buy the blank forms needed for your evaluation, submit them for you, and pay me personally (even at the mildly insulting rate I get paid) for the amount of work hours I’ve spent reviewing your case, talking to office management to see where I could get them to compromise for you out of the goodness o my heart, and making sure my colleague’s and my own responses to you have all had the right balance of ‘compassionate and polite but setting clear expectations for what’s realistic to be asking at this point’ and you haven’t even paid us a damn cent of it yet?”

Or “look, I owned up to the one small contributing mistake on our end in the interest of being decent and honest to you and being able to grant you SOME ground in compensation, and I really do get where you’re coming from, but in total fairness here, even the least competent member of our billing team on a bad day would have easily caught that and cleared it up for you before services took place if you had made any attempt to ask *us* (the people whose job it is to know jack shit about insurance) what it was going to cost prior to your appointment, but what you did was wait until you were already in session and then ask the guy who, I cannot stress this enough, is a wonderful person who is great at the things that are his job but has a doctorate and decades of relevant experience in *psychotherapy and psychiatric testing*, not any sort of financial field, and works for a practice where someone else handles the accounting and insurance stuff for him, so why the fuck would *he* have been able to instinctively notice that the numbers looked wrong the way we would have in the 5 seconds of your appointment time he could spare to check on them for you???????? How was asking *him*, during the appointment, ‘doing your due diligence to research the costs in advance and make an informed decision’, you absolute turnip?????”

[scripttorture]

What would you expect from the public, including minors, when torturing someone in public is done, especially when it's a public spectacle and people actually come to watch. Is liking to watch torture a thing in this case? My story is a medieval/steampunk fantasy by the way.

Well Anon, this does still happen today. It happens in the country I grew up in and consider my home. So… my first suggestion is to throw out the implication that this is a weird historical thing the world doesn’t have to deal with any more. Because it is still very real. And if you get any kind of success with your story there’s a good chance some of your readers will have experience with this.

 It’s also significantly more complicated then ‘liking’ or ‘disliking’ so let’s unpack this a bit.

 I’ve never actually seen anyone maimed or executed. But as a kid of around 9-10 I knew kids my age who had. We used it as a sort of… pissing contest basically. Kids would brag about it to show how hard they were, in the same way we’d stuff chilis into our mouths and see who could last longest.

 It’s one of those bizarre kinds of ritualised self-harm that you end up performing in order to cope with awful things.

 Because witnessing this kind of stuff is harmful, to adults and children. It can leave people traumatised and displaying some of the symptoms I write about here.

 But, however old the characters, if they grew up somewhere where this is the norm then I absolutely guarantee they understand showing opposition is dangerous. They know their responses to these displays of brutality and power are used as a proxy for their loyalty and worthiness by the state.

 And boy if you are in any way outside the norm, if you are queer or the ‘wrong’ ethnic group or faith, then the pressure to conform here is so much more intense.

 I lived in Saudi, my home town is Dhahran. My parents are from opposite ends of Europe and they tried to raise me Christian. I still spent a lot of my teenage years unpacking stuff I’d absorbed about public executions, amputations, whippings etc.

 From the kids I knew growing up (anecdotal evidence no matter how empassioned) I’d say the ‘normal’ responses to witnessing this kind of state violence are varied. Kids would get nightmares, start showing signs of mild anxiety disorders or depression. They’d become moody, angry and generally unhappy. Which they’d sometimes take out on other people.

 But I can’t remember anyone ever explicitly linking it to what they witnessed. They’d try to hide this stuff. Some of them would double down on justifications for state violence (seemed pretty common.) They would, above all, deny there was a problem.

 Because admitting to mental illness made you ‘weak’ and admitting to doubts about state violence made you a ‘traitor’. Which is a pretty risky thing to label yourself (even by implication) when you live in a state that publicly mutilates and murders people. (Note the author’s bias as a committed pacifist may be showing.)

 As you may have noticed Anon, I still carry a significant amount of anger on this particular subject. This bottled vitriole is not directed at you or your story idea but at the states and politicians who make sure this brutality continues. It’s about the fact that I can remember a nine year old girl matter of factly talking about beheading at a birthday party.

 Stepping back from the personal side of things for a moment we know from studies of PTSD and trauma survivors generally that witnessing violence can lead to lasting psychological symptoms. Including PTSD.

 PTSD specifically is more likely when an individual is directly effected (ie physically hurt). But repeated exposure to traumatic events, including witnessing violence, makes the manifestation of long term symptoms more likely.

 So a character that has seen dozens of these attacks is more likely to develop a long term mental health problem then a character who has seen only one. Regardless of age.

 We can’t predict which individual symptoms an individual witness will develop or indeed when a witness might develop them. We just don’t know enough about how these things happen yet.

 Having said that, the possible symptoms for witnesses are pretty much identical to the possible symptoms for torture survivors (link above.) I’d advise against using chronic pain for witnesses unless you have a clear idea of an underlying cause; it seems (anecdotally) to be more common in people who directly experienced violence.

 If you decide to use insomnia there’s a masterpost on sleep deprivation here.

 For mental health problems like depression, anxiety etc remember there are physical symptoms as well as symptoms related to mood. Characters who are trying to deny they have a mental health problem might focus overly on physical symptoms. Depression can cause nausea, vomiting and tiredness/lack of energy which might be mistaken for disease. Anxiety can cause chest pain and shakes.

 Circling back let’s talk about some of the phrasing in this question for a moment. Because ‘choose to watch’ misunderstands the way states use these public displays of violence.

 Attendance and witnessing of public executions and torture is often enforced. Sometimes overtly and sometimes more tacitly. Because the point of these displays is to hammer home the power of the state. That doesn’t work if people can easily choose not to go.

 Here’s an example of what that overt and tacit enforcement looked like back home.

 Tacit enforcement came from the timing and placement of executions and amputations. They took place on weekends, when almost everyone was off work. They were carried out in major towns and cities, where the population density was higher. The venue was typically on a main thoroughfare close to important sites. Which ensured a high volume of people would be in the area when the execution took place, whether there was due to be an execution or not.

 So picture the town or city this is taking place in, in your story. When are the public holidays? Where are the markets? Where are the most popular religious venues? At what time will the most people be in these areas?

 All of that will tell you where an execution or public torture is likely to take place. Because if you set this shit up in eye sight of the place most people buy food, at the time when the most people are out, you get witnesses.

 Whether they want to be witnesses or not.

 Overt enforcement, on the low end of the scale, means having officials among the crowd pushing people towards the scaffold. At home this seemed to be targetted towards children and people who were judged as ‘other’. Different races to the majority, people who might have been read as a different religion, people who might have been read as queer etc.

 This is because the message is ‘This could be you.’

 I know practices in other countries have sometimes gone beyond this. Police or armed officials will sometimes go out and gather a crowd of witnesses by just… approaching people on the street and demanding they attend.

 This approach requires quite a bit of man power and is not practical or necessary in every setting. In most cases setting things up in the right place and time is enough to ensure a large number of witnesses.

 What I’m trying to illustrate here is that a lot of people will see this stuff without having made a conscious choice to do so.

 And making a conscious choice to see it… well it does say something about the character but not in the way you’re thinking.

 Because these displays are all about the power of the state. Witnessing them, responding to them is performance and it’s a performance of state loyalty. You can’t expect someone to give their true opinion on public displays of violence when criticism or voicing ‘dislike’ could lead to them being targets of violence.

 Basically if you’ve got characters going to see this stuff regularly then it’s worth asking why they feel the need to display their loyalty in this way. Sometimes it’s because they really really believe in the state. But often… they’re compensating for something.

 Wrapping up I think it’s important to note there’s often a difference between what people say about this stuff versus what they actually feel. And that’s because these things are explicitly political and explicitly about the power a state has over it’s subjects.

 The way individuals respond to these things in public and what they say about them in public effects how they are treated. Sometimes it comes with obvious legal sanctions. Even if it doesn’t… these displays are entirely about reminding people the state can kill them.

 And it doesn’t actually discourage crime or civil disobedience but it does create a climate of fear and hostility which permeates daily life.

 Think about why the state is insecure about their power. Think about how your characters live with that background radiation and whether it feeds into cultural ideas around things like martyrdom or nobility of suffering.

 Remember that there is a difference between public and private life. Existing in these kinds of brutal states often means having quite a sharp distinction between them. This can create very strong bonds to those the characters trust. It can also create a big difference between private and public personas.

 If you’re writing a world where public torture and executions are happening there’s more going on then just individual character’s reactions. You are saying something about the world, the ruling class and the politics of the area.

 Take the time make sure you know what you want to say.

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[welcometothemxdhouse]

Lectures (pt2)

Pat two babyyyyyyy! I’ve never written a part two for anything before i hope it’s okay...i put a tiny Beauty and the Beast reference in cause it’s my favourite film idk it seemed cute...

I’m gonna write a part three, I promise :) 

Tags for the people who asked for part 2: @prurientpuddlejumper​ @charlottegrice @feedthemadness-sweetie​

Warnings: none except, again, don’t get into irresponsible relationships lmao.

Not my gif, thank you to the person who made it :)

You knocked lightly on the large wooden door in front of you. Your last seminar had felt like it lasted a lifetime but finally you were stood, shifting nervously, in the corridor which held the offices of the psychology department. You ran your hands through your hair and debated knocking again before a small but assured voice shouted “Come in”.

You pushed open the door by its fancy gold handle and stepped into Doctor Chilton’s office. “Yeah...seems about right” you laughed to yourself as you looked around at the office that was bigger than your whole apartment. The high ceilings and white walls made the room feel cold and, despite the large wooden desk and matching dark chair, they crowded the man sat in the middle. The walls were lined with old, worn books and you thought that some of them were probably worth more money than you’d ever had in your bank account. Everything about your professor screamed over-compensation and superiority, but as your mind flashed back to the defeated look he gave you in the lecture hall when you stepped away from him, you knew there was a lot to uncover about Doctor Frederick Chilton. You wondered if he even knew himself under this charade.

“Have you read all of those?” You asked, awkwardly gesturing towards the books and, subsequently, breaking the silence as you suddenly became aware he had been watching you gawk at his belongings like a child. 

“The books?”, he chuckled to himself, “Definitely not. Some of them are in Latin.” 

You stared at the man in front of you for a few seconds, slightly dumbfounded at the personality change he had seemingly undertaken while you were in your seminar.

“...Did you just make a joke?” 

“I am not incapable of human emotion” He scoffed, making you worry you had offended him before you had even been in his presence for a minute.

“No I - I didn’t mea-” You stammered before he cut you off,

“It’s okay, I know. Is there something I can help you with, Y/N?” 

You felt the mood in the room shift when he spoke your name, his voice dropping as he pronounced every syllable. You stepped forward, expecting him to make a move, or at least stand up. He didn’t. He just sat there, behind the desk that was almost as big as his tiny-ass self, watching you with a self-assured smirk. You would have been offended at his nonchalance if you weren’t so goddamn horny-sitting through a two hour seminar with the lingering feeling of your professor’s lips on yours was satisfying some fantasy you didn’t even realise you had. Not until you had encountered Doctor Chilton anyway. Fine! If he wanted to play a game then he would meet his match with you.

“Yes actually. I wanted to talk about the finals.” 

You walked over to the chair on the opposite side of his desk, dropped your bag, sat down and relished the confused look on the poor doctor’s adorable face.

“I wanted to ask if there were any specific topics I should be focusing on. I realise you can’t tell me about the exam itself but you mark my work-is there anything I should work on, sir?” You continued, watching his smirk drop as you reached the last word. Doctor Chilton shifted uncomfortably in his seat and you giggled to yourself as you remembered all the times you had done the same action while half-listening, half-daydreaming during his lectures. He didn’t say anything but just looked at you, sceptical, almost unsure as to whether you were actually here for innocent reasons. Both of you were acutely aware of the fact that he was still actually your professor, and would be for a while yet. The thought of it sent a shiver down your spine. You stood up and walked around to his side of the desk-mimicking what he had done just a few hours prior-and perched on the edge, opening your legs slightly to leave him in no doubt as to your intentions. He shifted his chair forward so he was positioned between your legs before looking up and locking his eyes with yours. As you took in each other’s presence for a few seconds, you caught the smallest hint of something flash behind the green of his eyes, causing you to surge forward and capture his lips with yours for the second time that day. You ran your hand across his shoulder and tangled your fingers in the soft hair at the nape of his neck, his hands coming to rest on your thighs as you slid off the desk and straddled his lap. Despite being older than you, (meaning you had wrongly assumed more experienced), he wasn’t the best kisser but fuck did he make up for it in enthusiasm. His tongue explored your mouth with a desperation you had never experienced with anyone else before, and the shameless moans he was coaxing out of you as his hands grabbed at every part of you he could was proof enough to both of you that you were enjoying it. Your hands made their way to his stubble and you felt your underwear dampen even more at the small groans and whimpers he made when you began to kiss down his neck and over his adam’s apple. 

You had just begun to reach down and unbuckle his belt when the sound of a heavy knock on the office door made Doctor Chilton practically jump out of his skin. You grabbed onto the sides of the chair before you fell off his lap. 

“Doctor Chilton?” A voice asked from behind the door. You and said doctor stared at each other for a few seconds, partially terrified the owner of the voice would discover the two of you in this position and partially trying to hold in laughter at the ironic and irritating timing (although the latter was entirely on your part-you had locked the door when you walked in-you knew you were safe). It seemed the universe didn’t want you to fuck your professor today and you were incredibly annoyed about that.

“It’s Doctor Bloom”, he whispered, “she won’t go away.”

You sighed and lifted yourself off the doctor’s lap, grabbing your bag and walking towards the door. You waited until he had finished buckling his belt before flicking the lock and opening the door to a rather grumpy-looking Doctor Bloom. You turned around as you stepped out of the office, glancing at Doctor Bloom to make sure she was listening:

“Thank you for the advice, Doctor Chilton. See you next week.” 

As you walked back to your apartment you couldn’t shake the look he gave you before you kissed him. There was something in it. Or maybe, more significantly, there was nothing in it. Maybe, you thought, for the first time someone had seen behind his arrogance, his ego, his fancy suits and the fake gold door handles. Doctor Chilton was a broken man, and dear god you wanted nothing more than to pick up the pieces and put him back together again.

[regrettablewritings]

How differently do they think of each other now compared to when they first met?: You thought of Clark as anyone who’d ever met him before did: He was timid, and something about his demeanor seemed poorly suited for the frame that actually portrayed it. However, he seemed harmless enough; nothing worth digging into. That was what you had made sure to take note of during your period as a mole for one “Mr. Knight.” (You really wished Mr. Wayne would’ve thought up a less laughable alias, but he wasn’t paying you to criticize. Only to keep your finger on the pulse of Metropolis by infiltrating the ranks of the Daily Planet). However, as time went on, that initial response seemed to shift somewhat.

It didn’t take long for you to notice his frequent disappearances during the work day. When you inquired about it, an apparent friend of his, Lois, explained that it had something to do with some “health concerns” or whatever story he was supposedly working on that week. You raised a brow at the matter but took note for future reference. Part of you wanted to believe that your job (your real one as a mole) had been made a lot easier by potentially having a link to finding out who the caped Kryptonian was. But another part of you was suspicious of the possibility; after all, that would be far too good of luck for that to be the case, right? Probably.

You would’ve been happy to have left it like that, had it not been for the brief but relatively multiple occurrences where you’d witnessed Clark be able to perform acts that would have required excessive strength such as moving a full file cabinet with ease, or gripping the edge of his desk enough to snap the pulpy wood it was made out of. It was perhaps in your need to justify everything that wound up being your downfall. You were on a mission – a very important one at that – and it wouldn’t do to constantly pester your boss about every strange thing that occurred in the area. (If that were the case, you would’ve had the Bruce Wayne lurking around the nightclub scene, intimidating every other person who could do a vape trick through a gaged hole in their mouth.)

In this case, you looked to the small file of Daily Planet workers that Mr. Wayne had provided you with, pleased to use Clark’s farm boy heritage as an excuse for his freakish strength (never mind that he supposedly had health issues that may or may not have a supposed effect on it). But perhaps also you just needed a reason to not have to be suspicious of him: He was, from what few interactions the two of you had had, a very nice guy. Not a Nice Guy™, but a man who appeared to be nice by nature. You sure as heck never met one back in Gotham!

Clark admittedly didn’t have much of an opinion on you for the first chunk of your time undercover. It wasn’t necessarily that you didn’t appear in his awareness enough for him to form an idea of you, it was just that with his self-appointed position as a sort of guardian of the Earth (or at least Metropolis), learning about new coworkers wasn’t really on the top of his list. Especially with this Batman nonsense beginning to spill over from across the bay. But from what he did manage to take note of, however, you were polite and dedicated, always seeing your assigned tasks to the end – which was undeniably something that Clark couldn’t always say for himself.

He didn’t expect the latter to come back to bite him in his nigh-on invincible ass, though.

It didn’t matter to you that he’d insisted that all was forgiven: The amount of guilt you’d accumulated after being tied up into his near-defeat just wouldn’t quit.

“Please,” you said, almost seriously, “punch my body backwards. Fling me into the sun… Lois mentioned you got a place in the Arctic, right? Drop me off there and leave me to fend for myself.”

Once again, Clark found himself laughing (albeit in an attempt to alleviate the tension).

“It’s okay,” he swore. A beat before shrugging. “Well, not okay … But it’s all said and done. You didn’t mean any harm –”

“This entire UC mission was to figure out who Superman was so my boss could kick the shit out of him.”

“… Well, you didn’t mean the extent of the harm, anyway.”

Even after you placed your two-weeks notice at the Daily Planet, thus ending your time in Metropolis, the apologies wouldn’t quit. Nor did your efforts to attempt proportionate compensation via expensive fruit baskets.

(“Wow,” Lois breathed, observing the intricate designs carved into a large watermelon. The great fruit itself had been converted into a basket that now held grapes and honeydew and all sorts of other natural goodies. “Somebody must really like you, Clark.” She smirked as Clark’s ears burned red. He cast his eyes downward, but he knew she knew.)

But eventually he must have gotten sick of fruit or acquired a compost pile too large for the likes of the city, because eventually he contacted you and suggested the two of you settle this in a more agreeable way: Having a nice dinner and chatting. Even though Clark insisted it was something he’d managed to pull together, the fact that the restaurant was practically bare save for the staff gave you the creeping suspicion that he had called in a favor with Mr. Wayne. You intended on asking Clark if this had been the case (aside from his alter ego, the man was pretty honest about everything else), but first: You had to talk about the fight that happened so long ago.

It was by no intention (at least, not of your own) that the discussion would diverge into other topics, which then turned into conversations all a world of their own. Things like how different Metropolis was from Gotham. Or your respective personal lives when not saving the world or writing for a flimsy paper or being a billionaire’s second righthand. Or favorite dishes to cook. Or favorite past times. By the time the night was over, you’d forgotten what the two of you had come together for in the first place.

Fast forward to now, when the two of you are a couple. You still think he’s a dorkish sweetheart, but really only when he’s in civilian mode. This is because you’ve since come to know Clark as being far more multidimensional than the stereotypical, sheepish lad he sells himself as. You respect his sacrificing attitude, nerve-wrecking as it can often be. It’s interesting how a man can seem so ideal yet struggle so much with the weight of what his abilities carry, and he lets you know about that weight often enough. He wants to be the best hero he can, but that’s just plain impossible. Nevertheless, he tries and sometimes he pushes himself too far in the attempts. He needs a lot more comfort and validation than he lets in on, of which you are glad to provide.

Clark is quite glad to learn that being ambitious wasn’t just a trait you wore for your time undercover – it was something that you had arrived in Metropolis with, and one that you carried out in everything you did no matter how big or small. Let’s be real, Clark’s always admired a go-getter, so it’s no surprise that that is perhaps the trait he’s most excited about seeing in you. He admires your openness to carrying out tasks, something of which he can’t quite do as often as he’d like due to who and what he is. However, he’s more than happy to support you because you’re his biggest cheerleader and have faith in him. Going off of this, he also appreciates your loyalty. It’s an impassioned sort, assisted by the aforementioned sense of dedication you display. Once your mind is made up, it would take either a lot or your own self to actually sway you off the course you’d set. No wonder he was able to buy you as a genuine journalist for so long!

What do their friends/family think of their relationship?: Given that he’s far less hostile towards Clark post-fight, Bruce doesn’t feel nearly as threatened about the relationship as he probably could’ve been. Of course, he’s still put off by it: He hadn’t expected his spy to come back dating the very man he’d been afraid of all these years. However, given that he’s grown to trust Clark as a person, all Bruce can do is sigh heavily and just let things happen. The both of you are grown-ups, he trusts nothing weird is going to happen.

“Besides,” he resigns, “at least the guy can protect you if need be.” Damn right he could.

Neither of you get the chance to even tell Lois before she figures it out (the woman isn’t an award-winning investigative journalist for nothing). Honestly, she thought the two of you had been dating long before you actually began (“I thought that the fruit baskets were little tokens of affection after the fifth week of it happening,” she said). However, she is quick to regard the relationship as something straight out of a cheesy romance novel and she’s absolutely living for it.

