#its not my thing but its another social media platform I can get myself onto and well validation is important to me 😂

[kingofbr00klyn]

I’ve recently figured out how to timelapse on csp so

watch me struggle to colour for 30 seconds

[okaystoptellingmetomakeanaccount]

Here the rambles i typed in my notes while i didnt have access to tumblr

On the plane:

I 49 percented this game that was on the screen thing. I originally wantedto 100% it because funny and also it was quite a surprisingly clever and fun puzzle platformer but there was too much bullshit at the end and im pretty sure level 24 was impossible so yeah excuses i ended it at 69 stars

(Game was called rotating castle i think but i cant find it anywhere on the web)

Then i watched a my little pony movie wonka and little woman (greta gerwig edition) in that order and my ranking would be 1 3 2 if the numbers were the order in which i watched them wow im so clear

After another flight we arrive in the city where my mother was born and where her mother still lives and so we arrive there do arrival things we arrive at my grandmothers home and i find out pretty much all social media is blocked so im currently writing all this in my notes app so i can copy paste it into tumblr later or reuse it whatever.

Then the next day i was the first to wake up and even while im writing this everyone else is still asleep. So my grandmother goes to me and she has made breakfast and its this sweet soup of which 2/3 of the stuff in it i have no clue to what it is. (future me extra notes: one of those things turned out to be sea cucumber. So i can say i ate that now. Which i say because i guess i find that weird? Gosh im realizing how white i actually am from inside) And the entire time we just point at things because i don’t speak any chinese dialect so at some point i try and wake up my mother so she can translate, so i go hey mom your mom is super sweet and she has made all these delicious things but i feel like the entire situation is very awkward because we dont understand each other so can you come, but then instead my father wakes up and starts complaining about being tired and to leave them alone so i go back to pointing at things. Then she has made some rice porridge and comes with a bag of peanuts and im struggling to open it so shes like let me do it but im like no i can do it dont worry and i thought i couldnt be more embarrassed with the current situation already but because im an idiot i rip open the bag too much and a quarter of the peanuts spill onto the floor and i can only say sorry which i dont even think she understands and clean the floor and then later she comes with a broom thing idk the english word and im like ill do it but then she points like no you eat and im eating rice porridge with peanuts while shes cleaning the mess i made and i felt so bad.

Shes so sweet to me and im only being stupid and i dont even know where im going with this this is just what happened anyways wenzhou is great i think.

(Its not really the walkability of this part of the city where i am is horrid)

Oh and then halfway through writing this she comes into the room again and starts putting some kind of creme on my face probably because my skin looks very dry and i dont know what to say so i just stare at my phone a bunch and completely butcher how you would say thank you in mandarin. I so wish i was less awkward.

Waking people up took so long that i fell asleep myself

Anyways things happened next morning apparently its workers day or something so thats cool. Grandmother gave me food while i was still asleep in bed a few times. Mother is currently getting her hair cut/washed at the neighbors home, but thats also their like where they have their kapperszaak idk the english word and google translate is blocked here and the other translators i cant get to work but they professionally cut hairs there but thats also just their home and im sitting in their living room rn while my mother her hair is getting cut in the room next to me.

And now guess what then my mom is like now its your turn, like my hair isnt short enough already. I dont need to be bald. And then i just sit there and have my hair cut as well while i hear the rest of the people in the house yell and like idk play a board game or something. But it wasnt a lot of hair that got cut so it was fine okay i guess.

After that i fell asleep again well

Anyways

LOOK AT THESE LOOK AT THESE CHINESE DUCK COMICS I MEAN LIKE THE COMICS ARENT CHINESE THEY ARE STILL DANISH AND ITALIAN BUT YOU KNOW WHAT I MEAN

The pocket is weirdly heavy. Some crazy paper quality compared to the usual ltb. Idk if theyre all like this or if they did that because this is a special edition. But like its heavy paper.

also got this

Ohohoh life and times and they included other secret???? Letter from home is in here!! I’m SO happy with that. I will force my mom to read all of life and times AND letter from home and its all in the same book. Honestly almost better than the Dutch edition for including letter from home.

And this poster.

And these behind the scenes notes book thing

And for it all being a single book

But like the dutch version is multiple books and thats fancy and we have funny articles written in and all the dutch and italian covers plus slipcase so yeah the dutch version is better objectively i win

A few years ago i was in germany and they had this very fancy life and times book but it was thicker than this chinese one but it was also smaller in like size im thinking about that now. That was also a cool book.

It was also expensive as heck and this one was not so then chinese version wins.

Im not making sense am i? No im not. Anyways cool look at this this is cool such cool guys. I will also force my mom to read dolly paprika ive wanted her to read that story so bad. I need people in my life to talk about dolly paprika the comic story.

Oh yeah funny thing about the pocket when i was in germany i saw the german version too. But it was in a different place. The eh life and times book was on a train station and this pocket was just somewhere between other magazines in some kind of stall thing before a bridge. Wait no i didnt find the pocket in germany it was in switzerland. And it was more expensive because of that. And i didnt know how to properly inducks yet so i didnt know it had a comic i wanted to read. Anyways i got the dutch translation a few months later anyways. Sorry tumblrderders i just need these rambles in my notes im sorry for copy pasting these completely in the post.

Anyways more tales from me the embarrassing stuff gets worse. Somehow i clogged the only toilet in the house and i tried for like half an hour googling stuff and trying to solve it myself but im an idiot (whats new) and just cant get it done. So while im trying my best to let no one know i messed up i message my mom because of course this happens when she has gone to eat with an old classmate and then she messages me back that she has told the rest of the family in the house and theyre gonna solve it. I swear i was going to cry oml. Anyways my uncle came and solved it in ten seconds by grabbing the plunger that i missed because it was blue for some reason and i thought that it was something else. So that happened.

Just thought,

There are so many Donald Duck and Mickey Mouse comics that could be made into live-action movies or tv series with very few changes and they would just… work.

Life and times just needs all the duck references gone, maybe add a bit more edginess and you have an award winning r-rated miniseries.

Take PKNA, replace Duck Avenger with some superhero called the Phantom Knight, then just adapt the comics. (Let his uncle from the life and times miniseries cameo of course) You will have a more successful superhero series than the entire CW Arrowverse.

Do you want money or not disney?

Okay im in hotel rn lotsa stuff happened but i have kinda lost my social media addiction and didnt feel the need to write about this stuff so it was chill and i did not need the writing outlet but this what just happened. I just saw a robot wait for an elevator. It was just standing there. On its little wheels. Waiting for the elevator. Then the elevator doors open. And it goes in. Deadass. The robot waited for the elevator. I dont even know why thats so funny to me and maybe im still living in the past but i had to double check there was no one else accompanying this thing. But it just waited and used the elevator on its own. Was nuts. I laughed for way too long about that. Also because my mother just missed it and i dont know if she believes what i saw. At least my brother saw it too.

Day later and it happened again and this time i recorded it. Still nuts.

(idk how to attach videos this is the best i could do)

No way on the airport back to home (actually the one to beijing but details) i see someone with a donald duck traveling case hes leaving rn so sadly no photo. But its the really dutch one. Pretty sure Nadorp drew the image on it. Ill attach a photo to this from the web when i post it. Just texts in the notes as of rn.

It was this

Luckily i lost my tumblr blog addiction in a few days already so most of what i did i didnt write down so thats thats a thing idk if thats good or bad i think its good.

Its definitely good we dont need to share everything with everyone how tempting it might be.

So that was that plus those duck disney comics here have a few pictures from what is it called? Nature or something idk i took. Youll get as many as tumblr allows because stupid mobile image limit

If ducks were meant to fly, then god would have given us wings

-Donald Duck in that one story i think it was drawn by vicar or something

[bloodredrose-archive]

a very lengthy lesson on beauty, by Katina

I’ve known that beauty was arbitrary, superficial, and at its crux, incredibly insignificant since I was a young teen, and I feel like anybody with a functioning brain can recognize that fact as well, but I think what truly solidified that revelation for me was my personal experiences wherein it was my sheer charisma, confidence, intelligence, intellectualism, assertiveness and wit—my essence, effectually—that not only got me to important places and enthralled people with ease but also made people view me as much more beautiful than I already am even though I’m probably considered ‘objectively’ ‘beautiful’ in the face/body, am a former runway model/pageant girl/athlete/etc. and have been described as a beauty queen in various respects by very prominent people (even when younger me lead a low-maintenance lifestyle as the result of being low-income, in forceful isolation & in cohort with unsavory people so my appearance was collaterally affected and I’d taken a lackadaisical approach to it).

Hell, I’ve literally accrued hundreds of thousands of followers on multiple social media platforms without showing my face (and, until this year, revealing my name) once for nearing 10 years because people were 1.) impressed and captivated by my words/thoughts/opinions and the firm manner in which they’re articulated, and 2.) intrigued by the mystique and the preemptive prevention of anybody’s preconceived notions of me and their self-projections onto me that accompany me eschewing my online identity while I transmit words, and people have correctly concluded that I must be a goddess roaming the earth without knowing a single thing about me beforehand because of that fact. Simply put, I do not need and have never needed to use solely my face or my body to reel people in. My hair & my attire are also the things that typically manage to entrance people about me, second to my disposition/character; my facial and bodily ‘beauty’ are legitimately the last priority for other people and they are last in priority to myself, too.

Anyhow, the point that I’m trying to make with this is that I guarantee a vast majority of you are not “ugly” or even average or above-average, you just lack charisma, personality, knowledge and confidence that you need to build in order to get by in this world and you also fail to recognize that beauty is subjective and adhere to the old adage “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure”; ergo, someone that you may regard as gorgeous is probably regarded as grotesque-looking to someone else, and somebody probably finds you with your “averageness” more beautiful than a literal high-profile supermodel (with a very crafted, curated, regulated and micromanaged image, bear in mind) because different niches appeal to different people. Even if you are foundationally “ugly”, misdirection is a concept that exists and can be easily utilized through the means of simply accentuating another feature of yours in order to misdirect people away from your “ugliness” e.g. your style of dress, your sense of humor, your gait, your hair, your sociable personality, your taste in music or art, your accessories, your nails — and notwithstanding all of this, it is perfectly fine to just exist as an “ugly” individual and not appeal to others or make the effort to appeal to others because you just do not give a shit. That is perfectly acceptable as well, and you are under no obligation to conform to the ever-fleeting beauty standards of today (another thing that I see many women struggle to cognize and accept, even without taking into account the Photoshopped and surgery-ridden ‘influencers’ that litter social media; beauty is not only subjective but it is also fickle and malleable).

“Beauty” is insubstantial, but more or less, the true form of beauty is just being yourself without caring a modicum for what others think about you because you weren’t put on this planet to care nor to appease everybody (which is an impossible feat to achieve, anyway), you were put here to grow and improve yourself — which is the most important thing you should do and focus on doing. There’ll always be at least one person that appreciates you for who you are, regardless of looks or personality or status, even if unknowingly or from a distance—consider that fact, and try to survive. You could lose your life at any time for any reason—live it to the fullest before that can happen, cherish it, and don’t waste it being a people-pleaser and a slave for something as meaningless as “beauty”.

[shihalyfie]

What went down with the DigiFes situation, from the community and translator perspective

I think the events of the last few days have gotten everyone in a huge fuss, and because everything got caught up in a lot of chaotic social media stuff, there’s been a lot of questions about what came from what and who knew what at what time. Fortunately, I happen to be:

Someone who’s a veteran in this fanbase and thus has a small handful of friends in this community, who also have their own friends

Someone who understands a little Japanese (although not as much as others in this community do) and therefore can read things in Japanese myself to some degree without needing someone else to translate it for me

So hopefully I can shed some light on what kinds of things were being discussed, and what was known and not known at what time in this fanbase with all of this.

The most important thing I want to establish is that there was no organized coalition or smear campaign. (Kind of ironic I have to say this when the topic at hand has so much to do with conspiracy theories.) I’m a veteran, I know friends who are veterans, they know other friends who are veterans but don’t know me at all. My friends usually agree with and like the same things I do, and I give them advice and assistance with my skillset when I can, and they return the favor. We pass things along through the grapevine, not through some super-secret club grapevine, just via the nature of social relationships and some Discord servers (multiple; again, not everyone knows each other). So these are my impressions of what happened, based on said grapevine.

How it all started

Konaka’s blog is long. Like, really long. Which is only natural, because he was recapping basically the entire 51 episodes of Tamers in excruciating detail, so no translator in this fanbase would be able to translate all of that and not lose their mind! So for the most part people who couldn’t read Japanese had pretty much given up on reading it (with maybe a few dedicated people using machine translation), and some people who understood Japanese would point out parts they found interesting, but for all intents and purposes it remained untranslated and not super-accessible to the mainstream. (Even the Japanese fanbase itself wasn’t super aware of the blog’s existence.)

So when that first post in May about 9/11 dropped, the people who did read Japanese started going “uh...”

At the time, the DigiFes stage reading hadn't been announced yet. So, in other words, everyone reading it only knew it as, functionally, him namedropping an alt-right YouTuber and praising his observations. The reaction from anyone reading the blog at the time was something along the lines of “disappointed and mildly concerned.” (Note the mildly.)

The posts in June about the Great Reset and the anti-vaccine sentiment were when people keeping an eye on the situation started to get really worried about how far this was going to escalate. At this point, I want to make something clear that may not be apparent to those who weren’t keeping up or who are outside the fanbase: Most of the translators and Japanese-reading people deliberately chose not to be too public about this at this time.

Why?

This is the irony surrounding the fact that said translators are now being accused of trying to further “cancel culture”: cancellation was absolutely not what anyone wanted back then! If anyone wanted to create a smear campaign, 9/11 conspiracies, the Great Reset, and anti-vaccine statements are already more than enough to make a starting case. But at the time, this was a blog that very few people (Japanese or otherwise) knew about, translating it would basically just boost its platform more than it would have had in the first place (which would be counterproductive), and -- well, let’s be real, it’s not hard to imagine that people might get reactionary over it, and people would go nuts. Was there any real benefit that would come out of that? Not really, no.

So at the most, those keeping an eye on it might have vented a bit on their personal accounts, but some even tried to self-censor with “[redacted]” or vagueposting, because this was a matter that needed to be handled with delicacy. Thus, there were “mild rumors through the grapevine” about what was going on, but those who knew were trying to hold back with restraint and mostly inform people quietly in the hopes of this not needing to become some kind of huge social media campaign.

(Also, to be a bit blunt about it, it’s really hard to be in front of someone who loves Tamers and is gushing about it and showing admiration for Konaka, knowing all of this and wanting to say something, but feeling like a jerk if you pop their bubble like “also, he’s probably an alt-right conspiracy theorist now.” Not to say that the ignorance-is-bliss concept is always a good thing, but...)

But since the blog posts in question were discussing the prospect of having his sentiments in fiction, everyone reading them was on edge anticipating what might be in store for DigiFes. The hope was that it might blow over. Hopefully, everything would be in the form of subtle themes with plausible deniability, it would all stay within the realm of “it’s not worth causing a fuss over this,” that would be the end of it, and we’d all move on with our lives.

Unfortunately, “Political Correctness is activating Cancel Culture” isn’t exactly subtle.

DigiFes and the aftermath

I think it’s too easy to assign too much responsibility to the fansub group that was indirectly responsible for breaking the news for all of this, but actually, the truth is, this would have gotten out anyway.

Even when the stream itself was going on, there were Japanese livebloggers, and there were also English speakers who caught on that something was happening with “the Tamers fighting political correctness”. Some hours later, an upload of the stream went live on YouTube, and quite a few people started watching it and caught onto what was going on. If the fansub group that released the now-infamous version hadn’t done it, I’m absolutely certain someone else would have eventually (perhaps in a different language first, but nevertheless). And even before then, information about what the hell was going on was already starting to circulate in broken and incomplete forms. That fansub solidified what was going on, and perhaps accelerated the moment the bomb dropped on everyone, but if it hadn’t been there, it would have happened much more gradually and chaotically.

On top of that, while the use of Western alt-right rhetoric (seriously, please do not try to bring the “injecting Western politics into Japanese media” argument here when all of us are asking him to take the Western politics out) meant that it went over most of the Japanese audience’s heads (hence your answer to “who approved this?”), there was at least one Japanese person who was politically savvy enough to call it out for what it was in disgust. (I’m not linking them here because I’m not dumb enough to fling them in a place where some of you trigger-happy people will go after them.) They didn’t even need to be super in-tune with Western politics to get it; they understood enough to tell that there were some pretty alarming extremist views in there. If they understood that much, it was naturally going to follow that the Western side was definitely going to become aware one way or another.

Even all that aside, at the very least, said fansub is accurate; imagine how much worse this situation would have been if someone else had taken it up and confused things further with a misleading translation, or, worse, deliberately messed with the contents. Basically, this debacle could have easily been a lot worse.

I don’t think anyone expected this to get as big as it did (as in, to the point mainstream anime reporters outside the fanbase picked up on it). There was a similar tri. reading back in 2016, but even a lot of the hardcore fanbase barely remembers it exists! These aren’t even supposed to be canon, either! But when you have that disclaimer at the front, and the contents are really like that, it was probably inevitable for it to become a social media sensation. I mean the contents...sure are a thing.

One thing I should point out about the disclaimer is that it only mentions the program itself. It doesn’t bring up the blog, and it doesn’t bring up who wrote this scenario, just the fact that the program contains alt-right rhetoric and conspiracy theories. Because it does! It’s not even technically praising or condemning the content within, it just says “we don’t agree with it”! What the group did condemn was...approaching staff about it (and especially starting a fight). Because, in the end, that’s what the disclaimer was for: a heads-up about what was in there, and an added reminder that the people translating this are just translating it for the sake of informational purposes. Or, in other words:

It was a content warning. Even without the disclaimer, there were many, many people who would have recognized the contents for what they were and been caught by it unawares, and become upset by it. There were many people who said that they were glad to have that there because it at least gave them some time to mentally prepare for what they were about to be slapped with!

It really, really was a disclaimer. When you have something that level of extremely politically charged stuff, it’s only natural to start suspecting that the translation group had an agenda (official translations tend to get this a lot when content is remotely political). But no, the translation group did their due diligence, even if their opinions were starkly opposed to what was in there.

