#it still earns ludicrous amounts of money every year

[vivalasthedas]

i am so curiious what the online component of gta6 will be like, cause rdo not having near the level of success, earning potential, and longevity, and lacking a lot of the well loved and wanted features of gta online, is kinda evidence they might not know How to capture that lightning in the bottle again.

Cause so many games have tried to get a bit of that success by apeing gta online, but failing to meet the basic criteria/missing what it was that made the game so dang successful, and instead starting out as an entirely online predatory nightmare live service.

[thefirstknife]

I want to put things into perspective for people who started playing with Beyond Light or Arrivals.

Before Beyond Light, seasonal content was only available during that season. It was "vaulted" the moment the season ended. Season of Dawn? You could only do Season of Dawn activities and earn the seal and the title between December 10th 2019 and March 9th 2020. After that, everything from that season was gone. Same with Season of Undying and Worthy (and Arrivals obviously, but that one was extended due to BL delay).

This was naturally unpopular as it pushed people to grind seasonal stuff in the 3 months the season was on so with Beyond Light, they changed seasonal content to be available during the entire year even after the season officially ended. The fact that we can still play Harbinger and Presage is something we wouldn't have been able to do under the old model. Being able to get the exotics and other gear, titles and seals and play the activities, all of that was not possible before they changed the seasonal model.

I'm not sure what else Bungie can do here unless we want the game to be funcionally unplayable due to overbloating it with past content. We've seen what that does to a game, and not just for consoles. Destiny 2 before DCV was very slow, too big and it was straining people's PCs as well as consoles. You can't keep adding content to the game indefinitely. There's a limit to the engine.

Keeping seasonal stuff all year long is the best we can get unless we want Bungie to make a completely new and separate game every year where we'll have to start from scratch every year. This is obviously ludicrous AND it doesn't solve the problem of old content being gone because if the games are separate, old content won't be in the new game anyway.

Currently, we're losing an outdated campaign that's 3 years old (which is also the only thing left over from Activision era: good riddance, no matter how good the campaign is), 2 strikes and 1 destination which is not used for anything besides the aforementioned campaign and Spider's material exchange (which is highly inaccessible because it requires people to go from the tower to the Tangled Shore and back just to do the exchange so they can purchase stuff in the Tower: moving the material exchange to the Tower is something that should've been done ages ago).

We are getting: a new campaign, most likely 2 new destinations, ?? amount of new strikes and, from the article "we’re bringing a carefully curated selection of content out of the DCV, including a classic raid, two PVP maps from Destiny 2, and one classic PVP map from the original Destiny. We’re excited to share more details on all of this in the months ahead." Meaning, we'll know more details about all new content coming to the game later.

I understand people being upset, especially when it comes to things they paid for. But I would also like to note that I'm pretty sure everyone played through this content more than enough to get their money's worth for what they paid. I'm not sure how many hours of replaying Forsaken people think is enough to get their money's worth, but surely replaying it at least once with every character is enough. We do the same with singleplayer games; we play through and then we deinstall. There's like almost 5 months left of this content staying in the game so if people are worried about getting their money's worth, they can replay the content for another 500 hours for sure. I'm pretty sure it's reasonable to assume that would be worth the money spent on the expansion. Or, if they don't have it yet, it will be free from December to February.

And of course, when it comes to seasonal stuff leaving, we knew that. We had it much better this year with the content staying for a whole year instead of being gone after 3 months. It's what we asked for. We can't expect seasons Hunt-Lost to stay going into Witch Queen. There has to be space made for seasons coming in WQ.

[repost-this-image]

All right Tumblr, let’s talk about art theft in PowerPoint format, because I’m hearing a lot of complaints, and some artists I know have literally stopped putting out art to the public because of rampant theft of their art.

[Transcription:  The story of art and art theft goes hand in hand with the history of copyright.  So why does that exist, anyway?  Whose genius idea was copyright law??

In the beginning there was no such thing as copyright. 

Books and artwork had to be carefully produced by hand.

Each new copy of a book took the same amount of time to produce, no matter how many copies you wanted, so there weren’t a lot of copies of books that weren’t religious text (like the Vedas or the Bible).

Because it took so long to write and bind a new copy of a book, an author’s livelihood wasn’t affected by other people making a copy.

Gutenberg changed everything

The invention of the movable-type printing press was HUGE, y’all.

You didn’t have to write really slowly to make each letter neat and legible; the type blocks were already made before you produced a book.

Once you’d set up a page, you could make as many exact copies of that page as you wanted, which meant you could print hundreds of copies of a book at a time.

Because it was easier to print a lot of books, you didn’t have to charge as much, so lots more people could afford to buy your books!

(Image of people using an early printing press with the caption, “These guys are printing 240 pages per hour.  So much faster than fancy handwriting!”)

There was just one problem...When it’s easy to publish and print lots of copies of your books, other people can also print lots of copies of your books.  And make money off them.  And if their copies are cheaper than yours, you lose sales, which means you don’t make money and could become a starving artist.  (Or author.  Whatever.)

But that’s not all.  That other printing house?  Doesn’t give nearly as much of a shit about your book as you do.  They’re printing out the bargain-basement version of your book, after all, so it doesn’t have to be as nice as your Super Official Version.  So they’re gonna make a lot more printing errors than the official copy that you originally ordered.

Oh, and if they don’t like the ending?  They could just fucking change it, and then people don’t know which ending is the real one that you wrote.

So in addition to not making that sweet, sweet sales money, your reputation takes a hit.  Ouch.

Copyright was the solution, but it wasn’t perfect.  On the one hand, an author got to choose which printers had the right to make copies of their books, and nobody else would get to print copies for 14 years after the original print date.  So you could control the quality and sales of your books, and actually make enough money to support you while you wrote a second book.

BUT without those cheap, shitty bootlegs, books got a bit more expensive again, so fewer of the unwashed masses could afford books.  It’s a tradeoff.

Why 14 years?  Because it was assumed that most of the people who were gonna buy your book, would buy it within that amount of time.  Sure, some people would buy it later than that, but not enough for you to really rely on those later sales.

Wait, only 14 years?

That’s right.  In 1710, when England and Scotland created the first copyright laws, your copyright expired after just 14 years.  Copyright law has been changed several times over the centuries to make that period last longer.

The most recent change to US copyright law, for instance, was the Sonny Bono law in 1996 (yes, that Sonny Bono).  This is why there were a lot of companies selling VHS tapes of popular cartoons before 1996, but when DVDs became mainstream a few years later, there were no DVD versions made--those cartoons had their copyright renewed right after the Sonny Bono Law passed, so it wasn’t legal for those other video producers to make and sell unlicensed copies of those cartoons anymore.

(Picture of VHS tapes with cheap, off-model images of Mighty Mouse, Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and Daffy Duck on the covers.)

That’s right, the tapes on this slide, that look like cheap bootlegs, were legally produced.  Because the old cartoons on them were, at that time, in the public domain. And they’re not anymore.

So what does this have to do with online art?

Copyright law still applies to art.  Yes, even if it’s made on a computer.  Yes, even if the artist chooses to post that art on the Internet.

Because the artist gets to choose how their art is distributed, an artist can say “Do not repost to other websites, and do not reblog without this caption,” and it is legally binding.

If an artist wants to sell prints of their own art, they can legally do that.  But you can’t sell or distribute prints (or digital copies!) of their art without their express permission.

Because we currently live in a capitalistic society, artists need to make money off of their art in order to be able to produce art full-time.  If they can’t make money off of it (say, because some asshole is off posting hi-res copies of it on other websites without permission and without giving the artist credit), then they have to get another job and don’t have as much time to produce art.  Which means you get less art.

Small-time artists aren’t like major corporations.  When you make a bootleg of a Disney Movie, or Disney’s promotional art (for legal reasons, I wish to point out that you should not do this because it’s illegal and Disney can and will sue you into the poorhouse), you’re preventing a massive, multinational corporation (which has unethically devoured hundreds of other corporations, btw), with already earns billions of dollars in profits every year, from making $20.  That’s a drop in the bucket.

But when you make illegal copies of a small-time artist’s art, that’s just a regular, not-ludicrously-wealthy  person, who relies on sales and commissions to earn a living.  That money could be the difference between them buying groceries next week, or having to have a glass of water for dinner for a few days.

The moral of the story:

Support small artists and small businesses!

The only viable replacement for copyright laws that both allows artists to spend time Making Art and also allows you to make all the copies you want, is socialism.  You just can’t have it both ways under capitalism.  It doesn’t work.

This, by the way, is also a reason I support a Universal Basic Income:  so that art theft doesn’t prevent independent artists from being able to do what they love full time, because their survival doesn’t depend on selling prints or drawing commissions for That One Guy who wants art of his unusual, weirdly-specific fetish that the artist REALLY isn’t into but hey, he’s shelling out $300 for it and money is money.

Also, if you remove an artist’s watermark to repost their art somewhere else, you’re both an art thief and a huge asshole.  Don’t do that.

End of transcription.]

[radramblog]

Ultimate^2

Super Smash Brothers Ultimate has finally unveiled its final DLC character, with reactions ranging fully across the spectrum. Hot takes abound.

I mean, statistically, just about every possible opinion is going to be represented. There were at least 500,000 people watching the reveal stream, and that’s not including those viewing through restreams. That’s insane for a trailer of any kind, let alone for a console-exclusive video game DLC.

Now that it’s been like… a day and a bit, I think most of the spciest takes have probably been made, which is the perfect time for me to chip in with my own milder opinion. More of a butter chicken, really.

(no images in this one i’m lazy tonight)

I figure I’m this late already, might as well drop some notes on the other ones first.

Piranha Plant was kind of the definition of an unexpected pick. Not only was it from an already well-represented franchise, being fucking Mario, it’s also just…not a character. As such it makes an odd choice for a DLC fighter…except for the part where it was free. If you owned the game in its first month. And frankly, I don’t think people would have been happy if it wasn’t. As it is, though, it’s a perfectly fine character- surprisingly cute, actually.

I’m unsurprised about Joker’s inclusion. With how huge Persona 5 became in both Japan and the west, capitalizing on it to make a shitload of money makes perfect sense. The character plays well enough, though the meter gimmick was kind of a daunting sign of things to come. All that in mind, though, the most surprising thing about Joker being in the game is that they still haven’t put P5 on the Switch. Atlus please.

Hero and Banjo/Kazooie were announced on the same night, and I distinctly recall someone saying that this was one for the Japanese audience and one for the Americans. I mean, I’ve never played Dragon Quest, so I guess I fell into the latter? Both series have a long, well-regarded pedigree (Banjo’s lack of recent offerings notwithstanding), so both arguably deserve their respective positions. Hero is the much more notable character gameplaywise, though, with the incredibly complex mana and spellcasting mechanics. Complaints about RNG in Smash aren’t completely unfounded- though it has existed in the past in the form of, say, Luigi’s misfiring side-B- but I know a lot of people think Hero took it too far. If I’m honest, though, the weirdest thing is just having Akira Toriyama-ass 3D models in the game. Banjo’s gameplay is…awkward. The kit is kind of a mess, but at least the gimmicks weren’t going too hard, you know?

Next was Terry, perhaps the most obscure character on the entire list in 2021. I actually really like Terry in this game- while he’s still trying to emulate a similar feel to Ryu/Ken, the difference feels more natural, if that makes sense. Maybe it’s because I’ve never really devoted significant time to them, but Terry’s kit feels easier to work within than the Shotos when going between characters.

Finally for the first Pass, we had Byleth. I think it’s for the best that they announced the second Fighter’s Pass before this released, because if both 4 and Ultimate had ended their run on Fire Emblem DLCs then people would have been pissed. I mean, people were already pissed, but like…moreso. As someone who has played Three Houses, I do think the game is worth celebrating, but having yet another Fire Emblem Protagonist (read: basically a blank slate) in the game over all the substantially more interesting characters 3H has to offer is just really frustrating. Also the final smash looks like dogshit, like FE3H has overall worse animations than Smash for obvious reasons but I’m pretty sure this attack looked better the first time around.

FP2 opened with Min Min, which brings ARMS to the table. ARMS. The only first-party fighting game Nintendo has outside of Smash, so it looks a bit less weird next to everything else but…come on, man. I think this was the most confusing pick of all of them- the game came out in 2017, and having Min Min in Smash would serve as promotion for a sequel…which hasn’t been announced. There was a graphic novel in the works, but it was cancelled earlier this year. Oops? At least the stage was fun.

As much as playing them is awkward and complex, the Minecraft addition was fitting. Only the best-selling game around. I think people weren’t sure if Microsoft would go for it, but they let us have Banjo, so sure. I’m mostly just annoyed that they couldn’t get any of the songs from the actual game in there- like, you got one in from the fucking mobile game, but you couldn’t just get C418 on the phone?

Sephiroth is definitely one of the hype-ier releases from this pass. The character is iconic, as is his theme and his home game. I’ve never played any Final Fantasy game, but I can still respect the name. Once I remember how to spell it. The whole bossfight aspect to his release was also quite cool, while it lasted.

On the other hand, I have no love for Pyra nor Mythra. There’s so much wrong with these ones, frankly. They’re another swordy character, immediately following Sephiroth too, and they go back on Smash’s very deliberate decision to split characters like Zelda/Sheik and Samus/ZSS up (Yes I know Pokemon Trainer does the same thing but I have a lot more leniency for them). Add in their being from a JRPG much less well-known or remembered than the previous couple characters and the designs being…questionable, I have a big issue with the whole thing. This was also around when I kinda stopped playing the game in general, and they definitely didn’t help pull me back in.

Kazuya might have, though. With the exception of him and Sephiroth, all the characters from the Fighter’s Passes were pretty much protagonist-types, but this motherfucker pulses with the essence of bad guy. What I’m saying is that he’s fucking cool, and while he’s ludicrously complex, that makes perfect sense since…I mean just look at the combo lists from Tekken 7. His inclusion also kinda rounds out the list of biggest fighting game franchises out there being rep’d in the game, though I imagine now I’m going to have stans from Mortal Kombat or whatever on my back. They’re not going to put a fatality-capable character in Smash, guys!

Finally, this rounds us around to the original point of this article. Let’s talk about Sora. And by that I mean…I don’t really have a huge amount to say about him. Kingdom Hearts is a franchise that completely passed me by growing up, and I don’t think I have the time or energy to devote to it now. I’m sure it’s good, people seemed really excited for him to be in the game so they have to have gotten that love from somewhere, but I don’t share that feeling.

That’s not to say that I don’t think he deserves a slot. The idea of “deserving a slot” in Smash Bros is kind of an odd concept, even though it’s come up a lot so far this post. But a slot in this roster isn’t just a place in a popular fighting game, because at this point, Smash is kind of a museum of (mostly Nintendo) games- and so having representation is a forever acknowledgment that the franchise is, or has been, an icon to so many. Kingdom Hearts, to my knowledge, has 100% earned that position, and so Sora getting to be playable here makes perfect sense. He wasn’t my pick (Touhou representation never I guess), but I’m happy for those who wanted him.