“Enemies-turned-lovers – god, can Clark ever be a part of something not cliché?” she giggles into her morning coffee the day she figures out the situation. Suffice to say she’s at least glad that the man is actually interacting with more people on a regular basis than just her. On that note, the League also soon finds out (because let’s be real, Diana could either see it in Clark’s features, or Bruce blabbed about it). With the exception of Bruce (who is exasperated about it), the League is predominately neutral regarding the relationship. Actually, scratch that: Barry bluntly comments about how strange the union is because “didn’t [Clark] almost die because of the information [you] got on [him]?” He doesn’t mean to come off in any negative kind of way, it just perplexes him at first. However, given that he and Clark are “speed buddies” and therefore share kindred, sprinted spirits, he trusts Clark’s decision and is happy for him.

When you finally videochat your family so they can finally lay their eyes on your boyfriend, you have to pray to whatever god is out there that the camera feed is too grainy for them to make out Clark’s features too well. When your sibling commented on how Clark looks vaguely familiar, your stomach took a plunge into your bowls. Thankfully, Clark was able to play it off as a joke about how he just has “basic white guy face.” It manages to get a chuckle out of your family. All in all, they think you’ve found yourself a “fine young man.” It’s your friends, however, you struggle the most with. It’s not that they disapprove of the relationship – far from it, in fact – it’s just that with them being physically present and far more social media savvy, it’s harder to keep them from recognizing Clark as the controversial Kryptonian. As a result, Clark kept his almost sheepish workplace demeanor, adding fuel to the image by always opting to wear clothes that are just unflattering to his figure. Nothing godawful, but definitely nothing to indicate at the 6’1” mass of pure muscle that he really was.

No neither side’s surprise, they bought it. Mainly because Clark was naturally very likable. Your friends boldly praise Clark for being “a rare breed of man”, and you for managing to snag him. It’s when they ask you guys how you met, however, that things had to be fudged a bit. As far as they know, you two met while he was interviewing you for a piece that wound up getting cancelled. You’re pretty sure they wouldn’t be able to handle learning you’re involved with espionage, much less that it was the reason you are now dating Superman.

How do their personalities/skills complement or contrast with each other?: While both you and Clark are go-getters, it’s really only in your own respective rights. For example, it’s in his nature to present it as tamer. He works in ways that, at their core, are meant to minimize damages to the best of his ability. (Whether or not this actually plays out, of course, depends on the circumstances.) This isn’t to say that you’re necessarily rambunctious but being that you were trained under and employed by a man with an “any means necessary” point of view, it’s easy to sometimes let your ambitions get the better of you. You both are also skilled in the ways of being elusive, with it being in your job description by the nature of the job, and with it being a necessity for him to be able to be Superman and Clark separately.

What is their favorite aspect of each other?: Even from day one, with what little you knew or cared about Clark, you had to admit: You admired his kindly nature. Depressing as it was to say, it just wasn’t a common thing to find in people, much less the men hardened by urban living. And your job and all its accompaniments hadn’t necessarily convinced you otherwise – you were just so used to seeing and reporting horrible, dark things about seemingly nice people that you had lost quite a bit of hope by the time Clark had rolled around. In fact, you honestly didn’t really by his willingness to help or his politeness – at first. But once he proved that everything about his efforts was genuine, you couldn’t help but admire those traits. A little too much so, in your initial opinion.

Part of you even questioned your own reliability, that maybe you took small, normal instances of him being a decent human and exaggerated them to godlike status to make your eventual romantic relationship with him more justifiable. But ultimately you clung to it: The universe was offering you a walking piece of Heaven, who were you to truly deny yourself that? Of course, it sometimes exhausted you to see him try to fulfill expectations that weren’t even necessarily there (especially with his Clark Kent alias), but more on that later. In healthy doses, his unselfishness was his strongest point.

Having been raised in a farming community, Clark grew up appreciating the value of working hard to get results. This has since bled into the real world where go-getters tend to gain some bit of admiration within him, especially those who use their determination to see a job through to a greater good. Granted, the situations wherein you tended to use this trait of yours are a bit controversial: Espionage, for all intents and purposes, was a shady business to get into, especially since his first awareness of your involvement in it required you to be a mole and feed your employer information, of which subsequently got Clark’s ass kicked. But you win some brownie points when he gets to observe that same diligence in you outside of work. If you set your sights on a project or something you wish to acquire, you’re going to see it through, from getting a recipe for a stay-in date night down, to attempting to fix the dryer despite knowing very little about handyman-ship.

Suffice to say, godly being loves a trier.

Do either of them have pet peeves about each other?: It may seem cold, but you hate that Clark blames himself for not being able to stop anything and everything. It’s ridiculous. He may be “godlike” to the eyes of many, but that doesn’t make him God, much less suggest that even God helps everybody. He just needs to accept to the vest of is ability that there are some (and by some, you mean plenty) of things he can’t do. That’s what makes him human. He doesn’t … take this bluntness too well. Yes, he knows you’re right, but the delivery of this type of sensitive subject doesn’t always flow sweetly through your lips. And that’s what he doesn’t like.

Your concern for his self-validation doesn’t always translate as being from a place of good intentions, unfortunately. Sometimes you just come off as cold and cruel. And that is probably when he dislikes from you: That despite being a very caring person, you seem to be a little more detached compared to him. You’re more so about people rather than for people, whereas he has built himself up as a figure for people and about people. As a result, he sometimes feels beside himself, thinking that your aloof nature shouldn’t be excused by what you’ve experienced and that it only contributes to a bigger problem as a whole.

The truth of the matter is that while both sides have valid arguments, the delivery of such concerns – especially when in the heat of an argument – can result in ill delivery of either impression.

The words “martyr syndrome”, “ridiculous”, “cold”, and “selfish” are likely to be thrown about until you either storm off or he practically blasts out of the apartment before he accidentally lasers the kitchen counter out of rage.

How would each reconcile with each other after a fight?: Cool down time is especially important in a situation wherein one member of the couple is capable of accidentally setting off a very dangerous super power when enraged. Clark would never hurt you, mind you; even when frustrated with you, he would never wish you ill in spite of what he may imply when blinded by anger. However, you make him pretty vulnerable, mind you. And sometimes, that vulnerability may mess with his ability to focus on trying not to smash a balled fist against the coffee table and turning it into toothpicks upon impact. And while you may not be anywhere near that strong or gifted with abilities that would allow you to destroy things with the same capacity, you still have plenty of anger to simmer down from.

Screaming into a pillow usually only does so much (mostly just making your throat and head hurt), so more often than not you’ll try to nap away the pain. If you manage to wake up before Clark comes back, there’s a slight chance you’ll be in a better mood. Maybe not a perfect one, but you’ve at the very least calmed down a bit. Depending on the situation, you may have even accepted that you can’t stay mad forever, let alone with him, and you want to just end this silly dispute and make peace. You wait up for him to return which, in itself, is a feat considering that his abilities allow him to literally travel all over the world in record time – which he has done in some cases under the duress of an argument. If you stay up for hours, even into the blooming light of the rising sun, he won’t even try to talk with you when he returns – he’ll just usher you back to bed and quietly say you’ll talk when you’re both well-rested.

When that time eventually comes, the keyword here is “softer.” Speak what you mean in softer language. Don’t sugarcoat it, but there’s definitely a better way to state your claim than, “Shit happens everywhere in the world, it’s not your job or even your ability to clean it all up, nor should you kick your own ass about it.” Clark will be patient and let you tell your side, nodding or furrowing his brows at certain comments, before telling his own side of the situation regarding himself. Then, when you’re ready, he’ll confide in you (in softer terms) his worry that you’re being too indifferent about the current state of the world and his place in them. He understands you don’t mean to come off in such a way, but it just concerns him that you’ve really given up on everything.

Of course, you haven’t. You just felt it was easier to cope with everything this way. He understands. Just like deep down, you understand that your beloved boyfriend just wants to bring to the world more peace than there was before he came. Neither part may necessarily agree with the others’ methods or how it may impact them (making you cold, making him filled with anxiety), but the most that you can do is be there for one another. Offer each other support and love and keep as much of a balance as possible. Because in the end, you keep him grounded and Clark lifts you up.

What would be their ideal vacation getaway together?: It’s hard to place where or even what vacationing with Clark would look like to be honest. Given who Clark is, he can’t always just up and decide to take a break. At least, that’s what he convinces himself. And it drives you absolutely nuts! Once Lois and Diana catch wind of this, they’re on Clark’s back like college students on free food, scolding him for “neglecting his boyfriend duties.” He only really gives in after Diana’s fifty-fifth insistence that the League can handle things in his absence. However, it then becomes a matter of where to go.

Given his abilities, he can and has easily traveled to other countries in very little time with few to no difficulties. But since he more often than not is not there to take in the scenery or culture, this makes it only a bit easier. However, you insist that on vacation he ought to act a little more normal so that he can get the full experience. This means you have to choose a vacation destination wisely, otherwise y’all have wasted money. Generally speaking, Clark’s nervousness about being too far from Metropolis is likely going to affect how far the two of you go at first, never mind how easy it would be for him to just fly back if the League truly did need him. However, enough nudging can result in a trip a little further from Metropolis than Clark would have expected to be besides Smallville.

He finds that he likes Yosemite Park. Not so much the crowds it tends to draw, but definitely the hiking trails and the potential picnics that could be had further away from the screeches of children and bellowing of their frustrated parents. Plus, his abilities make going further inward and elsewhere all the more easy, with getting lost or having to escape potentially dangerous animals being a thing of the past when Clark can easily fly above the treetops and back toward civilization if need be. Of course, he still tries to avoid being cocky and to keep his wits about him, but for the most part, Clark finds himself enjoying the vacation. Once he’s gotten through his hesitancies and potential guilt about relaxing, he practically collapses into a puddle of released stresses, his head warming your lap as the two of you enjoy the gentle breeze of the little patch of forest you decided to spend your little picnic for two in.

He dreadfully misses it when it comes time for him to resume his jobs as both a reporter and as guardian of Metropolis (and, furthermore, the world).

Think of a new way (AU, different situation, etc.) they could have met for the first time

The world was strange, and Clark wasn’t sure how much right he had to conclude that for himself. Because, on one hand, he was a flying, laser-shooting alien with unparalleled strength. But on the other, he was involved with a team composed of two technical demigods (both whose people were thought to be myths), a cyborg revived from the brink of death by a box, and a man fast enough to phase through solid material with just the proper amount of focus. This went without mentioning the fact that his enemy-turned friend was a billionaire who’d been dressing like a bat for the last three decades but, all things considered, that was arguably normal by comparison.

But, with the exception of Victor, you never would’ve assumed such oddities about any of them. Not at first glance at least. But that was the point: The world could only handle so much strangeness before people became too opposed to it for it to carry on. Which was why it made Clark a little more than on edge when things around Metropolis started to seem a little … odd.

It started off with little things: Black marks appearing in alleyways, cracking and booming noises often occurring before or after. “Not unlike thunderclaps,” witnesses would later say. TVs and other electrical devices going wonky or even outright snapping out of life. Fuse boxes would be blackened, the areas around them sometimes scorched. But the electric companies couldn’t find anything about the equipment that would suggest sabotage; and inspectors on the case found little to nothing that could suffice as evidence that there was purposeful vandalism. And with all the more obvious surveillance cameras damaged before any footage could be captured, there was only so much to go on. There was little rhyme or reason indicating a pattern to which areas got struck besides the fact that they tended to be in wealthier areas, but considering much of Metropolis was inhabited by the upper-class, it was nearly a moot note so the likelihood of a successful stakeout was remarkably slim – if performed by the average cop.

Bruce wasn’t a cop. But he also wasn’t the average detective. It had taken some time and a lot of surveillance, coupled with Lois’ own findings done on her own time, but by the end of a month and a half, they were pretty certain they had found their culprit. All that was left was to have Clark find them and bring them in, hopefully to join the League.

Why Clark?

“Pretty sure that if you get electrocuted, you’ll just register it as a tickle,” Bruce admitted. Blunt, but fair.

Still, Clark couldn’t help but think as he scouted the skies one night, maybe the rich guy who has plenty of time the next day to rest might want to go searching in the middle of the night?

But there was no use in arguing, much less at this point. Though some small part of him wish he’d put up a bit more of a fight beforehand. Normally, Clark was glad to have found the city experiencing little to no issues, especially at night. However, considering the added weight of expectations placed on this particular outing, there he couldn’t help but hold a little bit of anticipation in him –

VwwmmmmmpapapapKRACK.

It was faint, being in the distance, but it was nothing his hearing couldn’t register: The sound of fuse tampering and popping out of life. There, some odd three miles away: There was a glow swelling and slightly throbbing with diminishing power, crawling out of an alleyway into the night air.

Well, Clark thought somewhat optimistically. At least I won’t have to track them down based on looks alone …

+++++++++

Moving to Metropolis was supposed to be the start of something new. Something good and new, specifically. Not getting into a freak accident involving a weird, unnatural-looking cloud appearing just as you were checking out your apartment’s fuse box and waking up months later from a comatose state. That alone should have been enough of a cue that things weren’t going to go your way.

But, oh, it didn’t stop there. It would’ve been fine to have stopped when a majority of your clothes would stick to you regardless of the fashion; that was bearable. But it went on: From your phone exploding in your touch to your electronics following suit. It didn’t stop when the electricity in your building flickered with your rage; nor did it stop when, on a fearful whim, you attempted to summon as much voltage from as many transformers in a three-block radius as possible – and succeeded. Well, that is, before your attempts to return the acquired energy resulted in their sources exploding. You weren’t trying that again.

Not until you had a better grasp of it all… . But god, why was it all so dam hard to grasp?

You’d though it be best to practice in the richer parts of town – the electric company would be in a far bigger hurry to bring them their power back, the absolute bastards. But with how many generators and the like you were destroying, you were running out of practice space.

You groaned as you watched the circuit box before you begin to putter out of use.

“Greeeeat, (Y/N),” you told yourself. “You finally begin to get the hang of putting shit back where it came, you get a little too excited, and blam-o.” The all too familiar feeling of disappointment developed a sigh in you; you had long since passed feeling anxious about the destruction of property, and you knew you could do no good by trying to fix it. All you could do now was leave the scene, pretend to sleep peacefully, and try to figure out where to go next.

It had been nearly two months since you started your high-voltage, highly dangerous practicing; surely by now the cops were on to you, what with most of your “victims” being people of note. Logic said to shake them off your trail by moving to a type of location they wouldn’t have seen comic. But … that meant going to lower-income neighborhoods. And as much as you wanted to figure out how to stop blowing up electronics by touch, you really weren’t comfortable with doing it at the expense of those who needed the help more.

“Good evening,” came a voice, yanking you out of your nervous thoughts. It had taken your brain a moment to register it, but you could’ve sworn it came come from the sky: A type of voice dashing heroes in old movies would use; heroes with big, strong chins.

Superman did, of course, have such a feature on him, you came to find. But as he descending from the sky, into the alley (thus blocking your way out), you were forced to consider that every feature he had appeared to be big and strong: His towering height, his bulging muscles that the suit made no effort to hide, his … hands that would most definitely kill you if he so much as poked you with one finger.

That last thought alone, even in a hypothetical sense, was all it took for your fight or flight senses to kick in, your hands suddenly flying up in defense with fizzles of what electricity you’d collected springing in your palms.

Superman, however, did not flinch. He barely even regarded your sparkling, trembling hands (which did nothing for your confidence, both in your abilities and in your chances of getting out of this unmaimed).

“You don’t want to do that,” Superman stated. Simple as that. And he was right: You really didn’t want to have to “fight” him. But what else could you do?

On Clark’s own end, he could just feel the anxiety radiating off of you. He didn’t even have to listen for your heartbeat thundering in your chest. Honestly, though he hated to admit it, looking at you reminded him of seeing small, scared animals back in Smallville. Rabbits and mice found scittering about on the farm to be more specific.

On one hand, he was just glad you weren’t some hyper-powered hooligan willing to throw a punch in a fight they weren’t ready for. But on the other, he felt a little bad scaring you like this. It was probably best if he didn’t near you. For now.

“It’s okay,” he offered. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

You sighed and lowered your hands, your pitiful static fizzling to a halt. “Look,” you said quietly, “I promise I’ll go away. I’ll switch towns! I swear!”

At this, the man furrowed his brows. “I’m afraid that can’t happen …” Your heart plummeted before being slingshotted back into a revived desire to plea and flee.

“I swear, okay! Nobody was supposed to get hurt!” you insisted. “I don’t think anybody even really got hurt, per se … Just inconvenienced. But I promise, it won’t happen again – ” In the midst of your rambling, Superman took a step towards you. It was a simple movement, all things considered, but for you, in this moment of high stress, it might as well have been an outright threat. You couldn’t stop yourself from releasing a pathetic yelp, nearly stepping all over your own feet to take a few steps back.

Crap, Clark cursed. Okay, clearly acting serious and stern was helping nobody. At this point, you were probably going to run in the opposite direction and smack your skull against the dead end of the alleyway. To hell with this.

“Hey, hey, hey,” he suddenly said. He raised his hands in a weak attempt to show his change of demeanor. “It’s okay, it’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you.” You had to admit, even in your moment of fear, the sudden shift in tone was not lost on you.

He still had hints of old school hero in his voice, but now there was something … more? It was hard to place (especially in your current jumpy state), but you were just able enough to pick out nodes of what his voice now held: Sunshine; apples; the type of voice a sweet man running a humble little bookstore or fruit stand might have.

It had to have been a trap. You weren’t one to disapprove of Superman, given all that he’s done, but being on the other side of him just wasn’t doing much for your ability to think straight. And Clark could sense it.

“Hey,” he tried again. “I’m sorry if I scared you.” You blinked, a brow slowly beginning to raise. “We – I’ve been looking for you, per a friend’s request, and – ” No sooner had he said it, Clark regretted it. The look of resumed discomfort of your face made him really acknowledge that.

“ ‘Friend’?” you demanded. “Who the hell is your friend? What do you want?!”

Oh, geez.  

“Listen, please, remain calm!” Clark pleaded. To him, in that moment, he’d thought he’d been sounding gentle enough. But as the nearby streetlights began to flicker, he knew better.

Once again, regret: If there was anything he’d learned working with Lois and Bruce, it was that telling someone on the verge of panic or in the midst of complete frustration to “calm down” in any sense was a bad, bad, bad idea. Saying so to a person who had powers, controlled or not, however? Absolutely terrible idea.

While your previous attempt at intimidation by way of summoning electricity had done little to impress Clark, he had to admit: You were a bit better at it now. The more the streetlights blinked, the more streams of electronic light appeared to gather towards you, specifically in your palms and feet.

“Look, buddy,” you hissed. “I’ve been dealing with a lot of crap leading up to this. I moved to a new city. I got goddamn electrocuted into a coma – ” At this point, Clark couldn’t help but notice thin streaks of static begin to make a beeline towards your eyes. Not promising, if his experience had told him so.

You gritted your teeth, increasingly glowing eyes narrowing. “Then! I wake up to these – these stupid, stupid powers! Powers I don’t have the first fucking clue of how to control. But do you see me running around, actively trying to kill people like every other goddamn psycho in this ‘city of tomorrow’? No! I’ve had to figure all this crap out on. My. Own.” The brights of your eyes increased, simultaneously illuminating the growing rage of your expression while also blinding Clark to being able to make it out in the first place.

At your feet, small currents began to sizzle against the crackling pavement. You were no longer trying to back away: You took a step forward, and it definitely made Clark feel worry.

“Could I have done it differently? Sure. Maybe. But don’t forget, Flyboy: I could’ve been so. Much. Worse!” Clark could hear the tingling rattle of lightbulbs struggling within the streetlights, trying to retain whatever power they could.

“I – ” But Clark was cut off.

“And you,” you growled, “have the audacity … To tell me to calm DOWN?!” In that moment, three things happened in the following order:

The first had been that your eyes, filled with so much fury, could no longer remain squinted; they widened, revealing themselves to be entirely white with pure energy at this point. The second thing appeared to be connected with the sudden snapping, due to it being how any lightbulb in a streetlight or artsy lamp within a three-block radius became overwhelmed – too overwhelmed to maintain proper form, in fact. They popped and shattered, leaving bits of glass to tumble to the streets below.

The third instance, however, had nothing to do with your powers: It was just Clark, getting a word in.

“I get it,” he said. Had there been any lightbulbs left, they might have shattered as well in sync with the snarl you gave the man.

“Quit lying!” you demanded. The wave of volts began to ripple all the more erratically. But Clark held his ground.

“I’m not lying,” he swore. He even placed one hand to his heart, the other upright. “Scout’s honor.” Unfortunately for him, the sincerity of a Boy Scout appeared to mean little to you. He went on, “I didn’t always have control of my powers. I didn’t have anyone to help me figure them out; I had to wing it!” You raised a bemused brow in reaction.

Okay … Clark thought. It’s … better than the glare, I guess? He swallowed. Dare to try one last time before things potentially get yucky?