I was not personally involved in that translation, but I’ll give you this (copy-pasted with permission, from someone who wasn’t technically involved directly in it but was privy to discussions while it was being done):

no we brought up all of those questions like the fact that Yamaki's clearly off his rocker and this isn't supposed to be taken seriously in the first place or that maybe if we're lucky he'll just sound like a fake woke boomer but no matter how you slice it the plot is about him "convincing" the unbelieving Takato and co. into rallying up against the true enemy of Political Correctness and that's just literally the alt-right playbook in a nutshell

the thing even made it to YouTube, we were basically racing against the clock

I mean I really want to say this is plausible deniability but I don’t know how you can get any less subtle than this, this is not something you can mince words

like I really wish we could pass this off as “as long as you don’t know the blog you can take this innocently as political commentary or something” but I honestly don’t think this is something you can take innocently even without context

tbh the Political Correctness part is the most cringeworthy but Yamaki’s rant about fact checkers being evil and all that is probably a lot more worrying when you think about it

tbh I’ve never felt as conflicted about what’s the right thing to do as I do now

So in other words, it was not a reckless decision to just tack on a political label; it was done after a lot of consideration about the consequences to put the label on and what people would think of it with or without context, whether there might be a glimmer of light possibility to try and pass this off as more innocuous as it was, and eventually a determination that, in the end, there was indeed alt-right rhetoric in the program, and should be labeled accordingly.

The result was that, of course, everything broke out on social media, chaos burst out, a lot of hearts were unfortunately broken, and a lot of alt-righters started invading spaces accusing people of proving him right with cancel culture. Ironically, my personal observation is that, while there were exceptions, most people in the actual fanbase did honor the requests to not harass people about it, and this may actually be the most solidarity I’ve ever seen from the Digimon fanbase in my life, which is saying a lot considering how we usually tend to be a drama magnet most of the time. The ones who were actually directly messaging him were his newfound supporters locking down on offering him “support against people trying to cancel him” (I think they were more heartbroken and upset at him than anything...), and most of the harassment came from alt-righters not even in the fanbase, namesearching and sending harassing, accusatory messages to anyone involved for as much as expressing mild dismay. (You want to talk about harassment and being attacked for having an opinion? Pot, meet kettle.)

This leads us back to the question of the blog: if you’ll remember, I just said that the fansub in question did not bring it up at all. That’s because, at the beginning, there was no intention to bring it up if it wasn’t necessary; this was not intended as a smear campaign. The warning was attached to the DigiFes program because it was about the DigiFes program. But the resulting chaos had a lot of people bring up the blog because it better contextualized what was going on, and discussion led to people looking it up themselves and posting fragments of it on social media, sometimes even using machine translate.

Ultimately, that’s the reason this document was released: it was the same reason as the fansub being released at the time it was, which was “if it hadn’t been released, the alternative was watching things get disseminated more slowly and chaotically.” I will say outright that I was one of the people who got to lay eyes on that document before it was publicly released (and even helped out with some advice here and there); it’s no secret that it was being quietly passed around as an internal memo prior to the outbreak. The original version of the document had a request to not post it on public social media because of the chaos it would cause, and while I don’t know how many people got to see it before it was released, I’m under the impression that it was enough people that I was quite surprised everyone who saw it respected that request.

Why does the document contain a ton of analysis and debunking on top of just the translations? Well, when you’re translating those blog posts, you’re technically giving it a bigger platform (which was one of the reasons it was originally considered better to not post it publicly). Since the document exists primarily to inform people, especially about why certain things that may seem innocuous actually have wider context behind them, it’s going to need to contain an analysis like that.

The summary

There were a lot of decisions involved by a lot of different people through all parts of this ordeal. I think it’s fair to criticize whether they were the right decisions in retrospect or whether certain things should have been done slightly differently (including my small role in this), but nevertheless, it was one where the risks involved were thought through and taken into account in every step of the situation, with a desire to avoid chaos, or at least prevent it from getting too much worse. When you have contents like this, a controversy honestly is inevitable -- how on earth are you going to be able to put contents like Yamaki reciting off all the typical alt-right YouTuber talking points and ending in Political Correctness activating Cancel Culture and not expect that to make a stir at some point? -- and so, in the end, this wasn’t so much a conscious attempt at stirring the pot as much as it was the dam finally breaking, and a desire to keep it from spilling over too much. Nobody coordinated this! I think everyone just really hates drama.

Knowing all the steps and thoughts that went on behind all of this, I think being reactionary or accusatory for clout is the last thing anyone involved wanted to be. Considering just how many of these steps above could have easily been made into exposure, from the posts all the way back in May and June to the internal memo document that was made to keep friends quietly informed but could have been leaked to the public with only one bad actor, there was an active, common desire among people who didn’t even know each other to try and minimize the potential damage as much as possible. When you look at the situation now, of course it looks awful and hardly like something that came out of “trying to minimize damage”, but in reality there’s only so much you can do when the contents really are like that, and I personally believe everyone involved was doing what they thought was their best option as the situation kept changing.

I can’t speak for anyone else, especially since I don’t even know most of the people involved, and I didn’t have much of a role in all of this, but I think everyone involved, myself and my friends and everyone who’d been keeping tabs on this situation for months, has been going through a lot of heartbreak and conflict over what to do next, so please understand that there was a lot of thought put into all of it, and that it really was a difficult situation no matter how you look at it.

[pjstafford]

What Twitter has meant to me (and other social media musings)

Twitter is buzzing today - people leaving- threatening to leave- scared about others leaving. So, I do what I do when I want to process emotions in an analytical way. I write a blog. As I type this, I am struck by what a social media-oriented approach that is for a woman as old as I am, but I'm not ashamed to say social media has become important to me.

What I worry about today - almost mourning as if it is already gone- though it is not yet- is the platform that not only gave me the opportunity to play but almost taught me, as a mid-life adult, the importance of play. I worry that I will lose friends I care about. It is almost as if I live in a community and a natural disaster - a hurricane or tornado- is heading for my community and I fear the landscape will change. I will be displaced. I will not be able to find my friends.

Does that sound extreme? Let me give some background.

I was reluctant to join social media platforms - didn't do the AOL chat rooms in the day. I was not an early adapter. I feared social media would change the ways humans communicated in a negative way. In 2008 an old friend tracked me down to call me with news about another old friend and told me it was time to get on Facebook. I enjoyed it. I kept in touch with family and friends. I joined a scrabble group and the Bob Dylan fan club and found out it was possible to make new friends on social media. Then I broaden who I was letting onto my page and found myself moderating my content and, I still enjoy it, but not as much as I once did.

I became active on Twitter specifically because of a Facebook group I belonged to doing an Aquarius watch. More on Twitter in a minute.

I started this blog because I wanted a place to post my fiction and poetry and discovered I liked blogging and some people liked reading my blogs. I am the writer I always wanted to be - at least with an audience - if not getting paid. But I found Tumblr is a place where meanness is fostered and thrives. So I keep my Tumblr to write and post - mostly to Twitter.

Instagram is for pictures and I enjoy it very much. It's great. A picture is worth a thousand words and you see that on Instagram, but I like words and conversations very, very much. I've made no new, deeper connections on Instagram.

I've tried other sites =mostly for work- but, I don't want 100 different social media sites to keep track of and visit. I want a place where everyone, at least everyone I interact with regularly, knows my name.

So, let's talk about Twitter. I have two accounts. One PStafford3 is for my serious side. For a while, it was my only account, but for various reasons I decided I needed to differentiate between my serious side and my fun side - so I now, also, have PJSPosts. I, also, am the administrator of the account for the organization for which I work as I have been with other work positions. I once was the administrator of HearteyesForDavid fan account which I started, but in 2021 I passed it on to a younger and more capable fangirl.

This very month I graduated from a Digital Campaign / Social Media class that included various sections on Twitter. I get that, on one level, Twitter is about information gathering and information sharing, followers, influencers, and persuasion. Whatever changes come to Twitter, I will adjust as far as is needed for those purposes - learn to use it differently, moderate my content, and who I follow differently.

But it is the other thing Twitter is good for that I fear losing. I came onto Twitter as a fangirl when the X-Files was filming for its reboot and a star of that show had another show beginning. It was that simple. Within a few weeks, I had a group of four friends in a private chat who I now think of, seven years later, as among my very best friends. I have, I think, an identity within that community. I belong. I don't want to say that it's all been good. It turns out fan-based groups can be competitive over followers, petty jealousies, and misunderstandings. I don't often use the phrase In Real Life because I think social media is real life actually. If friendships are real, meaning they can bring you joy or pain, then it's real life.

But the platform Twitter has been uniquely suited to experience this "play" aspect of life in a way I don't think other platforms are. By play I mean, we create games, we debate episodes, we post "thirst" pics, we joke, and we laugh. It can get serious. There are scholars of the subject matter(s) who participate with us and philanthropists who manage fundraisers and artists whose art is worthwhile. Still, I think most people who I interact with on my PJSPosts account or in the hearteyes4DavidDuchovny community are on the platform for play and fun. One person described it today as her daily serotonin burst.

In 2020, Twitter became my lifeline. I ran a book club. We had Saturday night concert/dance parties. We posted memes about what stage of the pandemic we were in. 2020-2022 has solidified and strengthened this sense of community.

Twitter works because most accounts are public, you can search by subjects of interest, you can interact with people, you can follow, and you can have private chats. Your friendships can build and become deeper. Also, you can unfollow, block, and mute. You are the person responsible for the content you see and in charge of your own experience. Twitter has, also, been the most responsive when community concerns are raised - a fake celebrity account, violence, cruelty, hate speech, bullying- in ways that the other platforms have not been.

What Twitter most taught me ( in addition to the need for play) is the human need for community. My fear of what social media would do to the world (which obviously was warranted and is very real) was, in itself moderated, by the wonderful people I have met and interacted with on Twitter. In 2017 I wrote blogs about the fact that Twitter is, in fact, proof that mankind will seek to form communities in whatever reality they find themselves - around the campfires, in villages, towns, and cities, and on the internet. The fact that Twitter means I have friends around the globe and of different ages who all love the same thirty-year T.V. show I do is a strength of the community; not a weakness.

I guess, that this then brings me hope. We are humans. We will find other ways to connect if needed. I hope that the people who have been responsible for Twitter over the last 8 years know that the platform they created is valued beyond the money Elon Musk paid for it. I can't be anything but grateful today that it has existed.

Change is the one constant. It is, also, the thing we most fear. As I collect email addresses today "just in case". I hope the threat of a storm passes my community over and, if it doesn't, then that we find each other and rebuild elsewhere.

[potteresque-ire]

Hiya! I've only just started watching Chinese dramas and the drama behind the drama is already blowing my Western mind. Thanks for your meta btw! I was thinking about what you said about Chinese government not explicitly banning anything, rather people had BETTER catch on to what they mean 😨 Is it possible that delaying OOL is their way of warning future productions to think twice before involving Xiao Zhan, because they want to undermine his popularity? As he is 'too entertaining' 💀

Hiya Anon!! The decision to air a c-drama lies in both the government and the platforms. Once the drama gets the distribution permit from the National Radio and Television Administration (NRTA), it's up to the platforms to schedule the airing date.

The distribution permit for OOL was issued in May 2020, and so the government cleared it for airing a while ago. And so, it is the platforms that are holding the airing date back.

Multiple considerations go into the decision of when to air any drama. Here are some financial considerations I can think of: are there fierce competitors in the same period? It's usual for multiple c-dramas to begin airing on similar dates. The week between 2019/06/23 and 2019/06/30, for example, 9 series began airing—including The Untamed on 2019/06/27. And on that very same date, another prominent, very well-made drama also began its airing—The Longest Day in Chang'An 長安十二時辰). 

And then, has a popular drama of a similar genre been aired right before? If so, it may be wise to push back the airing date a little. Is it exam period or is it summer, with students being on vacation and having more free time to watch TV, chase after their favourite idols and buy merchandises? That’s the golden season for idol dramas! Are the production studios, platforms under pressure to produce a solid profit report to their investors? Better move a series with very bankable stars then ...

Afterwards, there are, of course, political considerations. For those who may be worried about c-ent’s current upheaval, I’d like to emphasise this: the government swooping in and say, or hint, that this and that popular thing displeases its Socialist sensibilities isn’t new. Dangai isn’t the first genre to be soft-banned, for example; before that, there was the ... Imperial Harem infighting genre 宮鬥劇 (sorry for the silly translation, I don’t know what’s the proper name for it!), which was extremely popular at the time of the ban with recent hits such as The Legend of Zhen Huan ���宮甄嬛傳 and Story of Yanxi Palace 延禧攻略. There was the time travel genre 穿越劇 (For example, Scarlet Heart 步步驚心). The state criticism against “sissy” 娘炮 idols also made its former round in 2018. 

And so, while there may not have been precedences where the government targets c-ent’s obsession with “traffic” 流量—a relatively new term that describes the heavy flow of social media posts, of buzz and cash surrounding a beloved something or someone, c-ent has a long history of, and ample experiences with, dealing with their government’s displeasure at something that its audience loves, that is financially lucrative for the industry and most importantly, along that line, something the industry wishes to keep. 

The last point may be worth emphasising: the production studios, the platforms (streaming, social media etc), the marketing companies, the yxh, the companies who employ celebrities as their spokespeople etc etc, all of them desperately want to keep stars like Gg and Dd around. This is especially true with c-ent being in its “bitter cold winter” financially since 2018, with the tightening censorship that means hit dramas, and "top traffic” 頂流 stars, are increasingly more difficult to make or come by. “Top traffic” stars, in particular, are very attractive to the industry because their fans are (far) more willing to spend money, generate the needed buzz on social media to bring in more “passer-by” audience and in turn, more revenue, and more investment, and more endorsements and sponsorships (see: the number of Dd commercials in SDOC4). 

Therefore, as fans and audience, I think it’s safe to assume this: at least on the front of wishing to protect Gg and Dd’s star status, to protect potentially popular dramas and genres such as OOL, these financial interests stand with us. Does this “saving” go against what is safe for these companies? One can say so. It would be safer for the platforms, for example, to air ... um, say, The Best Speeches by President Xi in place of dramas like OOL. The act would likely please the government very much; signal, perhaps, that the platforms have caught on its ultimate dream, with Xi being the One Idol of China. But this decision would also go against the very nature of these companies as for-profit entities, these Capitalist Existence that are traded in stock markets and are driven to make as much money and as quickly as they can.

What, then, is the easiest way to protect traffic stars like Gg and Dd, like Yang Zi 楊紫, the lead actress of OOL who is also very popular and who, reportedly, also has her own rather ... rambunctious corner of fandom? What’s the easiest way to “save” a potentially popular drama like OOL? Saying what is *the* easiest way may be difficult, but I believe I can name one easy way: to simply keep these popular people, these (potentially) popular things out of attention for a while, especially with October 1st (Communist China’s birthday) drawing near and in 2021, the year of the Chinese Communist Party’s Centennial. 

After all, regulations from the Chinese government tend to come in bursts—axes falling left, right and centre for a while and in quick succession, followed by an extended period of silence (and neglect). The wait, therefore, doesn’t have to be long at all. As short as after a few month’s time, certain parts of c-ent may return to what it was like before and these c-ent companies, having had so much experience in working around situations like this, would know when that time comes, when the coast is clear.

Meanwhile, as fans, we wait. Being in i-fandom means our words and actions have relatively little effect, but if we were in China, our best action would, too, likely be similar to the platforms that delay the airing of OOL, except we cross out the the word “popular” and replace it with “beloved”: we keep our beloved people, our beloved things out of attention. We refrain from going around and complaining, no matter how much we wish to watch the show. We refrain from starting fights. We stay out of hot searches. The Chinese government is bureaucratic and corruption is rampant, which means often times, the higher-ups in charge of dropping the axes have little knowledge about who or what their axes are supposed to fall on, and little care if they get it wrong. In such circumstances, the key to survival is to not stick one’s head out; to make sure we don’t offer our neck, and more importantly, our favourite stars’ neck, for the axes to fall on.

It may be difficult sometimes. We’ll hear hisses, from antis, from doubters, from those who simply aren’t familiar with the situation, that will tempt us to put ourselves and our favourite stars out in the open where the axes are raining. Patience and independent thinking are important in times like this, qualities that allows us to stop, excuse ourselves from the virtual crowd and think ~ wait, is what is being said true? 

The government’s attack on “traffic”, for example, together with the soft-ban on Dangai, have led to soft hisses that Gg and Dd are the targets. 

I invite everyone to step back and think a little—are they?

Here’s one small, but important point that may be lost in translation (and lost, too, even in some Chinese discussions where netizens have scrolled through their feeds too quickly): in the state opinion pieces, the term used against “traffic” stars has consistently been “唯流量”, with 流量 = traffic, and 唯 = only. The presence of the character 唯 is crucial: 唯流量 are not simply “traffic”, or popular stars; they are stars with only traffic, with nothing but traffic. No acting skills, no singing or dancing skills, no other demonstrated capabilities beyond getting their fans to vote and comment and buy things for them.

Are Gg and Dd 唯流量?

Here’s Gg:

(For those who may not know: A Dream Like A Dream 如夢之夢 is not just a Chinese language play. A Chinese adjective that has been used to describe it is 殿堂級 ~ “palace hall grade”, ie, it’s a royalty. Trivia: the version in China ends with a cappella with Patient #5 singing about himself, which means Patient #5 can ruin the finale of the 8 hour show if he fails to sing well, and beautifully.)

And here’s Dd: 

I think I can rest my case. My fellow turtles, what do you think? 

Such rumours—that so and so, this and that are the alleged targets—are currently running rampant on Chinese social media, with almost every noteworthy celebrity and media projects etc being named by a few who dislike them. However—or rather, ironically, one may say?—because everyone and everything under the sun has been named, the net effect is not that different from if nothing has been named at all. 

If a similar rumour, if more of such rumours creep onto the shores of i-fandom, therefore, please do not be afraid and remember—these speculations, these noises will most likely fade into obscurity unless the populous Gg+Dd fandom amplify it with their voices, even if theses voices are words of defence.

Silence can be a defence. Silence can be the best defence.

For the time being, with the greater sociopolitical environment being what it is, with “Capital” being reportedly targeted by the state (previously discussed here), platforms and TV stations that are part of Capital may be extra careful and temporarily keep all traffic stars out of their productions, out of sight.

But I remind myself this ~ this isn’t about Gg and Dd. This probably isn’t about 99.9% of the stars who may be temporarily kept out of these productions in the coming weeks, some of whom may have starred in Dangai. As a corollary, I find it important to remind myself that too, to think twice before wondering aloud who may be the targets, to make sure I do not, even accidentally, put any non Gg Dd star and their fans under the axes—not because my words can influence the Chinese government, but rather, because of a simple, almost cliché reason: Do not do unto others what you do not want others do unto you.   