As far as the actual gameplay looks, he reads like a character that kept in mind what people didn’t like about Hero when he released. It’s another sword-based character, which I think at this point speaks more about the demographic of video game characters than it does about Smash. But I appreciate that the Magic Bullshit is toned down, and that it’s also his only real gimmick (The 3-hit combo feature is A Thing, but other characters e.g. Bayonetta have already done that, so whatever). His recovery potential looks patently absurd- like he just gets Pikachu/Pichu’s Up-B as a Side-B that can also be chained with his actual Up-B? This guy better be light as hell or he’s going to be super hard to take out. I dunno, I think he looks solidly fun enough- more dynamic and aerial than the other swordfighters, at least- and that’s good enough for me.

And I guess that marks the end of Smash Ultimate. Not with a bang, but with a key…dude. It’s been a very solid run, the game managing to keep itself fresh across several years of development, even as other games have risen and fallen. Smash is kind of forever at this point, I think, though the finality of Ultimate’s ultimate character implies that this particular iteration may be coming to its end. And seeing as it is always one Smash per console, I wouldn’t be shocked if the Switch itself was nearing its endgame as well.

Okay but also it’s pretty funny how they heavily censored everything Disney out of Sora’s DLC except for that little Mickey charm on the trailer, like how much must that one shot have cost them, was it even remotely worth it, I don’t know but I kinda want to

[authorized-trash]

The Passage of Identity and Time

2116 Words

Analogince

Virgil escapes to a better family, one that’s much more accepting.

Warnings: Anxiety disorder, depression, homophobia, transphobia, dysphoria, cussing, panic attacks, heavy crying, misgendering, use of deadname

       Virgil didn’t start out his life as Virgil.

       He started it out as Amber.

          Born in small town USA in the year 1998, a baby named Amber was born. Her parents were ecstatic. The gender of the child did not matter to them, only that they had one. They had been trying for a child for months before the news of Amber arrived.

        The baby was small and wrinkly, as most are. Her father called her a raisin, earning a swat on the arm from the mother.

        Amber grew to a healthy height and weight for a two-year-old. She could talk and walk by now and was quite the rowdy child. Her hair was growing in curly and that odd almost-black brown her mother was known for. Her eyes were a deep brown, with little specks of amber around the iris. Long lashes surrounded the round eyes, making her quite the lovely child.

        (“Oh, she’ll grow up to be quite the lovely child.”)

        Amber continued to grow, and by the time she turned seven, she had shot up to four foot seven, a good head taller than all of her peers. She had cut her hair by now, a cute bob all the teachers loved. Her young idea of fashion was mud stained shorts and tank-tops.

        By the time Amber hit ten, she could tell something was wrong. She didn’t understand why she suddenly couldn’t play football with the boys, and why she couldn’t just go to grandma’s Easter party in pants and a shirt.

        (“That’s not a very feminine look Amber, you are a young lady, and you’re old enough now to act like it.”)

        For now she could ignore the growing feeling of discomfort in her skin. Amber could pretend nothing was wrong. And when the other girls commented on her odd nature, she dubbed herself a tomboy.

        That’s right, a tomboy. The totally normal option, and the only correct one.

        The only socially correct one.

        … But then puberty hit.

        Amber hated how her thirteen-year-old body changed so quickly. She was five foot eight and had been dubbed ‘giraffe’ by the nasty boys in school. Her height didn’t bother her, however. No, it was the hips that thickened, and the chest. She hated it, hated that she hated it. She didn’t think she was bad looking, per say, just… She didn’t look herself. She didn’t see a future in the person she saw in the mirror.

        With the self-loathing came the depression, and with the depression came the anxiety. There was so much of it. By the time she turned fourteen, Amber couldn’t do anything more than stare at her wall for hours, too anxious to move, anxious because she wasn’t getting done, anxious for what this could mean for her. Anxious for the grades, but too anxious to get up and do something about them.

        Around this time is when she started looking at her family at an outside point of few. Picket fence, white, Christian people. Extremely conservative, and right winged. She started finding flaws in their logic, started resenting every word that came out of their mouth.

        Amber was a sheltered child, and only received a device with access to social media at fifteen. There, she found an escape, making friends.

        She discovered the term ‘Transgender’ online.

        Everything clicked in that moment. The more research the more tears. Amber outright sobbed as she read, this was it. This had to be. She tested it out.

        (“He found what he was looking for, and he knew in his heart it was the right choice.”)

        She loved the way the pronouns sounded, beaming, she ran downstairs to her- his parents. His, him, he. God, did that sound so nice.

        Amber ran downstairs to his parents, but stopped. They were talking again. About the people who pretended to be a different gender. It hit Amber like a ton of bricks.

        They were talking about people like him.

        He walked right back into his room and cried.

        The anxiety worsened to nearly unbearable amounts.

        Amber continued to research and found that he wanted to save up for a binder. He began a savings account, saving every penny he got his hands on.

        It took ages, but he finally, finally, convinced his mother to cut his hair.

        (“You look like a guy now Amber.”)

        God did that comment fill him with joy.

        (“You look like a butch.”)

       Don’t say that like it’s a bad thing, lesbians are lit af.

        (“Do you really like it cut that short?”)

        No shit.

        Amber had never felt more confident, but there was one thing missing.

        A proper name.

        He scoured every male baby name he could find. Scrolled through every writer’s website. Hell, he even looked at the girls names to find one.

        It wasn’t until he was studying old literature when he found it.

        Virgil.

        He loved the way it sounded. Virgil. Such a nice name, genuinely extremely aesthetic in his opinion.

        Amber no longer fit, it didn’t feel right. It never felt right. Virgil.

        Virgil.

        Virgil.

        Virgil.

        He was now a junior in highschool, owned a binder, had short hair, wore baggier clothes, and went by Virgil openly at school. By now the hate had long since died down, and he was decently happy. Still ridiculously and ludicrously anxious all the tie, but that was something to look into at a later date.

        Right now, however, he had to get away from his home.

        He loved his parents, but they were just so… hateful towards any kind of minorities. POC, LGBT, and anyone who wasn’t a white Christian were seen as sinful in their eyes. Virgil was tired of being forced to attend a church about a religion he didn’t know if he believed. He was tired of listening to their bullshit.

        So when the time came that he went to college, he moved into a apartment He had gotten scholarships due to grades he had been careful to keep up and didn’t have to rely on his parents money.

        His roommate, an agender person by the name of Logan Thomasson, was one of the nicest people he had ever met. Supportive too. Logan and him hit it off. Logan was a bit hesitant at first, but eventually told Virgil that xe used xe/xyr. Virgil smiled and told them he’d accept xyr no matter what.

        Virgil’s parents didn’t notice his efforts to distance himself at first. Not until the second semester of his second year, when they had heard nothing from him. By now Virgil had long since started testosterone, and his voice had dropped significantly. It was almost time for summer break, and Virgil was making plans to stay at Logan’s for the break again, when he got the call.

        -

        “Amber, honey, are you there?” His mother called into her phone with that sickeningly sweet voice she used when she wanted to sound nice. Virgil gulped audibly, staring across the room at Logan, who was sitting with him to keep his nerves down.

        “Yes mother?”

        “Are you sick dear? What’s wrong?”

        “No mom, I’m not sick.”

        “Then why is your voice so deep, Amber? You know I hate it when you lie.”

        Virgil bit his lower lip and closed his eyes, feeling the tears fall. He couldn’t delay the inevitable. Sure, maybe it was a shitty thing to say to his mother over the phone and not in person, but he wouldn’t be able to stand her face.

        “I’m not.. I’m not Amber, mother.”

        “… What? Sweetheart of course you’re Amber, what has gotten into you?” By now Logan had gotten and moved across the room, and xe was sitting on xyr knees in front of Virgil’s hand, putting a hand on his knee.

        “No mom, I go by- I go by Virgil now. I’ve been taking testosterone treatment for a year and a half now.”

        “Amber.”

        “No- Mom it’s not-“ Virgil choked up, “It’s not Amber, I’m sorry, I’m-“

        “Amber I’m coming to pick you up. That college isn’t good for you. I knew we shouldn’t have sent you to a damn liberal school,” his mother could be heard shuffling around, presumably covering the phone with her hand, “Adam, your daughter believes she’s a boy, a boy Adam.”

        Virgil started sobbing now, sliding off his seat. Logan was quick to scoop him up in xyr arms, holding him tightly. Virgil rested his forehead on xyr shoulder, looking at the phone in his trembling hand.

        “Mama please,” he mumbled wetly, watching the screen fill with tears. The world becoming a blur. His heart pounded in his chest. He couldn’t take this, he was going to have an anxiety attack.

        “No, Amber, your father and I will be there shortly. Goodbye.”

        The phone beeped, and Virgil threw it.

        He cumbled in on himself, crying hysterically. He wanted that to go better, damnit. Maybe a little acceptance. Anything. God, it hurt so bad.

        Logan shifted him around so that xe could pet his hair, mumbling xyr stupid math equations in his ear the way xe did, in that stupidly endearing way that Virgil loved so much.

        His parents, true to their word, arrived that night.

        They didn’t bother to knock. Virgil didn’t even know how they knew where he lived.

        Logan was the one to see them when they arrived, Virgil had locked himself in his room. Logan had suggested it actually, god Virgil loved xem so much.

        “I do not believe you are supposed to be here.”

        “Amber lives here, yes? Where is she, we’re leaving. You would not believe how this place has contorted her mind.”

        “Ma’am, you need to leave. Both you and your husband.”

        “Now who do you think you ar-“

        “I’ve already contacted security. The officer is a good friend of mine, they will see you out,” Logan smiled over the couple’s heads, at the officer who was standing in the door.

        The couple spun around, spotting the officer. By now Virgil had poked his head around the door. He might as well watch his parents leave, this may very well be the last time he says them this close, or not through a picture.

        This was a mistake on his part however, because when his mother flipped around to confront Logan again, she spotted him.

        “Amber! Sweetheart! You have to come with us! I’m not letting my baby go to Hell!”

        Virgil crept out from behind the door, looking levelly at his mother, “No mum, I’m not leaving. Now I believe Logan asked you to leave. This is his-“

        “Our, Virgil, how many times to I have to tell you it’s our apar-“

        “This is Logan’s home as much as mine, and xe wants you to leave.”

        By now the security officer had already gotten Virgil’s dad out the door, and had walked up behind the mother.

        “Ma’am, these two have asked you to leave multi-“

        “Xe? XE?! Amber! These are demons! You are possessed, please baby, come with us- please!”

        “Ma’am! Either you leave or I arrest you, that is a direct order! Out, now!” The officer shouted, furious. They escorted the woman to the door, Virgil’s mother throwing a fit all the while.

        “You’re all evil in the eyes of god! You will repent one day! You will!!”

        And with that the door shut.

        Virgil gave a small, defeated smile, looking at Logan. Logan breathed heavily out of xyr mouth, before walking up to the dark haired young male. Xe gave him a small kiss at the top of his head, ruffling his hair.

        “I’m so, so proud of you.” Xe said softly. Virgil snorted softly.

        “You think they’ll still let me go to Thanksgiving?” He joked.

        Logan laughed.

        -

        A week past and Virgil had done nothing but delete the nonstop flow of messages from his old friends and family. He had no reason to talk to them. Not anymore.

        He and Logan had started dating since then, and both were extremely happy. Hell, they had even been debating the pros and cons of inviting the cute security guard, who was named Roman, into their relationship. The guard had been flirting nonstop with the two of them, and honestly, they were smitten by the non-binary officer.

        A few months later found them all happily watching movies on the couch with Logan’s ball python Dee.

        A year later found them all happily married, with Roman’s brother Remus as best man.

        Months after that found them adopting an adorable baby named Patton. The child was a spring loaded ball of red curls and freckles.

        Virgil didn’t start out life as Virgil.

        But he sure as hell didn’t end it as Amber.

-

A little fic a did as a sort of vent

I wrote all in an hour and a half, and I honestly don’t think I have it in me to go back through and fix it if there’s mistakes.

[bdgthinks]

The Two Sides of “The Two Sides of Singapore, As Seen By A Food Delivery Rider”, As Seen By A Food Delivery Rider

https://medium.com/@bdgthinksShort pre-amble: Just as how the original Rice article is just the opinion of one writer, what I’m writing below is likewise, just the opinion of mine alone. Also, my opinions are based on my experience working with Deliveroo while Yusuf worked for Grab Food so there may be some differences between the pay structure, zone distances and other company-specific policies.

I was clicking past Instagram stories yesterday afternoon, about to take a nap, when I saw a friend share this recently posted Rice Media article. Part photo journal, part commentary on the gig economy, Singapore’s class divide, and how income inequality is growing more apparent as we adapt to the ever-evolving Covid-19 situation? Sign me the hell up. 

All images courtesy of Ricemedia.co, Yusuf Abdol Hamid, or myself

20 minutes, a few raised eyebrows, and many heated texts later – I reluctantly abandoned my plans to nap because I read some many things in this article (which I highly recommend you read first before reading on!) that I disagree with profoundly. 

Before I start, I want to offer my appreciation to Yusuf (the narrator), Boon Ping (the editor/author), and Rice Media for publishing this piece that will help many understand the oft-overlooked issue of social/income inequality in an engaging and accessible manner. My misgivings towards some of Yusuf’s opinions notwithstanding, the general sentiment towards this article is extremely positive and has done what I believe every great article should do, provoke thought and inspire critical thinking towards the status quo! 

A smattering of positive feedback to the original article 

What I appreciated most about the article is encapsulated by joce_zhang’s comment, that it’s an important reminder to be kinder to people – regardless. 

 However, I couldn’t help but find it slightly troubling that Yusuf and Boon Ping (the editor) seemed to have oversimplified these issues and reduced the stakeholders to caricatures: the rich as the Monopoly Man; and the tireless ‘seen by many as a dead-end job’ delivery couriers as a Dickensian orphan, counting pennies and agonizing over whether they ‘deserve’ a Zinger. 

I worry that one unintended consequence of this article is that some ways social inequality is highlighted may lead to reinforcement of the divide rather than dissolution. 

During my Summer holidays in 2018, I became attracted to the idea of working part-time as a food courier cyclist as in my mind I saw it as being paid to just cycle and listen to podcasts. Since then, I’ve been an on-off Deliveroo cyclist during the shorter holidays or whenever I needed a little bit of extra pocket money. 

In past the two years, I’ve earned exactly $4081.63 from making deliveries (inclusive of bonuses) and dividing it by a conservative $15/h rate, I’ve worked for around 272 hours or about 700 deliveries. split about 60/40 between private properties and HDB flats.