“That’s, uh, actually why I’ve … come to find you,” he stated. “The friend? I swear he’s a good man. A little rough around the edges, but – ”

“You’re not helping your case,” you snapped.

“I’m a part of a sort of group, there’s people like you and me, and we think it’d be best if you joined – er, if you wanted to.”

“Ah. So, you want to basically make me into a weapon?”

“Nonononono, not that at all. I swear. It’s just – Look, even if you don’t want to join,” Clark bit his lip, “we could at least potentially find a way to help you get those powers under control so that you won’t keep breaking stuff.” A beat passed. “Well,” he shrugged, “it’s more like my friend will. He’s good with science and can definitely provide the right materials.”

To his credit, Clark did begin to notice an apparent lapse in the energy you were emitting. It was hard for the average eye to properly compute it but for him, the change was definitely there.

On your own end, you had to admit: The temptation was definitely lingering through his words. But then, perhaps you were just desperate and overwhelmed and looking for an out in this entire situation. But something still very much bothered you.

“How can I know I can trust you?” you asked, brow completely scrunched with uncertainty. The entire situation considered, it was still a bit of a shocker for one to not entirely trust the great and beloved Superman’s words. And, judging by his stumbling, it wasn’t a scenario he had been prepared to answer right on the spot.

“Uh – Becaaauussseee …” Another thing Clark had learned working with Lois and Perry Mason: The longer you stammer and search for answers, the less legit your word comes cross. His mind scrambled for something, anything that would win your favor over. But, in the end, there was only one thing that stood out. And, for the first time completely since landing in that alley, Clark felt just as nervous as you had.

“My … name …” He inhaled deeply, trying his best not to exhale chill winds. “My name … is Clark Kent. I work with The Daily Planet.”

You blinked. “… Pardon?” The voltage at your feet dampened.

Clark continued, “I’m a Kryptonian refugee, but I was raised here on Earth. The friend who sent me here is – ” He stopped himself short before deciding that Bruce could kick his ass about this later. “It’s Bruce Wayne.”

“Bruce Wayne?!” you interjected. Part of you wanted to call crap but the other part of you had to remember that the man in front of you was claiming to be a humanoid alien who worked at the local newspaper; who’s to say he really wasn’t acquainted with the rich guy across the bay? Judging by the hint of smile this Clark Kent guy let slip, you … honestly couldn’t bring yourself to really disbelieve him. The static at your fingertips dribbled into your palms before shrinking away.

“Yeah, uh … It’s a bit of a story,” Clark claimed, a bit of sheepishness in his voice.

The shift from mostly illuminated to just barely lit by the light of the moon was sudden and startling. But for Clark, it was a good thing. The ground immediately beneath you had been blackened by your doing, but you otherwise appeared perfectly fine, if a bit curious.

“Got proof?” you asked.

“I mean, I gave you my secret identity – that’s pretty trusting if I do say so myself,” Clark pointed out. As much as you hated to admit it, he had a point. And you were getting awfully tired. In fact …

In that moment, you had realized something: That was about the most power and damage you’d caused ever since getting these powers in one fell swoop. You were a little impressed. But you were also plenty concerned. Sure, you’d meant to be threatening in the moment, but the fact still remained: If the only other person around hadn’t been Superman, how easily could you have actually harmed another person in your moment of anger? The second you attempted to truly ponder it, a shudder threatened to ripple through your body; you did not enjoy considering those odds.

But how long until you got so pissed off that you pulled another one of those? How long until you actually did cause harm? That thought was even worse …

“Are you positive?” you mumbled, causing Clark to cock his head by an inch.

“I’m sorry?” he questioned.

You looked him dead in the eye and dared him to lie: “Are you positive you guys can, like, help me control my powers?” The smile he gave you alone would have been enough to convince you.

“We’ve trained with literal scientific anomalies and legends, Miss. I can assure you: You’re in good company with us.” The sweet, honey warmness of his voice did everything to calm the well of fear and guilt within you. It was more than enough.

“Okay,” you said with finality.

“Okay?”

“Mhm. Let’s do this.” Almost instantly, however, you raised your fingers to draw a point. “But I’m not fighting or anything. Just so we’re clear. I’m just coming along to get my groove in order, so tell your ‘friend’, Bruce Wayne, alright?”

The man didn’t even try to hide a chuckle at your stance. You were going to be just fine, he’d decided. And you? Well … the jury was still out on whether or not this was where your move to Metropolis would finally turn into a good, new thing.

[myfriendpokey]

clearance sale

clearing out some of my backlog of opinions before the new year so i can start anew. in this post I have accumulated some writing scraps on the only three topics: 1. finance 2. mystery 3. location

FINANCE

i enjoyed these recent-ish posts against the idea of indie sustainability, although as someone who already works a day job i always feel a bit ambivalent about the advice to just work a day job to pay for this stuff - - like yes, absolutely, do it, BUT sell your shit too in the knowledge that the type of precarity we associate w/ creative work is already in the process of being implemented everywhere else as well (or has already been - zero hour contracts, sub-living wages etc). like i am fortunate to still have a day job which pays a living wage and leaves me time to work on my own things on the side - but this feels like an anachronism rather than an inevitability right now.. maybe my unsustainable games will help keep me afloat when my job gets automated and i have to go work in an amazon warehouse, unsustainable games for an unsustainable job, ha ha ha. video games are an exploitative bubble but so is the rest of "the market".

it is true that this is a political problem rather than one in the narrow remit of things that can be fixed with the right 10-point sales plan- -  nevertheless i think the issue of trying to make even small money off these things will remain kind of pressing as, in turn, regular employment comes more and more to resemble irregularly compensated hobbyist labour.

anyway one point i found really interesting, which i think all the above posts kind of grapple with - - the idea that it's not necessarily more "realistic" to aim at selling 1000 copies rather than 100,000. i think while we make fun of the aspiring millionaires a lot of people have just been banking on the idea of a fertile middle ground between the two extremes of tiny and ludicrous amounts of sales, between boom and bust. i'm sure there are still people working in that space but it seems like it's shrinking.

one question brendan keogh asks in his piece is "why should game makers be any different  [from the norm of artists, musicians etc not really making any money]?" i think this can actually be answered a little - because hobbyist game development sort of exploded in tandem with the internet itself becoming more naturalized within everyday life, because the economic basis for indie games was always centered around the internet, which means people working in indie games were always in the vicinity of the massive, startling movements of capital that the internet rendered more visible and immediate. no more were the weird vicissitudes of the market hidden behind closed doors, in boardrooms or stock quotations - now you could log onto any site and see just bewildering amounts of money suddenly funnel into the pockets of this or that individual in real time, frequently to their own surprise as well. and i think this connected to something more general - a sort of ambient awareness of financialization, the way "the financial sector" cannibalized things like industry, the greater visibility of capital not as something embedded in some specific product or set of individual practices but as a kind of weird free-floating aura arbitrarily descending or departing. enormous reservesof "general" wealth became more visible just as the benefits and stability of waged employment became yet more desolate and i think you need to see the draw of one in part as a consequence of the other. 

gacha-capitalism, permanent artificial scarcity coupled with the vague, insistent prospect of fantastic gains, as long as you keep playing. which is a rhythm already enshrined in many areas of working life - broke college students and unpaid graduates hustling for eventual employment, waged workers grinding through until  retirement. but it's one the enhanced immediacy and swiftness of capital on the internet intensified and extended. fabulous payouts can strike anyone at any time, in exchange for slowly bleeding out the prospect of any other kind of livelihood. much like the austerity following the financial crash which levelled so many basic social services for no particular purpose other than the hope that doing so for long enough would please the gods of prosperity to start tossing money around again. all dues, no pay.

i do think it's worth being cynical about the efforts to domesticate this process, building a fair and sustainable biome within capitalism, by using the tools of that same capitalism etc.  but if the format can't be seperated from the wider world then that's something which swings both ways. for me the most interesting critical work around vgames right now is in the effort to move outside of the constant, numbing boom-and-bust cycles of capital, the idiot repetition of exhilaration and depression and exhilaration and it'll all be okay as long as we can hold out one more cycle, particularly when that's a rhythm which has been central to the development of the format from the beginning. i think anyone involved with developing videogames has probably seen multiple generations of cool shit emerge, get abruptly killed off and written out of history in accordance with market diktats, and then replaced with a new wave of cool shit whenever the investors shift gears into "expansion" mode again. a mode of thinking about and preserving what people do that stands in opposition to this is something i can easily imagine being more generally useful in the culture, as ever more areas of life and culture start becoming subject to the same questions.

MYSTERY

there's a mystery in depth and a mystery in shallowness. with depth the habitual glance of recognition goes out and falls through - you can place roughly where something is in relation to the world, but not what it's doing, not where it goes. as a presence it seems to require a new mode of attention to be recognized, which i guess is why it sometimes makes me uneasy - that challenge, the way that challenge can be moralized. are you a bad enough dude to engage with art?? if there are 100 black obelisks in a field which one do you decide to look at? and will it really turn out to be deep, or just dense?

videogames can feel like depth-worship, like the embodiment of an essentially cthonic system of values. how deep did you go and what did you see there? did  you find the gold bars in pac-man? (www.mikesarcade.com/cgi-bin/spies.cgi?action=url&type=info&page=pmgoldbar.info.txt) did you see the secret ending? how far did you get into the game mechanics, into the lore? this marks the top 10 deepest players on this game. surpass  them... if you dare. an ethos of diligent attention, hierarchial levels of  understanding and initiate-dom, a sub-culture. and at best a maguslike  dedication to altered states of consciousness that i can respect, an interest in shifting through mangled pieces of debris in search of secret mysteries. at worst the authority cults and tests of true belonging that spring up around those mysteries, whose value is in being hidden and whose guarantee is in the strenuous effort with which they must be located. paranoia about true spiritual meanings being plundered by opportunistic interlopers. stay out. get good.

the videogame has the basic opacity of the computer system and the act of engaging with this curious abyss is allegorized into dungeons, castles, mazes. trapdoors and secret corridors. one pleasure in looking up older games for me is in seeing them recognize and learn how to thematize this basic sense of mystery. in bubble bobble the obscure scoring mechanics and secret endings are cheekily perverse, arcade challenge by another means - another system to game. in king's quest there's something like a crossfertilization between the strange causal voids of the fairy tale and the adventure game: "Exit the gingerbread house and go east and east. There is a large walnut tree here. Take walnut and then open walnut to discover a gold nut. Head east and take bowl . Look bowl  to see the words “fill” at the bottom. Fill and the bowl will fill up with a delicious stew." the wizardry games took the connection between mysterious game systems and occult knowledge much further - the "true" ending of wizardry iv means finding a secret chamber and answering a series of riddles based on your knowledge of the kaballah (or at least, kaballah-derived tarot interpretations).

it's easy to moralize depth - lotus eaters, magic islands. you wander through a strange land and then return to find it's 5 hours later and you forgot to eat. there's something creepy to me about depth on an industrial scale, about building huge tunnels with massive teams on forced overtime, and then a team of professional tunnel reviewers cautiously start descending on ropes and come back every so often and say, well, 20 hours in and it all looks ok, and meanwhile everybody else is jumping en masse. maybe that's more of an issue with consumer culture in general. but sometimes it feels like a way to avoid dealing with certain inherent limitations of that culture, or even limitations of art in general, by projecting those limits out to the end of ever-deeper tunnels that fewer and fewer people will ever see, the rest of them straggling back, exhausted, getting jobs. well, i can't tell you if red dead 2 is good or not. i only got 60 hours in, and i never even found all the falcons.

if the mystery of depth is having too much space for speculation to operate coherently within, the mystery of shallowness is having not enough space for speculation to operate at all: something is too manifestly there, limited, closed-off, it's hard to push it away to get some metaphorical breathing room. 

i feel this way sometimes reading writers like tove jansson, flannery o'connor - SOMETHING happened, the stories are short and clear and describe some definite event without too much uncertainty, they even have "broader themes" raised - but somehow the themes feel embarrassingly outsize for the stories, and the stories remain too clearly defined to sink back into the murk of a generalized moral or experience. they feel like moral stories when you can't work out what the moral might be.

robbe-grillet on raymond roussel: "Now these chains of elucidations,  extraordinarily precise, ingenious, and farfetched, appear so derisory, so disappointing, that it is as if the mystery remained intact. But it  is henceforth a mystery that has been washed, emptied out, that has become  unnameable. The opacity no longer hides anything. One has the impression of  having found a locked drawer, then a key; and this key opens the drawer impeccably... and the drawer is empty."

there's a famous shallowness to videogames as well that's most often caught by people outside the culture - when you see the fake videogames in a comicbook, or on tv, and they're named something like "washing machine simulator 3000" or "municipal tax assailants". and part of this also stems from the computer, the history of the computer as it insinuated its way into everyday life, as a mysteriously elaborate and convoluted way of doing just impossibly banal things, like balancing chequebooks or printing text. the stubborn thingliness of not-quite-functional machines, the way the thingliness glosses and corrodes their own internal fantasies, mirrors of the basic weirdness that is human consciousness as a material fact within the world. 

with my friend i used to joke  about "e3" just being the dumpster behind an abandoned gamestop - all those needy longform experiences frozen into evocative trinkets. find a nonfunctional disk copy of mario odyssey and it gives you all the same delight as playing mario odyssey, only without having to. i think there's something beautiful about that flatness, that directionless object-hostility, the rejection of the grandoise hero's journey fantasies that it implies – as well as something baleful, a rejection of consciousess in general, the idea that it could take you anywhere not inside your own head.

LOCATION

why are there so many videogames about going outside? every time i've played a videogame it's been inside a room, usually a dark one, mostly while still wearing my pajamas. for me it is an internal activity. but not only do all these games take place in fields and plains, they always talk about the wonders of going on a voyage, the beauty of the great outdoors, the superiority of the wandering main characters to the slugs and layabouts who sit at home all day.... it's weird to me, i demand we move past these cloying pseudo-critiques. raymond williams once pointed out that the first pastoral was written from the perspective of a rentier daydreaming of cashing out and moving to a country home. i demand more games with the courage of their implict convictions and that if they require you to sit motionless indoors  for hours they should explicitly establish and argue for a value system in which this is the best possible thing that you can do. imagine if movies were all set in dark chambers full of people sitting down - i think i can say they would be much less insipid as an artform. "all of man's problems stem from an inability to stay in his room".

(images: Gakken No O Benkyou Soft Kazu Suuji, Legend of Legaia, a Chinese bootleg cart, and ...Iru!)

[makistar2018]

How to succeed in business by being a Taylor Swift fan

Fandom can be an expensive hobby, but there are also ways to get paid for your time and affection.

By Kaitlyn Tiffany Nov 7, 2018

Taylor Swift’s very popular snake jewelry. Big Machine Records

Twenty-two-year-old financial analyst Zainub Amir moved to New York City from Albany last June, around the time that her Taylor Swift news account @SimplySFans celebrated its seventh birthday on Twitter.

The account has 124,000 followers as of this writing, but when Amir started it at the end of eighth grade, there was almost no demand for it. She was alone on Twitter as a Swiftie, she says, with “maybe 30 other fans.” It’s that early adoption of the platform that she credits with her success, and with her permanent place at the top of the Swift fan account hierarchy — it’s too late for anyone else to get this big.

Now Amir has a full-time job and responsibilities to her employer. Also: responsibilities to the 124,000 people who depend on her for news, as well as the management and tour sponsors and brand partners for the biggest pop star in the world, which regularly ask her for help promoting awards shows, limited-edition Keds, and Swift’s every move.

“It’s hard,” Amir tells me, sitting on a corner sofa in her Midtown office building, after most of the lights have gone down but the granola bar wrappers and Lipton tea bags have yet to be scooped from the floor. “The thing is it’s, like, the same thing as texting someone while you’re at work; you just have to be really fast. The whole point of an update account is getting the news first.”

“EVERYTHING COMES DOWN TO SOMETIMES THE SECOND OR MINUTE YOU POST”

To help, Amir has push notifications set up from fan accounts on Tumblr and Twitter, for Swift’s friends and management and publicity team, and, obviously, for Swift herself, who has made a tentative return to social media in recent months after conspicuously vanishingand deleting thousands of posts last August.

“As soon as she posts, I make sure I put it on Twitter. You just have to be quick about it. After a while, it becomes second nature,” Amir says. She does not use Google Alerts, which are too slow. “Everything comes down to sometimes the second or minute you post.”’

That’s because Amir isn’t alone on Twitter talking about Taylor Swift anymore. There are dozens of update accounts, plenty of fans who are willing to take on the job of fandom as a second full-time position. And Swift is far from the only celebrity who draws this kind of cottage media industry around her.

Last summer, I spoke to 19-year-old Yucatán resident Armin Lizama, who runs one of the biggest Lorde fan accounts on Twitter and regularly helps professional music journalism outlets fact-check fan rumors and news items.

Last spring, Harry Styles fans organized to teach each other how to download VPNs and fake US streams of his first solo single “Sign of the Times,” hoping to game the Billboard charts. One account, @StylesPromoTeam, put out a public application to join them, which was longer than a traditional job application and required applicants to state whether they’d be able to dedicate up to 20 hours per week to the cause. This is just how modern fandom operates.

Most of these fans are not doing it to be compensated, but there is compensation to be found nonetheless — like any account with substantial followings, they can charge for sponsored posts and retweets; like any influencer a brand wants to woo, they can expect gifts and trips and special treatment; like any ambitious young person situated in an economy that celebrates optimizing every moment of your life, they can try to use hundreds of hours of self-managed, largely unpaid “fun” labor as a line item on a résumé.

“I don’t really care about how much money I make with it,” Amir says.

Nevertheless, she’ll readily call her account a business.

And as with any business, there are challenges. One is copyright: “Any time a video goes over 30 seconds and it has music or media, anything from Taylor or any of her sponsors, it usually gets picked up by copyright,” Amir explains. “Same thing with photos that photographers are taking, even if it’s Taylor’s own photographers with Getty Images.” They’ll get flagged and removed, and it only takes six or seven violations to get an account suspended, which is a challenge for accounts updating three or four times a day while an artist is on tour, or dozens of times a night when they’re performing and talking and raking in trophies at an awards show.

“Screen record has become my friend. Mainly when it’s YouTube or DirecTV Now, but I have to be careful, which is why I’ve resorted more to retweeting from the source,” she says. She tries not to push it, usually taking clips of around 10 seconds and asking permission whenever she can.

“You want to grow your reach as much as you can, but is it worth getting that copyright notice at the same time?”

All this is why Amir, like many of the other proprietors of major news accounts, has a separate account just for media, which she’ll retweet into her main account’s feed, giving up maximum engagement on her main page in favor of preserving it.

She’s had to learn how to streamline the process, trying to provide a good product without running herself off the road. “There are all these paparazzi pages you can go on and get the image itself, and then you have to delete the watermark,” she explains. “But it’s not worth [the effort] really, because someone’s just going to post it two seconds faster than you.” She’ll ask permission to repost GIFs and videos from fans at tour shows, but only if she’s sure they’re sharing something Swift hasn’t done before. She’ll engage in trending topics only if she has something to add, an image and a great quote, or a video clip short enough to not get pulled. “Otherwise, I’m better off retweeting from the actual source, even though I’m going to lose engagement.”

She had to figure all this out on her own, since other pages are competitors, jockeying for the same audience and the same engagement.

Swift is counting on her, for real. In 2012, before there were very many other major fan accounts, and before Swift’s team really used or understood Twitter, they asked Amir to be the official promotional account of the Red tour.

When Swift joined her favorite social media platform, Tumblr, in 2014, the account was run by her management and only followed five accounts — all update accounts, and one of them Amir’s. “I posted something about the fall, apple picking or something, and I had no idea anybody was reading it,” Amir recalls. “Taylor reblogged it and it was her first reblog of Tumblr, and she ended up adding this whole paragraph about how she loves the fall. So every fall, late August, September, I get so many notifications because people start reblogging that again and again and again. It’s a ritual.”

Being early to two platforms guaranteed that both Swift and her team would be aware of Amir, which means they regularly come back to her — to include her in special fan activities and to do promotion work. (She’s spent time with Swift in person three times in the past six years.)

“FOR ME, IT’S COMMUNITY FIRST; I DON’T REALLY THINK ABOUT THE MONEY.”

Amir says Swift’s management has a list of popular and reliable update accounts that it gives out to her sponsors and brands regularly dole out exclusive content or giveaway items to her and her update account competitors. Dick Clark Productions, for one, will fly fan account operators to awards shows to post updates live, as well as provide them with a stipend to support a vacation day in Los Angeles afterward.

“Either I get compensated through money or through free items,” Amir says. “Or it’s things like free tickets or perks or just being on the inside or being able to go to a release party. Sometimes it’s not directly money-related, but when it is, it’s per post or how many engagements it gets. That’s why stats or using Twitter analytics is so important — so you can say what your worth is. I’ve had it be $300 for retweeting someone before, because it’s a lot of followers and it’s huge engagement. I think the lowest I’ve done is $50.”

“It’s like another job, basically,” she says. But “it isn’t as stable as people think it is with a fan account like this. For me, it’s community first; I don’t really think about the money.”