After all, one step outside fandom, people cannot tell one idol from another, cannot tell one drama from another, cannot tell cpfs from solos ...

As fans of c-ent, we’re in this together. ❤️💛💚

[mashup-writing]

Somebody else by 1975 and it is sparkles-✨

It worked out well; Park Chaeyoung (Blackpink)

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Summary: Y/N and Rosé had decided to announce their relationship, but they were gonna be extra about it.

Requested? ☑

"I remember it all too well."

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It was the final part of Y/N's concert and while he's used to the feeling of thousands of eyes on him, what's going to follow was something that made him extremely nervous, which says a lot. Especially when he was counting on the audience for his plan to work.

At the start of his career, he had announced that he was a Transgender man on all of his social media platforms. An action that took a lot of guts, and and an action that drew a lot of attention to him. At the rising point of his career when he was questioned about it in an interview, his answer was something that made him well known figure within the industry.

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"Now Y/N at the very beginning of your career, you told the world that you were a trans man. That must've taken extreme bravery on your part seeing as those people who are against your community- The LGBT community, can be downright nasty and ruthless in 'Expressing' their dislike. What mae you decide to do this so early on in your time in the spotlight?"

Y/N smiles in his seat, switching from a laid back posture to one that elegantly demands attention, his next words being the ones that made him an icon amongst allies and LGBT people alike. "I am an advocate of LGBT rights before I am an artist, at the very start of my career I wanted to make it clear that I didn't want bigots to be a part of my following or an avid listener of my music and while I'm a man who values my privacy, I value honesty and transparency just as much. So if you're someone who believes that transgender people are just 'Confused' or that they're a 'Crime' against nature? Then go ahead and consider me your worst nightmare."

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Y/N had been sitting on a chair for quite a few moments now, holding a Q&A onstage before he stands up and decides to follow through with the first part of his plan. "Alright, now today's intermission, I'm going to do a cover of my most favorite song called 'Somebody Else by The 1975'. Oh and don't worry you guys, the Q&A will still continue after this cover." The stadium fills with loud screams and cheers from the people watching as he places his mic back on its stand and goes to pick up his electric guitar. The lights dim into a sunset red as the opening notes of the music fill out through the speakers, Y/N starts singing and playing his guitar as the crowd claps along to the beat.

At the start of the second verse, Y/N takes off his guitar and takes the mic off of the stand, walking back to the guitar stand, he puts the instrument down before walking back to the front of the stage and hyping the people up to sing along with him in the pre-chorus. The entrance platform that had sunk back down starts rising as a distinctly feminine voice fills the stadium at the start of the chorus. Y/N smiles widely as the stage screens show Rosé walking towards him, offering her hand. He takes it and raises their hands up, leading the Blackpink member into a twirl, the crowd has gone wild at this point and the duo are pretty sure that somebody or multiple people in the audiences are Blinks seeing the way they've started chanting Rosé's name even without Y/N introducing her beforehand.

The bridge part comes along and the two singers alternate their lines. When the instrumental hits, Rosé takes his hands and starts dancing along to the beat, dorkily smiling and roping the man into dancing along. When the final chorus comes, Y/N and Rosé sing together, motioning for the crowd to sing along and the stadium fills with the sounds of music and the combined voices of a chanting crowd.

The song comes to an end with loud cheers for the two vocalists who are now smiling widely while catching their breaths. Y/N offers his hand to Rosé and when she takes it, the two raise their hands and perform a bow. He lets go of her hand once they've come up from the bow, turning to face her before speaking. "May I introduce, Park Chaeyoung of Blackpink everyone."

The woman in question laughs, shaking her head before going to bow once again and waving to the crowd with both hands, Y/N decides to push his luck. "Also known as Rosé of Blackpink, or Rosie, or Foodsé, or Chipm-" He runs as she jokingly tries to swat at his shoulder.

The cheers continue and the two laugh with each other before Rosè speaks to the crowd. "So how did you guys like our cover?" She's answered with loud cheers and Y/N's manager signals at the two from behind the curtain, raising both his hands up. 10 minutes left, Y/N nods at him and smiles while Rosé turns her attention back to the crowd, he gives the singers a thumbs up with a dorky smile before taking his leave. Y/N shakes his head in humor.

"I'm pretty sure I'm speaking for both me and Y/N over here when I say that we're happy to see you guys loved it." Y/N turns to Rosé to agree with her statement. Y/N speaks into the mic saying that he and Rosé will spend the last ten minutes of the concert for the Q&A. The following minutes fly by with questions aimed at Y/N, questions aimed at Rosé as well as questions aimed at both come in droves, until Y/N announce that the next question will be the last one before the event comes to an end and they have to start saying goodbye. Multiple people raise their hand, and he leaves it up to Rosé to pick who gets to ask the final question. She gives her mic to a girl in the front row, and the girl states her question.

"How did you come up with the idea to have Rosé make a special appearance for a cover? Going by your latest Instagram posts before this album dropped, it seemed like you guys were writing songs together. So we were really hyped for a collab." The fan hands the mic back to Rosé who smiles at Y/N as he takes a deep breath, steeling himself for what's to come next. The Western singer brings his mic up to his lips to answer.

"There's a pretty good reason for this cover actually. 'Somebody Else' is a song that holds special meaning for the both of us, besides being our favorite song." Y/N motion for Rosé to take the lead, and she steps closer to him before speaking. "There was a point in me and Y/N's life that we didn't know where we stood. It a point we could sort of compare to the kid's game: Tag." She looks over to the man beside her, silently asking if he wants to back out of it. Instead Y/N takes her hand, interlocks their fingers and squeezes. Go on, I'm ready.

"Long story short is that I was hung up and broken hearted over this person and he was hung up over me." Collective gasps resound through out the stadium. After all, the only thing they know about you and Rosé relationship up until this point was that she was helping you write songs. You bring your mic up to your lips and speak. "The pictures on my Instagram of her looking at the lyrics I wrote? That wasn't Rosé helping me write. That was Chaeyoung reading what I wrote about her." The crowd goes crazy over the newfound information, and Y/N's pretty sure that they miss the way he referred to her using her real name instead of her stage name. But Chaeyoung catches onto it and she smiles softly at the man.

"I can't even begin to describe how thankful I am to Y/N by the way. Staying up countless nights and listening to me ramble on about being torn up, being there for me in every single way, helping me heal and doing all of this without expecting anything in return. Such a gentleman really." The crowd collectively 'Awwwwws' and Y/N hangs his head low, hiding his blush from everyone, Rosé laughs as Y/N looks at the ceiling, composing himself before speaking.

"I would never expect anything in return from you and you don't have to thank me either, I was just doing what a friend would've done at a time like that. Anyways, I stuck by her in those times all while all I could think of afterwards was how stupid the person who broke her heart was, all while I wished I was the one she had ended up with instead of them. I never even hinted at how I felt about her in those times, much less actually tell her. I promised myself I wouldn't tell her how I felt until the time was right. I didn't want her to feel guilty or pressured at all by what I had to say." Y/N looks from the crowd infront of him to Rosé before continuing "Time passed and her heartbreak had healed. But she still wasn't ready for a relationship for a while after that whole ordeal, so I kept my promise and I waited."

"When I had told my members and Y/N that I was finally ready for another relationship- That like, I was completely okay. Y/N decided to court me instead of asking me outright to be his girlfriend. Can you believe this sap?" The crowd laughs with Rosé as Y/N's jaw hits the floor, he walks away from Rosé and heads to the other side of the stage. He crouches and points to Rosé "I was being noble, chivalrous and mind you I was trying to prove that I was boyfriend material! Then she goes and calls me a sap?! I can't believe this..." Y/N lowers the mic and shakes his head in mock disbelief. Rosé doubles over in laughter before walking over to him and resting her free hand on his shoulder.

"Yes, I'm calling you a sap because you are one. But it worked out didn't it?" She looks down at Y/N before continuing. "I gladly said yes." The crowd goes crazy, people cheering, some were jumping, and the others were speechless.

Y/N smiles, a full smile from ear to ear as he takes Chaeyoung's hand on his shoulder to bring it to his lips. "Yeah, yeah it worked out well in the end didn't it?"

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A/N: Damn writing in 3rd person is a TASK. I might never do it again, I hope this was good enough? I'm not too sure about the ending but I liked the idea of them announcing their relationship infront of a crowd instead of doing it via a social media post. So yeah.

[shoezuki]

okay but about that thing on people just switching their sides up. I actually have a whole critical thing of the fandom that I'll never write post in my head that like.... I think comes up with an explanation on it. but I wouldn't be posted cuz it would be super critical of Twitter as a whole and i don't wanna die lol.

but also I was talking about this in zablrs rant-chat a few hours ago, and like. I think part of it is that people are very much emotion first. and with Twitter, tumblr, and twitch chat being the way they are with live tweeting/blogging/chatting what have you, you get all these emotional reactions first. which. fair. thats how people react, ya know? in a sense, that's what you're supposed to do/how you're supposed to feel.

the real problem, imo, is the people who get their ideas/views second hand from these platforms. like, esp with Twitter since the way trending works it really, really can push out bias and misinformation really fast. so the non-viewer is seeing this influx in "oh this character bad now" or "this character redeemed now!" and instead of looking for it themselves they fall into the mob mentality and go with it.

that means later, when the stream is done, people who reacted emotionally at first and now have time/distance enough to think logically don't. because now they're the ones falling into the mob mentality. I mean, even people who haven't watched the current stream agree, so maybe it has more basis than just the one stream!

so people then get the idea that those emotional responses are logical and so when someone comes in with a different perspective, they think "now hold on a second" and they argue against it. because, logically, they're in the right, so obviously you're wrong!

(don't even get me started on that. there is no concrete right and wrong, only what is, what isn't, and what should be and should not be done. but thats a whole other post)

and then people, because theyre arguing instead of having proper discourse, the literary definition which is literally just another word for discussion NOT argument, people are getting emotional again. and it's been proven time and time and time again that when you're responding based on emotion you're less likely to respond well to someone who's trying to tell you something else because it feels like you're invalidating their feelings.

(and boy, oh boy, don't get me started on how much this has created a divide between NT and ND viewers of the smp. because it feels, to me, that when a NT is feeling emotional and a ND is trying to speak to them with logic, they're being told they're heartless or something which is just hhhhh)

so we never get anywhere in the fandom. we're stuck in the same emotion-mob mentality-logic-mob mentality cycle and it's honestly just exhausting at this point.

tiny you’ve hit it right on the head. like. youre so fucking right here.

i talked a how twitter is Built in a way that sucks before Kinda like this n it REALLY plays a part in like. mcyt fans over there n information n ppls reactions to things. like. it REALLY shows in there n usually when im arguing that ppl are so Quick to React to things its over There moreso than here like. ofc Everywhere but anyways like, 

emotions are FIRST. its what ppl immediately feel in response to stimulus. like its a Whole Thing. how ppl can get angry and lash out then later will be like thinking it over and digest it better. and a LOT of dsmp stuff esp w tommy’s character appeals to emotions. like when we see ppl liveblogging its never dissecting or commentary on the flow and function of plot. its Always gut reactions

n like you said on social media it lasts SO LONG. the trending page on twitter is always fueled by in the moment thoughts and responses. things like ‘HE DIED’ and ‘SAM NOOK’ will get trending because ppl r livebloggin n freakin out about it. but it just drags all of it out too and creates like a domino affect.

idk how to say it without sounding like a dick either tbh but a lot of people will cling onto emotions and gut instant reactions, and will React and Speak according to that without thinking logically on analyzing things. so they’ll jump on ‘sam is a horrible person’ which sets off Other people and gets Others emotional and it spreads from that. mob mentality at its finest is how ppl will act in a Group and have the Same actions/thoughts largely because of emotional responses and Yeah It Do Be Here. 

n ppl jus will cling onto it so hard???? even when what others say is more rational and has logical backing its like. will just Stand Firm and can react badly and interpret criticism/analysis as Hatred and its WEIRD. 

like you mention the NT and ND aspect. and youre right like. not to lean on myself so heavy but i dont liveblog much or react In the Moment because im. like. not emotional. a part of my autism is i sometimes just Dont feel things or its not so Strong or i dont Get others emotional responses. easiest for me to feel is anger skjgfskg. 

n especially w philza n techno how ppl r so Reactive n Emotional about them in terms a them being ‘bad’ like. a lot a ppl i see defendin em and makin Hot Takes (comrades) r ND. 

[achaoticeternal]

A Dance. A Chase. A Purpose.

RANSOM DRYSDALE X READER masterlist  //  taglist

request from anon: 35. "sit your ass back down and talk to me" with Ransom Thrombey pretty please??😍

Summary: Ransom never has been one to chase a gall, but you’ve always been different. Word Count: 3.4k A/N: This is a reader and Ransom at a very formal gala. The Thrombey’s and Drysdale’s are “high class” people, they attend these kinds of things but I haven’t seen anyone write something like this! I hope you guys really enjoy it! This is also a lot of dialogue... whoops Warnings: Light swearing, people flirting with the reader, Ransom being an asshole but not a complete asshole

ANOTHER REAL QUICK NOTE: I WROTE ABOUT RANSOM IN A MAROON VELVET SUITE BEFORE THE GOLDEN GLOBES HAPPENED AND CHRIS JUST HAPPENED TO WEAR THAT EXACT OUTFIT TO THE GOLDEN GLOBES AND ALL I’M SAYING IS THAT THE UNIVERSE CAME THROUGH

His blue eyes continuously stalked you throughout the hours you attended the Gala. It wasn’t his scene and yet he adored the thought of ruining your perfect evening just with his presence. 

“Who put Ransom on the guest list?” You hissed at one of the event coordinators, “Don’t you remember what he did at the art show I hosted last year?”

“I’m terribly sorry Miss, but he’s the plus one for Mr. Thrombey,” the hesitant man replied, looking awfully terrified.

You took multiple deep breathes to soothe yourself and stop yourself from becoming flustered. Ransom has this awful hold on you that everyone could not, and you could absolutely not stand. He knew just how to stir you, be that good or bad, and absolutely ruin what should be paradise. He truly was the devil in a maroon velvet suit that was perfectly tailored to him.

“Yes, of course. I’m sorry for flashing, thank you for all your assistance tonight,” You smiled kindly to the man before scurrying off to find something to occupy yourself before Ransom had a chance. 

Tonight, all you wanted to do was raise funds to assist the homeless shelters in major U.S cities and inspire a few billionaires and millionaires to hand over a hefty check. But you had to play a little game to get money from the elite class. You made your way all around the ballroom in the designer gown; it was black and floor-length, layer upon layer of fine black lace. Across the skirt was intricate gold stars sewn into the material as an illusion collar and mesh sleeves complimented your top. Your appearance mixed with your charm could allure both men and women into acquiring whatever you desired. You knew that inevitably somehow you would run into Ransom since Harlan was a huge donor to your foundation. 

“Oh, (Y/N),” It seemed you’d be seeing him sooner than you thought as Mr. Thrombey waved you over. Gracefully, you turned to see him and other authors you’d invited enjoying their wine and making various comments about the younger people attending the gala. Harlan motioned at an empty seat, “my dear.”

“Alright, but I can’t stay long. Apparently, I’m the only one left with their head screw on right this evening,” You smiled as the older group chuckled.

“You’ve always been a prize, (Y/N). Standing out in school, in your community, and now your foundation. Your grandparents would be proud,” Margret, a theatre critic, complimented you.

Her words were almost reassuring. Your grandparents had left their company and their estate to you, their only granddaughter. The rest of the family received their fair cut of shares and money, but your grandparents believed that you had the best potential in ruining their media empire. 

But you felt all joy leave your body as a large pair of hands rested themselves upon your shoulder, squeezing them just tight enough to create a numbing sensation, “Yes, and she also always was quite the star in high school and even university. Our professor often gawked at how well-knowledged she is, and even her charm.”

You rested your right hand on top of Ransom’s, peeling it off and letting it drop to his side, “Well, Ransom, it’s wonderful for you to join us at the Charity Gala tonight. I hope everything is just as proper and tasteful to your liking.”

“Well, it’s a nice little set-up you have, but I’ve always been a man to enjoy a good party with plenty to drink and-”

“Hugh,” Mr. Thrombey warned his grandson.

Ransom gave her grandfather a childish glare before sighing, “But it’s still just so lovely, (Y/N).”

“This has just been so grand,” You stood and brushed out any wrinkles in the skirt of your dress, “but I must go meet with the city’s mayor to talk about the proceeds from this evening before they reach a politician's hands. Please feel free to check out our silent auction tables, there are some wonderful prizes to be won. And once we announce the winners, we will have a large auction while dinner is served in the banquet hall at 8.”

With pep in your step, you quickly made your own way to the banquet hall to make sure everything was going swimmingly.

                                                          -   -   -

“Yes, and up there on the platform, the seats will go the mayor’s wife, the mayor, the governor, myself, the senator, his wife, and then his son,” you pointed down the long table. Then you turned to look out over a sea of tables, chairs, and name cards, “And the menu is set for this evening?”

“Yes, ma’am. Everything is under control, tidy, and might I say, luxurious, thanks to you,” your proceeds manager, Pierce, complimented you.

“You’re too kind,” you slapped his arm lightly, “now, guests my enter around 7:30 or whenever the staff finishes setting our the glasses and rolls.”

“Oh, (Y/N),” you heard your name called by a silver tongue serpent who managed to sneak into the banquet hall early. As he sauntered over to you, Pierce noticed how to seemed to deflate slightly in the man’s presence.

“Miss, I’m so sorry, I’ll go tell security too-”

“It’s fine, Pierce. Hugh is an... acquaintance that I’ve known for years.”

“That’s a strange way of putting childhood enemy,” Ransom teased as he took a sip out of his champagne glass, “or childhood crush depends on how you view it.”

“Yes, yes, how could I forget. Pierce,” you gave him a look to dismiss him as you turned to look pointedly at Ransom, “what are you doing here now? The schedule is clear and I don’t understand why you can’t just fo-”

“You know schedules and timetables aren’t my forte, honey,” he cut you off, which he knew made your blood boil, “but I wanted to address a little rumor I heard? Apparently, at the banquet auction- you are going to be a prize.”