And I guess it’s also partly because of my different experience working in food couriering the past two years that made me feel so much discontent while reading Yusuf’s article. In these 400-odd deliveries to private residences (or heck, in any of my deliveries), I don’t recall having once been treated unnecessarily rudely, aggressively or dismissively by any of the stakeholders I interact with in the job – restaurant servers and managers, condo security management and customers alike. 

What I have experienced actually are customers that have tipped me for my efforts - especially ones who live in fairly inaccessible areas, and (during this circuit breaker period) offered me a snack or a cold drink to drop off their deliveries; security guards who ask me how my day was and if I’ve had my lunch or dinner; and restaurant staff who invite me to have a seat in the restaurant while I wait for my order. 

Some treats from kind customers 

Even when I had made a mess of the customer’s order from their order roiling around during a bumpy 15-minute bike ride (entirely my fault of course!), I’ve never heard anything more than an entirely deserved ‘tsk’ at the disappointment of having half of their pho soup ending up in the plastic bag instead of the bowl – and even then these tsk’s are far and few between! 

And it is (again, solely from my own personal experience) where I felt that Yusuf could have been cherry-picking the worst examples from his own experience to make a point. While service industry personnel are no doubt severely underappreciated and that should be improved as a whole, I feel that such blatant incidents are the exception rather than the rule. 

My point is: the world isn’t binary. Heck, even up to a year ago I was still echoing Yusuf’s entire argument and ranting rather colorfully about the injustice and discrimination of it all. Who are YOU to tell me which lift I can and cannot use? 

In the pursuit of delivering a commentary on some really important social issues, I feel that it fell short by over-emphasizing the ludicrousness of the elite and failing to consider the many other factors that contributes to this problem. 

For one, I thought that the annoyance projected to security guards seeing themselves as ‘a barrier between the riff-raff and their diamond-encrusted residents’ was a bit uncalled for – painting a picture of the fearsome guard – in employ of the up-in-the-air bourgeois hiding in their ivory tower, assailing an innocent courier who had the audacity to think that he had the right to take the same elevator as the residents? 

But then… when we consider that most lift lobbies are a good distance from the security guard posts where the guards are stationed, it doesn’t seem so unreasonable for a guard to have to raise his voice to get his point across, right? 

Being fortunate enough to live in a condo myself, I’ve sometimes felt unease in the duality that security guards experience every single day: faithful bastions in keeping residents safe, spending their days patrolling the lush, landscaped gardens and expansive feature infinity pools, but never once stepping foot into the houses they loyally guard.

And at the end of the day, clocking out to return home to an environment I assume is much less luxurious. 

So why then, do Yusuf and Boon Ping deign to foster an us vs them divide, arbitrarily placing one occupation on one side of the line and another on the opposite?

How about the incredulousness towards the guy who orders a stupid $11 Dal.komm latte every day, or the Grange Road resident who only orders a single scoop of Haagen-Dazs ice cream? 

Like I said, caricatures that highlight and reinforce the rich-poor divide.

Cherry-picking prevents the reader from seeing the single cups of coffee that I’ve delivered from Common Man Coffee Roasters to Tenteram Peak, the eight egg tarts from Whampoa Hawker Center to Toa Payoh. Or my dad, who lives a one-minute walk from the hawker center but still chooses to order through Grabfood because he paid for a subscription service that offers 50 free deliveries for just $10? 

All these customers lived in HDB units. 

As a courier, there’s nothing I appreciate more than collecting an order to find out I’m being paid $5 to cycle one block away, or reaching the restaurant to find out that a customer only ordered an easy-to-transport wrap instead of say, twelve packets of chicken rice – I’m getting paid the same amount anyway. 

So yes, they’re paying our salary, so thank you. 

Juxtaposition is also good and all for making a point, but is it truly accurate and representative? 

The word exclusive is used a lot by Yusuf - but are those who live in a smelly HDB with the pee smell in the corridor exclusively nice, and the expat who lives in the Ardmore Park condo with the super high ceiling exclusively mean? Is it wrong to live (or aspire to live) in an exclusive private property? These are questions to be stimulated, not answers to be given. 

There’s so much to pick apart, but my goal isn’t to say: I’m Right, You’re Wrong, it’s just that say that There Are Two Sides to Everything. 

A brief aside on ‘fulfillment’ 

While I love my part-time job – paying me upwards of $20 an hour to keep fit and listen to podcasts, I’m entirely cognizant that while I’m privileged that it’s a side-hustle, a side-gig, a part-time job to me; it’s also a livelihood to tens of thousands of hardworking people out there. 

Where I could turn off the app and head home when I decided I’ve earned enough in the week to eat at a new restaurant I’ve been eyeing or if it was too hot in the afternoon, most other people working my job can’t – if not, the lights may not turn on the next day. 

In a comment to an earlier draft of this piece, a friend shared that it’s a privilege to be able to separate your social identities. I think it’s also a privilege to have the choice of perspective. We exercise when we’re healthy, as a hobby, or a passion. Deliverymen don’t see it that way. There is no ‘good to do’, there is only ‘must do’. 

At the end of the day when the world starts to recover from Covid-19, you’re going to start getting photo and videography gigs and transition back to the white-collar world. 

As for the security guard and domestic helper at Ardmore Park, the server at the Grange Road Haagen-Dazs, and the tens of thousands of for-hire drivers and delivery couriers? There’s no ‘back to normal’ – this is their normal. 

In a discussion post on Yusuf’s article, a redditor referenced Maslow’s hierarchy of needs:

In the blue-collar normal, where every day is a struggle to meet the needs of financial safety and security, maybe fulfilment isn’t really an aspiration for most. In an article calling for empathy, I feel the quality slightly lacking in my reading. 

A few months back I began my education into inequality in Singapore with Teo You Yenn’s seminal This Is What Inequality Looks Like. In it, the title of one of her essays especially stood out to me: Dignity Is Like Clean Air. She describes, like Yusuf does, that many blue-collar workers in the service industry always feel invisible, that people don’t respect them, that it makes them feel small. I’d like to add on to** Dignity Is Like Clean Air** with the caveat: Segregation Is Not Necessarily Dirty. 

Going back to the ‘fucked up service lifts at the back for the smelly people, the non-residents and stuff’, how about we just call a spade a spade?

In restaurants, servers and chefs who have their meals there usually sit at tables near the kitchen (or even in the kitchen itself). 

In airplanes, consumers have the choice to pay a much higher premium for more leg room and a more gourmet selection of food. In fancy hotels, bellboys and concierge staff have to wear stiff suits – there’s usually a dress code for guests to enter certain areas. 

So, is it really that unfair, for someone who’s had the means to pay for the privilege of living in luxury, to not really want to share a lift with someone who might smell unpleasant from having spent hours cycling under the hot sun? 

The service lift provides the same functionality – no one’s saying that couriers are ‘lesser people’, we’re not being asked to walk up the stairs while the ‘masters’ take the magic moving box. It wasn’t created to separate the ‘undesirables’ from the ‘desirables’ like a pre-Rosa Parks bus, and it’ll be unhealthy to think of it as such – even worse to let it fester. 

To package my views into a neatly categorized box – When I’m Brandon the Deliveryman, it’s perfectly fine for a guard to request for me to take the service lift, but when I’m Brandon the Guest attending a dinner party at the same condo, no one is stopping me from taking the resident lift right? 

Different day, Different fit, Same me 

I still think that it’s incredibly fucked up that some employers make their helpers take a separate lift though. 

But in delivering the core message – is it more helpful to frame your reflection as ‘why do some people treat their subordinates with such contempt and how can we as society hope to change it’, or to just resent the fact that ‘rich people like that la’ – and laugh and pretend we’re friends. 

I guess what I’m most frustrated with about the article is that it had the potential to be so much more. It occasionally flirts with the possibility of going deeper into one issue or the other but ultimately ends up being a reflection of one privileged dude’s brief foray into an industry that many of us often take for granted. 

And because there are so many issues at play, people often fall into the trap of distilling extremely complicated issues into dangerous sweeping statements, which eventually does very little for the problem in question. 

Another frustration I often have towards the discourse towards social issues is that they often fail to carry a call-to-action. Okay, I’ve checked my privilege, I’ve understood that my successes in life is partly a byproduct of the wealthy family I was fortunate to being born into – now what? 

A good rule of thumb that I’ve been trying to implement into my life recently is to think about the net positive or net negative an action has onto society. And hence: 

To the fortunate: While it is important to understand your privilege and not take things for granted, you also don’t have to be ashamed of it. Every dollar you spend goes into the economy and is earned by someone else. So, what can you do to influence a net positive? 

Be kind to everyone, be kind to everyone, be kind to everyone. 

If you can, have the moral courage to call out undesirable behavior – especially if it’s someone close to you. But if you can’t – it’s okay too. Start with yourself. The world could do with less ‘you should do more’ and more ‘thank you for what you did’. 

This is not exclusive to tipping service staff or offering couriers a cold drink (although it is always really welcome!). Offer a kind word to anyone you interact with. Ask the office or school janitor if they’ve had their meal yet, wish your security guard a good morning/good evening when you pass them by, clear your tray when you’re at a fast food restaurant and smile and thank the servers if you pass them by. 

I promise you - these little acts of kindness will go a much longer way received than it takes you to give them. 

To our everyday heroes: Your intrinsic self worth is by no means defined by how an asshole treats you. You are so, so, so much more important.

You are somebody, you are somebody, you are somebody. 

In this essay, my intention is to extend the net positive that Yusuf and Rice has already generated while minimizing the net negatives it may unintentionally create by framing the issue as ‘us vs them’. 

I hope that it will be seen as an addendum to Yusuf’s original piece instead of a correction. To build up on the important issues that **each and every one of us **should acknowledge and then go one step further to see how we can resolve them. I hope that reading this has provoked more questions than it gives answers. I hope that we don’t see the world as black-and-white but how things can move to a more palatable shade of grey. 

Of course, my thoughts, beliefs, and assumptions here could be (and probably are) wildly ignorant and myopic, and I still have so much more to learn. So please confront me, dispute me and tell me where I’m wrong and what I don’t know. 

If I have to leave you with just one takeaway, I hope everyone remembers to be kinder to people – regardless.

(You can also find me at https://medium.com/@bdgthinks!)

[megatentious]

Majin Tensei 2 and Shin Megami Tensei If… let’s talk about them

This past year saw the fan translation release of two 16-bit Megaten games, Shin Megami Tensei If… (lord help me if I need to type this ellipsis every time) and Majin Tensei 2. I am maybe the only person who decided to play through both of these games for the first time in English in one year, and so maybe it will be instructive to see how these two series black sheep (can you call a game a black sheep if no one has actually played it?) fit together in the context of the larger franchise. Or maybe this is just an ungainly excuse to cobble together months-old observations into blog content. Let’s find out!!

Both of these games come from a period when Atlus was still trying to figure things out from a game design perspective, testing how much they could push their console audience with PC dungeon crawler inspirations. There were no compunctions at this point about making unforgiving design choices, even in their crowning achievement mainline series games. Sometimes this worked, like the lack of guidance in Shin Megami Tensei 1 leading to perfectly tuned feelings of lonely exploration. Sometimes this didn’t quite work, like the tedious backtracking and brutally untelegraphed stat skill check requirements of Shin Megami Tensei 2. “Getting Megaten’d” is a message board expression meant to describe the sudden game overs that can occur in this series after hours of play, so it’s not as if unforgiving punishment is something that has been eradicated from the more modern games. But there’s a reason even many Megafans (yes i just said megafans, please deal with that) refuse to play anything in this franchise that released before the Playstation 2, and it’s because of choices that are perceived as promoting tedium and time-wasting. We’ve seen how this can affect their big marquis mainline successes, but what happens when you apply these principles to dicier spinoffs? Well…

Majin Tensei 2 is at least, quite conceptually ambitious. Spanning numerous worlds and time periods, showcasing political intrigue and explicitly defined characters with varying motivations, five distinct endings across light-dark and law-chaos axes, hidden events that depend on how many turns you take and which demons you have in your party, there is a lot (too much!) to keep track of. There are ideas in Majin Tensei that pre-sage much of what makes up Devil Survivor, from demon races with differing map skills to introducing demon fusion to a strategy RPG space that was mainly just Shining Force and Front Mission. In practice though, what you do repeatedly in Majin Tensei 2 is slowly s l o w l y clear fifty plus maps, maps that will occasionally provide fun challenges, but more often that not will repeat large not particularly memorable landmasses with simply hellish amounts of monsters. Seriously look at this screenshot I took, this is less than one third of the map!

There’s a reason that so many volunteer debuggers dropped out during playtesting, and there is a reason that 100% of the ones who persevered used fast forwarding emulation features to finish. This is because Majin Tensei 2’s sluggishness can be linked to the infamous Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. problem, S.T.E.A.M. being a largely unloved Intelligent Systems strategy game on 3DS that was raked over the coals in reviews for allowing enemy phases to go on for inordinate amounts of time. Majin Tensei 2 does that game one better by allowing literal minutes and minutes to pass as each enemy decides its action one by one. Do you remember that map in the screenshot above? Imagine twice as many enemies as that taking 10 seconds each to complete their own turn. Majin Tensei 2 makes it clear that you are absolutely not supposed to kill every enemy, through turn limit bonuses and appeals to your general sanity. But that still doesn’t stop the game from dumping demons haphazardly across each map in the manner of someone pounding the bottom of a trashcan to make sure every piece of refuse has tumbled out. So even if you are trying to be efficient, with each passing turn you’re going to be dealing with plenty of downtime.

So yes, the game is cruel. Just to take one example, Majin Tensei 2 spends the whole game teaching you that you need to keep someone tough at your home base even if you think you are safe, since at any moment some sort of aerial demon can sweep in from 12 spaces across the map to occupy it and end your game. And then in one level 40 chapters or so in, the game will punish you for keeping anyone behind at your home base by spawning multiple inaccessible dragon type demons who will one shot anyone who was trying to hold down the fort no matter what (did I mention that this game has instant permadeath for all demons and instant game over for any of your five human characters, five humans whom you cannot possibly level up sufficiently to all be able to survive multiple demon attacks?). Majin Tensei 2 is willing to mess with you to the extent that it absolutely wants you to cheat. After all, this is a game that in 1995, allowed you to save after every turn, which is another way of the designers telling you that savestate abuse (or in my case, copious use of the rewind button) is built into the design.

So why put up with this sort of nonsense? Well, for one, you’re dealing with the atmosphere of a 16-bit Atlus game, a combination of visuals, sound design, music and tone that is simply unlike anything else in the industry. And there is absolutely satisfaction to be found in slowly conquering the game’s maps. But those who scoff at something like, say, Soul Hackers, will find this game absolutely impenetrable, which likely means it will only ever be played through by advance Megatenists (okay i changed it to this, are you happy). Majin Tensei 2 tries to do quite a bit, switching up much even from its direct predecessor, and the play experience ends up suffering despite the ambition.