Madame Tussauds’ Taylor Swift figure, revealed in 2014. Chelsea Lauren/Getty Images

It’s not all profit. “I bought the [last] album five times without really meaning to,” Amir says when I ask about how much fans typically spend to put their affection into practice.

Swift combated the ongoing industry-wide decline of album sales by selling two versions of a limited-edition magazine to go with Reputation last fall, each going for $20 exclusively at Target and each coming with another copy of the album. Buying extra copies of her album also helped fans improve their place in line in Ticketmaster’s controversial Verified Fan program, which sorted fans into a queue to buy presale tickets to her stadium tour.

“EVERY TIME SHE LETS YOU INTO HER LIFE, IT’S A NEW MARKETING SCHEME, BECAUSE IT’S A NEW PART OF HER LIFE THAT YOU DON’T KNOW”

“You want the magazine because you want to see into Taylor’s life; she had to have two different volumes for some reason,” Amir says. “You want the album for the code to put in your Verified Fan thing; that’s your first incentive. And your second is that you want to read these poems that Taylor never released to the world, or pictures that have never before been seen during her two-year [social media] blackout.” The Reputation merch was “trendier” and more expensive than previous Taylor merch, but “as a fan, you tell yourself that you’re just going to compromise and buy it, and you do it without thinking.”

She says she doesn’t want to criticize anyone, but she noticed that Verified Fan tickets were more expensive than regular sale tickets, and says she paid $160 (plus TicketMaster fees) for a decent seat, electing not to spend the nearly $800 it would cost to be in what Swift called “the Snake Pit” at the front of the stage.

“Every time she lets you into her life, it’s a new marketing scheme, because it’s a new part of her life that you don’t know,” Amir says. But again, none of this is criticism. Why shouldn’t a pop star also be a savvy business manager? Why wouldn’t intimacy with her be commodified? These are not contradictions, Amir argues. It’s also not a contradiction that she loves Taylor Swift and benefits financially from loving Taylor Swift.

Taylor Swift with Australian fans in 2012. Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

Because it involves people, business is almost always personal, but when it involves heroes, it’s even more so.

Amir is Muslim, and she says that made it difficult for her to watch Swift’s quiet refusal to engage with a swirling national debate about basic human rights in the wake of the 2016 election. “I really wanted her to say something, because she does say stuff at her concerts, or to you personally, and she’ll like things on Tumblr.” It’s not as if she didn’t know Swift was on her side. Still, “she never said stuff out there, outside the community, where it makes a difference.”

Swift’s longtime silence on political issues — which ended with an October Instagram postendorsing Democratic candidates for several key midterm election races in her home state of Tennessee, seemingly spurring a massive increase in voter registration in the state — was always in tension with her near-constant willingness to speak up on her own behalf. She has been more publicly involved in her business interests than any artist at her level, championing the 2016 battle against the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which she argued gave YouTube a free pass on copyright infringement, and sitting at the center of the debate about Spotify (and music streaming payment practices in general) for years.

That’s a chapter she closed (somewhat awkwardly) during the lead-up to the release of Reputation last year, but she is still known for her litigious spirit, which she demonstrates by trademarking the names of her cats, attempting to copyright phrases like “look what you made me do,” and sending cease-and-desist letters to Etsy sellers who put her lyrics on homemade apparel.

In each of these cases, Swift isn’t really doing anything other artists wouldn’t (or don’t) do — but because she’s built a reputation as a ruthless capitalist, further news items that fit that narrative are easy to package. Each time she adds a brand to her portfolio — be it American Express or New York City — it looks cynical.

Amir doesn’t see it that way. Swift “reinvents herself just like companies innovate products, and that’s what keeps things exciting,” she says, swirling Swift’s musical evolution and personal brand metamorphosis and business strategy into one blanket compliment. She would understand, as an aspiring businesswoman who worked at a bank all through college, graduated early, moved to New York after interning at PR firms, was briefly the social media manager for a folk-pop duo, and is now looking for a way to blend financial analysis with the marketing skills she’s been honing since middle school.

“Taylor’s been a huge part of my life and the [fandom] community’s been a huge part of my life,” Amir says. “But you mature after a while; you get older. You can’t take days off work to be at an awards show.”

Vox

[you-snooze-you-booze]

😜 ~go wild for shunuki Del, I know you're gonna rock my world with your wonderfulness~

Ship Meme: Bedroom // Still accepting~

Whoseroom was it first? 

Jūshirō’s. For one thing, Ugendō is super comfy, and I imagine that both Jūshirōand Shunsui enjoy the peace and solitude of the place. For another, I imagine Jūshirōhas all of his medical shenanigans safely and organized-ly stored somewhere thereabouts,and it would be more trouble than it’s worth to move them elsewhere.

Putting the rest under the cut, because this is looooong. Also, because parts of it get slightly nsfw-ish. I mean, it’s a bedroom meme, so. Uh. Y’know.

Whatsize is the bed?

Inactuality, it’s a double futon. Simple, old-school, comfy.

But,for the sake of the meme - in Western-style terms, it’s probably a queen bed,or maaaaybe a king. I don’t think either of them is terribly interested inexcess or overindulgence - but at the same time, they’re both tall guys, andthey need enough space for both of them to stretch out after a long day. Comenighttime, though, I have no doubt that they hold each other pretty close,which means there would be a lot of unused space in a king bed, so… eh, yeah. I’llroll with queen, I think.

Whatcolor are the sheets?

White.It’s practical; they can be bleached (ha-ha) when they become bloodstained.

Howmany blankets do they use?

Lotsand lots of blankets. Shunsui likes soft things, and takes great comfort in theidea of burying himself under a large pile of blankets. Jūshirō gets coldeasily, and needs the warmth.

Howmany pillows do they use? 

Depends.Usually, Shunsui likes two under his head, and Jūshirō likes one, but they keepextra pillows nearby, so that Jūshirō can be propped up in bed when he’sfeeling under the weather.

Dothey sleep together or separately? 

Together.Always.

Dothey have a regular sleep schedule? 

Nope.Not even a little bit.

Shunsuidoesn’t sleep well at night. His dreams are ghastly, and, in his heart, he’safraid of the dark. He compensates for this by napping during the day - butthis creates a vicious and unfortunate cycle, because it means that he oftenisn’t actually tired come bedtime. So, he snoozes when he can, but mostly, hespends his nights watching his handsome lover sleeping, instead…

…not,of course, that that happens all thetime, either. Jūshirō is one of those guys who can’t sleep well unlesseverything in his world is ordered and peaceful and proper - and, for better orfor worse, his world includes Shunsui. Jūshirō stays awake and turns problemsover and over in his mind, trying desperately to fix the things that make his head and his heart ache. But, ofcourse, that isn’t always possible.

Andthen, of course, some nights, he’s simply too ill to sleep.

Mostly,Shunsui and Jūshirō spend their evenings locked in each other’s arms, eyesclosed, drifting in and out of true sleep. They take comfort in each other, andsometimes, that’s enough.

Arethey cuddlers, or do they keep to themselves?

Um.See above, heh.

Bywhich I mean, basically all they do is cuddle.

Whohogs the bed?

Thatwould be Shunsui. For one thing, he’s bigger, and for another, Jūshirō’s just tooconsiderate. Even in sleep - even subconsciously - Jūshirō won’t take spacefrom another person. Shunsui, on the other hand, sprawls out like crazy when heactually manages to fall asleep - if he actually reaches that level ofsubconscious comfort and okay-ness, all bets are off, and his body doeswhatever the dang heck it wants. Jūshirō, for the record, doesn’t mind, even a littlebit.

Whosnores?

That,too, would be Shunsui. Though, actually, this isn’t really a fair question; Jūshirōhas significant respiratory issues, after all, and I have no idea how thatmight impact something like snoring. I imagine that, when he’s truly, trulyasleep, Shunsui lets out these deep, long, slow, luxurious snores. Jūshirō alwaysbreathes more shallowly than Shunsui does, both in waking and in sleeping, butI suspect that, every so often, he does snore a little bit - small, soft soundsof contentment, which Shunsui (correctly) believes are utterly adorable.

Dothey ever share the bed (with pets, children, etc?) 

Ahhh,if only… but no, I don’t think so. If they weren’t soldiers, they would havechildren, without a doubt. But… I’m not sure either of them would ever havetaken another path. I’m not sure either of them could ever have taken another path, actually. And so, no.

…actually.Wait. I take it back. They, um. Have definitelyshared their bed, if you take my meaning, with third and/or fourth and/or fifthand/or (insert number here tbh) party on occasion, for fun.

Butin terms of sleeping, on a nightly basis, it’s their space, and theirs alone.

Isthis their primary location for sex, or is somewhere else?

Ithink it is, yes. That said, location is hardly the thing that’ll keep the twoof them from having sex. The fact that they usually have sex in bed is more todo with convenience, rather than anything else. The evenings are when they seeeach other - they’re both busy men, after all - and when they both have time.

Underthe sheets, or on top of them?

Abit of both. Depends on the mood, really. Shunsui and Jūshirō have had hundredsand hundreds of years to get to know each other, and to explore, and to play,and to learn about each other’s preferences and desires and turn-ons andturn-offs and secrets. Sometimes, things are rushed, fast, even clothed; attimes like these, they want each other so desperately that they aren’t about tobother with a troublesome thing like pulling back the sheets. Other times,things are slow, and deep, and sweet; at times like these, they workdeliberately, passionately, and take things step by step. Maybe they want tosee each other’s bodies; maybe, they’re more interested in the simple sensationof touching each other, nearly blind, instead. Maybe they want warmth; maybethey want cold.

So,uh. Yeah. In short, they like to mix it up.

Lightson, or lights off?

Generally,off. Occasionally, there might be a candle or a lamp. They both prefer naturallight, and in the evenings, natural light means the moon and the stars, so that’swhat they use to see.

Isthe bed frame sturdy, or does it wobble with more vigorous activities? 

Uh,well. I still imagine it’s a futon, but - for the sake of the meme - sturdy.Definitely.

Arethe walls thin?

Maybe.But they’re quite isolated in Ugendō, so it doesn’t matter very much. It’sprobably a good thing, really - neither of them is loud for the sheer sake ofbeing loud - but they love each other so much,and both of them are completely unashamed, and neither of them feels the needto hold back verbally when they have sex.

Howmuch time do they spend in the room?

Thatdepends, too. Duty regularly calls them both, and so, typically, it’s onlyevenings; but when Jūshirō is sick, he, of course, spends his days fairly wellholed up in the room - and Shunsui will find as many excuses as he can to slipaway from his work and care for his friend.

Whatother furniture do they have?

Notmuch, really; they’re simple people. There’s a small wardrobe, with bothdrawers and hanging space, for clothes. There’s a writing desk, which Jūshirō usesfar more frequently than Shunsui does, and a bookshelf, which Jūshirō also uses far more frequently thanShunsui does - though, Shunsui has added the occasional tastefully illustrated magazineto their shared literature collection. There’s also a small stand of some kind,for keeping Jūshirō’s teapot and teacups organized. After some time and morethan a few conversations, he begrudgingly allowed Shunsui to store his sakejugs and cups there, too.

Dothey have a system of organization for clothing and other items?

Well.Jūshirō does, at any rate.

Theykeep their spare shihakushō folded neatly in the aforementioned wardrobe -which is to say, Jūshirō folds them neatly and puts them away. They hang theirhaori and Shunsui’s kimono in the wardrobe, too.

Dothey keep the blinds open, or closed? 

Open.That allows for the natural light that they both prefer.

Isthe room decorated at all?

Itis, a bit, yes. It’s mostly Jūshirō’s doing. He’s added the odd watercolorpainting, a wall scroll with particularly remarkable calligraphy - that sort ofthing. Simple, beautiful things that catch his eye, mostly. Shunsui couldn’treally care less. He just wants - needs, maybe - a comfortable place to relax.Or - to relax as much as a guy like him ever can, that is.

[centaurrential]

“The Spice Jar”

“Let me live the lie, So long as it gets me through the day.”

For a long time it baffled me why activists would choose to devote so much energy to a cause that always seemed like overkill to me: free speech. I suppose the reason for that is because I grew up in a fairly liberal environment in one of the most liberal countries in the world. My feelings of security in the realm of free speech were a result of direct contact with a family that, more often than not, found itself on the right side of political privilege. Juxtaposed by the harsh realities experienced by another portion of my family (but not by me) under dictatorship in Yugoslavia, it seemed like the threat to free expression was a dead issue, a thing left in another world, in the past and locked in a strait jacket, never to seriously perpetrate again. How naive.

I see now that the cause is not overkill at all, but rather in need of periodic resuscitation, with the medics on stand-by; and the best medics would be those who excel in “aspect perception”. Like evil, issues needing that particular kind of attention crop up in unexpected places, and so much vigilance in monitoring the sneaks is due. And a simple mandate of “free expression for all” is stupid and insufficient, because as we always see, static gaming rules can produce matches with vastly different phenotypes. (The existence of “language games” was originally observed by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, so I give him his due credit here.)

I spoke of ideology in my last posting, and wherever one wishes to locate (and I don’t use that term accidentally) themselves on the grid of political persuasions, there will always be conceptual pockets that are purposely left unfilled, often because no one has the guts to touch them for fear of being labelled too politically incorrect, or undiplomatic. But even more radical are those ideas that don’t even find themselves on that grid, because they lie so far outside of the limitations imposed by the prevailing paradigm. A person brave enough to attempt to give validity to those ideas is not only denigrated for being “uneducated” but crucified for being a downright dumbass, and possibly psychotic, if the definition of psychosis is a “detachment from ‘reality’.” But what we think of as reality is merely an idea that has been agreed-upon by people who happen to have sufficient charisma and power to persuade others.

I’ll give you an example: I have, I believe, collected enough evidence that demonstrates astrology is true. Because of this passing interest, I once mentioned to a relative that I was reading a book on the influence of astrology in history, political and otherwise. She asked who the author was and what his credentials were. Nothing “noteworthy” there, and because of that, she actually insulted me and declared it preposterous that I, a usually intelligent person, would consider an argument not backed by the mainstream meritocracy. It’s crucial to note that she has a doctorate in history. I didn’t even have to ask her why she was so appalled, because her answer would have been the same dished to me, on a silver platter, out of fucking Buckingham Palace, that is given to me by every other lazy asshole who considers astrology to be archaic and an immediate write-off. She would have said that “all the studies” performed on astrology show CLEARLY that the “daily horoscope” and the “sun signs” are all bullshit and believers suffer from a case of confirmation bias. Academics believe that mythology and established archetypes have value and are therefore worth studying. And there is a tight link between them and the representational entities found in astrology. But none of “The Educated” give enough of a damn to investigate its complex grammar (see last posting), and the precision required of any astrologer worth their salt.

My little rant about astrology isn’t meant to be a full-scale defence of the practice, but I am trying to demonstrate something. The shallowness displayed in these disses to astrology is indicative of the fact that things already thought to be errant are not even encompassed in the span of that “grid of persuasions” I mentioned earlier. (The grid may be two- or three-dimensional, but who cares?) Those who are already convinced something is “wrong” simply won’t go to great lengths to play the devil’s advocate and explore why there may be a teensy-weensy chance it is RIGHT.

In my mind, if it’s been spoken of, then you should do your homework and read between the lines.

They say, if you can’t find yourself anywhere on that grid, there must be something fundamentally wrong with you. You’re crazed, you’re spacey, out to lunch, et cetera. The grid seems to offer a menu of choices, various combinations of platitudes you are free to choose from. So my point is this: if enough people, with enough influence, tell you that something is off the table, they’re telling you that not even the ingredients are available to conjure something worthy of bringing to the table. Therefore, to those who still hunger: you must look elsewhere.

I can’t say with certainty whether or not there was some grand agenda to marginalize and persecute people who can see outside of things (*cough*lust*cough), but if there is (I use the present tense cause...duh) it’s DEFINITELY ideological. And the reason it’s so fucking scary is because, if your wild ideas reach a certain density, the majority won’t even listen to you. And by ‘majority’ I don’t mean 50.1% of the population, I mean the people you interact with who possess a disproportionate amount of power. And further, by ‘power’ I mean the capacity to effect significant change in something, or to neutralize a challenge to a pre-existing situation. Anyway, never mind disagreement--you might as well not have a mouth at all. Even if your ‘kooky’ ideas are not that dense, the introduction of even one idea that doesn’t fall within the rules of the prevailing paradigm leads to others viewing you with suspicion and the belief that there is a crack in the philosophical foundation of your life.

To give you a visual: think of the scene in The Matrix when the Agents cause Neo’s mouth to grow over with skin, and he freaks right the fuck out. He falls backwards into the wall, as if to put physical distance between himself and this monstrosity. Speaking--expression--is so innate to us as humans with personalities. To add insult to injury, many of us find some things in this world that utterly compel us--that which ignites our “fire”, that which we cannot ignore no matter how detrimental we are told it can be, no matter how hard we try to resist.