“I’m not a prize, I’m a respected woman,” you sneered, “and my marketing and social managers decided it would help the cause if we auctioned off a dance with one of the most powerful and eligible bachelorette's in New York.”

“Well then,” His eyes scanned across your face but going lower. You snapped your fingers in front of his face to snap him out of whatever the hell he was trying to do, “I guess I’ll be able to show you what a fantastic dancer I am tonight when I win.”

“In your dreams, Ransom,” You said with a smile as you heard the doors open and a crowd begin the flutter in, “Now please if you would so kindly take your seat able table 6.”

                                                         -   -   -

“Thank you so much for attending tonight’s charity gala,” You smiled warmly as you spoke into the microphone. Much applause followed, “This evening’s event couldn’t have happened without help from so many people within the community and all of you here tonight. I have a lot of people to thank tonight, but first I would like to thank the wonderful orchestra for providing such wonderful music.”

You gestured to the group seated on the right side of the banquet hall as they took their bows. You allowed for the chatter to calm before continuing your speech to thank the hotel and its’ management, the catering, your parents and siblings, your personal assistant, “and lastly I have three very important men and their families in attendance tonight. The Mayor of New York City, The Governor, and even Senator Holstead.” Each of the men stood, waved to the crowd, and were applauded, “And now, I would like to invite the Senator’s eldest son, MR. Wyatt Holstead to join me in announcing the winner’s for tonight’s silent auction and then we will proceed to bidding on specialty items.”

“Thank you so much, Ms. (Y/L/N). Isn’t she just fantastic?” Wyatt smiled at the audience as he made his way up to you with his own mic. He stood next to you and took your hand, “It is an absolute honor to be assisting you tonight and a help you raise funds to solve homelessness in this beautiful city, once and for all. But being in your striking beauty might be the cherry on top.”

You giggled as he raised your hand to his lips and kiss your knuckles softly. However, you could feel the tension across to the room as you made eye contact with Ransom, who was clapping with a less than excited look upon his face, “Why thank you. Now, Wyatt will be drawing and announcing the names of the winners while I present you will the item of auction. So- let’s begin.”

You forgot about Ransom and his predatory gaze as you awarded baskets and various items to strangers and friends that won them. The flashes of cameras and shaking of hands stirred your brain until Wyatt ended the silent auction.

“Congratulations to the winners! Checks can be dropped off this evening or mailed to the donation center within the next three days. But now, we move onto our live auction where we have some stellar items and events up for sale tonight!”

“You’re right, Wyatt. This first item up to bid tonight is a trip to the beaches of Italy on an all-expenses-paid vacation! Let’s start the bidding at $500, shall we?”

Immediately, hands and ladies’ fans flew up in the air. It was amazing how fast items were going and how quickly the evening was flying by.

“Going twice... Sold! The fountain pen collection goes to Mrs. Margret Dunwoody!” Wyatt called. There was applause as she grabbed her prize, “And now, for the final auction before any real partying or dancing begins, we have a real treat. One lucky person will be able to share the first dance and be treated to breakfast with our own, Miss (Y/N) (Y/L/N)! Now, this is quite the prize so let’s start the bidding at... two thousand?”

The hands’ of New York’s finest bachelors and bachelorettes shot up high.

‘$2,500″

“$3,500″

“$4,000!”

“$5,000!”

“$25,000,” One loud voice called from the center of the room. Ransom had stood, a smirk plastered to his face as his blue eyes met your own.

“$30,0-” Another man tried to yell out.

“$50,000,” Ransom called on top of him, “Anyone else?”

“Well then,” Wyatt said, looking to you and winking, “$60,000.”

“$75,000,” Ransom called back with ease. 

“$85,000,” Wyatt retorted.

 You began to become nervous. It would be awkward to watch Ransom’s and Wyatt’s little showdown, but you were the prize which made the experience only that much unsettling, “Boys, boys, you’re both pretty.”

“Going once...” You looked at Ransom only to be pondering something, “Going twice...” you started to pray that anyone else would bid, Wyatt was still in college and you didn’t need your record destroyed by a horny boy...

“$150,000!”

The banquet hall went completely silent, no one said a thing. You could here pen drop in the room with how deafening it was.

“Sold to Mr. Ransom Drysdale!” The Mayor called out from his seat, sensing the tension, “Now if Mr. Drysdale will make his way up to the platform to escort his prize to the dance floor.”

Ransom held a bit of swagger in his stride as he approached you. The shock was still evident in your stature as you tried to smile. People applauded and the band began to play again.

“My dear,” Ransom held his hand out for you, making sure to make this look a publicly decent as he could. You took his hand and he leads you down the stairs of the platform. Once you were on his level, he placed a hand upon your lower back and guided you towards the dance floor.

The band began to play a slow number that had the slightest touch of an upbeat. Ransom was surprisingly a great dance partner and easily guided you around the floor which captured the eyes of all in the banquet hall.

“You know, you’re not half bad at dancing,” you attempted to compliment him.

“I guess private school pays off a bit, but I’d still prefer dancing under your sheets,” he said in a sultry tone into your ear.

“Dammit, Ransom. I’m trying to enjoy my evening because you’ll be there to ruin my morning,” he spun you twice before pulling you into his chest again, “why did you even place a bid? You hate donating to charity, unless by force, and you know I can’t stand you.”

“Well, you know I love getting under your skin and I think the other bidder doesn’t have the same experience as I do,” He beamed, “in any category.”

“You’re disgusting.”

“But you can’t help but love me,” his lips dragged across your cheek.

The music faded out and a DJ began playing today’s hits. With all the formalities taken care of, this was no longer was your scene, “Well, good night, Ransom. I’ll see you in the morning and you can tell me about whatever girl you hooked up with, in the morning.”

With that, you escaped up to your suite in the hotel, hoping not to interact with anyone for the rest of the evening.

                                                        -   -   -

It was a few hours later now and you were still wide awake, relaxing in the living area of your suite as Brooklyn Nine-Nine played on the television. You had already showered and your hair was almost finished air drying, but you still wore the hotel robe. It was peaceful and allowed you to digest the events from the evening. But a knock on the door alerted you of an unexpected guest.

“Who is it?”

“Room service, ma’am,” You opened the door to reveal a young man with a cart, “Gifts from the hotel managers and a special man who wanted to thank you for this evening.”

“Oh well, thank you, just cart it in wherever you like,” You nodded and let him through. He quickly took care of his job before exiting, “good night.”

You grabbed the first card on the cart, a little formal thank you note from the hotel for a smooth event and the wonderful publicity. There was a second one with no name, but you figured it was one of the politicians you invited this evening.

You looked like the night sky, but you shined brighter than any star.

Shaking your head, you let out a small giggle at the little note like you were a school girl again. Even if there was a bump or two in the evening, it all still went practically perfect. But a second knock came from the door.

“If it’s another cart, I’m afraid I’m out of room in here,” You teased, only to open the door to reveal Ransom. 

“Well, were the flowers not enough? I didn’t know my prize would still be so hard to please, even after I swept her off her feet on the dance floor.” Here he was, smirk and all. Instead of his usual behavior of prowling a dance floor for a girl to satisfy him for the night, he was here, satisfying his need to tease you.

“Ransom, I-uh... Shouldn’t you be downstairs?” You pulled the robe close to your body like it could shield you from anything he could say or do to you.

“Well, my date left me on the floor-”

“I’m sorry to hear that, but it’s late, and I’m not a prize to be won, and you-”

“(Y/N),” He looked you in the eyes with his own blue ones that could make any woman melt and suddenly you understood why he came upstairs, “Can I come in, please?”

“I- maybe not tonight...”

“Please”

You took a deep breath before opening the door to allow him in, “Okay, but I do plan to go to bed before long.”

He walked in and immediately got a beer out of the hotel fridge before taking a seat on the couch. You grabbed yourself a bottle of water before joining him on the couch.

“So, were you trying to get away from your grandfather? or an ex?”

“No, I figured it was time we talk. And I mean actually talk. Not argue or bicker like we do in front of everyone else.”

“I don’t remember a time where we didn’t, so...”

“Maybe because you never give me the chance to talk-”

“Well, maybe that’s because every time I’ve tried to open up to you or trust you, you just cut me off...”

“Maybe that’s because you keep trying to meddle in my life like my family does!”

“I’m not doing this tonight! Not after everything I accomplished, I’ll see you in the morning,” you pushed yourself off the couch and attempted to make your way into the bedroom.

“No, (Y/N), I-” He let out a sigh and shook his head, “sit your ass back down and talk to me.”

“There’s nothing to talk about, Ransom!”

“There is everything to talk about”

IT hit you like a brick. He wanted to talk it out because after all this time he still wanted you. He wanted back sneaking into each other’s dorms. Pretending to hate each other, but sneaking kisses behind friends and family. You were the only person to ever deny him from what he needed. You were the girl to leave him on the floor. The same way you had left him on the floor homecoming your junior year, semi-formal your senior year of college, and various club outings. And now tonight in front of the public. You had always been the only girl to leave him alone and the only girl to walk out on him first. And after all this time, he still chased after you, because you were consistent.

 “Dammit, (Y/N). Why do you act like this? We have history, but you insist on acting like it never happened or that it was all bad.”

“Ransom, you know why we both called it all off...”

“Because you were inheriting a large media network? You could risk doing ONE thing that your mother didn’t approve of. I know why, but I’ll never understand-”

“Because you made me reckless and I couldn’t let my life slip through my fingers while I lived a perfectly pleasurable life off of daddy’s money. I need purpose and you never gave me one.”

“But you gave me purpose. And tonight, you looked like a night sky, shining bright with a thousand stars and reminded me of those nights where we laid under the starry sky and you let me spoil you. You helped me deal with the abomination that is my family, you were helping me learn to be a better person.” He took your hands into his own large ones and rested his forehead against yours, “I was going to propose and we were going to find a purpose together.”

“Fuck, Ransom,” The tears slid down your cheeks, but he caught them with his thumbs, “Why do we have to do this now? I was just starting to truly move on. Why can’t you let the idea of us go?”

“Because it’s the only good idea I’ve ever had. Please, (Y/N), I love you.”

Your breath got caught in your throat. In all the time that Ransom and you had spent together - teasing each other or flirting or otherwise - he had never said that he loved you. You never even heard him tell his parents he loved them. He truly wanted you.

“I- We... We can try again. But it’ll be slow and it will take time to heal what we burned, but if you’re willing than I am too.”

“That’s all I need to hear,” he whispered before pressing his lips against yours. 

                                                       -   -   -

The next afternoon, images of you and Ransom having brunch and holding hands while wandering around New York were splattered across media and magazine sites alike. People and reporters asked about the charity event the night before, what this relationship meant for your company, and even asking if you both were finally coming public with your relationship after months of hiding it.

A young reporter caught Ransom and asked it you satisfied his desires, targeting Ransom’s playboy bachelor status.

“I think you should be asking (Y/N) how much she raised for the homeless and those living off in a single evening instead of objectifying her. She’s the most powerful and influential woman in the nation and desrves more respect than that. Go report her record-breaking funding to your Editor, instead of a dumbass’s opinion on if she makes a good shag or not, sweetie.”

Once you made it into his car and made your way to Boston, you turned to him, “Thank you, for everything you said.”

“Of course, it was all honest and true. But I was never gonna tell them how wonderful you feel beneath me.”

“Ransom-”

“Oh c’mon, you love me”

[coreymichaelsmithson]

The Lights of Treasure Island

For the past few years, I've been living on a barrier island named Anastasia. A sandy, sleepy, slow place, just off the coast of our nation's oldest city, Anastasia Island features tall palm trees and gorgeous beaches, along with excellent sushi and a surprisingly active arts scene. Its most splendid attraction, though, is an old lighthouse, one striped with a black and white spiral and crowned by a bright red lamphouse. It towers commandingly over the dunes, casting a long beam that can be seen from nearly anywhere in town.

I've always liked lighthouses. In days of old we set these magnificent lanterns on the edge of the sea, to guide sailors through dark and treacherous waters, to show them the way home. Lighthouses represent so many things we need: safety, comfort, reliability, navigation. But in my mind, these structures hold the magic of candles, the magic of illumination itself. When we speak of enlightenment, we may be speaking specifically of rationality and discovery, but we are also conjuring images of light prevailing over darkness. And in this way the lighthouse emerges as a powerful symbol of the spirit.  

This February, for my 47th birthday, I explored the Outer Banks of North Carolina, where I saw several amazing lighthouses. Impressive as they were, I did not think they quite compared with the singular majesty of the structure that stands on Anastasia Island. After a harrowing return journey, one in which I drove with no working alternator (and sometimes without headlights or windshield wipers) through nearly 700 miles of tornadic thunderstorms, I felt the most profound relief when I finally crested the peak of the SR-312 bridge, which connects my island to the mainland, and I saw those familiar black and white stripes in the distance, signaling that I had made it home. Less than half a year later, my feelings about this special lighthouse of mine would be forever changed by a chance encounter.

Just under two months ago, I received a brief and rather unremarkable message from a stranger on Scruff, a queer dating platform that I use. One might charitably call Scruff "a social club for discerning gentlemen" ... it appeals to men who are hirsute, meaty, perpetually horny, and even a few of us freaks who defiantly straddle the line between "butch" and "nancy". Since this man's profile didn't really offer all that much information, and his one available picture wasn't particularly compelling, I promptly tucked his message away and forgot about it, and went for my customary sunset walk on the beach.

I live exactly one mile from the southern boundary of a state park, which offers a four-mile stretch of pristine dune habitat, completely undeveloped and sparsely occupied. The only man-made objects in sight are a few empty lifeguard stands, the city's sightseeing pier, a radio antennae, and our lighthouse. Dolphins gather here, their dorsal fins rising and falling between the breakers. Squadrons of pelicans fly in tight formations, gliding only a few feet above the water's surface. Terns and sea turtles nest in its sands, and I've found many shark teeth among the sea shells and ghost crab burrows. This is a special place, a holy place, and I've made a daily ritual of enjoying its cloudscapes and crepuscular glow as I explore the edge between land and sea.

After a pleasant stroll, maybe an hour or so of blissful meditation, I turned around and started heading back towards my car when I caught sight of a man who had just walked out of the water and was now drying himself off. We locked eyes.

He was the most beautiful man I had ever seen. Arrestingly beautiful, the kind of handsome that stops you dead in your tracks. I just kind of gulped for a second, and then walked right up to him, with an audacity that I didn't even know I possessed, turned on every damn bulb in my Christmas tree, and murmured, "Hi!", making the word shimmer like tinsel. In a short amount of time, I learned that he was a Russian artist, born in St. Petersburg but living in Moscow. I had met him during a brief pause on his long drive from Jacksonville to Key West; he had only intended on stopping in St. Augustine long enough to explore our old Spanish fort and take a swim on our nicest beach. He possessed a keen intellect, a quick wit, and a laudable command of English. As we spoke, he kept giving me flashes of the most mischievous smile, and so when I finally asked him what he was grinning about, he revealed that he was the same man who had messaged me earlier. This came as a surprise, for I hadn't recognized him at all ... I had only been drawn in now by his gorgeous movie-star looks, the undeniable sex appeal of his dripping wet body, and some weird sense of destiny.

We talked. We talked some more. We went to dinner. And then he stayed for the better part of three days.

In my bed, we enjoyed the most astonishing kind of communion. Our nights and mornings were filled with such tenderness ... soft eyes, soft caresses, fearlessly sustained gazes, the kind of kisses that tell a hundred little stories. One by one, various secrets were brought to light. We shared toe-curling carnality, thunderous climaxes, an unalloyed and unembarrassed intimacy. We shared joy.

On our second day together, I took him to the top of Anastasia Island's lighthouse. We lingered on each landing to kiss and giggle, and our embraces grew more intense. We felt a stronger and stronger pull towards one another. I knew that this was more than just a simple infatuation. By the time we reached the lantern's round balcony, and stepped out together onto the most spectacular view of St. Augustine, I knew that I was falling in love.

I don't blame you for rolling your eyes at this. You may, in your justifiable cynicism, think it ridiculous for a man to utter such a powerful phrase within such a short time. But if you've ever known me, you've come to recognize by now my considerable capacity for love. My passions and appetites may rise to the surface with little interference, and will I admit some recklessness in how I've invested my energies, but I am no fool. I am neither naïve nor desperate. And I can say in all sincerity that what we felt then was, at least for a short while, genuine love.

From the top of the lighthouse we could see everything. The old downtown, with its mixture of colonial and Spanish Renaissance buildings. The Matanzas River, named for the 1565 massacre of shipwrecked Huguenots, separating my island from the mainland. The harbor of St. Augustine, crowded with sailboats and pleasure craft, a forest of masts. And then the sea, blue and inviting, the sea that would soon separate us. We held each other tightly and looked upon the Atlantic together, casting our dreams towards the horizon, into this vista of seemingly endless possibility and hope.

On our last night together, we took a naked midnight swim in my pool, which is lit from above by a row of blue lights. A light and warm rain fell on our heads as we twined our legs underwater, and our ardor cast a web of rippling refractive patterns on the pool's concrete bottom. He looked me in the eyes, kissed me with the utmost gentleness, and formally invited me to come stay with him in Moscow. I accepted with my new magic word, "Да."

The following morning, our parting was so sweet, and so warm. We solidified our promise to be reunited. He drove down to Key West, enjoying a music playlist I assembled for him, and then he flew up to New York for a week's visit with old friends. After he returned to Moscow, we embarked on a passionate long-distance affair via telephone and social media apps.

I plunged right away into the Russian language, practicing for hours a day, rediscovering my knack for linguistics. I bought books on the cities of Moscow and St. Petersburg, books on Russian verbs, flashcards, a portable dictionary. I subscribed to online learning programs, put apps on my phone, read up on the country's history. I was all in, bringing every available bit of my enthusiasm, work ethic, and inventiveness to the challenge. Every day, I would send him sweet little videos or text messages ... sharing good news, conveying small but significant events of my daily life, showing off my rapidly accelerating grasp of Russian. I sent him notes of encouragement, pictures of me looking my cutest, small but enjoyable details of my life on Anastasia Island. I sent him a short clip of the black skimmers that sliced back and forth across the thin swash of the surf, their beaks dipping into half an inch of water. I sent him pelicans, beach crabs, waves, paintings, difficult words, idioms, cute terms of venery, sunsets, clouds, kisses, evidence of my changing body. I sent him love, every day. "каждый день," I promised him, placing my hand on my heart, "каждый день." Every day.