SMT If in comparion, well … If is by far the least ambitious game in the series to date. While Majin Tensei 2 lavishes you with cool unique digitized photo backgrounds, an extraordinary soundtrack with lengthy moody electronica from the late great Hidehito Aoki, and spectacular boss sprites, SMT if reuses all the most drab and uninspired wall textures from its predecessors, and offers absolutely nothing in terms of new music. Worse yet, many of the reused tracks have somehow depreciated in the conversion. Listen to the offkey shrillness of the iconic Ginza music here , seriously what did they do to it!?. If does feature some lovely new boss sprites, showcasing demons from rarer mythologies that were never again revisited (where are all my Persians at ATLUS???), but even some of the best of these are hidden in new game plus routes the average player will likely never see. The general fugliness of the overall game and relentless asset reuse gives the whole experience a very unfortunate rom-hack feel, and though it’s not hard to figure out why the game ended up this way (it was cranked out less than 9 months after SMT2) it doesn’t make things better.

I should note one important item here, however, and that is that the PSX version renders almost all of these complaints obsolete. It’s the version I first played actually, stumbling through the first few hours untranslated during a Japanese PS+ trial period. The PSX version not only offers very dramatic visual upgrades and some excellent needed remixes, there is a small measure of kindness built in for the player through the game’s Easy Mode. It’s only in this mode for whatever reason that Atlus offers a design “solution” for the most infamous portion of the game, a dungeon in which you are required to wait for hours of lunar cycles in order for students to dig your path forward. In Easy Mode the time requirement is halved for you. Behold the design advancements of the 32-bit era!

If is generally an odd game in the context of the series. There is a type of person out there who likes to call this game Persona Zero, and for people who have played the Snow Queen route of Persona One I can see why the comparison is made. But despite the initial high school setting and pseudo-selectable party members, it still feels strange and off-putting to play a Shin Megami Tensei game with almost no meaningful narrative choices (routes here are essentially locked in at the start). Guardians are seen as proto-Personas, but in this game they are earned only through dying and are associated with combinations of stat augments and skill lists that are frequently at odds with each other. What you end up with is a system that is interesting conceptually (should I die to gain useful spells at the cost of my current stats?) but unworkable in practice (it is almost never worth the steep steep battle count cost to experiment). The seven deadly sins theming is sometimes used to inform the map design and dungeon concept, but again more often than not these concepts simply lead to unfortunate tedium for the player (shout out to the final dungeon of Reiko’s route though, which very brilliantly mashes together traditional SMT dungeon design and a thematically cool map floor I won’t spoil for you).

If we look at SMT If through the prism of 16-bit Atlus design principles, having the foundation of SMT1 and 2 to work from should in theory have led the developers to refine their decisions in ways that ought to have helped the player experience. Instead, the game makes bold choices that result in remarkably less fun. For example, If understands that guns were ludicrously over-powered in 1 and 2, and tries to course correct by … making it much more tedious for the player to use guns? Bullets now cost money and can only be bought by slowly ticking up the counter to 99 one click at a time, with each bundle purchase of 99 filling up a limited inventory slot. The encounter rate is as insane as usual, Estoma takes a little bit more time to get than usual, and the game’s economy does not afford you that many useful things to spend money on in terms of equipment. Combine these three aspects of the game and every player invariable ends up large quantities of makka on hand to spend on bullets to your hearts content, and given that bullets are still far and away the best way to dispatch groups of enemies, you’ll find yourself engaging in this tedium in order to play the game efficiently.

I’ve spent a lot of time repeating the word tedium in these observations, and it’s unfortunate that this is the main takeaway most players will get from playing these two games. Both SMT If and Majin Tensei 2 devise interesting systems and then execute them as grimly as possible from a playability standpoint. There are aspects of true unique accomplishment in both games (Majin Tensei 2 has the funniest demon negotiation dialogue in the entire franchise! SMT If’s final dungeon really is super cool!) but the kind of player who is willing to experience them is essentially a rounding error. I don’t have any regret at all that I played through each of them in their entirety (FYI Majin Tensei 2 is longer than Dragon Quest 7 or Persona 5 and SMT If has a new game plus with all new dungeons that increase difficulty and dullness), but I might understand if you have regret. Then again who knows, you made it to the end of this aimless and dull writeup so maybe these games will be right up your alley! Be sure to let me know!!!

[nigeiadigitalmarketingcompany]

CalPERS in Bed With Jeffrey Epstein Client and Co-Investor, Apollo’s Leon Black Even After Apollo Pay-to-Play Scandal Led to Conviction and Jail Term for Former CalPERS CEO

Digital Elixir CalPERS in Bed With Jeffrey Epstein Client and Co-Investor, Apollo’s Leon Black Even After Apollo Pay-to-Play Scandal Led to Conviction and Jail Term for Former CalPERS CEO

CalPERS, which has endeavored to wrap itself in the mantle of ESG virtue-signalling, now finds itself embarrassed by its connection to Leon Black, the founder and long-standing head of private equity heavyweight Apollo, who in turn is more than trivially connected to sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, whose misdeeds are now coming under renewed scrutiny.

It’s telling that image-above-substance-sensitive CalPERS is bothered by being tainted by being one of many limited partners in Apollo funds, when it chose to look past lasting institutional damage done to CalPERS when a pay-to-play scandal that had Apollo providing the overwhelming majority of the dodgy money led to the conviction of former CEO Fred Buenrostro for bribery. Yet, as the letter embedded at the end of this post shows, CalPERS’ attorney Robert Khinda of Steptoe & Johnson, who headed the whitewash investigation of the pay-to-play affair, the giant fund took a fawning posture towards Apollo in accepting a settlement proposal from Apollo that may never have been properly papered up or accounted for.1 And more important, it looks likely that CalPERS got shortchanged on the fee reductions it was promised.

But back to the current scandal, which has a Master of the Universe looking like he’s been caught with his pants down. Not only is Leon Black’s name in Epstein’s infamous black book, but Epstein was an “original trustee” of the Leon Black Family Foundation, dating from 1997. Black has attempted to disavow state filings that reported Epstein as still on the board through 2012, years after Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to solicitation of prostitution. Black has tried claiming that the filings were in error and Epstein left the board in 2007.

Even less credible are Black’s claims about his relationship with Epstein. Bloomberg published a story earlier this week, Jeffrey Epstein Had a Door Into Apollo: His Deep Ties With Leon Black, which depicted Black as having permitted Epstein to solicit other Apollo executives for his “personal tax strategies”. The Bloomberg piece was clearly based on inside accounts. The article also had a section on CalPERS’ hand-wringing:

“Calpers takes this issue very seriously,” Wayne Davis, a spokesman for the Sacramento-based pension, said in an email last week. “The actions our general partners take, both in professional and private contexts, impact our assessment of which firms we desire as long-term partners. We consider any issue, including reputational risk, a serious matter if it impacts a firm’s ability to be successful.”

He said Tuesday that the pension fund is “in the process of contacting Apollo to discuss this.”

All CalPERS can do is make sanctimonious noises. The idea that Black would do anything other than repeat his official story is ludicrous. One wonders who CalPERS thinks will be impressed by its efforts to have a tea and cookies chat with Black about his poor taste in friends. Dumping its stakes in Apollo funds on the secondary market would come at a very high cost, particularly given how much CalPERS would need to unload.

But for CalPERS to act like some sort of naif about Black and Apollo and cop that had every reason to think Black was an upstanding guy is laughable. Not only is chicanery the default in private equity (see numerous articles about how the industry rips off investors, as well as SEC fines and disgorgements, including by Apollo) but Apollo was at the center of the bribery scandal from which CalPERS has yet to recover.

And there would be quite a lot to discuss if Black could be persuaded to be candid. Black claims that he turned to Epstein for professional advice on taxes, philanthropy, and estate planning. Why would someone like Black turn to Epstein, who has no training and no demonstrable basis for claiming expertise, when Black and Apollo have access to the top professionals, including tax attorneys who could treat discussions as attorney-client privileged?2

However, Black sent a letter to Apollo limited partners, which quickly made its way to journalists. Black also read it out loud on the Apollo earnings call earlier this week. It didn’t seem to do much to assuage doubts. For instance, the New York Times pointed out:

Mr. Black described his relationship with Mr. Epstein as one largely limited to tax strategy, estate planning and philanthropic advice.

“I want to emphasize that Apollo has never done any business with Mr. Epstein at any point in time,” Mr. Black said in his letter, a copy of which was reviewed by The New York Times.

Most important, he wrote, “I was completely unaware of, and am deeply troubled by, the conduct that is now the subject of the federal criminal charges brought against Mr. Epstein.”

But so far, Mr. Black has not discussed a company that he and his four children — as well as Mr. Epstein — invested in three years after Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty to a charge of soliciting prostitution from a minor in Florida. Mr. Epstein’s financial advisory firm took a roughly 6 percent equity stake in Environmental Solutions Worldwide in 2011. Two of Mr. Black’s sons serve on the board of the company, which makes emission control products, according to the company website.

Similarly, from Dan Primack at Axios:

Leon Black yesterday spoke publicly for the first time about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, in response to a question from JPMorgan analyst Ken Worthington.

He mostly just read, verbatim, the letter sent last week to Apollo employees (which is quite similar to a letter Apollo sent yesterday to its limited partners).

But he also said:

“There has been a virtual tsunami in the press on the subject. It’s seems to be the gift that never stops giving. For the press, it’s salacious. It involves elements of of politics of me too, of rich and powerful people and and my guess is it will continue for a while.”

I can’t speak for other media, but my interest in this story isn’t because it’s salacious or because Leon Black is rich. It’s because he continues to refuse to answer a central question about judgement ⁠— why he donated $10 million years after Epstein plead guilty ⁠— and Black’s judgement is a big part of what Apollo sells its shareholders and limited partners and portfolio companies. So, yeah, this will continue for a while.

Back to CalPERS. Let’s look at the key section of the deal that Black offered to CalPERS to make up for a pay-to-play fee that was so ginormous that it looked like a bribe, and some of that money did go to CalPERS CEO Fred Buenrostro in cash in paper bags.3

We’ll charitably assume this flimsy commitment was firmed up and properly commemorated.

Notice how this section twice refers to funds managed “solely for CalPERS”. That means a dedicated fund, not a “co-mingled” fund, meaning the common form of private equity fund. These dedicated funds are called “separately managed accounts”.

If you look at the list of CalPERS’ current Apollo investments, you’ll see only one that looks like a separately managed account, the 2007 “Apollo Special Opportunities Managed Account.”

In theory, there might have been other separately managed accounts in 2010 that were liquidated since then, but the fact that Apollo hans’t wound up 1998 and 2001 funds makes that seem unlikely.

The Apollo proposal says it agrees to reduce its “management and other fees on funds it manages solely for CalPERS by $125 million.” It also has verbiage about a new fund that appears never to have been consummates, since its “vintage year” would have been 2010 or later, and we see no fund like that (Apollo VIII in 2013 is a “flagship fund” with lots of investors).

But what are “fees on funds”? Aside from management fees, it’s hard to think of any. This clearly means (well, clearly if you’ve gotten down the curve a little bit on private equity sharp practices) means fees paid at the private equity fund level, not at the portfolio company level. Note also that fund expenses, like the cost of preparing books and records, are expenses, not fees, and aren’t eligible either

The Apollo VIII limited partnership agreement (and any CalPERS agreement is likely to closely parallel i) makes clears that

Similarly, the so-called “carry fee” is not a fee as defined in the limited partnership agreement. Pages 37 through 39 set forth “Portfolio Investment Distribution,” known in the trade the “waterfall.” And the 20% cut of the gains that goes to the general partner is repeatedly called a distribution, not a fee.

So CalPERS had $800 million of committed capital that was eligible to have its management fee waived until the $125 million was exhausted. Recall that management fees usually step down after the fifth year and are usually based on the amount of capital then deployed, and not the committed amount.

Some simplifying assumptions:

1. CalPERS was already a full three years into its 2007 fund by the time its fee reduction agreement with Apollo was effective. So it would have only two years of fee reductions at the full management fee rate

2. Due to the size of the commitment, the management fee was 1.75% (this if anything is conservative)

3. It effectively dropped to half that after the investment period of five years, meaning after the two years left at full rate on this fund.

2 x $800 million x 1.75% = $28 million

7 x $800 million x (.5 x 1.75%) = $ 49 million

Total = $77 million

So a reasonable guesstimate is that CalPERS got less than 2/3 of the face amount that CalPERS was supposed to receive from Apollo as compensation for the harm suffered by CalPERS, when CalPERS expected to get it all back in five years or so.4 And that’s before recognizing that letting Apollo and its fellow bad boys pay not a dime in cash was a ginormous concession. Black is worth nearly $7 billion. His worst take-home pay in recent year was $142 million and it’s been as high as in excess of $400 million. But CalPERS is too cowardly to demand that Apollo, which in this case would have been Apollo principals, to be personally responsible for their bad acts.

But the economics for CalPERS are even worse than the simple math suggests.

Remember those portfolio company fees we mentioned earlier? They are hidden from investors like CalPERS but really add up. Remember that the total cost of investing in private equity has been estimated at 7% a year. A bit over 60% of the total, meaning over 4% in total across the industry, are fees that don’t relate to performance, meaning not carry fees. That gives an idea how hefty those hidden charges are.

Some of those portfolio company fees are “offset” against the management fee. We say “some” because only fees that are specified in the limited partnership agreement are offset (and private equity firms have cleverly dreamed up other fees) and those specified fees may not be fully offset (the average in recent years across all funds is 85%, but CalPERS is generally able to get higher offsets, but the level of offset also depends on how hot the private equity market is).

The effect of getting rid of the management fee is that there would be no management fee against which to “offset” the portfolio company fees that would otherwise be offset against them. The effect is that Apollo could pocket all of the portfolio company fees, rather than have to reduce the amount of management fee to reflect the portfolio fee offset. That effect would reduce the economic value of the management fee reductions by at least 50%.

So I welcome seeing Leon Black squirm. And I wish the press were making CalPERS squirm for the right reason, for being such a dupe. But sadly, reporters and limited partners would rather play supplicant to private equity overlords, even when that amounts to becoming their victim. ____

1 As the post discusses and the letter below shows, Apollo was supposedly willing to provide $125 million in fee reductions. The so-called Steptoe Report touted that four funds, Apollo, Relational, Ares and CIM had “agreed” which means “offered on their terms” to provide $215 million in fee reductions. Yet of the total in pay-to-play fees, $48 million came from Apollo and another $10 million from Relational, Ares, CIM, and Aurora Capital. So we already have the head-scratcher that Apollo is on the hook for 58% of the givebacks when it supplied 83% of the dirty money.

2 The conventional view is that Epstein’s wealth came from extorting men who took advantage of the women and underaged girls he had in tow. I don’t find that credible since procuring and extortion both are crimes. Anyone Epstein tried to shake down on that basis could stare him down and tell him to try risking going public, it would be a sure-fire jail sentence for Epstein.