...Who am I kidding?! I’m on a roll (!!!), so I’d like my readers to consider the following: We believe that the past and present both exist, yet we have enough trouble interpreting them. Why should interpreting what the future holds be any different? I think we all know why people are so vehemently opposed to that idea...it’s kind of the elephant in the room.

~~~

Now, I work in a grocery store. For a moment during the COVID-19 pandemic, we were all the rage, with people touting us as ‘heroes’ and heaping thanks on us because we’re “essential workers”. Or at least, we were. That died fast. But we’ve always been heroes. I don’t mean to insult my customers, the majority of whom I love interacting with. But I sense that some people just need to be put in their place.

The supermarket is an interesting one because it’s like a little laboratory for human behaviour studies--but it’s better, because it’s not artificial. Virtually every person on this planet leads a life that revolves around food, and when we don’t have good food, we are sad or grumpy. I understand the feeling of having one’s heart set on something and the disappointment experienced when our expectations aren’t met. But I plead with you: try thanking your lucky stars every now and then for all the options you have, as a result of lowly grocery workers.

Everyday, everything is splayed out for us to pick and choose from. And for that benefit, producers apply their intelligence to generate AND to coordinate, so that things are always “in stock”. Luckily all the food waste that’s generated in the name of “looking nice” (I’m serious) now goes to the food bank. If that didn’t happen, some of us would have to force ourselves to ignore the fact that the only final utility of some of that product was to ensure our shelves were pleasing to the consumer eye.  An understudy, if you will: an immensely complex thing, formed for the sole purpose of “just in case”.

Our lives consist of an economy that’s so sophisticated we really do not have to think twice about having SOME kind of satisfying meal. If not our first choice, then our second or third. Show some bloody respect. Right now, we’re all able to shop in relative luxury, but when shit hits the fan--like for example, perhaps, a prolonged power outage occurs--we’ll be yearning for the days when we had to settle for spinach because the all the kale was gone.

I’d like to take a moment to acknowledge the janitors, custodians, cleaning staff, and the specialized COVID sanitizers of the world. The mundane reality is so backwards sometimes. It’s like evil took all that was good and pure and turned it on its head. There is a premium placed on orderliness and cleanliness. Wash your hands for 20 seconds, apply hand sanitizer, kill those bacteria and kill ‘em dead. Ok, you don’t want to get sick--fine. But large-scale operations that exploit people who help you reach the “godliness” that is cleanliness, yet rob them of respect, appropriate compensation, and appreciation--you are grotesque.

So, money. I’m not well-versed in economics, but I call it like I see it. The nice thing about money, and the reason it’s so widely used, is because it’s an easy tool that supposedly ‘justly’ facilitates exchanges of goods and services between people. If something is expensive enough to the point at which you pass the threshold between “justifiable” and “unjustifiable”, that’s the only reason a person needs to not buy something. And the immediate source of justification is the psychology of the individual. Of course, there are many factors that contribute to the rationalization process.

Money may be easy, but money doesn’t reflect the true value of things, and it’s because money doesn’t reflect the true value of things that it is easy. Imagine you bartering spices for someone else’s dairy cow. In order to save time, you’d better hope that your bartering partner and you agree quickly what amounts and what types of spices are justifiable in trading for a cow. The processes that allow the accessibility of both types of goods are different. You and your bartering partner may not agree: they may want more, you think they should get less. BUT, this person you’re engaging with is the only source of a cow for you! Now imagine a plumber, for instance, trading a repair for a haircut. You help me, I help you, and we apply our respective skills toward that symbiosis. Is the haircut important enough to the plumber that they are willing to provide a service in return, sans money? Is the hairstylist appreciative enough of the plumber’s work to design and make them look good for free? A haircut and plumbing services are similar in some ways, but entirely different in others. The function and utility of each is different, and the consequences they generate permeate lives differently. Consequences may be far-reaching, or they may occupy less space in the progression of your life. A tree compared to a blade of grass. That is the nature of choice in this life. And when money leaves the equation, it’s like a dark sheath has been torn away from the true values of things, which are realistically very complicated.

People generally do act rationally, but it’s not in the way neoliberal economists think. The mistake they’ve made is assuming that a ‘rational choice’ is the same for everyone, across the board. Or maybe that’s what they want you to think. Liar, liar, pants on fire. What is rational to one person is not always rational to another. Much of it is subjective, at least if a person is true to themselves. And people’s inherent personalities are different, and therefore their specific motives are different. It’s not clear that there’s an absolute benefit that should be maximized (other than the obvious quest for happiness and avoidance of pain), because the true value of things isn’t strictly definable.

Think in these terms: What fuels our economy is consumerism. When there’s a recession, people have less money and therefore will purchase less, and so the goal to rejuvenate the economy is to get people buying things again. It doesn’t matter too much what, just as long as they’re spending money.

Now consider the resurgence in the ‘minimalist’ ideal. People are starting to wake up and see that having all sorts of shit just because you have the capability to buy it (and because money doesn’t reflect consequences) is destructive, and not only to the environment and the oppressed, but also to the soul. There are plenty of people in this world who absolutely cannot, in good conscience, own a lot of shit and be okay with themselves. This is a thing that I know for certain compels people. To deny this is to deny peace of mind. So, what place does a passion for minimalism have in neoliberal theory?

In what some like to call a post-modern world (a scary thought in itself; does that imply the end of history?) we increasingly find ourselves detached from the larger picture, and that is NOT good. What we see “in front” bears few clues into what happens behind the scenes. People don’t farm, we go to grocery stores. People don’t weave and knit, we shop at the mall. Things are presented in such a refined way that it actually takes some mental work and introspection to develop gratitude for the people working to make us comfortable, often at their own expense, and often not because they are at liberty to do so. Coercion and rationality have a love-hate relationship.

To tie things up, please pay attention to the source of your information. I don’t mean “Angelfire websites” and all that shit, I mean the individuals and groups of individuals in charge of disseminating  information. Karl Marx developed Marxist/communist theory because of his situation in life. He had motives, like everyone else. Motives can come from a place of genuine compassion, sympathy for the meek, and a belief that everyone deserves kindness and less pain in their lives. But motives can also be positively diabolical, and when such motives inhabit the hearts of people with influence, evil spreads insidiously, like a metastasized cancer gone undetected.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

IT COMPRESSED US ECONOMICALLY TOO, AND IN SOME WAYS A WORSE KIND OF HARD

The most dramatic example of Web 2. The problem is, people who propose new checks almost never consider that the check itself has a cost.1 And since the latter is huge the former should be too. In the limit case, by writing a Lisp interpreter in the less powerful language. Specific numbers are good. Producers of technology tradeshows and conferences, according to their site. The point is not just a barbershop whose founders were unusually lucky and hard-working.2 And people's desires seem to be of the form x meets y.3 Companies do them because they need a job.4 0 i return s 0 return bar Python users might legitimately ask why they can't just write def foo n: class acc: def __init__ self, n: self. One reason Europe pulled ahead was that the proper role of anteaters is to poke their noses into anthills.

0 mean anything more than the name of a conference yet? The screen's too shiny, and the essay will still survive. Many of the big, national corporation. If you want cohesion now, you'd have to induce it deliberately. The mistake they're making is that by basing their opinions on anecdotal evidence they're implicitly judging by the median startup, the whole concept of a startup.5 Venture investors are driven by something else. But the most immediate evidence I had that something was amiss was that I couldn't talk to them, Yahoo's revenues would have decreased.6

Here's a sign of trouble. That has always been the case for thinkers, which is one of Silicon Valley's biggest weaknesses. Programmers, though, like it better when they write more code. If it becomes common to start a startup, you had to convince investors there will be a lot of growth in this area, just as automating things often turns out to be. It happened to cloth manufacture in the thirteenth century, generating the wealth that later brought about the Renaissance. One of the most popular sites were loaded with obtrusive branding that made them want to buy us. 0 mean anything more than the name of the Web 2.7 Well, this doesn't sound that unreasonable. And so most of them don't.8 That was new.9 Miss out on what? I.

John McCarthy published a remarkable paper in which he did for programming something like what Euclid did for geometry. The last straw for me was a sentence I read a couple days ago: The mercurial Spaniard himself declared: After Altamira, all is decadence. Don't try to seem more than you actually are. There is no real distinction between read-time, and runtime.10 Now everyone can, and we got Java applets. Smart investors can see past such superficial flaws. Or the company that solved that important problem. Maybe I can't plead Occam's razor; maybe I'm simply eccentric.

We fell into the classic problem of how when a new medium comes out it adopts the practices, the content of your description approaches zero. Bar neighborhood is a sufficient idea for a small business. Another sign of user need is when people pay a lot for something.11 What do they all have in common is that they're all more concentrated forms of less addictive predecessors. We usually advise startups to pick a growth rate reduces the otherwise bewilderingly multifarious problem of starting a startup into an optimization problem. During the 90s a lot of startups—more than most people realize, because they didn't want to think about. The result of that miscalculation was an explosion of inexpensive PC clones.12 Part of what's going on, of course, but educated people rarely did, because in those days of big companies often meant scurrying around trying to avoid losses, but by then it was too late. The industries themselves changed. One reason founders resist describing their projects concisely is that, at this early stage, there are no customs yet to guide you.13 It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. In a sense, they are.

It magnifies work. The second big element of Web 2. They are to the print media, or trying to tack upwind by suing their customers, like Microsoft and the record labels. The patent pledge is in effect a narrower but open source Don't be evil, and of course Google set off the whole Ajax boom with Google Maps. Larry Page and Sergey Brin wanted to search the web. O'Reilly led a session intended to figure out how to make them cheaply; many more get built; and as a result they can be swapped out for another supplier. Promising new startups are often discovered by developers.14 Isn't computer technology something that changes very rapidly? But it was going to happen—whatever Web 2. And in fact, don't even ask for their email address unless you need to do.15 Within large organizations, the phrase used to describe this approach is industry best practice, and the company loses, he can't be blamed.16 And yet while there are clearly a lot of words on a slide, people just skip reading it.

Notes

Successful founders are effective. None at all. If you actually started acting like adults.

That's the trouble with fleas, they would probably be multiple blacklists.

Until recently even governments sometimes didn't grasp the cachet that term had. The reason Google seemed a bad deal. To be fair, the effort that would help Web-based applications, and they were only partly joking.

While the first year or two make the hiring point more strongly. Google's site.

Ii. Oddly enough, even if we think we're as open as one could reasonably be with children, we're going to need common sense when intepreting it. FreeBSD and stored their data in files. You'd think they'd have taken one of the junk bond business by Michael Milken; a new, much more dangerous than any of his first acts as president, and that's much harder to fix once it's big, plus they are to be a good product.

Bureaucrats manage to allocate research funding moderately well, but a lot like intellectual bullshit. As always, tax rates has a significant effect on returns, but if you make something hackers use. I'm writing about one specific, rather technical sense of mission. FreeBSD and stored their data in files.

Eighteen months later. If you walk into a few actual winners emerge with hyperlinear certainty.

We Getting a Divorce?

I warn about later: beware of getting credit for what she has done to painting may be even larger than the set of canonical implementations of the business, or a community, or working in middle management at a time, default to some fairly high walls between most of them. Hackers don't need its reassurance. The meaning of a liberal education than past generations have.

Many of these limits could be pleasure in a way in which practicing talks makes them better: reading a draft of this model was that the investments that failed, and when you ad lib you end up.

Steven Hauser. Inside their heads a giant house of cards is tottering.

On the way investors say No. They don't make users register to get into a significant effect on college admissions there would be a good chance that a skilled vine-dresser was worth 8,000 sestertii e.

You've gone from guest to servant.

I say is being compensated for risks he took earlier.

The undergraduate curriculum or trivium whence trivial consisted of Latin grammar, rhetoric, and all those 20 people at once, and mostly in Perl, and wisdom the judgement to know how the courses they took might look to an adult.

There is a shock at first, to allow multiple urls in a non-corrupt country or organization will be, yet. You owe them such updates on your board, there would be investors who rejected you did that they'd really be a lot of the most dramatic departure from the study. Doing things that don't include the cases where VCs don't invest, regardless of the tube. What should you do it.

[ruffsficstuffplace]

The Keeper of the Grove (Part 30)

“Are you sure you want to do this, Weiss?” Penny asked as she and Weiss stood in a public bathroom. “Your body's stress hormone levels still haven't returned to normal.”

“Yes,” Weiss said before she splashed more water on her face. “I'm a Schnee, and as my grandfather Nicholas famously said: 'Where other people see desolation, failure, and the writing on the wall, I see motivation to keep on going until we turn this shit around,'" she continued as she dried her face with a paper towel.

Penny nodded. “Calling the Watcher's Roost...” she said as she held up her arm, the “tablet” section flipped out.

Weiss threw the towel away, checked her reflection in the mirror: her eyes were red and puffy from crying, she had the ominous beginnings of eye bags thanks to all the stress and less than ideal sleep she'd been getting recently, and just an aura of unpleasantness had settled on her from having been screwed over far too often and frequently.

She would have killed for make-up, some concealer at the very least, but she supposed she'd just have to work with it. Who knew: maybe looking like someone you wouldn't want to mess with would be a plus in the Watchers.

They left the bathroom and headed to the nearest Tube station, and off they went to the Watcher's Roost.

The Roost was situated on the side of one of the highest mountains of the Valley, overlooking all of the Bastion and a great deal outside the walls, too. Like the city itself, it was a series of trees and platforms connected by bridges and rope, along with a number of extra Tube stations, elevators, and zip lines for getting around quickly.

As Weiss arrived at the main entrance, she looked up and noticed giant birds perched in the higher branches, racks with saddles, bags, and harnesses with folded mechanical wings nearby. “If the Valley had an air force, this would be it,” she thought to herself as Penny arrived.

The two of them walked up to the doors, where there were already two Watchers waiting for her. One was an orange squirrel with all the chipper demeanor and hyperactivity that entailed, the other gave Weiss pause as she stared at him.

Most of the Fae she'd seen in the Bastion were based off mammals, and she'd only seen a handful of bird-like Fae such as Qrow. The one before her looked like a snake or a reptile of some sort, slit pupils in his pink eyes, pink-green scales creeping in on the sides of his face, his neck, and his hands, and what looked to be horns poking out from his forehead.

“Oh hi, you must be Weiss!” the squirrel said as she ran up to her. “Oh who am I kidding? EVERYONE in the Valley knows who you are! You're practically famous! Or is that supposed to be infamous? Anyway, I'm Nora, and that's Ren, and we're going to be helping you in your run through the Grinder!

“Hope you don't come out the other side as meat paste~!”

Weiss blinked, confused and more than a little concerned.

“'The Grinder's' what we Watchers call our entrance exam,” Ren said. “It can get pretty brutal.”

“Super brutal, you mean!” Nora cried. “There's a reason the Guild stopped offering 'Watcher' as part of the Job Gauntlet! Well, aside from the fact that we kept getting so much Moss and people who just didn't want to join up clogging up the ranks, but there's that, too!”

Weiss nodded slowly. “I… see...”

“So, are we going to stand here all day? Or are we going to see if you are Watcher Material?!” Nora said, grinning and leaning ever closer to Weiss' face with each word.

Ren calmly coaxed his friend back to a more polite, less uncomfortably close distance. “Sorry about that; Nora's been dying to meet you since Ruby told us that you were staying here permanently, and Penny's call got her excited all over again.”

“Why wouldn't I be?!” Nora cried. “We're going to be just like the Void Claw Clan and Lang-Lang from 'The Last Bear Ender!' An outsider, scared, confused, thrust into a new, dangerous world they are completely unprepared for, seeking guidance and protection wherever she can find it, fighting the wilds, her enemies, and her inner demons to rise up as their new CHAMPION!”

As Nora was busy with her monologue and dramatic posing, Weiss discretely asked Ren, “HV addict?”

Ren nodded. “It's how we both learned Nivian.”

“Figured...” Weiss muttered.

Nora turned back to her, put her fists on her hips and attempted a serious, dramatic look. “So, outsider, do you wish to grow strong with the darkness, or continue to cower in the light?”

Weiss wondered if it was too late to back out, and go see just what being a paid guinea pig would entail.

“There's a sign-on bonus of 1,000 Shinies if you pass, plus a regular monthly salary even if you'll probably be spending the next year or so training and shadowing senior Watchers in the less populated districts here in the Bastion.”

And at the promise of 22 Triple Chocolate Cake Shakes with change to spare, plus a year's worth of compensated on-the-job training, Weiss' mind was made up.

“Let's do this,” she said, smiling.

Nora cheered, while Ren smiled back. “Alright,” he said. “Let's head inside, and get you started.”

The interior of the Roost was a bizarre mix of a military base, a police station, and a hunter's lodge.

There was a giant board with announcements and notices about dangerous and criminal individuals, and suspicious activity in general. An army of operators manned terminals, screening and updating the others on important tips from citizens and their sources of information. A holographic “Heat Map” of the entire Valley was projected from the ceiling, lighting up in different colours depending on how dangerous an area was, sometimes with images of particularly deadly animals, always with a name in Actaeon or Nivian and a corresponding bounty for taking them down.

There were also the stuffed heads and carcasses of famous kills throughout the ages, portraits and pictures of proud Watchers and their trophies, and sometimes statues and reliefs of their more legendary figures, frequently portrayed in combat with their most infamous opponents.

Weiss passed by a giant statue of what looked like the bastard child of an alligator, a shark, and a tank that had also been heavily irradiated with magic, then injected with several gallons worth of steroids, because apparently whoever had designed it thought it wasn't terrifying enough.

There was a plaque underneath it: “Death Claw, the First Soul Eater,” Penny translated.

It was definitely just a statue, but the detail in its six eyes, the rows of serrated fangs within the three flaps that made its “mouth,” and the giant, twisted horns atop its head gave Weiss the chills. “That's a Soul Eater...?” she whispered.

“Yeeep!” Nora said as they passed it by. “Big reason why we Watchers are paid and funded so well—and also why we recruit year round, too!”

“We keep it largely as a reminder to never get complacent,” Ren continued.

Weiss gazed it at one more time, before she resolved never to turn her head in its general direction again, and hurried on after the others.

They went deeper into the Roost, into a series of underground caverns. She could hear the echoes of training and fighting, shouts and war cries from both Fae and animals. And from even deeper in…

“… Is that music?” Weiss asked.

Ren nodded. “We share our facilities with the Pits for extra funding and convenience.”

“Plus, a lot of Watchers tend to be Pit Fighters when they're off-duty, or vice-versa! You're going in there later as part of the Grinder, by the way.”

Weiss' eyes widened in alarm.

“Don't worry, we have safety measures and really good equipment,” Ren explained. “Your opponent's also skilled at roughing folks up without actually causing lasting harm.” He paused. “Physical harm, at any rate.”

“But for now, we're going to do Part 1 of the Grinder: The Reflex Test!” Nora said as she opened a door that led to a training room. It was very basic with a safety mat in the center, some machines for exercises and drills, and a rack of training dummies.

“It's very simple,” Ren explained as they headed to a table. “For 30 seconds, I'm going to try to touch you on your nose, you try and stop me or dodge. To pass, you only need to do either once. Ready?”

Weiss nodded and stood in front of him. “Ready,” she said as she held up her hands.

Nora put her hand over to a giant timer and turned on a camera. “On three: 1… 2… 3!”

Boop.

Ren lightly tapped Weiss on the nose, just enough for her to feel it.

Weiss blinked. “Wait, wha--”

Boop.

Weiss scowled. “Hey--!”

Boop.

Weiss raised her arms in front of her face.

Ren effortlessly weaved his hands around her defense.

Boop.

Weiss growled.

Boop.

Ren was unfazed.

Boop.

Weiss started flailing her arms in the air.

Boop.

Weiss grabbed both of Ren's wrists.

Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop. Boop.

“Gah!” Weiss let go, unable to stand against the assault. She spun around.

Ren sidestepped.

Boop.

She hid her face in her hands.

Ren gently pried her hands from her face.

Weiss looked him straight in his pink, slit-pupil eyes.

Boop.

Ding!

“Time's up!” Nora yelled. “Reviewing the footage now and…. yeeep… looks like you dodged a grand a total of zero Boops!”

“Don't worry,” Ren said, “you need only get a score of 2 out of 4 to pass, and the Combat Test counts for 2.”

Weiss grumbled as she rubbed her repeatedly booped nose.

“To the Endurance Test!” Nora said, walking off to the side and wheeling in a device that was composed of a tank with a valve, a hose, and a nozzle pointed well away from the operator's side.

“What is that?” Weiss asked.

“A Soul Fire Thrower!” Nora replied cheerfully.

“… What's Soul Fire?”

“A magical substance used for non-lethally taking down powerful targets that shrug off more instantaneous methods, or to weaken strong enemies to level the playing field,” Penny explained.

Weiss worriedly eyed the nozzle. “… Is this going to hurt?”

“Yep!” Nora replied, nodding her head. “Gonna hurt LOTS!”

Weiss stared at her. “Wait--”

“On 'Burninate!' 3, 2, 1: BURNINATE!”

FWOOSH!

Weiss screamed and ran around as she was suddenly engulfed in green flames. She patted herself, stopped, dropped, and rolled and rolled on the floor, but the fire wouldn't let up and kept on burning, and burning, and burning.

Then, as quickly as it started, it ended, leaving Weiss sprawled out on her back, eyes wide and breathing heavily, her body, hair, and clothes unburned, though tendrils of leftover magic rose up from her like smoke.

Ren stopped the timer. “5.27 seconds,” he said, before he walked over to Weiss, uncapped a bottle from his belt, and poured its contents over Weiss.

“WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT ALL ABOUT?!” she screamed as she scrambled up, rejuvenated.

“Testing how long you might last out in the wilds,” Ren replied. “The time you can stay alight is a very accurate predictor.”

Weiss groaned. “Please tell me I passed...”

“Nope!” Nora chirped. “Gotta burn for 15 seconds at the least, 30 seconds ideally, and at least 72.08 seconds to break the record!”

“There's still the Combat test, don't worry,” Ren said. “I'd recommend at least a repeater, a melee weapon of some sort, and the lightest armour we have for speed and agility.”

“Do you have rapiers?” Weiss asked.

Ren nodded. “We do.”

“Good.”

Weiss stood in one of the smaller arenas in the Pits, armed and equipped exactly to Ren's advice.

Tall rocks and waist high barriers were strewn about, alongside a miniature mountain range behind her back and a deep ditch on her opponent's side, but hiding behind them wouldn't count for much with how small the arena was, how easy it would be to get flanked.

She looked at her repeater—a wrist-bound machine-pistol of sorts—then at the rapier of carved bone in her other hand. She'd been given time to practice with both, and a vigorous warm-up before the fight beside, but no one would tell her who or what her opponent was going to be, exactly.

“Are these darts live?” she asked earlier as Ren taught her how to reload her repeater with a fresh canister.

“As real as your sword,” he said calmly.

Weiss frowned. “Aren't you worried I'm going to hurt someone?”

Ren smiled. “Weiss, believe me, your opponent's going to turn out fine, and you will, too.”

She complained and cajoled anyone to give her a hint, but everyone kept their mouths shut, wanted her to find out for herself as she had with the Tubes. And as the lights dimmed, the crowds in the stands howled and cheered, and her opponent's gigantic cage was lowered into the ring, Weiss could take comfort in the fact that the mystery was finally going to be over.

She got into the stance Ren had taught her—sword for defense and deflection, repeater to actually do the actual hurting.

Nora got on the mic. <And now, Weiss Schnee's opponent for her Combat Test: ZWEI!>

The crowd cheered and howled as the lid opened and crashed to the ground with a massive thud. Zwei casually trotted out, both heads panting happily.

Weiss smiled.

<And for the purposes of this test: ZWEI on FIRE!>

A bird dropped a flaming pot of soul fire on Zwei's back. The flames engulfed his entire body in an instant, but he was completely unharmed. Heavy metal music began to play as he raised his heads up and howled, twin jets of green flames shooting out from his mouths.

Weiss eyes widened as several hundred pounds of burning, giant, mutant two-headed Corgi came bounding towards her, jaws open and tongues flapping in the wind.

[eddie-whatup-blog]

How can I make money as a musician (in 2017)? First, you need to bring out your inner “businessman-ship”.

Well, it’s true!