My love deepened by the hour. I know this is going to sound so gushy and gross, but I really pushed the lighthouse metaphor pretty hard, calling myself "твой смотритель маяка" or "your lighthouse keeper". I meant this in all sincerity, without a drop of bathos or schmaltz. Our time atop the lighthouse was sacred to me. I promised him that I would keep its light burning bright.

Over time, however, things shifted. As my interest grew, his began to dwindle. He sent less and less of himself, slowly removing from our conversation his humor, his sexuality, his warmth, his trust. It was like seeing a fully assembled jigsaw puzzle get lifted into the air, and watching all the pieces falling out ... at first only a few at a time, then more and more, until there was only a jagged perimeter where there had once been a lovely picture.

The nadir came when he lost his temper with me over my visa. I was confused about the process, as the Russian consulate and other sources were providing patchy and often conflicting information, and his own explanations changed from day to day. During our last video chat, I asked one too many questions, and he snapped. He rolled his eyes, effectively called me stupid and childish, and hung up on me three times. My many attempts at reconciliation were completely rebuffed. It was both baffling and extraordinarily painful.

Two days after our fight he was in a terrible car accident, one from which he miraculously escaped unharmed. He posted on social media an impassioned paragraph about the event, and how it drew into sharp focus all the love he had in his life, how he felt that he wasn't deserving of such love, how grateful he was for his friends. Yet instead of contacting me, inviting me into this experience, or trying to repair our frayed connection, he spent his evenings logging back into Scruff, the aforementioned dating app. He continued to ignore me, choosing instead to pursue (or perhaps refresh) other opportunities. I tried in vain to reach him, to restore our bond, but was met with only the most chilling silence.

How had I been so wrong? Had my desire devolved into mere obsession, albeit one artfully disguised as love? Had my zeal somehow suffocated him? The irony for me was that this disastrous affair unfolded during a period of rapid and positive transformation. In the space of the last seven months, I'd already changed my diet, fixed my teeth, joined a gym, paid off a chunk of my debt, reorganized my home office, purchased a standing desk, resumed my daily beach walks, started seeing both a psychiatrist and a therapist. My relationship to my body was improving, I was working at a higher level of professional responsibility, gaining new clients, writing my fourth novel, and churning out the finest paintings of my career. A recent experience with ayahuasca had given me valuable insights into my adulthood. It seemed only right that this Russian should be the cherry on my sundae, a prize I had been working so hard to deserve.

And so, after admitting my own disenchantment, I surrendered. Reeling from an overwhelming feeling of loss, I wrote him a heartfelt letter in Russian, one in which I explained the hurt his indifference was causing me. I poured a lot of benevolent energy into this letter. And then I said to him the saddest word I've learned in Russian, "Прощай", which is the type of goodbye you use when you think you are not likely to see someone again. It translates, literally, into "forgive me."

Here is the letter I wrote to him, translated into English:

***

"V_____, beautiful V____:

Okay. I give up.

Your silence gave me a very clear and very painful answer. You have been entrusted with something rare and beautiful, and you have shown that you do not want it. So now it's gone.

I'm sorry my heart bored you so much. I will no longer annoy you with my desires.

The love that I offered you ... pure and strong, given without demands or jealous limitations ... does not come often.

It pains me to realize that you do not appreciate what I have tried to give you. It is even more painful to realize that I may have aggravated the situation with my zeal. But the distance that you put between us is your choice, and I must respect that.

It seems that the epiphany you experienced in the car accident, the moment you thought of all the love in your life, did not include my love for you. Your priorities are yours, and I accept that. But you almost died yesterday, V_____. And instead of choosing to bond with a man who cares about you so much, your focus shifted to Scruff. Your indifference is so obvious now. Please do not say anything ugly or cruel in response. There is already enough sorrow on my island. I feel both grief and embarrassment, but not anger. I've always wanted the best for you, and it's still true.

I sincerely wish you a long and happy journey. I hope you enjoy many successes and find many pleasures. I hope you stay healthy. I hope the man you choose deserves your best gifts. I hope you find a better lighthouse. I must direct my light now to those who are really looking for it. So now I must tell you the saddest word that I have learned in your language.

Goodbye."

***

Please allow me now to rewind a few years, and tell a correlative story.

In the autumn of 2019, during a period of intense sadness and frustration, I fled from Anastasia Island and drove impulsively across the state to the Gulf Coast. I didn't have a clear destination, I didn't pack enough clothes or supplies, and I was so blinded with tears and unexpressed rage that I didn't know where I was, or even care much about where I might land. While getting lost somewhere in the vicinity of St. Petersburg, I glanced at a map, dragged my finger along the squiggly coastline, saw the name Treasure Island, and thought, "That's gotta be the place."

I don't know what I was expecting to find there. Something about the name sounded so exciting, so exotic. And as the evening wore on, my anticipation grew. I thought, in my desperation, that everything would be all right once I got to Treasure Island. Over the next few hours, I convinced myself that I'd finally feel good again in such a place, that my pain and confusion would certainly evaporate once I reached this safe haven. I'd check into a nice hotel room, preferably one with 300 thread-count sheets and a coffee maker, and I'd dream about pirate ships and gold doubloons, and when I opened my eyes and yawned and stretched against the sun-dappled pillows my life would basically feel like a commercial for some bougie brand of almond milk. When I arrived, however, I was deeply disappointed to see another narrow stretch of high-rise hotels, littered beaches, rank seaweed, and greyish-brown water. I found the cheapest hotel room around, one of the few remaining vacancies on the shore, and there I found neither crisp bedsheets nor good coffee. The view from my balcony, however, was utterly amazing: I could see not only a broad curving swath of the beach, but also a glow of distant resort hotels, some of them reflected in the waves. It was strangely romantic, seeing these twinkling lights ... red, gold, green, blue ... and their silent conversation with the stars, a dialogue of jewels above the warm churning waters of the Gulf. But it wasn't the salvation I had been hoping for.

When I got up the next morning, I was still facing the same problems, the same irritations, the same heavy sorrows. Treasure Island would not, could not, rescue me from myself. So I drove back home to my own island, back to my lighthouse, and was relieved to discover that it was in fact even more stirring than I had remembered. During my absence Anastasia Island had become a magical and restorative place, quite different than the one I had left only days before.

What I should have learned back then, but have only come to realize now, was this: I didn't need to travel to a distant island of treasure and twinkling stars, for my own island already had plenty of both. I didn't need to seek the incandescence of a handsome man to light my way, as my own inner flame was at last beginning to shine without the shutters of inhibition or profligacy.

I am now recalling my disappointment with Treasure Island, while concurrently considering my grief over the Russian. At first, I wanted to hate him for his carelessness, for how he squandered my gifts. But I don't hate him. Not really. There's no need to wring my hands any further over his callousness. I don't even mourn his absence anymore. My mood has shifted today, and I no longer choose to see this abortive liaison as being so devastating. For I know, deep down, that the failure here was not really mine. I am not a loser for investing myself unreservedly in someone who could not fully appreciate me, nor I am not the weaker man for feeling injured. I will not be permanently depleted for having offered all that kindness to an undeserving recipient, as my wellspring of love remains inexhaustible.

I tried to share my lighthouse with the Russian. But he did not recognize how special it really was, and he declined to follow its beacon to a rewarding harbor. And thus, our romance was destroyed, and his memory became just another broken boat littering the shallows.

I have seen so many ruins in my years: bad relationships, lousy jobs, soured opportunities. My life story reads like a ledger of dashed hopes. It seems sometimes that both the island I occupy and the more elusive island I am eternally seeking are surrounded by shipwrecks. Yet the lighthouse of my spirit still stands, sturdier and stronger than ever. The waves may batter its bricks, salt may scour its surfaces, it may occasionally groan under its own weight ... but it will not crumble, it will not fail, and even in the darkest of hours this lamp of mine will continue to shine: bright, focused, undiminished.

[meltalk]

Social media - good, bad or ugly?

When you think of social media what is the first thing that comes to mind? For me, it’s Facebook and Instagram. Those are my go to apps. I feel like I may be dating myself by my choice of apps, because when I think of the variety of apps there are out there like Tik Tok, Snapchat, Twitter to name a few there are so many platforms that a person can use. But what are these apps really used for? You see a lot of random posts poking fun and/or criticizing some of the more recent topics in the news. You see a lot of selfies. There a times people share old photos that may otherwise be hidden in a box never to be seen by the very people in the photos. My personal favourite are the variety of food dishes that are shared with variations that other folks have tried. Mmmmm! I love me some good food.

There are some really good shares on social media, but then there is another side to social media. Negative comments, links to articles of things not going right with the world. Posts of party’s, outings, and various activities, sometimes questionable activities. And sometimes, these posts when shared and reshared come look questionable to some, but okay to others...It’s all in the eye of the beholder.

When we are younger and trying to “find” ourselves, we sometimes do some really dumb things. When these things get captured on camera or video, sometimes find themselves on social media. These blunders can sometimes have a negative impact later on in life. When going for that dream job, some employers now search you on social media, are they going to like what they see, are they going to think twice about hiring me because I used to be a “partygirl” when I was younger and did some crazy things, that somehow found its way on social media?(I wasn’t by the way)

Will my kids search my name and find that time when I was rude to another person for no good reason that somehow found it’s way onto YouTube? How do you protect yourself from the bad and ugly of social media? Do you just not join?

Sad to say, but you would be missing out on a lot. The people that you can reconnect and network with is amazing. The milestones that sometimes you forget that you get reminded of are so helpful in keeping your connections to people. Did you forget your friends birthday, only to be reminded on Facebook it’s her birthday today, wish her happy birthday! Thank you Facebook...you just made me out to not be a shitty friend. And let’s not forget those recipes!!! Did I mention that I love food! I love trying new foods. The variety of recipes that I have gotten and tried that I otherwise probably wouldn’t, priceless!

All in all, social media, good, bad, ugly? It’s all in how you use it. It’s been great for me as an avid viewer as opposed to an active poster. From social to career, I use as a means to communicate something that is meaningful to me. When I post it’s because I want to share something of importance to me, I don’t share random photos or posts. That’s just me. Some others have more to say, and that’s ok. Just know the world is watching!

[spacegirl-daydreams]

I searched for a YouTube DJ for years and when I found him 9 years had gone by. This is the story.

If you’re a maladaptive daydreamer than you know how important your music playlist is. Around early 2009 I had gotten into underground musicians who remixed video game music on YouTube. Being still a kid and new to the online world it was exciting for me to find alternate versions of my favorite songs, and it didn’t take long for me to implicate them into my dreamworld. However there was this particular song that i considered my favorite. I could literally put myself in any situation, any scenario with it, and would be satisfied with listening on loop for long periods of time.

Back then I did have a playlist of music saved on Windows Media Player, but for some reason I didn’t download the song onto my computer. YouTube was still in its early stages back then, and having a YouTube playlist wasnt abnormal in these times. I simply just had it in my favorites. I remember onetime a teacher had got on to me for my headphones being too loud in the library. Fun times~

Fast forward it’s around October 2010, and I’m searching for the song in my playlist, but I couldn’t find it. I looked up and down for the video, but it was nowhere to be found. That’s where reality set in, the guy had deleted his channel.

I was devastated.

I never saved the video, and it was never uploaded again from any other channel. Ever so often I would check to see if he would make a return, but he never did. I would also check to see if anyone else might have uploaded it, but nothing.

Now I have to mention this point so that you may have a bit more understanding.

Back then there was a community of guys/girls who remixed music, and most of them were popular among the videogameing community. Around late 2010 a YouTube channel had appeared honoring those musicians for their hard work, and awesome tracks. This channel would post their work (with permission I think) to this channel. I started to reach out to the channel, and other musicians who were affiliated with the guy. I was concerned because he was rather popular, and everyone seemed to like him.

None of them knew who I was talking about. It was as if he had vanished and everyone forgot about him. After not finding anything on his whereabouts I sort of just gave up, but through out the years I would remember the song and try to find him yet again.

I did it all.. (I’m embarrassed to share this) I used multiple search engines. (Bing, Yahoo, Google) you name it.

Searched the song, his channel name, and little bits of information would pop up. I would find old instant messenger accounts, old social media platforms he long deserted etc. It was always the same thing for years. I know at this point it seems like I was an obsessed stalker, but I didn’t want to cause him any harm or distress, I was just a concerned fan who couldn’t accept the fact that he vanished. It was like interacting with him, and his music created a safe space in my life for happiness, and when I lost it.. it was like a piece of that was ripped away from me.

I’ve already wrote a lot so I will try to wrap it up the best way I can. So around 2019 I was bored and surfing the web, and decided I would give it another go just for the heck of it. I didn’t mention this earlier, but the guy was asain, and I’m only mentioning it because that was the key to finding him.

Despite all the years of searching on google for his channel I had came across an asain site that for some reason had YouTube’s videos on it. There I found a video of his friend, which lead to me finding the friend’s YT channel. The videos were old and outdated, but at the time this particular DJ was trying to get his music known. I found videos of him and his friend just being silly and dancing.

—— Under this is where I start to feel really awkward sharing this with you guys. ——

I start looking at the comments hoping to find something of his, but I didn’t see anything. I had gave up on looking, but ended up subscribing to the channel just in case I wanted to try again. A few days later something told me to check the other videos, and that’s where I saw it.

The guy had an old comment on one of the videos from a new channel. I clicked it and found out that the guy actually never left YouTube.. he had just left the community. None of his old videos were on the channel, so of course that song wasn’t there. I was excited that I had found him, and decided to send him a comment on one of his videos.

I asked him if he was *so and so* and if he was thanked him for his contribution to the music community. He actually responded and thanked me, but he wondered how I found him.

I couldn’t tell him..

I couldn’t tell him.. oh ever since I found out you deleted your channel I’ve been searching for you off and on for nine years. I seriously couldn’t believe it had been nine years since the search had begin, and I felt so embarrassed. What’s funny about it all was that it didn’t feel like nine years. So much time had gone by and I didn’t realize it. That’s the thing with maladaptive daydreaming. You lose so much time in your own reality..

My best friend at the time didn’t judge me though, and congratulated my persistence. I think that was the only incident that I was ever persistent in something. I ended up subscribing to his channel and left him alone. As I was saying before my goal wasn’t to stalk him, I just really wanted that song back.. Maybe that’s what it was all along. That piece of peace it gave. I just craved it for all those years.

I had to suck it up and finally let it go. I had to let that part of the past go. He had moved on with his life, and probably hasn’t thought about it since then.

If you didn’t realize by now I have a hard time letting go of things that brought me joy, because I have a deep fear that I won’t find happiness anywhere else. I’m working on it though. It’s been a tough 2 years, but I’m making progress.

Sorry for the wall of text, I just felt that if I shared this with the community that I could get it off my chest. A weight has been lifted sort of.

Thanks for reading and if you got this far share your thoughts! Have you had a similar experience?

[breadreballion]

Portrait of a Lady on Fire (2019). I was so excited to watch this movie, after hearing a lot about it on social media. Queer movie, period movie, example of female gaze, etc. All this created an upheaving excitement in me, making me more and more curious as in what does all these terms really represent and how can it be turned into cinema. I had to search a lot, to find this movie on a streaming platform, fortunately, found it on Mubi app. I had a different kind of curiosity related to this movie, thinking, will it help me answer questions I'm looking answer for? Will it satisfy me in a way that I will feel comfortable watching any sex scene without flinching? Really had a lot of questions, and a hope, that this will be different. And it is. I watched it over a two-day span, because it was almost impossible for me to watch in one sitting. Portrait of a lady on fire is a perspective-changing movie, so much so that it turns away the male gaze, and presents the female gaze. What isfemale gaze? Men and women see the world differently, and the world we live in, men's point of view is considerd default, with women also being ascribed that vision of men. As the noted 19th century feminist scholar Simone De Beauvoir wrote,

"Representation of the world, like the world itself, is the work of men; they describe it from their own point of view, which they confuse with the absolute truth."

Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex.

Hypersexualization of women's body, focus shots on breast, the way women are dressed, to look seductive, are just the tip of iceberg as in how male gaze dominates the media we consume. This movie is refreshing in this sense. Firstly, there are no men in this movie, in this plot. A movie about women, directed by women. Women's life, though dominated by men, too exist in thier own sphere, wity thier own character, autonomy and worldviews. In this movie too, Heloise, Marianne, and the maid, Sophie, had thier independent life, independent stories, yet so intertwined. These women, despite having obvious class differences, make such simple relationship, helping each other out, reading, that this looks such a beautiful example of female solidarity; and the movie is such a perfect example of our lives, destiny decided by society- but women just finding thier ways to live, to enjoy, in whatever hidden way they can. Heloise marriage is fixed; one knows it right from the start of movie. The whole purpose of Marianne is to draw a portrait of Heloise for her future suitor, about which Heloise has previously rejected the previous painter and destroyed their efforts because she didn't see her real self in those portraits. Marianne is asked to draw Heloise in a way in which Heloise never gets to know that she's being painted. She accompanies Heloise on walks, spends time with her, observes her, and paint her. Here starts a masterful portrayal of female gaze, how through Marianne eyes, we can see how women observes women, they look at each other, what they focus on, what not. This is refreshing to see in any movie, because women are often for being portrayed for vanity in movies, being an element of sexual contentment. As John Berger has said in "Ways of Seeing"- 

"Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves. The surveyor of woman in herself is male: the surveyed female. Thus she turns herself into an object -- and most particularly an object of vision: a sight"

Movies like Portrait of a lady of fire has two expectations to fulfill- that they are "queer" movies, representing queer people lives- an expectations which is not the case with normal heterosexual romantic movies. The representation has to be very careful in queer movies- as they speak and represent a community. Often this has failed, creating harmful narrative, like in Blue is the Warmest Color- which is a good story of two women, but the director has put so much explicit sex scenes, that too made to sell it as "lesbians fetish." The scenes were so toxic that the actresses themselves while filming them felt most uncomfortable and violated- but the movie is famous around for its sex scenes, and seen as a representation of queer cinema, but ironically it does more harm to queer narrative- as it is a movie made on heterosexual assumption of homosexual lives. As in most movies, women are just there as secondary character, either as an eye candy, or to push the plot for Male character. When Berger says above, "the surveyor of women in herself is Male, the surveyed female" he is talking about how this male dominated, heterosexual narrative rule women's body and their daily performances and how women present themselves, often not to comfort of their own self, but to satisfy the males around. This experience is all to real for most women. All of us has changed our posture, our way of sitting, the way we speak, the language we speak when we are around men, to look more feminine, to look desirable. Movies also, sometimes consciously, most of the times unconsciously promotes this. The norms of femininity, what looks good, what not, etc. and pushes them onto women. Portrait of a lady on fire also does away with that- the raw scene, of Sophie's abortion- and it's recreation later, in a way shows the lives of women as it is for them- no hiding, no airbrushing. Their real experiences depicted as they are felt. This movie is loosely centered around the Greek story of Orpheus, who journeyed to the underworld to plead for the return of his dead wife, Eurydice. Hades, god of underworld, allowed Eurydice to follow Orpheus back to the world of the living, but delimited Orpheus’s sight: if he turned back to look at her, he would lose her forever. Orpheus looked, and was punished with the kind of loss that cracks you open. The movie has a scene, in which Heloise, Marianne and Sophie are reading this story- and they disagree, one saying that he shouldn't have looked, so that his wife could be saved, and other saying that everyone wants a last look of their lover- it's very natural. This story, like the movie, the most crucial element to its core is the act of "seeing". The story of Orpheus depicts how look, how seeing can kill, especially that seeing which is forbidden, unacceptable, but here, instead of lust, desire, is involved, beauty is involved, that seeing is a risk to be taken.