However, I am told that private jets get cursory to no checks when coming in from overseas if the jet owner is seen as being reputable and not coming in from a destination perceived as a risk for drug hauls. So I wonder if the real service Epstein was offering was indeed tax “planning” in the form tax evasion by transporting high-value assets to tax havens.

3 The Steptoe & Johnson report attempts to depict Apollo as a victim of the placement agent Al Villalobos. If you think Leon Black could be victimized, particularly to the tune of $48 million, I have a bridge I’d like to sell you.

4 Reading just the excerpted paragraph, it’s clear that the real intent of the fee waiver was to induce CalPERS to sign up for a new separately managed Apollo fund, which it appears never happened.

Calpers Apollo Fee Reduction Agreement

CalPERS in Bed With Jeffrey Epstein Client and Co-Investor, Apollo’s Leon Black Even After Apollo Pay-to-Play Scandal Led to Conviction and Jail Term for Former CalPERS CEO

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[thelastmemeera]

What does it mean to be a billionaire?

So there’s been a lot of discussion floating around regarding billionaires and society, and I’ve noticed that most people have no idea what a billion dollars is for practical purposes - people tend to think of it as a vague, nebulous concept of “a lot of money” rather than something concrete you can wrap your head around. This is understandable, considering 1) a billion of anything is really hard to visualize and 2) the average person has no real reference point for an amount of money that large. So I’m going to try to break it down for everyone:

Okay, so imagine you have a billion dollars. What can you actually buy with that?

This is a mega mansion that will have an Imax cinema, a bowling alley, and a spa when it’s fully complete. It costs around 4.6 million dollars.

Now let’s buy one of these in every country in Europe - that’s 50 mansions you now own. So how are you going to travel between all your many homes?

This is a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the fastest street-legal car in the world. It has a maximum speed of a face-melting 254 mph and can go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. It costs around 2.5 million dollars.

Let’s buy a dozen of them - you know, in case you total a few of them racing around the highway. But maybe a sports car is still to slow for you:

This is an Embraer Lineage 1000. It’s private jet that can seat up to 19 passengers, and we’re going to buy it for 53 million dollars.

How about a boat? The Tatoosh is a 303 ft private yacht, meaning it’s longer than a football field. We’ll take it for 369 million dollars.

Do you like art? Just for fun let’s buy Monet’s most expensive painting ($90 million) Van Gogh’s most expensive painting ($151 million), and this monstrosity, which is made with 8,601 diamonds and costs 65 million dollars.

Now that we’ve gone on our ludicrous and absurdly wasteful shopping spree, how much money do we have leftover? About 12 million dollars, which is almost an order of magnitude more than the average American with a bachelors degree or higher earns in a lifetime ($1.8 million). So if you for whatever reason decided to buy the 50 houses, 12 sports cars, plane, yacht, art pieces etc. and immediately set them all on fire, you would still have enough cash leftover so you never would have to work again if you so chose. This is what it means to be a billionaire.

But we’re not done yet.

The richest person in the world is Bill Gates, with a net worth of 86 billion dollars. If he liquidated his assets, what could he buy?

Well, for starters, the Burj Khalifa - the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2,722 feet tall, costing around 1.5 billion dollars.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most advanced particle accelerator for 9 billion dollars.

The Hubble Space Telescope for 10 billion dollars (including 20 years of operating costs).

The Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world, more than a mile wide.

And to top it all off, a fleet of five Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the largest military vessels ever built for around 8.9 billion dollars each. If you look at the picture very closely you can see the people standing on it for reference.

If Bill Gates bought all of this, he would still have around 2.3 billion dollars leftover. That’s enough to go on the billionaire shopping spree I described above twice over (so 100 mansions, 24 sports cars etc.) and still have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank when it’s all said and done.

But we’re not done yet.

Currently, it’s estimated that there are 2,043 billionaires alive today, with a combined net worth of around 7.67 trillion dollars.

This is Russia, the largest country in the world, extending more than six and a half million square miles, with a population of more than 144 million people. The United Kingdom could fit inside Russia 70 times.

In 2016 Russia’s gross domestic product was about 1.28 trillion dollars. This means that if the two thousand and some odd richest people in the world - less than half of 0.1% of 0.1% of the Earth’s population - liquidated and pooled their assets together, they could buy every single product and service made in Russia for almost 6 years.

So yeah, make of that what you will.

[unabashedtastemakersublime]

Politicians Want to Protect us From the Evils of On-Line Gaming Part 1

A mom had finished dressing up her 2 children for college by 5 in the morning. Following this, she'll head for the casino for an amount of some gambling activity.Does it sound such as a also ludicrous to be real situation? Think againToday, gambling looks like a everyday task that folks ignore also easily. But, they don't understand the possible harm being caused for their lives due to gambling.Usually, gambling also known as betting is a form of sport that involves belongings and money being put at risk. All the belongings or money are at a risk whilst the likelihood of wining is really minimal or is completely determined by chance. But, you are able to generally use some kind of wicked ways to get, but nevertheless you are able to never be absolutely sure of winning the game.

Gaming are of several types: one of the types is beatable while one other is unbeatable.The games that will simply be trampled ergo making a statistical good probability through utilization of strategy are called as beatable games. Some of them are poker, even though it could be labeled as sport requiring ability; Pai Gow poker, Tiles, video poker, position devices, horse racing, sports bets.

If nothing of the techniques in the overall game helps the ball player to get the overall game, then it becomes an unbeatable game. Some traditional examples on this type are baccarat, roulette, keno, position devices, craps, casino war, pachinko, faro, 3card poker, 4 card poker, pyramid poker, red dog, Spanish 21, Caribbean stud poker.

Equally unbeatable gambling and beatable gambling is found at the casinos. You can find still additional gambling games that aren't being played in the casinos like mahjong, backgammon, lottery, coin tossing games like head and end, several carnival games such as for example Hanky Pank and The Razzle.Another form of gambling sport could be the repaired chances gambling which may be noticed in functions such as for example football, hors racing, tennis, baseball, tennis and a great many other sports that entice thousands of individuals on betting on the winning team.

Still the exact same, they're all various kinds of gambling which does not have a chance of experiencing continuous wins.In gambling, individuals typically take to to obtain straight back what and all they lost during the span of the game. A few people continue steadily to enjoy the overall game having a opinion that they shouldn't slice the monotony of these luck. As a result, they keep betting and wind up placing them selves at a threat of having a loss rather than gain.

Many individuals who enjoy gambling state that they enjoy only for satisfaction and for a recreation. Numerous others claim that they enjoy it to earn some money and gambling is a very easy way to complete earn money.Since gambling involves plenty of kinds of intellectual task, alongside tension and attitude of champion, it's probable to become hooked on the game. Later on, it might affect the one who is mixed up in sport of gambling.

With all these psychedelic consequences due to gambling, a few people also take part in betting whether a record is fake or correct, or whether an function will need place at a particular time with still another person. That happens typically on scenarios wherever 2 persons debate against each other with solid opinions against each other. Typically, The 2 persons place bets for money and for enjoyment just to create their stage on a certain issue.

Due to the bad aftereffects of gambling, many appropriate jurisdictions choose not to legalize the gambling activities. Because of this, all agreements that have resulted in debts due to any gambling task are taken as unenforceable by law.This is the main reason gambling is a dangerous activity. Those who chance simply do not realize the harm of gambling to them.As informed, never put good money soon after bad money. If by any chance you are involved with gambling, end straight away to devoted any loss on your own side.

If you are one that thinks gambling is a new task that blossomed in Las Vegas in the 20th century, you may want to comb up on your gambling facts. To get advisable of how big the gambling history is, take to going back a couple of thousand years. You'll observe that games centered on chance and the roll of cube have now been always been an integral part of human history.

Not only did the Asian and different populations enjoy gambling and games of chance, many Indigenous American communities employed such activities well before the current casino. Add to this the kinds of gambling carried all over the world by Western explorers and you've a worldwide sensation of problem and excitement. Here is a starter reality - lotteries have also been used to raise resources for community structure projects.

e In the event that you see 100 persons on the street in one day, it's a pretty safe bet that about 65 of these have located a bet or built a wager before year.o By many matters, profits in gambling casinos global add up to $30 million annually. Various studies report that Indigenous American concerns host almost 300 casinos.History of gambling details: The state of Nevada legalized gambling in 1931. New Shirt was the 2nd state to create gambling appropriate (1976). South Dakota and Iowa followed in 1989.o While casinos have operated in Nevada because the 1940s, the state developed its Gambling Commission in 1959.

One fable that seems unwilling to die is that online gambling isn't good to players, due to casino get a grip on, less-than-random figures and so on. Basically, this is false. Safe-gaming application, eCommerce Online Regulation and Confidence (eCOGRA) and various certification nations have removed much of the insecurity and unfair play. The fable might shortly develop into one of the many Internet gambling facts.o Casino fashion games are undoubtedly the most used task online, outnumbering sports betting 2 to 1. Lotteries and pari-mutuel betting are much down the list in percentage of online gambling task, as are real-time online poker rooms.o The Interstate Cord Act, transferred in 1961, is a federal legislation that had the goal of reducing gambling activity. What the law states claims it is illegal in the United Claims to make use of line transmission (such as telephone) to put bets or share gambling information เว็บบอลออนไลน์.

Intriguing Gaming Facts: Sixty % of online gamblers use British as their main language. Second in line is Russian. Germany takes up place number three, in accordance with a study by Inland Activity Corporation. For age, the figures are shut, but these between 26 and 34 enjoy much more than others. One out of each and every five players is over the age of 45.o As well as online casinos, a number of the most used kinds of Web/Internet gambling are lotteries, sports publications (wager on football, rugby, baseball etc.).

e Based on a 2007 history in USA Nowadays, the Venetian Macao casino was the biggest on earth (on the southern hint of China). Foxwoods in Connecticut can also be advertised whilst the world's largest casino.Very Intriguing Gaming Facts: Video slots are often regarded the most used online casino game. Roulette is one of the toughest games to get, while casino poker is usually regarded one of the easiest (with only a little skill). If you can learn how to depend cards, you are able to move blackjack to the top of the "easier" list.

[andrewdburton]

The Margin Loan: How to Make a $400,000 Impulse Purchase

So, I kind of just bought the house next door to me.

We’ve already gotten straight into the renovations with a symbolic first step: a new front door.

This is already somewhat amazing, for a small-town boy who refuses to even buy himself a new car.  But even stranger are the details that surround this deal:

I’m not moving into it.

I don’t really need or want a second house.

I have no long-term plans to be a landlord.

I made the decision on a whim, and the whole transaction only took about 45 minutes of actual work.

I paid “cash” for the house, avoiding the hassle of getting a mortgage – while not having to accumulate an entire house price worth of cash.

And most importantly to you, I used a financial trick that I only recently learned about, but upon further study is an incredibly useful thing to have at your disposal (as long as you use it responsibly).

The real story is this: 

About two months ago, I learned through the grapevine that the house next door would soon be on the market. There was a cryptic “for sale by owner” entry on Zillow with a $400k asking price, but no pictures and no information on how to contact the sellers. In response to the information vacuum, Zillow had just automatically sucked in a really ugly Google Street View picture of the house.

Figure 1: Just(in) listed

In my area, we are in the middle of an insane housing boom. Every new property that comes to market, no matter how modest, is treated like Justin Timberlake stepping onto the stage of a dazzling arena of adoring fans.

This has left several friends who arrived more recently searching fruitlessly and losing the inevitable bidding war for each uninspiring property, over and over again.

And my little street happens to tick a lot of boxes for our type of shoppers: a walkable and bikeable central location which also backs onto open space and features newer (1990s) houses with a layout that can easily be split into two units with separate entrances. All at lower prices than the older houses without views and without house-hacking potential, just up the hill. 

Figure 2: Actual scenes from my back yard(!)

So I knew this place was a good deal and a good investment, and sure enough several friends were interested. The only problem was, so was everybody else: a bidding war was already bubbling up and we only had a few days at most to lock it in. 

And my most interested friend was self-employed, and in the middle of a year-end business boom –  both factors that would delay her ability to get a mortgage. How could we secure this house, so she would get an amazing deal and I would get to live next to a really great group of friends (and continue my plan to gradually take over more of the street) rather than rolling the dice with a random set of new neighbors?

The solution: we made a deal where I would make an all-cash offer to buy the house, with very quick and friendly terms to the seller so we could beat the other offers. Then my friend would take her time to get a mortgage, and buy the place from me at a more leisurely pace – effectively just leasing it from me in the meantime.

The problem: I didn’t have anywhere near $400,000 sitting in my checking account, and I did not want to sell a bunch of shares and trigger capital gains taxes (which in my case would be at least $60,000), just for this short term project. I’m a good friend, but not that good.

The Ultimate Solution: Learning from a friend who has been doing this for years, I transferred some of my existing investments out of Etrade and into a new brokerage firm (Interactive Brokers), which has an unusually good Margin Loan capability.

This let me borrow money against my own shares, at an interest rate of about one percent (1%!), without selling any of them. 

So end result for me is like a very flexible mortgage, but at less than half the interest rate, and with a virtually-overnight origination speed. And I am the CEO of the bank!

Introducing the Margin Loan

Let’s start with an example of what I did, although with fictional rounded numbers just to make it simple.

The way a margin account can work, if you’re careful.

You may have already heard about the often-risky practice of “buying stocks on margin”, along with its notorious darkside, the possibility of a “margin call”. But there’s also a big potential advantage, which is why people do it. Let’s summarize both of them so we can see how to do it right.

In the best case, a margin account allows you to do things like this:

Put in $100,000 of your own money and buy, say, some shares of the VTI index fund.

Use that as collateral to borrow an additional $100,000 to buy more shares (VTI or otherwise).

You end up with $200,000 invested.

If the stock goes up by 10% per year ($10,000) and you are borrowing the money at only 2% (which costs you $2000), you get $8000 every year for “free”.

The downside is that this can happen:

You invest your $100k, borrow that second $100k, and buy the same $200k of shares.

COVID hits and your shares suddenly go down 50% (total value is now $100k)

BUT, that $100,000 margin loan you took out hasn’t changed. In other words, you still owe the brokerage $100k, and your account value is now only $100,000. The total value of your account is now zero.

Even worse, the brokerage is not cool with this situation, because they require a 50% “maintenance margin”.

They automatically sell half of your shares in order to reduce the loan balance to $50k.

You’ve just lost 100% of your money (because you own 50k of shares and owe the brokerage 50k), and you were forced to sell the shares at the worst possible time, shutting you out of the possibility of a rapid rebound (like we saw just after the 2020 Coronacrash).

Note: if the stock drops fast enough, you can even lose more than all your money.