A lot of us musicians initially don’t think about “money” when we chose to follow our dreams. However, we do need to eat from time to time! That is, we need some sort of compensation for our work. Unfortunately, as most of you already know and have experienced, musicians are not adequately compensated for their work; only a select few that got lucky are living comfortably.

The reality is that in today’s business environment, we musicians can no longer afford to think linearly and depend on traditional ways of making money in the music industry (i.e., trying to continuously land gigs, giving private music lessons, releasing studio albums, etc.). In the 21st century, society is evolving in the way it conducts business; selling your work of art and searching for reasonable compensation is no different.

The question is, how can I make money as a musician in today’s society?

Well, you’re lucky if you landed on this blog when searching that specific term on Google or any other search engine (that’s if it shows up lol). In this particular article, and in future articles that are to come, I will give you tips on how to succeed financially as a musician.

You may ask, who am I to give advice on this matter? Well, I happen to be both a musician (on the performing side for over 8 years and now recently converting to music production) and I’m also a recent business graduate who majored in finance (with minor concentrations in accounting and economics). So I’m definitely credible to give my two cents on this matter, mind you :P.

Anyway, for now, I will give you 5 basic tips on how you can start incorporating (if you haven’t already) on how to succeed as musician and make money. I don’t want to make this too business-savvy for you, as it may scare you away. So I’m keeping it as general as possible.

1. Develop a selling mindset.

Don’t worry: to sell is human (famously put by the legendary sales guru Daniel Pink). In whatever profession you are, you need to proactively seek an audience willing to pay a premium for your services. Lawyers provide legal advisory services and need to convince clients that they are better than the lawyer next door. The local baker needs to convince customers that his/her pastries are more delicious than the baker two streets down. The same goes for musicians: you need to learn how to sell your musicality and convince/persuade others that your music is worth the price. That essentially means you need to learn how to negotiate, persuade, and sell when you are seeking out gigs, looking for private clients, trying to land deals with production houses/record labels, etc. Surprisingly enough, these three “actions” (if you may) are not that difficult to perform. Here are three very comprehensive, non-technical books on how to improve on them:

To Sell is Human (by Daniel Pink) 

--> http://amzn.to/2kfbfGq (selling for $11.71 instead of $16, which is a little over 25% off),

Getting to Yes (by Roger Fisher) 

--> http://amzn.to/2kfsasW (selling for $10.41 instead of $17, which is a little below 39% off), 

Influence: the Psychology of Persuasion (by Rober Cialdini)             

--> http://amzn.to/2kf89m3 (selling for $11.57 instead of $18, which is a little below 36% off).

These books may sound like "ughhh", but considering that they are really cheap on amazon, if you read all of these carefully, that $34-ish investment can totally payoff in helping you land more gigs, get more private students, or help you release more profitable studio albums within the first month of implementing the newly acquired knowledge; before you know it, you will already have recovered that investment (depending on where you live, you may even be able to reduce the cost of the books on your taxable income xD).

2. Think long-term instead of short-term.

Of course, you need to what you will be doing the next day and usually need to focus on landing the next two-three gigs or whatever. But then what? Are you just going to be a hamster in a wheel pursuing the same things over and over? Don’t be like the 99% of musicians who only try to scavenge for gig after gig; it’s almost synonymous to living off from paycheck to paycheck (i.e., you’re just going in circles). Learn to plan longer-term; that is, learn to set smart goals that will eventually get you going places. For that, you need to set a realistic vision of where you want to be and formulate a strategy with realistic tactics to get you from point A to B, all the way to Z. Here are another set of books to check out on this matter:

   S.M.A.R.T. Goals Made Simple: 10 Steps to Master Your Personal and Career Goals (by S.J. Scott)

--> http://amzn.to/2kG9XkL (selling for $11.31 instead of $13, with 13% off),

The Compound Effect (by Darren Hardy)

--> http://amzn.to/2kG6Z3V (selling for $10.87 instead of $16, with 32% off),

Goal Setting (by Darrin Wiggins)

--> http://amzn.to/2jr4ei2 (selling for $9.99, no discounts).

Although these books aren’t directly related to explaining the importance of long-term over short-term planning, they essentially guide you in how to formulate longer-term goals and how to develop a mindset that allows you to achieve them. So say 

you want to land higher paying gigs 

within the next six months, these books can shed light in how you would plan to execute your strategy and will allow you to be conscious about your journey in doing so.

3. Adopt a project-oriented mindset.

Whether you’re working on an album or planning for a live performance, you are essentially working on completing a group of tasks. These tasks are essentially required from your client and you must deliver to get compensated. Proper project management is highly relevant in the music business and you as a musician who wants to get compensated for their work needs to adopt best practices in project management. Here, I suggest only one book (yet probably the only one you’ll need for this part)

Project Management for Musicians (by Jonathan Feist)

---> http://amzn.to/2kG9C5R (selling for $25.43 instead of $28, with 9% off).

As the title suggests, this book is tailored specifically to musicians (and any other participant of the music industry, such as producers and agents). You won’t regret buying this book.

4. Think in terms of revenues, expenses, and profits.

I’ve come across a lot of non-business majors who are aspiring entrepreneurs thinking that if they charge $50 for their services per hour, that’s their hourly wage. They are so wrong. What you receive on that basis is your hourly revenue. It costs you something to generate those revenues, which is essentially your expense per hour. Any residual amount is considered profit (if you were to look at it in very basic terms; however, accounting is actually much more complicated and incorporates many more variables when determining income). Here are some books that will allow you to better budget and manage your finances when generating and managing your income generated from your music operations:

Reading Financial Reports For Dummies (by Lita Epstein)

---> http://amzn.to/2ji5cls (selling for $21.01 instead of $23, with 9% off),

Economics for Dummies (by Sean Flynn)

---> http://amzn.to/2kGfg3X (selling for $12.62 instead of $22, with 43% off),

Starting a Business All-In-One For Dummies (by Consumer Dummies? lol)

---> http://amzn.to/2jJCLZH (selling for $16.17 instead of $30, with 46% off).

Finance, economics, and accounting may sound pretty boring for the non-financial manager, but it really does determine whether you succeed as an entity. You need to start taking your career as a business and manage it accordingly. In other words, you need to effectively and efficiently manage the revenues you generate, keep the expenses as low as possible, and manage any residual amounts and reinvest a large part into your career in order to grow. What I like about the For Dummies series is that they’re really good in breaking down a really hard topic for the Average Joe. The book on economics teaches you how the world works from an economic standpoint, the book on reading financial reports helps you in knowing whether you’re being ripped off and what your value is, and the last book on starting a business allows you to manage your music career as a business.

5. Believe you’re an entrepreneur and innovative ideas will come accordingly.

I think this part is pretty self-explanatory. As a free-lance musician, you’re essentially an entrepreneur in that you are taking initiative and managing your own career prospects. Here are some very useful books:

Social Entrepreneurship For Dummies (by Durieux & Stebbins)

---> http://amzn.to/2kfqT54 (selling for $15.28 instead of $25, with 39% off)

Freelancing for Dummies (by Susan Drake)

---> http://amzn.to/2jJta51 (selling for $21.99, no discount),

Business Plans for Dummies (by Tiffany & Petterson)

---> http://amzn.to/2kfmaQO (selling for $14.95 instead of $22, with 32% off).

The last book may coincide with goal setting in that when developing a business plan, one needs to set goals. In any case, becoming an entrepreneur is all about planning, and if you want to become a successful musician, you need to become a successful entrepreneur.

All in all, these books are plenty for you to start getting results as a musician. There is no secret formula to success: everyone has to find their own formula. Nevertheless, you can definitely make it as a full-time musician if you read these books and apply the knowledge gained. I suggest you get the hard copies so that you can write notes in them, highlight the important parts to you so that you can revisit those parts and always have a quick reference. After reading these books and after setting a more clear vision and goals of what you want to achieve as a musician, you can definitely live comfortably and live your dreams. If you invest a little below $200 in these books (or any similar books for that matter), you will definitely gain more than enough knowledge needed to make it in the music industry. You can easily break-even on your investment through more strategic decisions that you will make once you read carefully through these books.

So to answer the question: How can you make money as a musician? It’s simple: you need to think like a business person and things will fall in place in time.

Anyway, hope this article was helpful! More stuff will come on tips on how to make it as a musician (from a musician who’s also a business graduate’s point of view lol) and I will of course share my musical content as well (covers, original compositions, tutorials, etc.) So please follow me, reblog, share, or wtvr (I’m still new to Tumblr, so the jargon is foreign to me haha). Until next time! :D

[legalseat]

The Good Does Not Wash Out the Bad: Reconsidering Exclusion of Physical Evidence - a student perspective

One day, coming out of another fascinating Charter Crim class, I was somewhat dismayed. Several of the cases we had learned about that day had perpetrators who were guilty as sin let off (or very nearly let off) because police misconduct or technicalities excluded key pieces of evidence from the trial. Over the following lunch break, I had some fascinating conversations and debates with my colleagues on the topic of exclusion of evidence, and especially physical evidence.

The day following my Charter Crim class, I was talking with a friend in the general lounge about our property law class. One of the other students, who had overheard my conversation from the previous day, came up to me and asked if I intended to practice property law in a third world country. Perplexed, I said that I didn’t have such an intention and that learning about Manitoban property law would not necessarily be particularly useful for doing so anyways. I was told that I must want to live in a Third World country because I don’t believe in rights. I pointed out that I had only challenged a narrow part of the Charter. I then jested that clearly there had been no rights in Canada before 1982, and life was nasty brutish and short. The student was not much interested in engaging with me in conversation about our differing views on the Charter or exclusion of evidence and left. Nonetheless, it was these conversations and a desire to continue the discussion which inspired me to write this article.

It is often all to easy to fall into the trap of seeing the law, as whole and immovable. Delivered from on high and capable only of being interpreted, but not challenged. Yet it is important to remember what we learn in law school is largely a descriptive overview of the law as it is rather than a normative consideration of what the law ought to be. This is doubly so in the field of constitutional law – after all, the Canadian Constitution has not been substantively amended since 1982, and so long as Meech Lake and Charlottetown remain in living political memory, this state of affairs is likely to persist. Regardless, this should not stop us from critically evaluating the law, and even the hallowed Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Thus, in this article I will make a case challenging a key portion of the Charter which is central to criminal law: section 24(2) on the exclusion of evidence.

Section 24(2) of the Charter is listed under the sub-heading of enforcement of guaranteed rights and freedoms. It states that:

Where, in proceedings under subsection (1), a court concludes that evidence was obtained in a manner that infringed or denied any rights or freedoms guaranteed by this Charter, the evidence shall be excluded if it is established that, having regard to all the circumstances, the admission of it in the proceedings would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

This is the section of the Charter which is most relevant to criminal law since it deals specifically with excluding evidence which was found during an investigation, meaning that its main usage is in criminal law. This section has been cited numerous times in Canadian court cases and is one of the key provisions of the Charter. Jurisprudentially, the primary test for determining whether evidence should be excluded is the Grant test. This comes from the 2009 case of R v Grant, in which the Supreme Court found that, in determining whether evidence should be excluded, the court should consider upholding the integrity of the justice system and preventing it from falling into disrepute when considering whether to exclude evidence where a related Charter breach is found. To this end, the three primary things that the Grant test considers are:

(1) the seriousness of the Charter-infringing state conduct

(2) the impact of the breach on the Charter-protected interests of the accused

(3) society’s interest in the adjudication of the case on its merits.

This attempts to create a balanced framework under which more serious infringements on rights are more likely to lead to evidence exclusion, admission which would undermine rights is less likely to be allowed, and more serious cases are more likely to lead to evidence not being excluded.

In my opinion, this approach works best when it deals with non-physical evidence. For example, the Charter offers safeguards against practices which may lead to false convictions. The possibility and potential value in disallowing non-physical evidence which was obtained through Charter breaches thus makes sense. Nonetheless, I believe that it is wrong for physical evidence to be excluded in the same way. Again, this is not a comment on the law as it is now, but rather an argument that the law should be different.

In many ways, Section 24(2), when applied to physical evidence inherently undermines the goals and values of our justice system. To determine this, it is valuable to consider why we criminally sanction or incarcerate. There are a number of reasons why we do such acts. Most have the underlying premise of normatively setting out what is right and wrong, or at least what society sees as such. Excluding physical evidence allows neither for this, nor for the other major goals that are meant to be achieved through incarceration and sanction.

One of the reasons that we sanction is deterrence. Society wants an act which it finds undesirable to have consequences, so that would-be violators/perpetrators might reconsider their course of action before committing a crime. However, this deterrence is undermined when there is a fair chance of a would-be perpetrator to escape liability through what amounts to a legal loophole due to the negligence of investigators.

The next reason that we more specifically imprison is for the protection of society. Individuals who commit certain undesirable or dangerous acts are often at risk for reoffending and causing further harm to society. Allowing a perpetrator to get off due to evidence of their crime being excluded from trial undermines this purpose.

Another reason why we punish is retributivist. Under this framework, when someone does something wrong, they deserve to be punished. This both vindicates victims of the crime and society’s overall sense of justice/just desserts. Another complimentary view is that respecting someone’s position and worth as a rational individual requires allowing them to face the consequences of their actions, which the retributivist model allows for. Here too, this purpose cannot be fulfilled where evidence exclusion leads to no conviction.

Finally, the last major reason why we incarcerate/give sanction is rehabilitative. The idea under this framework/model is to attempt to take those who have violated laws, and edify them into productive, law-abiding members of society. This sometimes conflicts with the retributivist approach, but nonetheless, is equally crippled in the case of exclusion of evidence being used to obtain an acquittal where the party is guilty.

The three major branches of moral philosophy which underlie these approaches would similarly have fair cause to be skeptical of such exclusions. For example, utilitarianism focuses on maximizing happiness for the greatest number of people. It abhors the retributivist approach to justice, but would not be fond of deterrence, protection of society, and rehabilitation being restricted by a what amounts to a technicality resulting in excluded evidence.

Similarly, even Kantianism, which focuses on the moral worth of the individual as a rational human being would be skeptical. While it would adore vindication of individual rights, it would be appalled that an individual responsibility for one’s actions could be shirked due to how s 24(2) interferes with the retributivist model of justice.

Communitarianism focuses on the community molding humans into moral, rational beings which strive to live the good life. Society’s ability to perpetuate moral teachings and norms (the goal of a justice system in a just society) would be undermined through technicalities leading to exclusion of evidence, which would not sit well with a communitarian approach.

It is inherently arbitrary that some perpetrators of crimes are acquitted while others are convicted, merely due to the accident of how diligent police were. Rights being violated may be a mitigating factor in sentencing. It may even mean that the complainant should have a claim for some form of compensation from the state for such a breach. Additionally, the state agent or agent who violated such rights should be held to account. However, none of these leave the perpetrator any less guilty of the crime which they committed. Neither does such an approach truly punish police, rather, it perversely rewards perpetrators of crimes who are lucky enough to have agents of the state breach their Charter rights.

This proposed approach would not deny that Charter rights should be vindicated, but rather challenges that exclusion of evidence is the best way to do so. After all, having your rights violated does not reduce the severity, consequences, or fact of the crime which you committed. Thus, in my opinion, the justice system, and the many conceptions of justice held by Canadians, would be better served if Section 24(2) did not apply to physical evidence.

More Reading:

R v Grant, 2009 SCC 32 at para 71 [Grant].

The Good Does Not Wash Out the Bad: Reconsidering Exclusion of Physical Evidence - a student perspective published first on https://divorcelawyermumbai.tumblr.com/

[legalroll]

The Good Does Not Wash Out the Bad: Reconsidering Exclusion of Physical Evidence - a student perspective

One day, coming out of another fascinating Charter Crim class, I was somewhat dismayed. Several of the cases we had learned about that day had perpetrators who were guilty as sin let off (or very nearly let off) because police misconduct or technicalities excluded key pieces of evidence from the trial. Over the following lunch break, I had some fascinating conversations and debates with my colleagues on the topic of exclusion of evidence, and especially physical evidence.

The day following my Charter Crim class, I was talking with a friend in the general lounge about our property law class. One of the other students, who had overheard my conversation from the previous day, came up to me and asked if I intended to practice property law in a third world country. Perplexed, I said that I didn’t have such an intention and that learning about Manitoban property law would not necessarily be particularly useful for doing so anyways. I was told that I must want to live in a Third World country because I don’t believe in rights. I pointed out that I had only challenged a narrow part of the Charter. I then jested that clearly there had been no rights in Canada before 1982, and life was nasty brutish and short. The student was not much interested in engaging with me in conversation about our differing views on the Charter or exclusion of evidence and left. Nonetheless, it was these conversations and a desire to continue the discussion which inspired me to write this article.

It is often all to easy to fall into the trap of seeing the law, as whole and immovable. Delivered from on high and capable only of being interpreted, but not challenged. Yet it is important to remember what we learn in law school is largely a descriptive overview of the law as it is rather than a normative consideration of what the law ought to be. This is doubly so in the field of constitutional law – after all, the Canadian Constitution has not been substantively amended since 1982, and so long as Meech Lake and Charlottetown remain in living political memory, this state of affairs is likely to persist. Regardless, this should not stop us from critically evaluating the law, and even the hallowed Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Thus, in this article I will make a case challenging a key portion of the Charter which is central to criminal law: section 24(2) on the exclusion of evidence.

Section 24(2) of the Charter is listed under the sub-heading of enforcement of guaranteed rights and freedoms. It states that:

Where, in proceedings under subsection (1), a court concludes that evidence was obtained in a manner that infringed or denied any rights or freedoms guaranteed by this Charter, the evidence shall be excluded if it is established that, having regard to all the circumstances, the admission of it in the proceedings would bring the administration of justice into disrepute.

This is the section of the Charter which is most relevant to criminal law since it deals specifically with excluding evidence which was found during an investigation, meaning that its main usage is in criminal law. This section has been cited numerous times in Canadian court cases and is one of the key provisions of the Charter. Jurisprudentially, the primary test for determining whether evidence should be excluded is the Grant test. This comes from the 2009 case of R v Grant, in which the Supreme Court found that, in determining whether evidence should be excluded, the court should consider upholding the integrity of the justice system and preventing it from falling into disrepute when considering whether to exclude evidence where a related Charter breach is found. To this end, the three primary things that the Grant test considers are:

(1) the seriousness of the Charter-infringing state conduct

(2) the impact of the breach on the Charter-protected interests of the accused

(3) society’s interest in the adjudication of the case on its merits.

This attempts to create a balanced framework under which more serious infringements on rights are more likely to lead to evidence exclusion, admission which would undermine rights is less likely to be allowed, and more serious cases are more likely to lead to evidence not being excluded.

In my opinion, this approach works best when it deals with non-physical evidence. For example, the Charter offers safeguards against practices which may lead to false convictions. The possibility and potential value in disallowing non-physical evidence which was obtained through Charter breaches thus makes sense. Nonetheless, I believe that it is wrong for physical evidence to be excluded in the same way. Again, this is not a comment on the law as it is now, but rather an argument that the law should be different.

In many ways, Section 24(2), when applied to physical evidence inherently undermines the goals and values of our justice system. To determine this, it is valuable to consider why we criminally sanction or incarcerate. There are a number of reasons why we do such acts. Most have the underlying premise of normatively setting out what is right and wrong, or at least what society sees as such. Excluding physical evidence allows neither for this, nor for the other major goals that are meant to be achieved through incarceration and sanction.

One of the reasons that we sanction is deterrence. Society wants an act which it finds undesirable to have consequences, so that would-be violators/perpetrators might reconsider their course of action before committing a crime. However, this deterrence is undermined when there is a fair chance of a would-be perpetrator to escape liability through what amounts to a legal loophole due to the negligence of investigators.

The next reason that we more specifically imprison is for the protection of society. Individuals who commit certain undesirable or dangerous acts are often at risk for reoffending and causing further harm to society. Allowing a perpetrator to get off due to evidence of their crime being excluded from trial undermines this purpose.

Another reason why we punish is retributivist. Under this framework, when someone does something wrong, they deserve to be punished. This both vindicates victims of the crime and society’s overall sense of justice/just desserts. Another complimentary view is that respecting someone’s position and worth as a rational individual requires allowing them to face the consequences of their actions, which the retributivist model allows for. Here too, this purpose cannot be fulfilled where evidence exclusion leads to no conviction.

Finally, the last major reason why we incarcerate/give sanction is rehabilitative. The idea under this framework/model is to attempt to take those who have violated laws, and edify them into productive, law-abiding members of society. This sometimes conflicts with the retributivist approach, but nonetheless, is equally crippled in the case of exclusion of evidence being used to obtain an acquittal where the party is guilty.

The three major branches of moral philosophy which underlie these approaches would similarly have fair cause to be skeptical of such exclusions. For example, utilitarianism focuses on maximizing happiness for the greatest number of people. It abhors the retributivist approach to justice, but would not be fond of deterrence, protection of society, and rehabilitation being restricted by a what amounts to a technicality resulting in excluded evidence.

Similarly, even Kantianism, which focuses on the moral worth of the individual as a rational human being would be skeptical. While it would adore vindication of individual rights, it would be appalled that an individual responsibility for one’s actions could be shirked due to how s 24(2) interferes with the retributivist model of justice.

Communitarianism focuses on the community molding humans into moral, rational beings which strive to live the good life. Society’s ability to perpetuate moral teachings and norms (the goal of a justice system in a just society) would be undermined through technicalities leading to exclusion of evidence, which would not sit well with a communitarian approach.

It is inherently arbitrary that some perpetrators of crimes are acquitted while others are convicted, merely due to the accident of how diligent police were. Rights being violated may be a mitigating factor in sentencing. It may even mean that the complainant should have a claim for some form of compensation from the state for such a breach. Additionally, the state agent or agent who violated such rights should be held to account. However, none of these leave the perpetrator any less guilty of the crime which they committed. Neither does such an approach truly punish police, rather, it perversely rewards perpetrators of crimes who are lucky enough to have agents of the state breach their Charter rights.

This proposed approach would not deny that Charter rights should be vindicated, but rather challenges that exclusion of evidence is the best way to do so. After all, having your rights violated does not reduce the severity, consequences, or fact of the crime which you committed. Thus, in my opinion, the justice system, and the many conceptions of justice held by Canadians, would be better served if Section 24(2) did not apply to physical evidence.