Modern movies have lost the aspect of romance, of falling in love. What is portrayed is love at first sight, or unrequited love, where one partner is aware, other is not. Also, since we live in a hetronormative world, most movies unconsciously have a hetronormative aspect to it- how men and women navigate the start of a relationship, and their desires are often quickly fulfilled in events like one night stand, or getting drunk or making out. This heterosexual romance has been so normalised by society, it is often overlooked that romance, desire and falling in love for homosexual couples is different. The women in this movie, Helenoise and Marianne represents that. The time to know each other, slow building of desire, in a soft, genuine and yet so sensuous way. Looking, observing, and pining.

Portrait of a lady on fire is a refreshing take, first, because for the first time I have found the representation of female gaze in any media I have consumed. The way a woman looks at another woman. Being fed male gaze by popular media throughout, I was surprised to notice sometimes while watching this movie, I felt my eyes focusing on those parts of characters which in scenes later, focused by the camera. The gaze of the female director felt like my own. I saw myself represented.  One more thing I enjoyed is pining. The slow build-up of desire, the realization of falling in love, getting to know each other. Desire in its pure, unadulterated form. 

Watching this movie was once in a lifetime experience. I felt it is my movie. My own. An experience which I never expected. The subtle way topics like abortion, women's friendship, the looming prospect of marriage and of course the art is covered. Looking helps in falling in love, we all know that. But how looking helps in getting to know each other, deeply, movingly and in an forbidden way- is this movie. The love, the romance and ofcourse, in all the right ways- a queer love story is handled. The movie is God tier. I will end it here now, with these lines of Mary Oliver which this movie reminds me-

“You do not have to be good, You only have to let the soft animal of your body, love what it loves.”

[tinyshe]

[copy, save and share censored information; fight for freedom of information]

COVID-19 Injection Campaign Violates Bioethics Laws 

Story at-a-glance

Safety data analysis and reporting in clinical trials of the COVID jabs appear to have been manipulated in at least some cases. One method for manipulating randomized clinical trial safety data is to only analyze the “per protocol” treatment group (those who completed all doses and were fully compliant with the study design) as opposed to “intent to treat” which would include all patients that have signed informed consent

For example, if a participant only accepted one dose and trial protocol called for two, under a “per protocol” analysis, adverse events they experienced would be dismissed and not included in the safety analysis. This is a classic way to manipulate safety data in clinical research, and it's usually forbidden

Since the COVID shots only have emergency use authorization, they are experimental products and, as such, they are not authorized for marketing

Bioethics are written into federal law. As an experimental trial participant, you have the right to receive full disclosure of any adverse event risks. Full disclosure of risks is not being done, and in fact is being suppressed

Adverse event risks must also be communicated in a way that you can comprehend what the risks are, and the acceptance of an experimental product must be fully voluntary and uncoerced. Enticement is strictly forbidden

As the inventor of the messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccine platform, Dr. Robert Malone is one of the most qualified individuals to opine on the benefits and potential risks of this technology.

His background includes a medical degree from Northwestern University, a master's degree from Salk Institute, a bachelor's degree in biochemistry from UC Davis, a Giannini fellowship in pathology and a post-graduate fellowship in global clinical research at Harvard.

He taught pathology to medical students for about a decade at the University of Maryland and the University of California Davis, and then became an associate professor of surgery at Uniformed Services, University of the Health Sciences, where he launched a major research institute focused on breast cancer and high-throughput screening in genomics for breast cancer.

After that, he helped found a company called Inovio, which has brought forth a number of gene therapy discoveries, including vaccines, and the use of pulsed electrical fields as a delivery method. After 9/11, a colleague at the University of Maryland's department of business and economic development connected him with Dynport Vaccine Company, a startup that had received a DoD contract to manage its biodefense products.

"That's when I transitioned from being more of an academic to the advanced development world of clinical research, regulatory affairs, project management, compliance, quality assurance — all of that stuff that goes into actually making a product," Malone explains.

"It was a huge epiphany that the world really didn't need more academic thought leaders and [that] I was wasting my time focusing on that. What the world really needed was that people understood the underlying technology and the discovery research world, but also understood advanced development, which is that drug development is a highly-regulated world. And there aren't very many of those.

So, I set out to become really expert in that latter part and worked with the government, particularly in biodefense and vaccine development, for a couple of decades. And that brings me to the present.

I've captured a couple of billion dollars in grants and contracts for companies that I've worked with, and clients from the government, from BARDA [Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority], from the Department of Defense and others."

COVID-19 'Vaccines' Are Gene Therapy

I've been accused of falsely stating that these COVID shots are not vaccines but gene modifying interventions. However, even Malone agrees with this statement, and as the inventor of the technology, he should know. He points out that in Germany, by law you cannot refer to this technology as a genetic vaccine or gene therapy vaccine. "The German government has specifically outlawed the use of gene therapy-based vaccine as a term," he says.

With his background, and having received the COVID shot himself, he can hardly be called an "anti-vaxxer" and/or someone who doesn't believe in gene therapies. Yet, he recently went public with concerns about the safety of rolling out this kind of technology on a mass scale, and the unethical ways in which they're being promoted.

As has become the trend, he was immediately censored. Wikileaks even went so far as to erase him from the historical section of the mRNA vaccine page and his own personal Wikipedia page was removed. All references to Malone inventing the mRNA technology were removed and attributed to a variety of institutions instead.

Blowing the Whistle

Malone's public involvement with the COVID jab issue began with a short essay1 reflecting on the bioethics of the current campaign to get a needle in every arm. This essay grew out of a conversation he'd had with a Canadian physician. Malone's essay catalyzed an interview with Bret Weinstein in June 2021 on the DarkHorse Podcast.

This isn't the first time Malone has spoken out against unethical behavior in science. He was also a whistleblower in the Jesse Gelsinger death case,2 back in 1999. Gelsinger was a young man who had a rare metabolic disorder called ornithine transcarbamylase deficiency syndrome (OTCD), where dangerous amounts of ammonia build up in your blood.

He'd been diagnosed at the age of 2, and was managing his condition with a regimen of nearly 50 drugs a day. At 17, Gelsinger signed up for an investigational gene therapy. Like the COVID shots, the therapy involved injecting a gene attached to an adenovirus, which would be integrated into his DNA to permanently produce an enzyme that prevents ammonia buildup.

Gelsinger was the 18th person to receive the gene therapy, and while the others had only experienced mild side effects, Gelsinger had a severe response after scientists at the University of Pennsylvania administered adenoviruses doses that were far above what had been approved by the corresponding safety committee.

Gelsinger became disoriented and developed jaundice and acute inflammation, followed by a rare blood clotting disorder and multi-organ failure. He was dead within days. Even a decade later, Gelsinger's death is still considered the biggest setback for gene therapy.3

"When the Jesse Gelsinger events happened, I also had long been a deep insider in the gene therapy space, so I had specific knowledge of what had happened at Penn — the ethical transgressions, shall we say, that occurred — and had awareness, again, just like now, of the technology," Malone says. "So, I was able to make sense of things that otherwise were obscure for journalists and even other scientists."

After speaking out about the ethical transgressions that contributed to Gelsinger's death (dosing which exceeded approved levels), Malone became a "persona non-grata" in the gene therapy community. In other words, he was blacklisted by his peers and prevented from participating in gene therapy research.

"That's part of why I went in a different direction with my career and focused on government work and biodefense, supporting the Department of Defense," Malone says. "The lesson learned for me is that I'm able to be resilient, together with my wife's support.

Another key lesson was that your friends will support you through times of crisis if you behave with integrity and maintain your friendships and treat people with respect. I also had a lot of support for having spoken out and taken an ethical high road on that and not compromised myself …

It's part of why I'm comfortable [speaking out now]. People tell me that I come across as balanced and calm. But yes, this is a little bit frightening and once again, [I'm] putting my career on the line. But once again many of my colleagues in the government are grateful that I'm speaking this way. They are not able to have a voice because of their jobs and government policies about speaking out."

Public Responses to Censorship Make a Difference

As explained by Malone, he's been heavily censored since his three-hour interview with Brett Weinstein. LinkedIn even deleted his account. However, LinkedIn users all around the world canceled their accounts in protest and wrote the company, explaining their cancellations were in protest of Malone being censored.

The social media uproar culminated in a major news article in a mainstream Italian paper, which appears to have pushed LinkedIn over the edge. LinkedIn eventually reinstated Malone's account and even sent him a letter of apology.

"I don't think I've ever heard of a company writing a letter of apology after delisting and deleting somebody," he says. "My sins were 'profound,'" he says sarcastically, "They were that I outed the chairman of the board of directors of Reuters who is also sitting on the board of Pfizer, for cross-posting the Wall Street Journal article on vaccine toxicity risks, and well, basically for complaining about censorship.

So, they sent me my list of sins with six different posts that were to pretty much anybody's eye innocuous, which I then took and cross-posted onto Twitter. So, that revealed the absurdity of that … The note [of apology] that I received basically said, 'Look, we don't have the expertise to censor you, but if you cross the line, we have the right to summarily delete you again and so mind your manners.'"

The Repurposing of Drugs to Combat Pandemics

In recent years, Malone has been involved in yet another startup company (Atheric Pharmaceuticals), in collaboration with the DoD, that focused on repurposing drugs to combat Zika infection. That company went bankrupt for lack of investor interest in repurposing drugs for treating infectious diseases.

When the COVID-19 outbreak began, he got a call from a colleague who works in the intelligence community in Wuhan, China, who urged him to put together a team to investigate the possibility of repurposing old drugs against COVID.

His team is currently about to enter clinical trials for a number of licensed off-patent drugs. That said, his biggest contribution so far is probably his commentary on the bioethics of what is going on.

"Both my wife and I are deeply ethical people," he says. "We're high school sweethearts. We try really hard to live ethical lives and to help our fellow man as well as the animals in our lives. So that's just the place we come from. It's bedrock. We're not rich people.

I recall a long telephone call with the Canadian physician that poured his heart out about the situation in Canada that he's encountering, both with vaccine administration in primary practice, and also in administering alternative therapies to outpatients, which generally have no therapies available.

I mean, the position is a bit shocking — in the emergency rooms all across the world. Basically, you go to the ER and if your O2 sets are down, pushing towards 80, they say, 'Well, go [home] and come back when your lips are blue.' And that's the essence of it. They don't really offer anything.

So many physicians, including this gentleman in Canada, have been seeking alternative strategies and they've tested and administered these various agents. We've heard of fluvoxamine, ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine. There are many, many others now, including those that we're working with (famotidine and celecoxib) that seem to have therapeutic benefit when administered early to shut down this hyperinflammatory response.

So, he shared this and the stories of multiple reports of vaccine adverse events that in his clinical judgment were clearly vaccine related, some of them quite serious, and that the Canadian government would summarily dispose of those as non-related even though in his clinical judgment, they clearly were related.

He spoke about the enticement of children in Canada with ice cream and the willingness of the Canadian government to administer vaccine to children without their parents or guardians consent after enticing them with ice cream cones, and some of the other things that I just found shocking ...

It mirrors what we're seeing across the world, where governments are taking liberties with people's health and their rights without real legislative authorization to do so in most cases."

Core Bioethical Principles Are Being Violated

Malone and his wife Jill are both trained in bioethics, so after listening to this Canadian colleague, he decided he could help by writing a lay press opinion piece about the bioethics of experimental vaccines under emergency use authorization.

"I have intimate knowledge of not only the emergency use authorization legislation, the FDA policies behind it, I even know the people that wrote it," Malone says.

"So, we dove in, refreshed our memories on the whole history of the modern bioethics construct that briefly runs from Nuremberg Trials to the Nuremberg Code, to Helsinki Accord, to the Belmont Report in the United States, and to the common rule that exists in the code of federal regulations."

In summary, since the COVID shots only have emergency use authorization status, they are experimental products, and as such, they are not authorized for marketing. The core bioethical principles that apply therefore involve three key components:

1. Bioethics are written into federal law — As an experimental trial participant, which is what everyone is at the moment who accepts a COVID shot, you have the right to receive full disclosure of any adverse event risks. Based on that disclosure, you then have the right to decide whether you want to participate.

Adverse event risk disclosure should be provided at the level of detail disclosed in any drug package insert. However, the COVID shots have no such insert or detailed disclosure, and adverse event reports are even being suppressed and censored from the public.

Instead, as explained by the FDA,4 since the COVID shots are not yet licensed,5 rather than providing a package insert, the FDA directs health care providers to access a lengthy, online "fact sheet" that lists both clinical trial adverse events and ongoing updates of adverse events reported after EUA administration to the public.

A shorter, separate, online fact sheet with far less information in it is available for patients — but, provider or patient, you still have to know where to look up each of the three EUA vaccines separately on the FDA website to access those fact sheets.6

2. Adverse event risks must be communicated in a way that you can comprehend what the risks are — This means the disclosure must be written in eighth grade language. In clinical trials, researchers must actually verify participants' comprehension of the risks.

3. The acceptance of an experimental product must be fully voluntary and uncoerced — enticement is forbidden. "I argue that all of this public messaging that we've all been bombarded with … constitutes coercion," Malone says.

"The most egregious example of this that I've ever seen, is the federal government identifying 12 people … and labeling them as the dirty dozen, [saying] that they are responsible for causing death because they are disseminating what the government has determined to be misleading information about vaccines. This is mind boggling to me and to most of my colleagues."

How Falsehoods Are Getting Top Billing

As you probably know, I am on that "disinformation dozen" list. The irony of this situation is that government officials are really the ones contributing to the deaths by not adhering to bioethical principles that are enshrined in law. It's a classic case of 1984 Orwellian doublespeak.

As I mention in the interview, the "misinformation dozen" list is the creation of the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a shady organization funded by dark money that sprung up less than two years ago.

"Yeah, you don't even have to go to dark money. It's out in the open. There's this Trusted News Initiative led by the BBC. They announced … last fall that they have integrated Big Tech, Big Media and new media, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, et cetera, into an organization that was intended to control false narratives relating to elections, but they decided to turn it on what they perceived as false narratives for vaccines," Malone says.

"As if that wasn't enough, the Wellcome Trust and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation have announced initiatives where they're making block grants to Facebook, which is then funding these new pop-up fact-checker organizations … [that] are employing methods to smear people and to ban information …

What happens is these fact-checker organizations will make their pseudo fact check, like what I experienced with Reuters — which was transparently false, their fact check — and then the media will recycle the fact check. So that moves up in the Google ranking and they're citing themselves. That's what's going on. And it's sponsored by the likes of Wellcome Trust and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and they're quite proud of it."

Why Target Children and Pregnant Women?

Considering the unknown risks involved, why are governments and vaccine makers pushing so hard for children and pregnant women to participate in this experiment? Both have an extremely low risk for complications from COVID-19, which makes adverse effects of the vaccine all the more unacceptable, if not all together intolerable.

There's the appearance that there was manipulation of safety data analysis and reporting in the Phase 1, 2, 3 clinical trials … by focusing on patients who had completed the study per protocol, as opposed to those that entered the study as intended to treat. [If] you've only accepted one dose of vaccine under those clinical trial protocols and you have an adverse event … that information about the adverse event … is lost. It's not included in the safety analysis. This is a classic way to manipulate safety data in clinical research, and it's strictly forbidden. ~ Dr. Robert Malone

Making matters worse, there's no process in place to capture all side effects. Somehow, this was left out, and there's evidence to suggest this was done intentionally.

"I think it's important for the listenership to recognize that what we have is still an emerging understanding of what the adverse events are," Malone says. "I could tell you the story of how the cardiotoxicity adverse event was recognized, and it was not through official channels. There is [also] the appearance that the CDC is deliberately under-reporting adverse events to the public.

And there's the appearance that there was manipulation of safety data analysis and reporting in the Phase 1, 2, 3 clinical trials for some of these products by focusing on patients who had completed the study per protocol, as opposed to those that entered the study as intended to treat.

That's a subtle distinction, but what it means is that if you've only accepted one dose of vaccine under those clinical trial protocols and you have an adverse event, and you decide to drop it out, or they gently suggest that you shouldn't take the second dose, that information about the adverse events that you received — which would have made you at even higher risk for the second dose — is lost. It's not included in the safety analysis.

This is a classic way to manipulate safety data in clinical research, and it's strictly forbidden. So, the FDA is onto that trick. Normally, if I was to do that, I would get slapped down immediately. Why they allow these large drug companies to do this (if, in fact they did) — and you can't claim that Pfizer didn't know what they were doing — is beyond me.

Now that we know about the adverse events associated with the cardiotoxicity in adolescents and the damage to the heart and the deaths associated with that, people can start to do calculations based on official CDC data, [but] those data are flawed.

They probably under-report the true adverse event rate by about a 100-fold if you're relying on the various historic analysis information. But you can look at those data. And if you're a data scientist, you can do the calculations that the CDC is not doing and not disclosing to us about risk benefit.

The ones that I've seen done by well-trained and highly experienced specialists, people that work for the insurance industry that do this for a living … come out literally upside down."

If the clinical trials did not include patients dropped after Dose 1 in the safety analysis, this would indicate a "per protocol" safety analysis was performed, and therefore that the safety data analyses leading to the emergency use authorizations were not based on rigorous safety assessments.