So, margin is a powerful tool that can multiply your profits or your losses. However, since the stock market tends to rise over time, it can still be a valuable option, as long as you use it with great caution. So why, and how, am I using a margin loan? Although the basic idea (and risks) are the same, I am using my margin loan a bit differently, to withdraw cash instead of buying more shares. And I am keeping my borrowing well under that 50% threshold in the example above, in order to reduce the risk of trouble in the case of another market crash. Here is what I did:

I created a new account for myself at Interactive Brokers, selecting the “IBKR Pro” account type to get the lower margin rates, and set it up as a “margin” account versus the unnecessarily complex “portfolio margin” option.

I transferred a relatively large amount of shares of stable, diversified companies (mostly the VTI index fund and some Berkshire Hathaway) into this new account. 

With a securities transfer, your actual shares move between from your old brokerage to the new one, rather than being sold on one side and re-bought on the other. This avoids triggering unnecessary capital gains taxes. I was able to make this part happen entirely online – no phone calls required.

Then, since my account was new, I had to sit and wait for 30 days, to clear the security lockup period. This is a good reason to plan in advance by setting up an account when you aren’t rushing to buy a house. But the deal still worked out, and I’m even more prepared for next time.

After that I was able to withdraw cash using the margin loan feature. The brokerage lets me go all the way up to 50%, but I kept mine to a lower percentage.

Now, when I go to make a withdrawal from my account, I see a screen like this one:

Although I already have some money borrowed on margin (a negative cash balance), the system calculates how much extra I could still borrow based on the current value of my shares. As I pay off this loan, the green number will grow and eventually the red number will rise above zero as well.

This money simply went immediately to my checking account. I used a wire transfer, which the brokerage did for free.

Within less than an hour of that money hitting my checking account, I was able to wire it right back out to the title company, and buy the house.

Technical note: In this case, I did already have a portion of the house price ($140k) available in cash. This allowed me to borrow a smaller amount ($260k) using the margin loan, which made it possible to stay within a conservative borrowing range without requiring millions of dollars in shares.

The Real Magic: Ludicrously Low Interest Rates

For a brokerage, a margin loan is an easy and automated way to safely make money off of their clients, because they are really just lending you a portion of your own money.

So as long as they set the rules conservatively, they have your shares as guaranteed collateral and can sell them instantly if needed. This means they can offer rates barely above the prime rate. And Interactive Brokers is particularly aggressive, offering the rates below at the time of writing.

(Interactive Broker Margin rates as of Jan 2021. Note: you can always check the current rates on their website here)

For comparison, Robinhood offers margin loans at 2.5% and Etrade is something silly like 7.95% and up as I write this. Even the low-fee standard Vanguard is in the 7% range. So, Interactive Brokers is truly unique for now – which is why I created my account.

Cool Implications of This New Trick

1: Staying fully invested without fear

In recent years, I have found myself disobeying my own advice and holding more cash in checking accounts than I should have. By foregoing the returns I would have earned if I left this money in the stock market, I have cost myself many thousands of dollars.

But I was holding back due to a range of fearful excuses like, “What if there’s a stock market crash and I want to get some shares on sale? What if my income tax bill is higher than expected? What if a house comes up on the market and I want to be able to spring on it quickly?”, and so on.

With the margin loan option now in place, all of these fears disappear. I can now safely remain fully invested, and in the unlikely event of one of those “emergencies” above, I can just pull out any amount of money I might desire. No delays, and no taxes.

2: Being able to buy houses on short notice (or even become a mortgage company for your friends)

In my situation, I was able to lock in a good deal on a house due to the power of the “cash offer”, which benefits my friend who will eventually buy it from me to become the final owner. After buying several properties with actual money rather than a mortgage, I have found that the benefits are huge:

By offering cash (and providing proof of funds as needed), you show the seller that you are serious, and that you can actually afford the house. In a hot market, many buyers make offers on houses that they can’t truly afford. Several weeks later, they find that the financing falls apart, leaving the seller hanging and needing to re-start the sale process. A cash buyer is thus much more reliable

Mortgage companies can be very slow, taking a wise but extensive list of steps before they hand over the money. It can be 6-8 weeks between offer and closing. With your cash, it happens at your own pace (it could be as fast as one day, but 3-4 weeks is reasonable if you are doing inspections and other due diligence.

With a cash offer, you can make your own decisions about how to handle the inspection, or even perform your own (if you happen to be qualified as I am). You also don’t need to pay an appraiser $600 to take a random dartboard guess at the value of the house you are choosing to pay. As an advanced buyer, you presumably know the value better than anyone else.

Finally, with cash you eliminate any loan origination fees and you can choose your own insurance coverage and deductible, since you are the only one at risk.

Although this arrangement is unconventional, it doesn’t feel too risky for me, because the house is solely in my name. If my friend changed her mind or otherwise could not complete the deal, I still own the house, which could be sold at a small profit or rented out. From a legal and accounting perspective, all I’ve done is bought a house as an investment.

For those with sufficient savings (and who are not prone to worry), this “Cash Buyer Vigilante” idea could become a valuable service for other friends, or even a sort of business: you help your clients to make cash offers to buy houses, which gets you a better deal in a competitive market, and you collect a fee for the service. You may also earn a small spread on the difference between the mortgage rate and your broker’s margin interest rate.

3: Avoiding unnecessary taxes

If you never have to sell your shares, you can keep those gains on paper instead of out in the real world – perhaps even for your entire lifetime.

As long as you’re comfortable with the margin loan interest rate (which will not always be as low as it is today but should in general remain cheaper than a mortgage), you can borrow against your growing pool of investments for everyday living expenses, house purchases, and even charitable contributions.

And if you borrow to make additional taxable investments (which is exactly what I have done for the house next door) , the interest itself may be tax deductible as well. For example, consider the following hack, just one of many:

You have millions of dollars of appreciated Apple and Tesla stock, and want to tax-efficiently fund a nice lifestyle forever. You could

Use a margin loan against these shares to buy a solid multi-unit apartment building (preferably with a high yield and a hands-off management company to manage it for you)

Collect the considerable rent, while taking any allowable depreciation deductions

With a good property, the surplus after all of these expenses will more than pay for your margin loan interest and your own pleasant lifestyle. Groceries, household expenses, kids, travel, whatever you like. And you still own your original investments and haven’t paid capital gains taxes on anything.

You do have to be careful, of course. My rule of thumb is to be more than prepared for the worst stock market decline that has ever happened, and even then have a backup plan beyond that. So, my primary house will never be at risk, and only a small portion of my total investments will be subject to margin borrowing. 

But if you do it right, I believe this trick allows you to trade a very small amount of risk for a rather large increase in life options and satisfaction – in other words, fun.

So I look forward to sharing more stories of how this neighborly arrangement works out, and the intriguing adventures I have with this new margin account after that.

In the comments: if you have more experience and/or questions about margin loans, please share them, and I will update this article so we can make it more comprehensive.

—–

A note on Interactive Brokers: I chose this firm based on advice from some friends who are established investors, followed by some online research. I am happy with the results so far, and I received great customer service when setting up the account and going through the learning process of the margin loan (which is really easy). But, like everything in life, I still view it as an experiment. I have lots left to learn.

The company has a nice “online-university” style explanations of all sorts of things, with nicely formatted pages and video lessons – including more advanced forms of trading that I don’t plan to get into. But in the case of the margin loan, I found this guide to be useful.

IB also offers a referral program. If you establish an account and like the results enough to recommend it, you can share it with your friends. As the program currently stands, you will get $200 for each new customer, and your friend will get up to $1000 (1% of the value of the assets they use to fund it) – payable in the form of IBKR shares, which is kind of a novel way to pay a bonus.

If you are thinking of signing up and need a referral link to get your own 1%, you are welcome to use mine here – which will of course benefit the MMM blog so thanks if you do!

from Finance https://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2021/01/29/margin-loan-ibkr-review/ via http://www.rssmix.com/

[wesleyv21-blog]

Nearing the end of week one!

Hello, y’all!

Just a disclaimer: writing and speaking in English is already a little difficult, so if I say weird stuff just ignore it lol. Somehow, it’s already felt like ages since I landed; yet at the same time, in the words of a man I had the honor of talking to today, ya no he aterrizado; todavía estoy en las nubes. Hay mucho para contar y voy a empezar con martes.

On Tuesday, we spent our last day in the town of Tababela. After going through various logistical things, a group of us hit the town around early evening/late afternoon to this little pizzeria catered for tourists. It was called Chester’s (after the owner’s beagle), and the menu was even in English lol. It opened not long after the new international airport did, which explains its presence. Needless to say it was a blast, and I can definitely say I will miss the tranquility, hot sun that made you feel at ease with the world, and the hospitality of the inhabitants of Tababela.

We touched briefly on a problem that seems rampant across the so-called Global South. The colonial legacy has such a stranglehold still on the population yet at the same time has facilitated the rise of a new elite who keeps their pockets lined with foreign cash while doing nothing to alleviate social injustices in their own country. This is a problem that will need to be problematized further. También, I had some insightful interchanges with some of the other students about our privilege to even be in this country. We have so much wealth (broadly defined) that has put the world at our fingertips. It wasn’t a matter of if I could study abroad; it was where. I believe this is so telling. Then our academic director, Faba, nailed it on the head: can you imagine a group of Ecuadorian students romping through the states asking random people questions in the name of “research?” Of course not! It would be ludicrous. Yet that is exactly what we would do the next day.

On Wednesday, we were given instructions on how to get to the bus stop in Tababela and to proceed there after breakfast para coger el autobús hacia un pueblo cercano que nos asignaron nuestros profes. My group’s destination was Pifo, a little town to the south of Tababela and only about a 40-minute bus ride east of downtown Quito. When we arrived, we were tasked with finding the city square, observing all we could about it, going up to random strangers to ask them about the town, find a place to eat lunch, and navigate the bus system once again to make it to our hotel in Quito. It was quite the experience. That I lived to tell about it I think demonstrates just how well I and my fellow students can survive in a Spanish-speaking country. What we found out was that Pifo seems to be a “just-passing-through” kind of town, as many of the merchants would only come into Pifo to sell their wares even though they didn’t live there. I talked with a man who was on his way home to Ambato from the airport. He and I ended up having a fantastic conversation about politics and current issues facing Ecuador. Some of the big ones are a massive amount of foreign debt, a national referendum that might amend the Constitution along 7 lines which takes place this Sunday, and the ages-old dilemma of capitalistic investment vs. conserving the environment. Then, we met this other very nice man who ended up problematizing our notion of “poverty.” He told us that too many foreigners come to Ecuador with their preconceived notions of what poverty is when, he said, the reality is that Ecuadorians are rich beyond compare in biodiversity and natural beauty. Ecuador is, in fact, the most biodiverse country per square kilometer or meter or something like that lol in the world. Yasuní National Park out east is actually the single most biodiverse spot in the world. While in a restaurant for lunch, we broke a plate accidentally and ended up having to pay for it lol. Once we had all the info we needed, we boarded the bus for Quito.

Quito is quite unlike any city I’ve ever seen. It’s long and narrow, with the towering Pichincha volcano to the west and the just immense Cotopaxi volcano to the south. It’s crowded, loud, tall, and there’s always something going on. Our taxi from the bus station took almost as long as our bus ride into the city, yet the distance separating our hotel from the bus stop was less than 2 miles. At night, after we got settled, the program directors invited some local Ecuadorian university students to come share their perspectives with us in a panel format; then, we had the chance to talk with them personally. Two stand out most in my mind. One, a 26-year-old architecture students with a wife and child, hailed from a part indigenous, Kichwa-speaking family. His hair was braided in a long braid that reached his waist. When asked about it, he told us that for him, wearing his hair this way was an act of resistance. For too long, the mestizo-dominated society (mixed European and indigenous Andean and Amazonian heritages) have marginalized darker-skinned, indigenous, and afrodescendant communities. For this student, wearing his hair in the traditional way handed down to him from his grandfather was a giant middle finger to this oppressive regime. And he is teaching his son to do the same. He related how one day, his son was made fun of for his long, girlish-looking hair. His son responded that no, he was not a girl, instead he was a proud indigenous boy whose long hair enabled him to make contact with the universe. Apparently the boys who made fun of him went home to their families and expressed jealousy over this boy’s self-confidence and “cool” hair. Isn’t that awesome? This man’s resistance was inspiring for me, even though I come from such a different context.

Similarly, there was a young woman studying sociology. She had quite the structural lens and was very articulate in diagnosing some of Ecuador’s problems in terms of oppressive social structures. When asked about the topic of abortion, she quickly moved onto more enabling aspects of Ecuadorian patriarchy that make abortion so controversial and fatal in many cases. In her perspective, the lack of sexual education in Ecuador is a dire problem that needs to be addressed. This country has the highest rate of teenage pregnancy in all of Latin America, and she thinks that a big part of this is the lack of sexual education. But what is there to do in a country dominated by both machismo and marianismo and a conservative Catholic church? In her view, structural changes are urgently needed. It was refreshing talking with someone like her, because even though we are from different contexts, her analysis reveals that patriarchy might operate similarly in different places. Needless to say we got along quite well. After the students left, we all went out to the Plaza Foch, a well-known hotspot for Quiteño youth due to the numerous bars and clubs. I ended up with a group that settled on this little outdoor area with restaurant stalls all selling food and drinks. They had cards and board games in a clear marketing strategy aimed at foreigners lol. I ended up talking with this man who is a Venezuelan refugee. He had come very recently to escape what is a state meltdown in Venezuela. Although he has multiple degrees, he cannot work as that for which he is trained because he doesn’t have enough money to hurry along his application for work papers or citizenship if he wants it. He told me that you have to have money in order to do these things efficiently, and right now he doesn’t have it. So, he works 2 jobs day and night and has no time to even enjoy the money he’s earning. From his perspective, Ecuadorian society was much more reserved than Venezuelan; apparently in Venezuela, people chat and gossip and are much friendlier with each other. For him, Ecuadorians weren’t like that. He also hated the heat and eventually wants to move somewhere colder lol. He was in awe when I told him how cold New England is!

Something I’ve been struggling with today is where I fit in the matrix of Ecuadorian society. Being a white male westerner, I come to Ecuador with two sets of stereotypes attached to me. The first is that I’m wealthy, and as such I represent the legacy of colonialism, the crippling external debt Ecuador owes to many other countries, the sharp divide in material wealth between the global north and south, and the ongoing phenomenon of cultural exportation from the United States. At the same time, I am a target for robberies because of my perceived wealth. I am also just one more foreigner in this country; as such, I am also invisible, I take up hardly any space, I cannot take part in the political discourse of this country, and I have been told to minimize myself as much as possible to reduce the risk of being attacked. I feel that all this cultural baggage I bring with me is contradicting. I don’t quite know where I fit in the order of things, and I have had the privilege of not having to know this for most of my life. In the U.S., my presence and my body are buoyed by just about every social structure we have. Here in Ecuador, I may retain many of those privilege, yet they have been recast to include some feelings of marginalization I have never before experienced. I do not yet know how to reconcile this. But I tell you that I am constantly aware of others staring me down as I pass them on the street. I know that my every action has hundreds of possible witnesses. It is a disconcerting feeling; I feel like an alien. And lol that’s because I am. Yet how do I derive meaning from this knowing that at the same time, I am perhaps the poster child of the global north? I’ll keep you updated on this, because I feel it to be right at the heart of why I’m here in the first place.