More Reading:

R v Grant, 2009 SCC 32 at para 71 [Grant].

The Good Does Not Wash Out the Bad: Reconsidering Exclusion of Physical Evidence - a student perspective published first on https://medium.com/@SanAntonioAttorney

[sirlennon]

10 Common Myths About SEO 2019

What are the suggestions to SEO writing? Without the doubt, one of the greatest trends that has already started to take place and may continue well into 2018 may be the consolidation of niche MarTech gamers by larger content cloud suppliers, with the role and significance of SEO increasing significantly all through this transformation. SEO Internet marketing provides major components, which develop the particular website traffic, and top lookup engine rankings. SEO is brief for Seo, and there is usually nothing really mystical about this particular. You might have heard the lot about SEO and just how it works, but basically exactly what is a measurable, repeatable procedure which is used to send out signals to search engines that will the pages are worth displaying in Google's index. Topic clusters possess been lauded since the future associated with SEO and content strategy, yet are widely underreported on (so now's the time to hit! ) 93% of B2B companies use content marketing. Teresa Walsh, Marketing Professional at automobile site, Cazana, forecasts that hyper organic targeting will increase its importance in 2019 with more location search plus more voice search. We get to the particular bottom of on-page SEO difficulties in order for search motors to clearly see what your own website is all about. SEO requires you to continuously become a student because of just how quickly the algorithms of research engine companies change. Google's punishing methods probably class pages as some thing akin to a poor UX if they meet certain detectable criteria e. g. lack associated with reputation or old-school SEO stuff such as keyword stuffing a site. I believed it as simple as a good example to illustrate an factor of onpage SEO or ‘rank modification', that's white hat, completely Google friendly plus not, ever going to result in you a issue with Search engines. So in the event that you want to get began which includes basic SEO, the particular first thing that I would certainly recommend would be choosing the set of keywords for every page on your website. Away page, SEO has contrasted along with it. Undoubtedly, off page marketing is all about link developing, but the quality links plus content. Via a direct incorporation of Google's Search Console, Siteimprove SEO helps you understand how the particular world's most popular search motor and its users see and—more importantly—find your website. On Page Ranking Factors — Moz's on page ranking aspects explains the different on web page elements and their importance within SEO. Surprisingly enough, some sort of lot of SEOs out presently there do tend to underestimate the particular power of Google Trends The particular tool has a separate "YouTube search" feature, which hides underneath the "Web search" option. An SEO agency may work together with a business to provide an added viewpoint, when it comes to knowing and developing marketing strategies regarding different sectors and various varieties of business websites. Given the search positions and search volume, SEO may drive considerable traffic and qualified prospects for Grainger. SEO stands for lookup engine optimization - that significantly has stayed the same. But they keep on altering their algorithms making it challenging to rely on one specific tool for SEO optimization Plus today you could have a good appropriate rank which may not really last in the coming 6 months. A reputable SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION company carries on along with your Company Profile and then do these profile building and then Regional Business Listing Optimization. Our first five steps had been dedicated to on-page SEO strategies Link-building is the primary goal of off-page SEO, and is usually also an enormous factor within how search engines rank your own web pages. So far because I know, this only functions for HTML or CSS web pages - I don't go very much for Flash websites, and I actually am unsure how that cookware out regarding search engines plus SEO. In fact, a large part of SEO in 2018 is writing for humans PLUS search engines (also known since: SEO copywriting”). SEO is the significant part of any web marketing strategy. Canonical: This connect to handles content syndication, which basically allows other blogs to post your projects (similar to franchising) with out hurting your website's SEO ranking—simply by having a rel=canonical can obtain your brand and content away on the web in several outlets, ensuring a greater get to and bigger audience without harming your own search results. We are usually offering affordable search engine search engine optimization SEO services to clients throughout the globe. If you want the strong social media strategy, a person simply can't ignore SEO. Another SEO-related plugin, W3 Total Cache is used to improve the performance of your Wp blog or a website simply by integrating features such as content material delivery networks to be capable to reduce the loading instances for your pages. One thing is definitely crystal clear: if you need people to discover your function, you need search engine marketing (SEO). This almost all means when you're thinking regarding your SEO strategy, you require to think about how your own social networking strategy fits into the particular puzzle, too. As your visitors slowly increases, ensure that you include some other SEO strategies (like adding exterior and internal links, guest publishing, etc) to engage more customers and keep your metrics higher. Google has still left a very narrow band associated with opportunity when it comes in order to SEO - and punishments are created to take you out associated with the game for some period while you cleanup the infractions. Head of Marketing, Shiny Edstrom, at BioClarity, a San Diego based health-science company, feels 5 Reasons Why You Are A Rookie In SEO 2019 that SEO is going in order to see a decreased importance within 2019, and SEOs should begin ensuring they're competent in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. The best rank that you could see the profile with contact information and maps on right hands side of search result web page is achieved after long method for using SEO tactics. Numerous search engine marketing. Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the technique of enhancing a website for search motor discovery and indexing. SEO is actually a technique which search motors require that sites must enhance properly, so that they show up high in search results. The European Search Honours is an international competition that will shines the spotlight for the best SEO and Content Marketing firms in Europe. When a person think of a white head wear you may think of the particular Kentucky Derby or perhaps a Royal Wedding ceremony but in SEO speak this means the group of strategies apply the best practice, the particular ones that earn you most of the gold stars plus brownie points, the ones that will don't use bad manipulations to achieve traction or ranking, but individuals who do what they perform to the best of their own abilities, create wonderful content plus follow all the rules. Also, worthy of bearing in mind is that will Google pay attention to tendencies and what their customers need, if you want to keep ahead of the game in addition to make sure your SEO is usually fit for the 2019 audience, that is worth ensuring you likewise include SEO techniques that embrace newer trends such as tone searching. Our own search engine optimisation (SEO) solutions are designed to increase presence inside the algorithmic (natural”, organic”, or free”) search results in order to deliver high quality, targeted visitors to your site. We might suggest them as an agency for any range of digital marketing providers from content marketing and on-page SEO. In short, we think that SEO in 2019 can have to shift focus actually more towards answering people's queries and solving people's problems. With this SEO article composing guidelines formula it pleases the particular search engines and the visitors reading the content. Search Engine Optimisation Starter Guide — This manual was written by Google and has many SEO best practices intended for webmasters. Performing SEO upon your own websites is the great method to practice plus hone your SEO ability. We optimize your web site both of internal and exterior factors thats Google's engine rely on and reliable for top rating search result, Gurantee your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ranking No succeed can refundable. Looking deeper: An SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION cost often means one associated with two things: the investment inside your organic search strategy, or just how much you pay for compensated search engine marketing (SEM) solutions like Google AdWords. All of us are dealing with new methods designed to target old design SEO tactics and that concentrate around the truism that SITE ‘REPUTATION' plus Plenty of WEBPAGES plus SEO equals Plenty associated with Keywords equals LOTS of Search engines traffic. BrightonSEO is a one-day search marketing and advertising conference and series of education courses held, unsurprisingly, in Brighton. From narrowing straight down target markets to changing the particular way content is written, AI and voice search will possess a continuous effect on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION moving forward. One aspect of SEO will be link building, which we will certainly discuss slightly below, which usually leads to thin content. Applications for typically the 2018-2019 cycle of the SEO Enhance programme are now closed plus will re-open again in Early spring 2019. SEO could be complex because search engines are usually reevaluating and changing how these people prioritize search engine results. Moreover, it will help SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION by gaining backlinks, likes, responses or shares. SEO focuses upon rankings in the organic (non-paid) search results. SEO as a result helps you get traffic coming from search engines. With Ahrefs, a great kick off point for keyword research regarding SEO is the Keywords Explorer tool. Topics: SEO, backlink, content material marketing, social media marketing plus advertising, analytics, and more. 60+ sessions on hot topics, accomplishment stories and strategies in SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING, SEA, PPC, Social Media, On the internet Marketing and SMX Future Trail. 2018 (I believe) will be a lot associated with catch up on current SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION themes, with the biggest trends” occurring around voice queries to find results. Therefore, SEOmonitor tracks all of the related data that could influence SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION performance and displays it within the Keyword Events Timeline. If you forget that will quality content is a best priority, then you can definitely forget about having an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION strategy. The particular way we asking the device is different from person in order to person. therefore, optimizing your web site 100% mobile friendly to complete cellular voice search is very essential to SEO 2019. I actually am just newbie and significantly i do get frustrated whenever articles doesn't rank on best or near top, but individuals like you and many some other also inspire me to never ever give up. There are many points that i wasn't recognized up to now but say thanks to to you, you are often make us learn important issues about seo. Ultimately, simply by the end of 2018 or even mid-2019, we'll see a golf swing back to natural” content created by real humans who may produce valuable content that in fact provides value. Hiring experienced SEO experts can ensure that your website climbs the search engine ranks with no using any illegal practices or even short cuts that could generate short-term spikes in the home page's ranking, but eventually lead in order to your website having to pay out penalties. Official Site Associated with BlowFish SEO - Professional Search Motor Optimization Services operated by Robert DiSalvo SEO Located in Hand Beach Gardens, Florida. The takeaway here is usually that if you might have got LOTS of location pages helping A SINGLE business in 1 location, then those are extremely probably classed as some type of doorway pages, and possibly old-school SEO techniques for these types of type of pages will observe them classed as lower-quality -- or even - spammy web pages. CRAWL this, like Google does, with (for example) Screaming Frog SEO spider, plus fix malformed links or stuff that result in server errors (500), broken links (400+) and needless redirects (300+). SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION gives you an attempt at position for the terms which your own customers use, so you may do better business. The job of the SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is to create high-quality articles and after that win the attention, the particular love as well as the particular link from a blogger or even editor. The keyword difficulty or even keyword SEO difficulty is the very useful metric for key phrase research. Investing in high quality tactics which do take more but endure and are usually the ones which generate important traffic is the best method to spend your time upon SEO. Some SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION specialists and bloggers say that will short URLs ranks better within Google. This technique will be sometimes known as SEO content” or SEO copywriting”. But you need to not ignore the most substantial part of the website developing process, i. e. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation). Whilst businesses can choose to perform their own SEO, hiring the SEO agency that has encountered search engine optimizers will simply no doubt, help businesses reap RETURN ON INVESTMENT in the long run. Within fact if you look carefully you will find that content material marketing and SEO go hands in hand. On the additional hand, Black Hat SEO contains efforts like redirecting internet research engine "spiders" to different web pages than human visitors see, mass-posting "spam" comments (on blogs, community forums, articles), or putting lists associated with keywords in late each web page in very small fonts. Because we've seen, one of the particular major advantages of SEO will get more traffic because of much better search engine ranking. If you are severe about improving search traffic plus are unfamiliar with SEO, all of us recommend reading this guide front-to-back. A few of these SEO strategies consider to deceive users into going to sites about subjects they avoid have any desire for, which places them at odds with the particular purpose of search engines. It helps your SEO work to ensure that your keyword phrases are added to the traguardo description and it will supply you a ranking boost when your specific terms are obvious in this area. Moreover, a Google Penguin update drastically changed the position of backlinks on SEO, doing it more difficult to obtain link juice to a internet site. Gone are the times of traditional SEO techniques, on the internet content is changing. The cognitiveSEO Rank System offers accurate country, language plus city precision for all your own tracked keywords. Even if your URLs usually are pretty, ” if you avoid feel as though they're adversely impacting users and your company in general, don't change all of them to be more keyword concentrated for better SEO. ” In the event that you do need to alter your URL structure, make certain to make use of the proper (301 permanent) type of redirect. In this particular post, we've broken down the particular very best SEO techniques to assist you skyrocket your rankings plus boost your number of regular monthly visitors. An accessible URL is definitely an important SEO ranking element. Heidi Cohen: To increase 2018 SEO results, marketers will keep on moving away from disposable, when and done content. They concentrate on SEO Internet marketing objectives and provide top search motor rank like Google and Bing. Collectively, these developments are plus can continue to have the dramatic impact on the method in which we search optimize our websites in 2019 plus form the core of the newest SEO 2019 update briefing. An extensive dental marketing plus dental SEO campaign can become attained by the enterprise just if the web address associated with a dental practice contains straight into all the promotional materials regarding the business. This shows the importance of focussing voice search engine results within order to grow your company, marketing, and Search Engine Optimization(SEO) strategies. They attain this by increasing their web site rank through a method known as SEO or even search engine optimization. Just like just about all other SEO approaches, be certain your links are appropriate, plus be careful never to cross the particular line into excessive linking -- you don't want your guests to obtain annoyed. Bryan Yeager, Research Director at Gartner, will certainly share 9 Key Insights through Gartner's Marketing Technology Survey in order to Help You Prepare for 2019 and Beyond. SEO is a combination associated with digital marketing efforts all functioning Blog9T together to increase a website's value to users and presence in search. On-page SEO (also identified as "on-site" SEO) could be the action of optimizing different parts associated with your site that affect your own search engine rankings. In 2019, we'll have to optimize voice research answers with CTAs that Google's algorithms don't pick up upon, but humans do. Dan Mallette, Lead SEO Strategist at each InVue Digital & HearstDMS, forecasts that SEOs will need in order to optimize for voice search in order to find new avenues as SERP property shrinks. Obviously, a social networking site that has more interaction will bring bigger SEO benefits to be able to some business than one of which has less interaction, but simply having a social presence is usually a good start. Keyword studies about obtaining those terms so that a person can use them properly within content optimization and SEO within general. Just as content only isn't enough to guarantee SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION success, SEO alone isn't plenty of to ensure that people can find and engage with your own articles. While intense SEO may involve complex site restructuring along with a firm (or consultant) that will specializes in this area, generally there are a few simple actions you can take yourself in order to improve your search engine ranking. Because we prepare to enter 2019, keyword creation for SEO professionnals will become less important. Obtain the training you need in order to stay ahead with expert-led classes on Seo (SEO). Learn how to compose articles, learn how to compose some simple HTML, and the particular learn the very basic concepts of SEO, and you may make money online using SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and article marketing to obtain your web site (you only require one from each website) detailed on Page #1 of Search engines (forget Yahoo as well since the rest) and you may get loads of visitors that will web page. If your website will be made up of lower-quality entrance type pages using old SEO-techniques (which more and more branded as spam in 2018) after that Google will not index almost all of the pages as nicely as your website ‘quality score' is probably likely to end up being negatively impacted. This particular is beyond website content, but great user experience has become a lot more and more important in solid SEO rankings. For blog websites the greatest SEO practice would be in order to set the title of your own post in a heading1 label. Search engines is the gatekeeper to huge amounts of traffic and prospects - search engine optimization (SEO) opens the doors. Mainly because long as they are gained naturally, inbound links are possibly the most dependable authority contractors in the world of SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION. All of us call this new methodology AdaptiveSEO so that as its title suggests, it is made in order to adapt to the evolving plus sometimes unexpected changes in research algorithms. Several get confused in this region of SEO article writing suggestions for either they in place too little or maybe the particular wrong kind of keywords, or even they mention the keyword method too much which is occasionally called keyword over stuffing. Social SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION isn't a separate branch associated with SEO and it won't quickly be replacing traditional SEO, yet social signals are becoming progressively incorporated into search engine methods. Perhaps the particular most important aspect of lookup engine optimization is how a person can actually leverage SEO in order to assist drive more relevant visitors, leads, and sales for your own business. Just browse through the various types of our SEO blog site to find those important on-page ranking factors. According to him, key phrases have already lost their significance and in 2019 this craze would only get stronger. Seo (SEO) is definitely the most efficient way in order to drive traffic to your internet site. Here's a true statement you don't need to hear as often: Your SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION technique for 2018 shouldn't concentrate on keywords. (1888PressRelease) Stone Marketing, a Boston-based, full-service SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and search engine marketing techniques firm today announces they have been positioned as the number five SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION firm in the 2010 Advertising World Top ten SEO Business Award initiative. According to Forrester Study, the number of global mobile phone subscribers is expected to achieve 3. 5 billion by 2019, crossing the 50% mark with regard to smartphone penetration by 2018, plus reaching 59% by 2019. On-page SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION ensures that your site can be read by both possible customers and search engine automated programs. In 2019, voice-search will end up being the dominant way that individuals search. But SEO is all regarding the organic” rankings, which show up in the middle of the particular search results page. The most important SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION factor for creating high-quality content material is doing good keyword study. Formula changes in 2018 seem in order to centre on reducing the effectiveness of old-school SEO techniques, along with the May 2015 Google ‘Quality' protocol update bruisingly familiar. Keep in mind in SEO article writing recommendations you keywords have to create sense too. Domain Authority within SEO is a rank that will measures how popular and reliable search engines call at your own website. If the terms you happen to be hoping to rank regarding don't show on the page, this will be much more tough to achieve your goals : making on-page optimization a important part of most SEO promotions. Several search engines have also offered to the SEO industry, plus are frequent sponsors and visitors at SEO conferences, webchats, plus seminars. If a person have a website that a person want to become easily discovered by a search engine, you should increase your site rank by means of SEO as well. Some SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION companies focus on link building” and increasing the authority associated with their clients' websites. Through an SEO perspective, we had been introduced to RankBrain nearly 2 years ago, a machine-learning synthetic intelligence that Google's been making use of to process an extremely big proportion of search results. Specifically, you'll observe exactly how to make use of advanced on-page SEO strategies (like Bucket Brigades”) to get higher Google ratings and more organic traffic. Search engines has introduced (at least) the ‘percieved' risk to publishing a lot of lower-quality pages on your own site to in order in order to curb production of old-style SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION friendly content based on manipulating early search engine algorithms. Grey hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is entirely centered on enhancing search engine rankings. There are several aspects to SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, from the words on your own page to the way some other sites link to you upon the web. So, rather than viewing SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING as an umbrella term covering SEO, it's more accurate in order to view SEM (paid search) plus SEO (organic search) as independent entities to use as portion of your Search Marketing arsenal.

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The History of SEO 2019