Multiple patients claiming to have been included in COVID-19 clinical trials have also reported on social media that their reports were excluded from final safety analyses, although this cannot be verified.

Risks Significantly Outweigh Benefits

A study7 posted July 7, 2021, which looked at deaths occurring in children in the U.K. during the first 12 months of the pandemic, found 99.995% of children diagnosed with COVID-19 survived.

By July 19, 2021, in the United States, a total of 335 children under 18 had died with a COVID-19 diagnosis on their death certificate.8 An analysis by Marty Makary and colleagues at Johns Hopkins, together with FAIR Health, showed none of the children under 18 who died and were diagnosed with COVID-19 between April and August 2020 were free of preexisting medical conditions such as cancer.9

Now, while the average healthy child has a minuscule chance of dying from COVID-19, and their risk of developing heart inflammation from the COVID jab is also quite low, the risk associated with the injection is still significantly greater than any risk associated with the natural infection. As explained by Malone:

"That ratio comes out suggesting that there will be more lives lost to receipt of the 'vaccine' in a universal vaccine campaign than there would be if all those kids were infected by SARS-CoV-2. This upside-down ratio appears to extend or very close to equivalent at least up to the age of 30.

So, we're in a position where the data that we have are admittedly flawed. Is that by intent or what? From my standpoint, the data are the data, so I can't smoke out what somebody within health and human services intended to do, but I can look at the data, and others can.

And the data absolutely do not support a positive risk-benefit ratio for vaccination of infants through young adults, based on any normal criteria. So then why are they doing this crazy stuff? It seems to all be wrapped around the axle of the need to justify universal vaccination.

I argue that this is actually a mid-century policy that goes back to the '50s and the '60s polio vaccine campaign, when the government and world health authorities established a position that it was OK to lie, to withhold information about risk for vaccines, because to have the full spectrum of information about the risks of vaccines would cause people to not accept the vaccine.

So, 'Shut up, we know it's best for you and don't question us' is a firmly authoritarian position. It is intrinsically authoritarian and paternalistic. It's exactly the kind of stuff that George Orwell wrote about in his book '1984.' It was a warning … of how governments and authoritarian structures will behave and do behave."

Denial of Vaccine Dangers Has Been Federal Policy Since 1984

Ironically, Malone points out that in the 1984 Federal Register,10 it's stated that posting information into the federal register about vaccine risks that jeopardizes vaccine I uptake shall be suppressed.

"So, it's a clear federal policy going back to 1984," Malone says. "This is the way they're going to handle things. And they're going to handle it with the noble lie of saying, 'No, there are no risks and what we're doing is fully justified' …

I don't think we have to go to imagining some grand conspiracy at Davos between certain individuals. I think this is an emergent phenomena of the intersection of old-school thinking about information management and new-school capabilities and technologies.

I think the CDC, HHS, WHO, and Wellcome Trust or Bill & Melinda Gates foundation, etcetera, have just grossly misread the population, certainly in the United States. And so now we're in a position where before, according to Del Bigtree, there was about 1% to 2% of people that self-identified as anti-vaxxers, and we're now [above] 40%. Clearly, about 40 to 50% of the population are just dug in. They're not going to accept these vaccines.

The White House now finds it necessary to have a special group to identify and target 12 American citizens for what they believe to be vaccine disinformation, and to make a big public press announcement about it. Don't they have anything else to do? It seems like the world has got bigger problems than Dr. Mercola, but what do I know?

The whole thing is mind-bending. And a lot of people, including many Europeans, are really lit up over this. They remember. European intellectuals are very aware of the dynamics that happened in Germany in the 1930s … I think this could be a turning point in a lot of things."

The Powers That Be Have Been Given Free Reign

While Malone is not interested in speculating about the intentions behind all this malfeasance, he's intimately familiar with the power of Big Pharma to manipulate governments. As detailed in other articles, several of the COVID injection makers have a rich history of illegal activity and unethical behavior, and now they have been given free reign to do as they please.

They're been completely absolved from liability if and when something goes wrong with these injections, and governments are enticing and bullying citizens to participate in Big Pharma's experiment.

"If you give that kind of liberty and power to a global multinational and absolve them of any accountability, they will serve their stockholders," Malone says. "They are not geared to serving the rest of us, whatever they may say in their press releases.

That's just how big pharma behaves, and we've chosen this model. Messaging having to do with alternative treatments and the importance of wellness, those are not consistent with the 'Take this pill, pay your price and shut up' kind of business model.

Personally, I think that Mr. Gates and his foundation have done enormous irreparable harm to world health community through his actions and his own personal biases. He has really distorted global public health. At some point, there will be books written about this, and I'm sure an enormous number of Ph.D. theses will be granted. But meanwhile, we all have to live with it."

[notebooknebula]

Matt McKeever, BRRRR Investing

https://www.jayconner.com/matt-mckeever-brrrr-investing/ Matt McKeever is a CPA & Real Estate Investor. He implements the BRRRR investing strategy in London Ontario. https://www.youtube.com/c/MattMcKeever/ You'll learn how to analyze multifamily properties and how to maximize your return on investment through strategic renovations that will allow you to increase rents, your equity and your cashflow!

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Jay Conner (00:10): Well, hello there and welcome to another episode of real estate investing with Jay Conner. I'm Jay Conner, your host, and also known as the Private Money Authority. If you're brand new here to listening on iTunes or Google play, or you may be watching and listening to the live stream right now on one of our YouTube channels or Facebook and you're new to Real Estate Investing with Jay Conner show. We talk about all things, real estate, how to find deals, how to get them funded, how to sell them fast, how to automate your business. So you're actually running your business and it's not running you. And since we launched the show back in June of 2018, I've had some very, very amazing guests here on the show with me, and today's no different, but before I bring my guest on, I want to let you know about what one big thing that we do here on the show. And that's talking about funding for your deals.

Jay Conner (01:04): Well, the short version of my story is, my wife, Carol Joy and I started investing in single family houses here in Eastern North Carolina, back in 2003. And the first six years that we were doing business, I relied on the local banks and mortgage companies. But in January of 2009, I was cut off from a funding, but no notice like the rest of the world. And so I was introduced to this wonderful world of private money. How to get funding for your deals that has nothing to do with your credit. Nothing to do with your verification of income. Nothing to do with your experience and how you can actually set your own rules to get funding for your real estate deals. So I've been using private money for funding ever since 2009. We've got 49 private lenders right now, funding our deals.

Jay Conner (01:55): And if you would like to learn as well about how you can get funding for your deals, the same way I do without relying on banks, then I've got a free online class for you to check out after the show. You go over after the show to www.JayConner.com/MoneyPodcast. That's JayConner.com/MoneyPodcast. There, I will teach you and reveal the five easy steps as to how you can quickly have zero funding for your deals, and very quickly having the hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars in funding.

Jay Conner (02:37): So with that, I'm just so excited to introduce to you my guest today. My guest is a CPA and a real estate investor. You don't find too many of those combinations inside the same head. So anyway, he implements this thing called the BRRRR investing strategy. And we're going to dive on that and find out what in the world that strategy is. So he primarily focuses on small apartments and commercial deals. Now he has got a very, very popular YouTube channel. That right now has over 60,000 subscribers. And we're going to tell you here in a moment, how to get over that YouTube channel and you can check him out, but on his YouTube channel, he teaches you how to analyze multifamily properties and how to maximize your return on investment through strategic innovations and renovations. That will show, that will allow you to increase your rents, increase your equity and how to increase very quickly your cash flow and these properties. And own this same YouTube channel, you'll find videos where he's teaching this ranging from renovating properties, duplexes, triplexes of all sizes, as well as dealing with student rentals his best practices for buying properties, how to manage your tenants and your portfolio of properties.

Jay Conner (04:02): So he's also going to show you on his YouTube channel, how he structures joint venture deals. How he gets funding for his deals. How he negotiates with banks, refinances properties, and of course, much more. So be sure to subscribe to his channel when we tell you about it here in a moment, and you'll be able to follow him in his pursuit of financial independence and how you can get it also as well. With that, I'm so excited to bring onto the show right now, Mr. Matt McKeever. Hello, Matt! And welcome to the show, my friend.

Matt McKeever (04:35): Thanks, Jay. Appreciate the warm introduction.

Jay Conner (04:38): Absolutely! Glad to hear you. So, you're up in Canada. Well, whereabouts in Canada?

Matt McKeever (04:43): So located London, Ontario, about two hours from Toronto, which is our big city here in Canada.

Jay Conner (04:49): I got you. Now is all of your investing these days taking place in Canada?

Matt McKeever (04:54): Yep. So right now my portfolio is exclusively in Southwestern Ontario. So within right now, actually it's pretty much all clustered in London, Ontario, which is a market with a 500,000 Metro population area. Just to kind of give you guys a rough idea. Median house price is around 350 to 400.

Jay Conner (05:14): So with everything that we're going to be talking about here on the show today, and also on your YouTube channel, do all or most of the strategies apply to doing this type of business the way you do it in the United States?

Matt McKeever (05:29): Yeah, absolutely. So if anything, the United States has maybe more friendly investor regulations in most States. So everything we do here in Canada can absolutely be replicated in the States. And in fact, sometimes it's easier because you guys have nifty little tricks, like the 10 31 exchange, which is completely nonexistent here in Canada.

Jay Conner (05:50): I got you! And that comes into play more often in the world of commercial than it does in single family homes. Right?

Matt McKeever (05:58): Absolutely! So here in Canada, unfortunately we don't have that 10 31 exchange. We can find a handful of other innovative ways to try and, you know, help us speed up the velocity of our money. But really for myself, when I first joined like a lot of investors, my biggest thing was either limited amounts of resources, right? The limited amount of my own money. And like a lot of people I had discovered private money like yourself. So we're constantly focused on how can I stretch the little bit of money I have to control the most amount of real estate as possible. And that's what really led me into that BRRRR investment strategy, where you buy a property, renovate it, you know, fix it up, bring it up to its highest, best most efficient use, then rerent it out at a higher amount, then go back to your lender and refinance and pull out the money. And I started originally doing that on small single family homes and small multi-families. And now I've just graduated to doing the exact same business model, but just with small apartment buildings, rather than like a triplex or a fourplex,

Jay Conner (06:56): I got you. Well, just in case some people aren't able to stay to the end of the show. Let's go ahead and let everybody know right now how they can find your YouTube channel. That's got all the trainings on it and et cetera, where can they go for that?

Matt McKeever (07:09): Yeah. So if you hit me up on YouTube, it's just Matt McKeever. That's M C K E E V E R. And anywhere social media, you'll find me on those platforms. So if you're not on YouTube, I'm everywhere else as well.

Jay Conner (07:24): Well, what I want us to talk about. Well, thank you for sharing that, Matt. What I want us to talk about today here on the show are really three topics. First I want to hear about your personal journey in real estate. Secondly, I want to, I want you to talk about the power of social media and how you use social media to leverage success in your business. And then thirdly, you got an interesting concept that you talk about. You don't talk that much about ROI, Return On Investment or Return On Cash. You talk about this thing talking to call return on time. So those are the three topics let's start with your personal journey, Matt, and your story.

Matt McKeever (08:03): Absolutely. So like a lot of real estate investors you know, my gateway into real estate investing the gateway drug, as I like to say it, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. That's what really started my entire journey. And in my fourth year at university, you know, I was going through for business. I was going to get my CPA license and really the reason I wanted to get into business or become an entrepreneur was to, you know, get rich. Like a lot of people. But I didn't really know what get rich meant and had no idea how to actually achieve it. And so I was speaking with one of my roommates at the time we lived in a six bedroom student rental house and I was like, Jake, your dad's rich. He owns like a big company with hundreds of employees. I was like, go ask him how we get rich.

Matt McKeever (08:49): Cause we both know we want to get rich, but we have no idea. And he actually gave us the book, Rich Dad Poor Dad. And ever since reading that book in the back of it and a list of other books to go read, I went and read every book from that as well. And just really got addicted to this idea of real estate investing and being able to build up a, you know, passive cash flowing investment portfolio. I didn't end up jumping into real estate until age 25. So from kind of 2021 discovering real estate to 25 and actually executing that I was just consuming information, trying to save up money. But also I was trying to get outside my comfort zone because all my friends and family thought I was crazy for wanting to get into real estate investing when I was already on, you know, the corporate path to that white collar job with the corner office.

Matt McKeever (09:37): At the age of 25 is when I bought my first rental property. And on my 25th birthday, I ended up making a commitment to myself. So I downloaded an app on my phone that would count down the days to my 35th birthday. And I decided to make a commitment that I would retire by the age of 35 because of real estate investing. And so I was the guy at different parties or networking events, people would say, Hey, Matt, what's new with you? What's up? I'd pull out the phone and be like, Oh 2,465 days until my 35th birthday. When I get to retire. Long story short, kept buying real estate, kept in asking them that. And instead of having to wait 10 years, I actually retired from being a CPA, a chartered accountant at the age of 31 and just went all in to real estate investing at that point.

Matt McKeever (10:22): And then from that I found like a lot of people, once I left the corporate 9-5 behind, my success in real estate actually really started hockey sticking because I had all this extra time and energy now to deploy into my real estate investing business. And in that first year of quitting my day job, I think I acquired 32 additional units that year. And then continued just to, you know, focus on different unique investment opportunities, started teaching other people about real estate investing as well. Because when I quit my day job at 31, I found it's kind of lonely. There's not a lot of other 31 year old retirees out there. And so I didn't really have a peer group to hang out with. So I decided to start writing these really long emails to my friends, you know, like 5,000 word emails, trying to explain to them how they could quit their day job in five years, if they would just invest in real estate like I did.

Matt McKeever (11:15): And I'm sure as you can imagine, your audience can imagine. No one responded to those 5,000 word emails because that's a small novella. Thankfully at the time I happened to be reading a book and the books that speak to your audience in the language they wish to be spoken to. And immediately clicked for me, the reason that I love real estate and the reason so many people are drawn to real estate investing is because it's such a tactical, you know, real investment, right? Like it's a physical thing. Unlike say paper stock or paper assets. So immediately started documenting on my YouTube channel, just how I was going about investing in real estate. So if you go back to like my very first video, you can see, I was still swinging a hammer. Like I was still sweating up in the attics, re-insulating, running duct work, stuff like that.

Matt McKeever (12:01): So really have been exposed to almost every aspect of the real estate investing journey. But at this point now what the day to day looks like is I've got a wholesaling business with five full time employees just wholesaling real estate. I've got a company that just BRRRRs apartment building. So in the last eight months or so we've acquired about 70 units in that entity and have just been BRRRRing those apartments and then also have my education and just networking, which is, you know, my YouTube channel, social media presence and a couple other little education companies. So definitely just, you know, constantly trying to level up and surround myself with like minded individuals when it comes to real estate.

Jay Conner (12:43): Now you just said, that particular entity you've been BRRRRing properties. First of all, how do you spell that? Secondly, what does it mean?

Matt McKeever (12:53): Absolutely. So B R R R R. And so it stands for Buy, Renovate, Rent, Refinance, and Repeat. And so really what that looks like is simply finding, to me the best way to explain it is you're just looking for under utilized assets and you're going to try and bring them up to their highest, best, most efficient use. So oftentimes what that looks like for me these days is we're buying an apartment building here in Ontario that maybe is being rented out for 50% of fair market value. And the landlords owned it for 10, 20 years. There's not a lot of equity and they're no longer motivated to operate it at a hundred percent efficiency or anywhere close to it. They're often approaching retirement age. So we go in there, buy the property. Then we implement strategic renovations, which again, unlike, you know, on HGTV, a lot of my YouTube fans would love to see me blowing out walls, you know, doing open concept this, that, and the other, but most of my renovations are really boring.

Matt McKeever (13:52): It's like, let's clean out all the junk. Let's paint the property. And maybe we'll put a new kitchen and bathroom tops. And so really we're just focused on what creates the highest return on investment from those dollars we're investing into the property. So in my market here in London, Ontario, specifically usually adding dishwasher to a kitchen that can increase not only the rent we can charge every month, but also in general increases the quality of tenant that we're going to be drawing from as well as say, adding laundry. If you can put in suit laundry, oftentimes in my market, I can charge between a $100 and $150 more per month in rent. And yet the cost of actually, you know, installing that laundry, depending upon the layout of the unit might be $2,500. So a very fast payback period in regards to when we can earn back that initial investment. But because we've increased the rent amounts.

Matt McKeever (14:44): Now the actual capitalization rates of the property, you know, is going to revalue the property at a higher amount as well, if we the same cap rate. So again, what I'm really focused on is just taking underutilized assets, bringing them them up to their highest, best, most efficient use. Then re-renting them out for top dollar. And once we've re-rented it out for top dollar, you know, our income statement looks a lot more attractive, which means the lender and the appraiser is going to reappraise the property and refinance the property a much higher value. And ideally with our business model, if you're doing it right, once you're done this BRRRR and with the larger apartment buildings, it's usually taken us about 18 months to do it from start to finish. What you're going to end up doing is being able to extract all the initial capital you invested in. So the idea here is, you know, if I can refinance at a 75% loan to value, I maybe buy the property for, let's say a million dollars, put 500,000 renovations, but then get it to reappraise at 2 million. Well at a 75% loan to value, I actually will get $1.5 million in new financing, right from the property, which means I can pay off the entire acquisition costs. So that's really the base model here is to implement what we call a perfect BRRRR.

Jay Conner (15:58): I love it! I never heard of the BRRRR strategy. I love it! Now, one thing you were just talking about was buying the properties. That's the first letter in the BRRRR strategy. So here in the US there's a popular website called LoopNet. What are, what are some of your favorite strategies these days for locating these under you know, these underperforming assets?

Matt McKeever (16:26): Yeah, so there's a lot of different strategies. One thing that is very different about the U S market and the Canadian market is, in the U S market, you guys have the freedom of information act. Here in Canada, we've got the protection information. It's so like, it's literally the exact opposite. So you guys are all about free information. We're all about keeping it all secluded and hidden and private. So honestly my best way is like personal networking. So I'm happy to share some tips here, but it's something that doesn't seem to resonate with a lot of people my age or my generation, which actually makes for a great opportunity for anyone that's willing to actually just build relationships, build rapport. And so, like, we actually target a certain type of realtor even to network with. Like the realtor I want to network with is he's like, realistically, they're above the age of 55.