Just a note on the pictures below. The first is a breathtaking shot of Cotopaxi, which rises over 19,000 feet above sea level! It’s one of the highest active volcanoes in the world. The second is the volcano of Pichincha, which demarcates the western edge of Quito. The volcanic peak is the one like dead center with the light-ish streak running down it. The last is a picture from a little bridge in La Carolina park in downtown Quito. I will definitely be coming here to hang out and enjoy the little nature escape in the middle of the city!

[repost-this-image]

I made a PSA.  I hereby give you permission to post it wherever.  (Again, you can do this because I, the creator of these images, specifically have given you that permission.)  Please support independent artists.  A transcription is at the bottom of the post for those who need it.

Transcription:

Digital Art Theft:  What it is, and why you should care The story of art and art theft goes hand in hand with the history of copyright.  So why does that exist, anyway?

Whose genius idea was copyright law??

In the beginning, there was no such thing as copyright. ⦁ Books and artwork had to be carefully produced by hand. ⦁ Each new copy of a book took the same amount of time to produce, no matter how many copies you wanted, so there weren’t a lot of copies of books that weren’t religious texts (like the Vedas or the Bible). ⦁ Because it took so long to write and bind a new copy of a book, an author’s livelihood wasn’t affected by other people making a copy.

Gutenberg Changed Everything

The invention of the movable-type printing press was HUGE, y’all. ⦁ You didn’t have to write really slowly to make each letter neat and legible; the type blocks were already made before you produced a book. ⦁ Once you’d set up a page, you could make as many exact copies of that page as you wanted, which meant you could print hundreds of copies of a book at a time. ⦁ Because it was easier to print a lot of books, you didn’t have to charge as much, so lots more people could afford to buy your books!

There was just one problem. ⦁ When it’s easy to publish and print lots of copies of your books, other people can also print lots of copies of YOUR books.  And make money off them.  And if their copies are cheaper than yours, you lose sales, which means YOU DON’T MAKE MONEY and could become a STARVING ARTIST.  (Or author. Whatever.) ⦁ But that’s not all.  That other printing house?  Doesn’t give nearly as much of a shit about your book as you do.  They’re printing out the bargain-basement version of your book, after all, so it doesn’t have to be as nice as your Super Official Version.  So they’re gonna make a lot more printing errors than the official copy that you originally ordered. ⦁ Oh, and if they don’t like the ending?  They could just fucking change it, and then people don’t know which ending is the real one that you wrote. ⦁ So in addition to not making that sweet, sweet sales money, your reputation takes a hit.  Ouch.

Copyright was the solution, but it wasn't perfect. ⦁ On the one hand, an author got to choose which printers had the right to make copies of their books, and nobody else would get to print copies for 14 years after the original print date.  So you could control the quality and sales of your books, and actually make enough money to support you while you wrote a second book. ⦁ BUT without those cheap, shitty bootlegs, books got a bit more expensive again, so fewer of the unwashed masses could afford books.  It’s a tradeoff. ⦁ Why 14 years?  Because it was assumed that most of the people who were gonna buy your book, would buy it within that amount of time.  Sure, some people would buy it later than that, but not enough for you to really rely on those later sales.

Wait, only 14 years? ⦁ That’s right.  In 1710, when England and Scotland created the first copyright laws, your copyright expired after just 14 years. ⦁ Copyright law has been changed several times over the centuries to make that period last longer. ⦁ The most recent change to US copyright law, for instance, was the Sonny Bono law in 1996 (yes, that Sonny Bono).  This is why there were a lot of companies selling VHS tapes of popular cartoons before 1996, but when DVDs became mainstream a few years later, there were no DVD versions made—those cartoons had their copyright renewed right after the Sonny Bono Law passed, so it wasn’t legal for those other video producers to make and sell unlicensed copies of those cartoons anymore. ⦁ That’s right, the tapes in the photos on this slide, that look like cheap bootlegs, were LEGALLY PRODUCED.  Because the old cartoons on them were, at that time, in the public domain.  And they’re not anymore.

So what does this have to do with online art? ⦁ Copyright law still applies to art.  Yes, even if it’s made on a computer.  Yes, even if the artist chooses to post that art on the Internet. ⦁ Because the artist gets to choose how their art is distributed, an artist can say “Do not repost to other websites, and do not reblog without this caption,” and it is legally binding. ⦁ If an artist wants to sell prints of their own art, they can legally do that.  But you can’t sell or distribute prints (or digital copies!!) of their art without their express permission. ⦁ Because we currently live in a capitalistic society, ARTISTS NEED TO MAKE MONEY OFF OF THEIR ART IN ORDER TO BE ABLE TO PRODUCE ART FULL-TIME.  If they can’t make money off of it (say, because some asshole is off posting hi-res copies of it on other websites without permission and without giving the artist credit), then THEY HAVE TO GET ANOTHER JOB AND DON’T HAVE AS MUCH TIME TO PRODUCE ART.  Which means you get less art.

Small-time artists aren't like major corporations. ⦁ When you make a bootleg of a Disney movie, or Disney’s promotional art (for legal reasons, I wish to point out that you SHOULD NOT DO THIS because it’s ILLEGAL and DISNEY CAN AND WILL SUE YOU INTO THE POORHOUSE), you’re preventing a massive, multinational corporation (which has unethically devoured hundreds of other corporations, btw), which already earns billions of dollars in profits every year, from making $20.  That’s a drop in the bucket. ⦁ But when you make illegal copies of a small-time artist’s art, that’s just a regular, not-ludicrously-wealthy person, who relies on sales and commissions to earn a living.  That money could be the difference between them buying groceries next week, or having to have a glass of water for dinner for a few days.

The moral of the story: ⦁ Support small artists and small businesses! ⦁ The only viable replacement for copyright laws that both allows artists to spend time Making Art and also allows you to make all the copies you want, is SOCIALISM.  You just can’t have it both ways under capitalism.  It doesn’t work. ⦁ This, by the way, is also a reason I support a Universal Basic Income:  so that art theft doesn’t prevent independent artists from being able to do what they love full time, because their survival doesn’t depend on selling prints or drawing commissions for That One Guy who wants art of his unusual, weirdly-specific fetish that the artist REALLY isn’t into but hey, he’s shelling out $300 for it and money is money.

⦁ Also, if you remove an artist’s watermark to repost their art somewhere else, you’re both an art thief and a HUGE asshole.  DON’T DO THAT.

[danguy96]

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory: A Sweet Retelling - Chapter 1

Author’s Note: I hope this doesn’t feel too late or too soon, but here’s the first actual chapter of my retelling of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It’s mostly going to be quite a bit of setting things up here, but I hope you’ll still like it, though I hope you don’t find things to be too much like the book, since while many lines will be lifted from the book and it’s adaptations, I really do hope on making it somewhat of it’s own thing. As always reblogs, likes, and comments are always appreciated, and all respective characters belong to their respective owners. Please make sure to support the official release, and I hope you enjoy this.

Previous

Chapter 1: Meet Charlie Bucket 

  As you would have probably guessed by now, this is a story about an ordinary little boy named Charlie Bucket. Now, Charlie, at first glance, seemed like a typical, average young boy, and, for the most part you would be correct with that assumption. Charlie was not faster than any other child in the world, nor was he any stronger or wealthier than other children. However, what he lacked in those areas, he made up for with being a rather imaginative and clever young lad (well, as clever as a ten-year old boy could probably get, but still clever, nonetheless), and would often come up with ideas for stories and even inventions from time to time. Though, Charlie’s little habit of dreaming would occasionally slip into daydreaming, which got him into some scraps of trouble at school during his classes or when doing his homework (in fairness, his classes were usually very, very boring). Still, in spite of this, Charlie was still a good-hearted and charming boy, who would always give his finest “How d’you do?” to the people he’d meet.

  The rest of his family consisted of his father, his mother, and his four grandparents. These four grandparents consisted of the father and mother of Mr. Bucket, Grandpa Joe and Grandma Josephine, and the father and mother of Mrs. Bucket, Grandpa George and Grandma Georgina. Now, Grandpa Joe, though extremely old, was still a fun-loving man who just loved to tell fascinating stories from his youth, including his time doing service in the war (though, it was hard to tell when was telling the truth, or just telling tall tales, though it didn’t really matter to Charlie, since he loved Joe’s stories either way). Joe’s wife, in contrast, was a bit more down-to-earth than her husband, and usually liked to keep to her knitting and sewing (often knitting and sewing things for the rest of her family, especially for little Charlie, who needed the extra warmth for the winter most of all, due to him being prone to becoming sick during that time of the year), but she was probably the sweetest old grandmother you could possibly find. Grandpa George, on the other hand, was a somewhat curmudgeonly, old Irishman, who almost alway seemed to be grumbling about what was wrong with life and the world nowadays, and seemed to be waiting for the day when he would, as he put it, “finally get to meet the good Lord.” Grandma Georgina, a brash woman of advancing years from Scotland, had less of a “glass half-empty” outlook on life than her husband did, though she did have a habit of being, well, “inappropriate”, such as claiming that she could show attractive young men that she’s “still got it” after downing more than quite a bit of gin (Charlie’s parents promised to tell Charlie just what sort of “it” Georgina had when he was older). Even in spite of their foibles, Charlie still loved his grandparents, and the same could most definitely be said about his own parents as well, even if they didn’t exactly live in the lap of luxury (an understatement, to be sure).

  You see, the whole of this family lived in a small cottage on small hill near the edge of a small city in England (though, I couldn’t tell you which one, just that it was far away from the hustle and bustle of cities like London or Oxford), right next to a not-so-small Garbage Dump. The house wasn’t nearly large enough to accommodate all seven people, and, as you could probably, life was extremely uncomfortable for them all. There were only six rooms in the place altogether (though, technically it was four rooms and a cellar, so it was even less than that); there was one “main room”, where all four of the grandparents slept in the same large bed on both sides (or, rather basically lived in the same large bed, since they hadn’t gotten out of it as far back as Charlie could remember, since all four were so old and had lost even the will to get out of the bed), one bedroom where Mr. and Mrs. Bucket slept, a kitchen (which just barely counted as a room, seeing as how it was practically right out in the open and almost right next to where the Grandparents slept), a room in the cellar where Mr. Bucket would occasionally tinker on home-made inventions of his, a bathroom, and one makeshift bedroom in the attic for little Charlie. Now, in the Summertime and in Spring, living conditions weren’t completely terrible, but in the Winter, freezing cold drafts would blow throughout the house and make the floor feel like ice if one walked on it without socks or slippers, which was just unbearable. There wasn’t any question of them just moving out and buying a better house, or even building a proper bedroom for Charlie. They were far too poor for any of that.

  Because they were so poor, both parents and even Charlie had to put in their fair share of work in order to make ends meet, with Charlie recently having taken up an evening newspaper route after school. As for Charlie’s parents, Mr. Bucket was the main breadwinner of the family, and worked at the local Smilex toothpaste factory, where he would sit all day screwing the caps onto toothpaste tubes after they had been filled. The hours were long and tedious, and the amount of money he was paid wasn’t nearly enough to help provide for his family, no matter how hard he worked or however fast he screwed the caps on. Mrs. Bucket would usually spend one half of the day taking care of the house and cooking for family, while spending the other half of the day working at an old laundromat, where she would wash and dry other people’s laundry in a very old-fashioned and tedious way (the town in which Charlie lived in was very old-fashioned as well, so having a washing machine and dryer, or even having a laundromat with those things, was quite the luxury). While she only had to work there every other day, the pay was no greater than the pay which Mr. Bucket earned, and she would sometimes even have to work there till late in the evening, even after Charlie got home from school.

 At home, though, Mr. Bucket still did his best to keep a glass-half-full attitude, tries his best to help the family by fashioning together some homemade contraptions together in order to make their lives a little easier (such as repairing an old vacuum cleaner he found thrown out in the dump, building a “work-in-progress” automatic woodcutting device in order to save time on chopping wood for the stove, repairing an old wireless radio set, and a “work-in-progress” shave and haircutting device, just to name a few, and to answer your question, the reason why he didn’t sell his inventions in the city is because they weren’t “new” and “up-to-date”), and loved to play with his similarly imaginative son when he had the chance, even helping him build a small clubhouse in a tree that was just between Charlie’s house and the Dump, using mostly the debris that was left out near the house. Mrs. Bucket was more down-to-Earth and practical than her husband, rejecting some of her husband’s more ludicrous inventions in favor of using a bit of elbow grease around the house, and was the de facto enforcer of house rules, but she still loved her husband and her son dearly, even if there weren’t enough hours in the day for her to spend time with both of them.

  Now, even though the Buckets were definitely poor, they could still afford some of the basic essentials: running water, electricity, and heating… though they would sometimes have trouble with the last one, and had to resort to wood and coal-powered stoves whenever Mr. Bucket had to fix the heater. The main problem they had was food. Even with the combined pay of Mr. and Mrs. Bucket’s jobs, and Charlie’s paper route, all that they could afford were small loaves of bread with margarine for breakfast, boiled potatoes and cabbages for lunch, and watery cabbage soup for supper. There were days when things were a bit better, and they were able to buy some things like lard, eggs, and some meat (particularly corned beef), but those days seemed to only come once or twice a month if they were lucky.  

 The Buckets didn’t starve, of course, but every one of them usually went from day to day with a devastatingly half-empty feeling in their stomachs, and just didn’t feel completely well-nourished after they ate. They all had dreams of one day being able to eat more scrumptious and satisfying meals, but Charlie was probably the one who suffered the most of all. Although his mother, father, and even his grandparents would usually do their best to give them some of their own share of lunch or supper to help him keep up his strength, it still usually wasn’t enough for a growing boy his age. Oh, how he desperately craved something more filling and satisfying than cabbage soup or boiled potatoes. But the thing he longed for and dreamed of eating more than anything else in the world was… CHOCOLATE.

 Walking his way to school in the mornings, Charlie would walk by the local sweet shop and see great slabs of chocolate piled up high in the shop windows, and he pause briefly to stop and stare and press his nose against the glass his mouth watering like mad. Several times a week, he would see other children taking creamy chocolate bars out from their pockets, lunch boxes, or backpacks and see them munching greedily into them without the slightest thought, and that, of course, was just pure, absolute torture for the boy.