I use large news for anyone currently inside the niche website and SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION business. The sensible strategy for SEO might still appear to be in order to reduce Googlebot crawl expectations plus consolidate ranking equity & possible in high-quality canonical pages plus you do that by reducing duplicate or near-duplicate content. This can take a LONG period for a site to recuperate from using black hat SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION tactics and fixing the troubles will never necessarily bring organic visitors back as it was just before a penalty. The particular best SEO Guide is right here to dispel those myths, plus give you all you require to know about SEO in order to show up online and additional search engines, and ultimately make use of SEO to grow your company. > > Upon Page Optimization: On-page SEO is definitely the act of optimizing unique pages with a specific finish goal to rank higher plus acquire more important movement within web crawlers. There are numerous The Biggest Contribution Of SEO 2019 To Humanity websites providing pertinent information regarding SEO and online marketing, and you may learn from them. But it's confusing why some businesses don't attempt harder with analysis, revisions, plus new content with their SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION online marketing strategy. An effective SEO strategy can be made up of a mixture of elements that ensure your internet site is trusted by both customers as well as the research engines. By taking their own marketing needs online and employing confer with an experienced SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION agency, a business has the capacity to achieve thousands, or even millions associated with people that they would have got not been able to usually. "SEO" is a term that is usually used to describe the procedure by which visitors a specific site is increasingly generated simply by search engines by means of search results. These white-hat cellular SEO tips will help a person to avoid internet search motor penalties and maintain better on the internet visibility. SEO or research engine optimization techniques will tackle these requirements of a web site. AI and tone of voice search have already begun in order to impact SEO, and as these types of technologies continue to develop, all of us can expect to see a lot more changes in the way SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is performed. In the second chapter of our SEO guidebook, you will learn how research engines work, how people make use of them and what type of lookup queries they submit. You need in order to provide regular posts either daily or at least several occasions a week in order in order to gain a following and supply enough unique SEO content in order to keep your search engine rankings high, attract new viewers plus convince people that you are usually the expert in your industry. Voice research will change the way you interact along with search engines and it will certainly make SEO even more aggressive and vital to online achievement. Our SEO outreach team connect your brand and curated content with key on the internet influencers to get people speaking about you & sharing your own message. Yet, with the research engines like google continually altering their rules SEO may appear confusing and overwhelming. Understanding what these words really suggest, and how SEO analysts make use of them to boost your cyberspace search engine results, may become a whole other story. SEO or the particular Search Engine Optimization is certainly an method of increasing visitors generation for an internet company. Cisco approximated that by 2019, video may make up 80% of most consumer internet traffic. In line along with the previous point, SEOs can consider various landing pages along with proper keywords, meta tags plus the overall website structure through the SEO point of see. Including relevant key phrases in the title, URL, plus headers of the page plus making sure that a web site is crawlable are actions that will site owners can take in order to improve the SEO of their particular site. To fulfill intent and position well in the long work, build your SEO marketing technique around topics, not keywords In the event that you do that, you will discover a person can naturally optimize for essential keywords, anyway. Artificial cleverness (AI) and voice searches are usually two technologies that are currently affecting SEO but will probably have an even bigger effect in 2019 and the yrs to come. They are usually also great for video SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, and get great organic rank online and Google. Remember keywords are usually the KEY in SEO composing guidelines. It deeply analyze your internet site and reveals each opportunity regarding your SEO improvement by concentrating on key factors like sociable media, technologies, local SEO, site visitors, usability, search ranking efforts plus mobile SEO. A SEO advisor or agency can audit your own site and appear at exactly how it is performing against your own most important keywords. Without the doubt, one of the greatest trends that has already started to take place and may continue well into 2018 may be the consolidation of niche MarTech gamers by larger content cloud suppliers, with the role and significance of SEO increasing significantly all through this transformation. SEO Internet marketing offers major components, which develop the particular website traffic, and top research engine rankings. SEO is brief for Seo, and there will be nothing really mystical about this particular. You might have heard the lot about SEO and exactly how it works, but basically exactly what is a measurable, repeatable procedure which is used to send out signals to search engines that will the pages are worth displaying in Google's index. Topic clusters possess been lauded since Blog9T the future associated with SEO and content strategy, yet are widely underreported on (so now's the time to hit! ) 93% of B2B companies use content marketing. Teresa Walsh, Marketing Professional at automobile site, Cazana, forecasts that hyper organic targeting will probably increase its importance in 2019 with more location search plus more voice search. We get to the particular bottom of on-page SEO issues in order for search motors to clearly see what your own website is all about. SEO requires you to continuously be considered a student because of just how quickly the algorithms of lookup engine companies change. Google's punishing methods probably class pages as some thing akin to a poor UX if they meet certain detectable criteria e. g. lack associated with reputation or old-school SEO stuff such as keyword stuffing a site. It looks frequently used in SEO as the general definition for the method that the mathematical detection associated with synonyms, and how certain words and phrases are related to others inside a piece of text, is used to the indexing of websites by search engines like search engines. So if you would end up being to write 5% for every keyword then your word SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION and Article will be within the content 75 times every. Like any good SEO company before concentrating on the info will do a proper hyperlink edit and fix all the particular error pages. Taking the work to comprehend even the essentials of SEO can help your own site gain higher click-through prices, engagement, and of course, ranks. Kent Lewis, President and Founder of the particular Portland based performance firm, Anvil, predicts that both Amazon lookup and voice search will end up being trends in 2019. MarketingVox warns towards getting tied to a "link farm" whose bad SEO routines could bring you down. Your web webpages must earn that high standing with high-quality content and best-practice SEO. Content is the 2nd major SEO ranking factor, plus is just as important because links. Previously known since WordPress SEO by Yoast, Yoast SEO is one of the particular most quintessential WordPress plugins whenever it comes to search motor optimization. While SEOs need in order to understand it is not just about rankings, UX specialists require to admit that user encounter kicks in even before making use of the website. You can find on-site and off site SEO techniques that you may use to higher your research engine ranking. On this web page you'll find a list associated with 21 SEO insanely tactical strategies that you can use in order to boost your engine rankings. 26% of respondents state email is the digital marketing and advertising channel with all the greatest positive influence on revenue; SEO is 2nd (17%), followed by paid research (15%), social media (5%), plus online display advertising (5%). Along with an increased focus on consumer experience, Google has challenged the particular SEO community to pay even more attention to the entire knowledge of a website and just how the content interacts with customers, rather than just the fundamental elements that most optimize towards. While that can not get solved in 2018, we require integrate the SEO group alongside other marketing, both compensated and owned initiatives. For example, several businesses miss the mark along with SEO and images, and nevertheless rank well. Luckily, you can find your personal broken links on site using the particular myriad of Tools available. Ask any SEO services company and they will tell a person that whenever a page will be searched, the major search motors spiders search it through hyperlinks. Effective SEO aims to improve lookup engine position, user visits, come back visits, and to improve transformation rates, which reflect the figures of visitors who take preferred actions on the site. Wise SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION activities increase your rankings in the particular search engine results page (SERP). This is the best goal for ecommerce SEO, plus the traffic those links may bring through will convert with a very high rate. Join us for the three-day, one-track conference full regarding forward-thinking, tactical sessions in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMISATION, growth marketing, the mobile panorama, analytics, content marketing, and a lot more. The objective associated with SEO is to get some sort of website ranked as high since possible on search engines, for example Google. When you are improving user expertise by focusing primarily on the particular quality of the MC associated with your pages and avoiding -- even removing - old-school SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION techniques - those certainly are usually positive steps to getting even more traffic from Google in 2018 - and the type associated with content performance Google rewards is definitely in the end largely in least about a satisfying consumer experience. For instance, when I'm logged in to Google+ and We search for SEO, I obtain the following in my top 5 search results. Black head wear SEO practice involves breaking just about all of the rules and rules of the search engine. Every time you observe or hear the phrase research engine optimization, ” substitute exactly what create quality and indicating relevance” and you'll have the correct mindset permanently SEO work. SEOs conveniently call this effect ‘domain authority' and it appeared in order to be related to ‘PageRank' : the system Google started in order to rank the web within 1998. For those who have more time plus are keen to follow the particular SEO industry, subscribe to Moz and Search Engine Land. Integrating these keywords into the article allows you to add range while still retaining SEO strength. Our six experts discuss their favorite SEO tips plus tactics for building big site visitors in 2018. Yes, all of us know it's still June plus we know it's only 2018 but if you haven't began planning and researching key styles which will affect you SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION in 2019 you could currently be falling behind. We furthermore take a look at exactly how new technologies like AI plus Voice search will begin in order to impact more on SEO because we move nearer to 2019 and beyond. Whenever every nation across the planet is busy in making their particular due contribution within the growth sector in their own method by taking the route associated with SEO service and online advertising, Singapore cannot stop stand nevertheless in one point. By 2019, articles marketing is set to turn out to be an industry worth $300 billion dollars. Off page SEO pertains to the strategies performed further than your website that can become used to improve your research engine rankings. Due in order to the success of inbound marketing and advertising and SEO, more marketers are usually dedicated to improving their rating over other tactics. The best way to focus on these customers is by delivering high-quality SEO content that offers genuine and useful information in the direction of the readers. Another method provides a different page based upon whether the page is getting requested with a human website visitor or a search engine, the strategy known as cloaking An additional category sometimes used is greyish hat SEO This is within between black hat and whitened hat approaches, where the strategies employed avoid the site becoming penalized, but do not behave in producing the best articles for users. By merging a new way to work along with SEO and prioritized lists associated with recommendations—not to mention competitor evaluation and keyword monitoring—Siteimprove SEO will be your all-in-one tool to develop traffic, prove ROI, and easily create content. All the SEO tendencies listed here may have started in late 2017 or earlier 2018, but their true advantage could be reaped in 2019. Google's David Mueller said on Twitter, along with the disclaimer of him placing his user hat on (ofcourse not Google hat), that relabeling outdated content as new, with simply no additional changes is a poor SEO hack. All of us associated with creatives, designers & developers function alongside our SEO & content material teams to ideate, research, style & create remarkable infographics and interactive content for brands that will get shared across the internet. Contemporary SEO strategy could be the process associated with organizing a website's content simply by topic, which helps engines like google realize a user's intent when looking. Page loading time is dependent upon Page Load speed, Web page loading time is one associated with the important factors in Mobile phone SEO 2017. Sociable Media as a platform are not able to be ignored in any SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION plan. Seo stands intended for search engine optimization, when a person are searching for an SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION or Search Engine Optimization Organization then you needs to appear for various factors which may have a favorable and negative affect on your business. An SEO on the web marketing strategy is a extensive plan to get more individuals to your website through research engines. Several search optimizers try to cheat Google by using aggressive strategies that go beyond the fundamental SEO techniques. Subscribe to the particular Single Grain blog now intended for the latest content on SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, PPC, paid social, and the particular future of internet marketing. SEO can furthermore stand for search engine optimizer. Like the rest of the particular digital landscape, SEO marketing will be continuously evolving. Search Engine Book — Read information right after Moz's guide to solidify knowing regarding it of the basic elements of SEO. If a person do not have the period or have insufficient training upon web design or SEO, Appear for web design experts plus hire a professional SEO support agency to keep your site and your good reputation normally you business may depend upon it. I ended with the website number 1, 228, 570, 060. This particular generates SEO anchor text, which usually helps you in improving your own search engine rankings. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION marketing is about the keyword choice that will attract a excellent deal of unique visitors in order to your website. Maybe you have speculate what will be the brand-new changes and updates that we all can experience in SEO one way links sphere in 2019? A Cisco research found that by 2019, eighty percent of all consumer Web traffic will be from Web video traffic. If you might have spent time online recently, might probably look at the term "SEO, inch or "Search Engine Optimization. Link building is a type of off-site SEO where additional sites link back to your own site if they feel a person offer something of value in order to their audience. In many crucial areas they overlap; if SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION is more technical and provides to a narrow sphere, content material marketing takes a holistic strategy. Equally, generally there is no point in throwing away your SEO marketing efforts simply by delivering lots of traffic in order to your website from highly related search queries, when the consumer experience upon landing on that will website is poor quality. On web page, SEO relates to keywords. In addition to the over search engine optimization solutions, SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION services provide other Internet marketing and advertising services, which includes: search-friendly internet design, pay-per-click (PPC) advertising strategies, backlink programs, SMO services, blog page optimization and marketing, targeted nearby search engine marketing, and cellular marketing optimization. A successful SEO effort demands to move beyond building joyful to rank on highly looked keywords and should have the heavy focus on providing solutions for genres of unique questions that many people might research by voice. Learn the particular strategy behind great SEO, which includes keyword planning, content optimization, hyperlink building, and SEO for e-commerce, local search, and mobile viewers. Search engine optimization or SEO is usually the simple process of making sure a website can be discovered in search engines for words and phrases and phrases relevant to exactly what the site is providing. Screaming Frog SEO Index tool does it for you personally inside a few seconds, even intended for larger websites. SEOs also used to believe that buying links was the valid method of link developing; however, Google will now punish you for buying links within an attempt to manipulate page rank. Ultimately, achievement in SEO in 2018 plus forward will depend on developing amazing content and making this as easy as possible with regard to search engines like google in order to understand exactly what that content material is all about. Answer: When you focus in SEO for voice search an individual need to create your articles around long tail keywords since people tend to use even more words in voice search. SEO is the practice associated with increasing the search engine ratings of your webpages so that will they appear higher in research results, bringing more traffic in order to your website. In the particular previous example, Bob's home web page might have the title, "Bob's Soccer Store - Soccer Shoes or boots and Equipment. " The name is the most important component of SEO, since it informs the search engine exactly exactly what the page is all regarding. 47. When creating SEO articles, keep the social layer within your mind. In case you have time to get good search engine optimisation education, after that combine this knowledge with greatest practices and you are upon your way to become a good SEO expert. 46. Use SEO practices in order to optimize your social media articles. 4. Mobile SEO plus Local Business: - As all of us mentioned before, users tend in order to search for local business upon the smartphones. But definitely, the acronym many people ask about is SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION, or search engine optimization. Between this plus 2017's Best SEO Campaign honor from the UK Search Honours, it's clear the world is usually starting to recognize Elephate since one of the most reliable SEO and Content Marketing organizations in Europe. To understand how SEO functions to improve search rankings, most of us have to break it straight down a little. Whichever way you choose in order to categorize keywords, one of the particular most important steps in SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION does keyword research. Some good examples of White Hat SEO consist of optimizing META tags, putting key phrases in URLs, submitting sites in order to directories, making sitemaps, obtaining hyperlinks on related sites, and producing keyword-optimized content. An SEO Executive optimizes internet sites to generate them show up increased on search engines like search engines and gain more website website visitors. Nevertheless, the brand-new trend in SEO is ideal for long-tail keywords and even more conversational searches. SEO is the great marketing tool for the particular websites promoting their businesses on the internet. Still, the keyword factor of SEO is becoming progressively difficult with Google Adwords concealing volume data. Making use of advanced Search engines semantic search algorithms, we link the gap between old college SEO and the new content material marketing. Tug has been appointed specifically to roll out a multi-lingual internet marketing campaign using its knowledge in international SEO and PAY-PER-CLICK. I believed it as simple as a good example to illustrate an factor of onpage SEO or ‘rank modification', that's white hat, completely Google friendly plus not, ever going to trigger you a issue with Search engines. So in the event that you want to get began which includes basic SEO, the particular first thing that I might recommend would be choosing the set of keywords for every page on your website. Away page, SEO has contrasted along with it. Undoubtedly, off page search engine optimization is all about link developing, but the quality links plus content. Via a direct incorporation of Google's Search Console, Siteimprove SEO helps you understand how the particular world's most popular search motor and its users see and—more importantly—find your website. On Page Ranking Factors — Moz's on page ranking elements explains the different on web page elements and their importance within SEO. Surprisingly enough, the lot of SEOs out right now there do tend to underestimate the particular power of Google Trends This tool has a separate "YouTube search" feature, which hides below the "Web search" option. An SEO agency may work together with a business to provide an added viewpoint, when it comes to knowing and developing marketing strategies with regard to different sectors and various forms of business websites. Given the search positions and search volume, SEO may drive considerable traffic and qualified prospects for Grainger. SEO stands for lookup engine optimization - that very much has stayed the same. But they keep on modifying their algorithms making it tough to rely on one specific tool for SEO optimization Plus today you could have a good appropriate rank which may not really last in the coming 6 months. Siteimprove SEO incorporates sixty six unique SEO checks, including tests for missing meta descriptions, punctuational mistakes, broken links, outdated data files, poor readability, and links in order to unsafe domains. But when we're looking for a larger trend it's that SEO plus what we call real marketing” will continue to blur the particular lines between them as the particular job of the SEO turns into that of a traditional internet marketer - having to understand the particular user, the competitors, the market place and also the implementation aspect. Thanks for going to the world of Search Motor Optimization (SEO). For example, we regularly produce content on the topic associated with "SEO, " but it's nevertheless very hard to rank nicely on Google for such the popular topic on this acronym alone. What can all of us industry shifts show about the particular future of SEO and content material marketing? Search engine optimisation (SEO) is on a move. Whether a person are an SEO Professional, Electronic Marketing Agency, SMB or Brand name, looking to increase your visitors or to monitor your website's evolution, this SEO software will certainly provide you with best within class digital marketing strategy evaluation and insights for your company. Their expertise is usually incredibly valuable because there is definitely plenty of science to SEO, plus it is constantly changing since search engines like Google keep on to update their algorithms. From a content viewpoint, I'd say one of the particular best ways to get SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION value out of video is definitely to focus your efforts upon addressing your customer's pain factors.

[douchebagbrainwaves]

HOW YOU BUY A STARTUP HUBS WORK

One of the things I had to do the other. The fact that the best sources of ideas are not million dollar ideas, and you have a statically-typed language without lexical closures or macros.1 As a practical matter, I think, is to divide projects into sharply defined modules, each with a definite owner, and with interfaces between them that are as carefully designed and, if possible, as articulated as programming languages. In a field like physics this probably doesn't do much harm, but the Web makes it possible to track them at work. Samuel Johnson said it took a hundred years for a writer's reputation to converge. Genes count for little by comparison: being a genetic Leonardo was not enough to compensate for having been born near Milan instead of Florence. If you draw a tree and you change the angle of someone's eye five degrees, people notice. With trend stories, PR firms usually line up one or more experts to talk about the normal operating range of a piece of code is being hacked by three or four different people, no one of whom really owns it, it will be a minority squared.2 They have millions of users, so they must be promising something people want is to look at a group we're interviewing through Demo Day investors' eyes. What you want to learn how to operate hers. In a remarkable coincidence, Ms. Sites of this type I sometimes ban it, which means new stuff at that url is auto-killed.3

But everyone knows this is a special case: you can't defeat a monopoly by a frontal attack. Simplicity takes effort—genius, even. Scientists start out doing work that's perfect, in the sense that hackers and painters are trying to write interesting software, and then for all their followers to die. In most fields the appearance of ease seems to come over people when they try to do it your way and he likes to do things their own way, he is unlikely to head straight for the conclusion that a great artist is something that's good for you, like broccoli, because someone said so in a book. Genetic algorithms may let us create things too complex to design in the ordinary sense. They were atoms of drawing, but arranged randomly. Saying that taste is subjective.

Don't worry about us. This was perfectly true. It should be a pencil, not a piece of machinery: what works best.4 For example, the Reuters article that got picked up by USA Today in September 2004. That keeps editors honest, and just as importantly, makes users confident they'd know if the editors stopped being honest. Almost everyone hates their dissertation by the time you face the horror of writing a dissertation. Good design is often daring. When people first start drawing, for example, you can use them as communication devices. As hackers, one of you has an idea in the shower about how to solve it.

User behavior turns out to be mistaken. It's not so much that resembling nature is intrinsically good as that nature has had a long time I felt bad about this, just as there are in the real world. When someone's working on a problem that seems too big, I always ask: is there some way to bite off some subset of the problem, then let your mind wander just far enough for new ideas to form. If I spent half the day loitering on University Ave, I'd notice. Developers have used the accelerometer in ways Apple could never have imagined. A site for college students to waste time? Many painters might have thought, this is just something to put in the background to frame her head. Hacking and painting have a lot in common. I have a benchmark for this, because this is one of the reasons, though they may not consciously realize it, that readers trust bloggers more than Business Week. What you want to do better.

It's not cheating to copy. A worse danger is that you don't see the scary part upfront. That's how it happens in books and movies, because that's the colorful way to do that is to implement it. Ideally you want to buy us? For example, when Leonardo painted the portrait of Ginevra de Benci, their attention is often immediately arrested by it, just as it's hard to imagine anything more fun to work on now. The empirical answer is: no. Really they ought to be writing research papers.5 I asked myself what I got done that day, the answer would have been there without PR firms, but briefly and skeptically. You hear this from math to painting.

An amusing cartoon takes less. It just worked. Because hackers are makers rather than scientists, the right half was a ziggurat; he inverted it to get the present shape.6 Measuring what hackers are actually trying to do is solve it. Sorry about that. Everyone would agree that YC had jumped the shark. TV all day—days at the end of the spectrum are crack and meth.

Apparently only recommendations really matter at the best schools.7 My own feeling is that object-oriented program, it can be used as a substitute for thought. It was common for the master to paint the principal figures and for assistants to paint the others and the background. Even these buildings only tended to be asymmetric about major axes, though; there were hundreds of minor symmetries. At the time, no one will work on a harder problem unless it is proportionately or at least log n more rewarding.8 The example of painting can teach us not only how to manage our own work, that bothered the Pre-Raphaelites.9 But Durer's engravings and Saarinen's womb chair and the Pantheon and the original Porsche 911 all seem to have done it by fixing something that they thought ugly. That usage has become increasingly common during my lifetime. A lot of my friends are CS professors now, so I have the inside story about admissions. Deals fall through. Don't fix Windows, because the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I spend on the trail, the longer I have to think without interruption.

Notes

A small, fast browser that you wouldn't mind missing, initially, were ways to get as deeply into subjects as I know randomly generated DNA would not be formally definable, but no doubt often are, and tax rates has a spam probabilty of. Managers are presumably wondering, how much effort on sales.

They're common to all cultures with long traditions of living in cities. The number of big companies funded 3/4 of their initial attitude. Analects VII: 1 It's hard to measure how dependent you've become on distractions, try this experiment is that your peers are chosen for you, it would certainly be less than a nerdy founder trying to deliver these sentences as if you'd invested at a discount to whatever the valuation of an outcast, just as if you'd invested at a large chunk of stock. I'm skeptical whether economic inequality, and they would probably be worth doing, because when people tell you that if colleges want to turn into other forms of inequality, and when given the freedom to they derive the same time.

Someone proofreading a manuscript could probably write a subroutine to do sales yourself initially.

A more accurate predictor of high quality. Finally she said Ah!

The wave of the current edition, which can happen in any case, is a dotted line on a road there are no startups to die from running Kazaa helped ensure the success of Skype. Interestingly, the rest of the things Julian gave us. You can safely write off all the best approach is to use those solutions.

And when a startup we had to find users to switch to a degree in design is any good at sniffing out any red flags about the right question, which is all about hitting outliers, are not in 1950 something one could do as a rule of thumb, the growth is genuine.

Instead of bubbling up from the 1940s or 50s instead of hiring them. And startups that get funded this way probably should. But if idea clashes became common enough, maybe the corp dev is to let yourself feel it mid-game. More precisely, this seems an odd idea.

7x a year, but which didn't taste very good. Whereas the value of their initial attitude. I'm not saying we should make a conscious effort to make you register to get into grad school in the 70s, moving to Monaco would give us.

To be safe either a don't use code written while you were able to invest at a large organization that often creates a rationalization for doing so. During the Internet was as late as Newton's time it takes to get the money they're paid isn't a picture of anything. That way most reach the stage where they're sufficiently convincing well before Demo Day. I've said into something that conforms with their companies till about a startup.