  Only once a year, on his birthday, did Charlie Bucket ever get to taste even the tiniest bit of chocolate. The whole family saved up their money for that special occasion, and when the great day arrived, Charlie was always presented with one small chocolate bar to eat all by himself. And each time he received his birthday bar, he would place it carefully in a particular place in the refrigerator, and treasure it as though it were a bar of the finest solid gold; and for the next few days, he would allow himself to only look at it, but never touch it. Then at last, when he couldn’t take it any longer, he would peel back at a tiny bit of the wrapper at one corner to expose a tiny bit of chocolate, and then he would take just a tiny bite of the sweet delicious bar, which he would savor just long enough to allow the taste to spread out slowly over his tongue. He would then take another tiny nibble the next day, and the day after that, and so forth and so on. In this way, Charlie would make his fifty-pence (sixty-five cents in American money, just to be clear for readers on both sides of the pond) bar of birthday chocolate last him for as long as he could mange.

  Ah, but dear readers, I have yet to tell you about the one awful thing that tortured Charlie, our dear, sweet lover of chocolate, more than anything else. For him, this was far, far worse than seeing slabs of chocolate in shop windows or watching other children mindlessly munching away at creamy candy bars right in front of him. It was the terribly torturing thing you could imagine. You see, dear readers, in the town itself which Charlie lived in, within sight of Charlie’s very own house, there was an ENORMOUS CHOCOLATE FACTORY!

Just imagine that!

  Oh, but this wasn’t simply any old ordinary chocolate factory, and it was owned by no ordinary, everyday man. It was the largest and most famous factory to ever produce chocolate, candies, and all manners of sweets and confectionaries in the entire world! It was the Wonka Chocolate Factory, owned by none other than by a man known as Mr. Willy Wonka, the greatest, wealthiest, and most famed chocolatier and inventor of chocolates and other sweets the world has ever known! Very little was known about Mr. Wonka himself, but the stuff that was known about him was the stuff of legends, and his factory matched the enormity of the stories surrounding him. There were huge iron gates to the North, South, East, and West leading into it, and a high wall surrounding all four gates, and towering chimneys which belch out smoke, and one could even occasionally hear strange whizzing coming from deep inside the factory. In fact, it was so tremendous and breathtaking, that at times it felt a little intimidating, even scary, if you stood near it, what with the way it towered over the town and casted it’s massive shadow. However, you would immediately forget your worries as you stood outside the factory gates when you soon learned for yourself that outside the walls, for half a mile around in every direction, the air was scented by the heavenly rich smell of melting chocolate!

  Twice a day, on his way to school in the morning and his way home during his paper route, little Charlie Bucket had to walk right past the gates of Wonka’s factory. Every time he passed by, he would walk as slow as he possibly could, and he would take long and deep sniffs and savored every bit of that chocolatey smell. Oh, how he loved that smell!

   Although he loved Willy Wonka for his chocolates (or, at least whatever little bit of chocolate of Wonka’s his family was able to afford for his birthday), Charlie also admired Mr. Wonka for the exciting, charismatic tales stories surrounding Mr. Wonka and his life (which Charlie just so happens to knows about, thanks to his Grandparents, particularly Grandpa Joe), as well as for his ingenuity and skills at being an inventor and innovator of all things related to chocolate. Such accomplishments of Wonka’s (mixed in with him taking after his father and grandfather when it came to imagination and a drive to create) soon led to young Charlie being inspired to hopefully become an inventor himself one day so that he could help his family, with dreams of even opening up his very own sweet shop.

  Until that day, though, he was just Charlie Bucket; a poor boy with not much to his name other than a paper route, a clubhouse he and his father built, a tendency to daydream, and small bit of optimism to help him get through life. Still, Charlie continued to hope, dream, and wish for things to get better for his family, even if things seemed almost hopeless at this point. But even though he loved his family very much, and would do anything in order to help them rise above their troubles, the one other thing he dreamed and wished for more than anything was to one day be able to go inside Wonka’s grand factory itself, just to satisfy his curiosity to see what it was like in there, and to finally meet Willy Wonka himself.

  However, dear readers, even though he didn’t exactly consider himself to be the lucky type, Charlie Bucket was the luckiest boy in the entire world, even if he didn’t know it yet, and little did he know that his wishes were soon to be granted in probably the most unlikely of ways.

 And I’ve finally finished Chapter One. Sorry it took so long. I’ve sort of being through some personal issues (both mentally and physically), but I still managed to pull through and finish this proper beginning to my fanfic.

As you may pick up, I do sort of borrow heavily from Dahl’s original text, but I also changed things up a bit to give a bit more depth to Charlie’s family as I set them up for the story proper. While this is mostly just set-up, I still felt it was important to do this sort of thing, much like how Dahl would usually spend a chapter or two setting up the story and characters. And I probably may continue to borrow a bit from the original text, but I do promise you that I try to make this story it’s own thing with my own takes on certain bits of dialogue, even if a few elements from other adaptation of this story will eventually make their way into this retelling. Speaking of which, I hope you picked up on any references or nods to other adaptations of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, as well as a few shout-outs from other certain stories as well.

I hope you enjoyed it, and I hope you also share your thoughts on it with me.

Next time, we get into the story proper, so be sure to stick for when it finally comes out.

@takashi0, @thevideonasty​, @true-king-of-monsters, @celticpyro, @everythingwonka, @theliterarywolf, @roristevens, @mask131, @jewishmagpie, @fantastic-nonsense, @keskronwolf, @catcfmusicaluniverse, @grimoireoffolkloreandfairytales, @dongelmeister, @jamesandtheblog, @adventures-of-the-candy-man

[splashrollstumble]

One Year as a Digital Nomad: My Thoughts

I’ve been working as a digital nomad now for almost exactly one year and decided that I would share my inane thoughts and experiences for those who might be interested in the lifestyle.

A digital nomad is a term used to loosely describe people whose jobs are usually done on a laptop and are location independent. That is, they either don’t require you to attend an office or don’t involve the kind of work that requires you to stay in one particular place. Some examples include writing, photography, graphic design, web design, coding and video editing.

Being a digital nomad doesn’t necessarily mean you work for yourself – many digital nomads are normal, 9-5, Monday to Friday, company employees. However, the nature of their job means they never have to go into the office and can work from anywhere in the world – so long as there is an internet connection. Many digital nomads stay in one place for months or even years at a time, while others are essentially homeless travelers who work from hotels, restaurants, airports or anywhere else they can get a wifi signal. I fall into the latter group.

I got into digital nomad’ing via what I consider to be the simplest route available – content writing. Content writing simply means writing content for any kind of publication – websites, blogs, marketing agencies or even physical newspapers. All it requires is a laptop and a basic grasp of grammar and literacy in the language of your choice – English, of course, being the most widely accepted. Through content writing, I got involved in product reviews, research, technical writing, financial analysis and eventually journalism, which is what I mainly do now.

You can’t put a price on freedom

Working from a yacht off the east coast of Australia

The number one reason that I chose to become a digital nomad is the freedom. Not simply because I can work from home in my underwear (something I do far less often than you would think) but because I can go wherever I want, whenever I want. This is not something that necessarily appeals to everyone, but for me, I would go so far as to say that it is now a non-negotiable aspect of my life.

I earn CONSIDERABLY less than I did in my old 9-5 office job. I mean, like, seriously multiple, multiple times less, but I would never give up what I have now to go back to that. For me, there is genuinely no price that you can place on freedom. As a result, my lifestyle has had to take on some changes and I can no longer afford to live in major cities like London or New York. I can’t even eat sushi that often anymore. I can, however, live on a beach in Thailand, a lakeside cottage in Bulgaria, or literally anywhere else in the world that has vaguely decent wifi and affordable accommodation. For somebody with a severely debilitating addiction to travel, this is an understandably necessary requirement.

The unforeseen benefits

In the course of becoming a digital nomad, I have reaped many unforeseen benefits along the way. Probably the most significant of these are the lessons in motivation, self-restraint, diligence and independence. In my old job, I would do the least amount of work required in order to not get fired and I would call in sick the maximum amount of times possible without it triggering a disciplinary hearing. I was lazy, inconsiderate and unmotivated because I knew that I would still get paid the same amount of money no matter what I did.

Now, there are no sick days. There are no unnecessary toilet breaks or extended lunch hours. No sneaky work avoidance tactics or bullshit excuses. If I don’t work, the only person who loses out is me. Every minute of every hour of every day is potential earning time and every minute spent not working is money lost. This is an aspect of the lifestyle that would scare off many people but if I can do it, trust me, anyone can. It all comes down to how badly you want it.

Another incredible benefit that I have gained from this lifestyle is the amazing amount of new information that I learn on a daily basis. Over the past year, I have done the equivalent level of research that most people would do while studying for a degree. Not only have I learnt how to write on a professional level but I have also gained a wealth of knowledge on a range of ludicrous and useful topics in which I previously had no interest. Cloud computing, health and nutrition, gambling regulations, UK and US politics, relationship and sex advice – you name it. I now know all this crazy stuff about finance and economics that was all Greek to me before and I know practically everything about blockchain technology – something that I seriously hope will be useful one day because, f*ck me, it’s confusing!

All and all, I can safely say that one year on, the decision to become a digital nomad is working out swimmingly. I’ll admit, I’m still incredibly new to all this and have no idea if it will actually be successful in the long run. I haven’t even done my first tax return yet and have literally no idea which country I’m even supposed to do it in. But I’m no longer afraid of losing my job like I used to be in the old days because now the only person in control of my financial future is me…. which, when written down like that doesn’t actually seem like the best idea.

Anyway, whatever, the point is – life is too short to worry about money. I still have 153 more countries to see and this world is not going to travel itself. So, see you on a beach somewhere! I’ll be the guy squinting at my laptop in the annoying midday sun. (Seriously though, who works on the beach? That’s just ridiculous.)

Me, working on the beach

Actually becoming a digital nomad was, of course, a relatively more difficult and complicated process than I have described here. However, if you think it’s something that would interest you, feel free to ask me any questions. I would highly recommend it – especially if, like me, you have the nagging feeling that there is more to life than spending 40 hours a week in a dimly lit office cubicle.

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[wholemilk-emptymind-blog]

The Pied Piper

Most of the time when I’m street performing I feel like I’ve perfectly accessed my bloodline: my Great Grandfather Franco and his Pied Piper lifestyle. The family story is that he’d play in the streets and people would follow him all around until they reached his house, where he’d play for them on the porch. My mother makes fun of him often, saying he was never as good as his own son who was technically trained and had an endless knowledge about the workings of “the business”. She claims his songs sounded funny to her because he was a self trained writer and didn’t play any songs she knew.

I think my Great Grandfather had an understanding of what street music can do for the spirit. He was a healer, and he was providing more than sound that people wanted to hear. I feel him in my blood as soon as I find a parking lot for my car and walk around looking for a spot to post, carrying my instrument without a case so that it can be free and alive with me. These days I have no fears at all; it’s almost as though I have scheduled shows, and I just show up to my post as if expected. This surprises people, and they’re always wondering what I’m doing there. “Is she homeless? Should I give her money or food? Is she going to spend my money on drugs and not fix her life?”

I feel like it’s partially my mission on Earth to try to change this perspective people have of artists who want to make a living with the love of their life. My Great Grandfather Franco was not homeless or poor. He never worked a “real” job in his life, but he had two homes to call his own and also a successful little business on the side selling lemon ice. He also fathered a few more generations of talented musicians. This was many years ago, I’m aware; I apologize for trying to make the example somehow seem current.

My point is that people think the “clean” money is the money that comes from institutions. “Real” work comes from filing into those institutions every single day and asking for permission to take time off in order to live a day in your own life. To me it’s ludicrous to think about how short the time on the Earth is for a human being, and then to realize the surrender that happens every day within this small increment of time. The surrender is that of individual aspiration and personal fulfillment, with the reward being steel-cut affirmation and handsome numbers. Isn’t there something on this Earth that you love more than that? I understand the people with families who must sacrifice and do what it takes, and I believe it’s their mission to get it done because the family is their passion in life. But there are so many who are just waiting for an opportune time to take a leap and do what they actually want, and they wait for that time in a place that entirely clouds and pales their spirit. I was once one with this objective.

I derailed from my story, but I feel as though the message was mildly important. I want to talk about the streets themselves on the hard days of my work. As I said by prefacing this essay: most days are emotionally effortless and much like a romantic film. People come up and want to talk to me, they tip very generously and restore all of my faith in humans. Then there are days where the magic isn’t there on the outside.  I become a noise box that spouts inconvenience, and no one looks my way. In fact, many times, the city people make an obvious effort to avoid me by crossing the street before they come my direction.

“The hard days” are some of the loneliest of my life, and there are times when I think of giving up because of them. The question I face, now that I think about it, is: “Does this mean you’re just doing this for the money?” That’s something to really force myself to consider, and I’m ready to do that now. I think what happens is that I force myself to treat music as though it’s my job. I secretly tell myself that it’s my profession, so I have this stupid expectation that it should bring me money every time I’m out there busking. It’s true that the busking normally makes me just as much money as my old job working at Starbucks did, but that’s entirely not the point.

I sometimes get stuck within the brainwashing of society that determines “clean money” and “messy money”. As I mentioned before, “clean money” seems to come from being hired by an institution and working certain set hours with a guarantee for financial supply, while “messy money” comes from the odd jobs. Busking is a very, very odd job, but it’s entirely my own. I have to keep in mind that this independence makes it much more valuable to me than just money itself. No matter how unpredictable the material aspect of it can be at times, I’d still rather be out singing and playing my heart and soul for others, than sacrificing both for some financial padding in my life.

I suppose this means that, on the days I earn around three dollars, I still get paid. What’s the reward waiting for me on these days? I get to play with the knowledge that I’m talented enough to earn quite a bit of money on most other days, and I get to be out in the elements sharing all of my hard work with people who wouldn’t otherwise hear it. I’m going to start thinking of it as volunteer work from now on when business is slow, and I’m going to take it as a sign that these are days when I need to love people harder. These will be my days off, and I’ll be free entirely of “work”.

It’s so normal for people now to be swept up into money worries, and I’m no exception. I truly don’t believe I’m meant to have very much money in my life; just enough. So I have to be careful to retrain myself that it’s okay to get little recognition, and that it’s extremely okay to earn barely any money for my efforts. I guess the money has simply been a form of evidence that I’m making this work. There are people who haven’t believed in the cause of my music like I believe, and so when I started to earn money from it I noticed their perspective start to change.

It’s sad that money is what it took for them to see me for what I am, but at the same time I grew mildly addicted to this reaction from them. Admitting it is hard, but I suppose it almost feels as though I’m not a “real” musician on the days I don’t earn much money at all. This is ridiculous, simply because the question exists: “What is a real musician?” I don’t have an answer to that question currently, but I do know that it doesn’t just mean earning money playing music. I wanted to be a musician so badly that I majorly narrowed down the qualifications to merely being able to play, and earning a good amount of money from playing.

So now I’m on a mission to retrain my perspective. I’m going to look the slow and lonely days in the face from now on, and then I’m going to write about their effect on me and try to find only the positives.