Matt McKeever (17:21): They've been in business for at least 15 years. And what we're doing is we're approaching those realtors and being like, Hey, who have you sold the property to? Like a large apartment building to 10 years or longer ago? They're sitting on a ton of equity. I want to go make them an offer and make them a ton of money and make that offer through you and have you make commission off of it. So we're very focused on trying to structure win-win opportunities when possible, and make sure that everyone eats because we find when make sure that everyone else profits from a deal we'd done, they get addicted to that cycle and they want to get us more deals. But again, we're very boots on the ground and often focused on doing things that our competition won't do. So everyone loves the idea of hiring a VA out of the Philippines and hitting them, them hitting the phones for a thousand calls a day.

Matt McKeever (18:10): But what we'll do is I'll literally send one of my employees to stake out an apartment building, and they'll just park in front and literally talk to every person going in that building, being like, who's the owner? Can I get the owner's phone number? And we find that usually, you know, we ask enough, we will get that owner's phone number. And a lot of the apartment buildings I buy are literally through that process of, originally it was myself or a business partner just taking it out. Now we have employees taking out the apartment buildings, but we found that that's the best way to really get deals. Because if an owner has already thought about selling the property, contacted a realtor and listed on the market, they're now focused on just getting top dollar. And if they're solely focused on getting top dollar, that's fine for them, but it's usually not going to work for me and my business model. So we're often focused on not finding sellers, but actually creating sellers by making what we call blind offers. I don't even really know what their motivations are, but I know that they've owned it for so long that they're probably sitting on massive amounts of equity. And so I'm hoping that I can present them with a unique offer that they haven't even really considered. And, you know, then we can get that conversation rolling.

Jay Conner (19:17): So do you have your people stake out properties that looks just on the outside like it could use, you know some rehab and renovations and really be brought up to increase, you know, rents or whatever, or do you approach it differently? By again, looking for someone that probably has owned this property for a long time or which comes first? They've owned it for a long time or it looks like it could use some renovations or both?

Matt McKeever (19:47): Yeah, we're definitely open to either. In general, the way we're usually going to like again, because we don't have like easy databases of information. It can be very cumbersome to really figure out who's owned what property for how long on a grand scale. I can definitely look it up individually, but there's no way for me to like print off, you know, a giant data set. So in general, we're more focused on the building first and then doing our research afterwards. So literally what I'll do, and again, nothing fancy here, but I'll go to my local cities, zoning map, look at the zoning, look for a high density residential. And then I'll go on Google satellite and look just from the satellite view and find apartments, buildings, right? Identify the apartment buildings. Then literally go on Google street view. Sometimes on Google street view, you can see the property manager sign on the building.

Matt McKeever (20:40): So we'll immediately just call the property management firm then. If we can't find that, that's when I'm probably going to send someone to stake out the building. Get in contact with the tenants and find out who manages it and how. But at the same time, we've got a lot of other strategies. So here in Canada, Kijiji is really popular in the States. I think it's more often Craigslist is the, you know, the online classifieds the people are going to use. But I also love going on Kijiji, looking through the for rent ads. And you just look for the landlords that are beaten down and they're just sick of it, right? So like there's no good photos taken. And sometimes I don't know what it's like in the States, but in Canada you can read it like, the landlord will write all in caps, like no debt deeds. And that's like the title of their Ad. And like, this guy doesn't want to be a landlord anymore. This guy wants to sell to me, even if he doesn't know it yet.

Jay Conner (21:31): I love it! When you said a moment ago, something really, really important to your, the success of your business is networking and relationships. Well, that ties right into how you're able to leverage social media. So would you share with my audience here strategies and tips that you're doing these days to leverage social media and to really how you harness the power of it?

Matt McKeever (21:57): Yeah. And so the first thing I think that we need to really discuss is why even care about social media, right? And I find a lot of investors think that it's simply a distraction. And if you use it as a distraction, it absolutely is if you use it as a business tool, it absolutely is. So you're right. Either way, it really just comes down to how you use it. But for me, what's really powerful about social media is having that one to many conversation before the advent of social media and online networking and things of that nature. Realistically, the only one to many conversation we could have as real estate investors is going out to your local real estate investment group. Right. And you could maybe go, and if you were lucky, you could get up on stage and maybe talk for half an hour, give a little presentation or breakdown about what you're doing.

Matt McKeever (22:44): And that group maybe met once a month. So maybe once a year, you could get in their lineup, get up on stage and talk, or you had to become the host of the meet-up group in order to have that one to many conversation on a reoccurring basis. Whereas on my YouTube channel. And again, like my YouTube channel, isn't massive by YouTube standards, but it's important for what I'm focused on. And what I'm focused on is really talking to my core audience, which is Canadian real estate investors, and then just real estate investors in general. And so even with just like 60,000 subs on my YouTube channel, any given day, I'm averaging 4,000 to 5,000 views on my YouTube channel. The average view on my YouTube channel is about seven minutes long. So I view that as myself being able to have, you know, 4,000 to 5,000 conversations that are seven minutes long, every single day.

Matt McKeever (23:33): Well, that's more minutes than there already is available on the day. So right away that one to many conversations, extremely powerful. But even more so as real estate investors, it's not like we necessarily have to go, you don't need millions of followers or millions of views in order to have a very effective business model. You really just need, like for a lot of real estate investors, their business would be changed if they had five good private money partners, right? Or five private money lenders. And you can really build up a relationship with those people through social media. So a lot of people, they decide that they want to lend their money to me before I ever even make an ask. And that's simply because they're able to watch and see my projects. They get to see me interact on interviews or go live on Instagram or Facebook and just have conversations.

Matt McKeever (24:20): And they get to build a personal relationship with you. And something that we all need to remind ourselves as people like doing business with people they like. And so if you're not putting yourself out there on social media, if you're not trying to present, you know, your story, your image, your business model, you're not giving anyone even the chance to fall in love with you and your story and want to invest in you or your business. So for me, there's just so much power when it comes to social media, but I know I've just been kind of talking high level. So specifics. If any of your listeners here are brand new to social media, they're intimidated by the idea. They don't have a lot of time to invest into social media, pick one platform and spend at least 80% of your social media efforts on that one platform.

Matt McKeever (25:03): Now, if you're a small investor and you're looking just to get a couple money partners or finding say two or three money partners with six figures or more to invest would be a game changer. I personally would focus on LinkedIn and I would literally just write one or two blog posts a week about my business model. Understand that's never going to go viral. You'll probably be lucky to get more than a couple of dozen views, but that's all it takes. All you really want to do is really cultivate a strong relationship with a handful of money lenders. Now, for myself, there's value in the education and email list and all that stuff. But for a lot of beginner, real estate investors, you don't need that. You just need to build a handful of relationships and still social media is going to be a faster means to that end. Than going out to your local real estate investing group.

Jay Conner (25:49): That's awesome! And then to wrap up Matt, I want us to hang out a few minutes on your view and your take on return on time versus return on instead of ROI, et cetera. So what's your take on return on time and why is that so important?

Matt McKeever (26:08): Yeah, it's something that I think a lot of investors are looted by at the start. And so in general, I kind of view this evolution of real estate investors and their sophistication based upon the metrics they talk about. So CPA by nature. So kind of a numbers nerd and, you know, a ratio nerd to begin with. But in general, when brand new people come to real estate investing, I find they talk about ROI, you know, return on investment. And they're really impressed by the return on investment real estate can generate. Then once they get a little bit more sophisticated, they really start appreciating and understanding leverage. And we hear them talking about things like cash on cash returns, and really then it's about the velocity of their money. Then as people continue to graduate and evolve as investors, maybe they start looking at larger multifamily properties.

Matt McKeever (26:55): At which point in time, they usually start talking about cap rates or IRR. The internal rate of return. And again, all of these metrics are useful, but at the end of the day, what really draws us to real estate investing in my opinion, is the ability to have a high return on time. And that's what I'm really focused on these days as an investor and I'd encourage anyone else that's in real estate investing to start viewing things through that lens. And so one of the best examples I can give is wholesaling real estate. Here in Canada, it's still a relatively new concept. It's maybe only five years old that people have really been doing it to any serious capacity. And so it's got a little bit of a negative stigma still here in Canada. However, if you look at what you can accomplish with say, wholesaling versus flipping a property, usually the return on time, even if the total profit is lower on that wholesale deal, let's say you can wholesale a deal for $10,000, or you could flip the same property and make $50,000.

Matt McKeever (27:52): Well, the bigger question to me is how long does it take to wholesale assign that piece of paper versus actually flipping it. Well for the average person here in Canada, assigning it, you're probably going to assign it in one to two weeks. So your return on time, let's say it took you even a month. Well, your return on time is $10,000 per month. Whereas if we're going to flip the property, well again, we have to tie up the property. We have to wait for it to close. Then we close on it. Then we have to do our renovations, fix it up. Then we have to put it up for sale. Then we have to sell it. Then we have to wait for it to close. Well, oftentimes even if you're going to make $50,000, that entire process from start to finish, it might be five or six months.

Matt McKeever (28:31): Well, at that point in time, you're looking at very similar return on time, but your perception of risk is higher as well because with the wholesale deal, we make the money before ever even closing on the deal. While we're flipping there's a speculative piece to it because we don't really know what's going to sell for, until it sells. So for myself and a lot of people that I'm trying to help level up as real estate investors these days. I really want them to focus on the highest return on time investments. And this is also really important because a lot of us, when we first get started as investors, a lot of us swing the hammers ourselves. We clean up the units ourselves. We paint the units ourselves. But oftentimes those are the lowest value skills, right? Like you could probably find someone to pay $10, $15, $20 an hour to clean up or paint the unit. Whereas you, as the investor would likely be better served going and finding the next deal or going and talking with your next private money partner. And really building those relationships and send yourself up to do more deals rather than trying to squeeze every deal for every penny. We're better off to go find more deals. So this idea of return on time is just really being cognizant and not getting distracted by one piece of the puzzle, but really looking at the puzzle as a whole, When it comes to our investing and investment strategies.

Jay Conner (29:46): Excellent! Thank you, Matt. Well, folks, go ahead and check out and subscribe to Matt's YouTube channel at YouTube/MattMcKeever and that's M A T T M C K E E V E R. Matt. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. I really enjoyed having you.

Matt McKeever (30:07): Thanks, Jay. Really appreciate it.

Jay Conner (30:09): Alright! There you have it folks. Another show. I'm Jay Conner, The Private Money Authority. Wishing you all the best. And here's to taking your real estate investing business to the next level. We'll see you on the next show. Bye for now.

[purplesurveys]

1157

survey by hxcsingingsk8r

Phone Scavenger Hunt

First off, what phone do you have? I have an iPhone 8.

And what provider do you use? It’s a local one you wouldn’t know about, called Globe.

How long have you had your current phone? I can’t remember if it would be 3 or 4 years this 2021. Either way, it’s definitely been a while and I’ve been itching to upgrade. It’s too early to make such a big purchase, though.

Do you have any cases for it? Describe them. I have a clear case that I bought last year. Before that, I had a pink Otterbox case that I managed to destroy even though Otterbox is normally known for its durability. I just have a very unique ability to wreck everything I’ve ever owned lol.

How old were you when you got your first cellphone? I was technically 6, but it was meant to be a present for my 7th birthday. We threw a birthday party a month in advance because my dad had to fly back abroad for work before my actual birthday, but we wanted him to be present at the celebration so we decided throwing a party early was the best route.

What about your first smartphone? [If the answer is different] It was an iPhone 5S.

How old are you now? Dunno what this has to do with the theme of the survey but I am now 22.

Okay, move onto the scavenger hunt part

What is your lock screen picture of? It’s of Kim Seon Ho at a restaurant, lmao.

Home screen? It’s one of the shots from a recent promotional photoshoot Hayley did for Good Dye Young.

How many pictures are thre currently on your phone? This question just made me so anxious hahaha. I have way too many photos; and upon checking, it turns out I currently have 6,266. My god do I need to clean up my camera roll this weekend.

How many videos? I have 227. I have no idea it’s gotten to be this many; I barely use my phone to take videos. I’ll go ahead and delete some of them right now, just to give my phone (and its storage) space to breathe.

What is your most recent picture of? It’s a work thing...I guess I’ll explain it so it can make more sense. So one of our clients has got this Lent campaign going on, and to spread word about it we’ve tapped a handful of food bloggers to try out the offers themselves and post about their experience on social media. Now that we’re in the middle of Holy Week they’ve gone ahead and uploaded their own posts, and I’m in charge of taking screenshots so I can show to the client that the execution had been successful.

And the most recent video? It’s a private vlog. Every Sunday, or at least every other Sunday I take a few minutes to sit down and do a weekly video thing where I talk about my ~mental~ and ~emotional~ status, and it’s basically a way to be in touch with myself and keep track of my progress. Who knows, maybe I’ll actually get to uploading them one day.

Do you have any albums? If so, of what? Yeah. I have one for Cooper, one for Kimi, and a bunch of tiny albums I’ve made where I compiled 4–5 photos of friends to post on their birthdays.

What pictures have you favorited? I have a lot of favorited photos. There’s no required category for me to label them as such.

Do you have any shared albums with friends or family or work? No. I’m not sure if I can do that, or how to do it if it is allowed.

Do you have any alarms set? For what time and for what occasions? I have a bunch of alarms but only because they’re archived into the Clock app and I just haven’t gotten around to deleting them. When I was still new at my work, I used to have alarms set for certain work tasks I have to take note of every week – but now that I’ve gotten into the groove of things, I don’t need the alarms to be reminded about them anymore.

Check your weather app, what is the weather and temperature where you live? It says ‘Mostly Clear’ and shows a temperature of 26ºC.

Do you have the YouTube app? Do you have your own channel? I do have the app and my own account, but I never use it to post videos. It’s nice to have my own channel so that my homepage can be tailored to my interests.

Do you have an email app? Which one do you use? I just have the default Email app that comes with iOS, but I never use it because it’s so wonky. It doesn’t refresh new emails and it takes forever when it does, and it doesn’t always show the full thread of email conversations. If I absolutely need to check my email for something I usually have to pull out my laptop.

Does it say that there is an update available on your phone or any apps? Yes, it reminds me everyday hahaha. I don’t update unless Apple has been planning a big revamp with new features, though; and if the updates are just to address bugs, I disregard the reminders.

Go into your contacts, how many contacts do you have total? It says I have 178.

Name all of your contacts under the letter M: Feels a tad bit invasive, so I’ll just name five people I have under M: Lui, Kim, Patrice, Danika, and Andi.

Name all of your contacts under the letter U: I don’t have anyone under U.

Do you have any contacts that are businesses rather than people? Which ones? No, I don’t really use text to contact businesses. If I wanted to inquire or order from one, I usually head to their social media page.

Go into your notes, how many notes do you have saved? This is another one I have a hoarding problem with lol. My phone says I currently have 561 notes, though I’m fairly certain the biggest chunk of it comes from minutes I’ve taken down from work meetings. It was a whole lot less when I was still in school.

What kinds of things do you save in your notes? Like I said, I use Notes for taking down minutes from meetings. There are also a few surveys on there, from times I didn’t have internet and couldn’t post them on here.

Do you have any voice memos saved? What of? Yep. Some of them were recordings I had to do for journalism classes I was assigned to do voiceovers; some are interviews, also from my journ class; and the rest are of me rambling.

Do you ever use the calculator app? Pretty frequently for work.

Do you ever use the Maps app? Not really. If I needed directions, I would check out Waze for that.

Do you have any health/fitness apps? Which ones? I still have the Nike Training app from the very brief time I wanted to start working out earlier this year.

Do you have the Instacart app? The what now? I’ve never even heard of that.

What about a delivery service like Postmates, Uber Eats, Grubhub, Doordash? I have the McDelivery app for McDonald’s, but I also have other general delivery apps like Grab, Lalamove, and Transportify.

Do you have something like Venmo, Cashapp, or Paypal? I have the Paypal app but I never use it. I also have a couple of e-wallet apps just in case I’d have to use them as a payment method, since some businesses  I purchase from prefer certain ones. Ultimately, though, I use Grab’s mobile wallet the most often.

Do you use Bitmoji? I think I did before? I never used it all that regularly though. Didn’t see the point.

What other keyboards do you use besides English? Any? Filipino, Korean, and Emoji.

Which social media network apps do you have? Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Tumblr, TikTok, and Snapchat. So I guess I have all the main ones?

If you have Instagram, what is your handle and how many followers? I have a very private one I only use for work. I didn’t want it to have any followers but at present there’s Angela (because she asked to follow it this week) and Bea (idk why).

What do you typically post on the various social media platforms? The only ones I regularly post on are Twitter and Facebook, and on either I share life updates (if there are any) and memes; though on Facebook I have to watch out what kind of memes I share and make sure they aren’t too offensive because I’m friends with relatives, workmates, and media on there lmao. But on Twitter, I basically have no filter.

Do you make TikTok videos? I don’t make any myself, but I do enjoy going through the app.

Do you only add people you know on Facebook? Yes, for the most part. I’ve taken to adding people as long as they’re from UP or my high school even though I’ve never met them as well, but if I sense that they only added me to try and sell me insurance OR try to get me into MLM, then it’s an instant unfriend for me.

Do you have an app that tracks Instagram followers? No, because I don’t need to track my Instagram followers. I’m off the radar as off the radar gets.

Do you have a Snapchat? Yeah, it’s still on my phone just because but I literally never touch it anymore.

Do you ever take selfies with filters? What app's filters do you use? Eh, just before. I don’t really take selfies anymore, period.

Do you use any apps like Depop or Poshmark or Etsy? No. Out of these three I’ve only ever heard of Etsy, too.

What messengers do you use to talk to people? Any besides just texting? I have Messenger to stay in touch with family and friends; Whatsapp and Viber for work; and Telegram just in case my friends want to play games.

Do you have any photo editing apps? Which ones? I have this app called Foodie that has some pretty filters. Otherwise, since I’m not on Instagram anyway I’m never on the lookout for photo editing apps; no one ever filters their photos on Facebook and Twitter lol.

Do you have any games? Which ones? I do have a ton of games on my phone. I never play any of them, but I keep them just in case I get bored enough to start revisiting them. I have word games, drinking games, games similar to Heads Up! where one person will have to guess the word on the screen while the phone is on their forehead, and gimmicky games like 1010! and Candy Crush haha.

Do you have any rideshare apps like Lyft or Uber? I have Grab, which is a rideshare, parcel delivery, food delivery, and online grocery app all in one.

Now go to the actual phone app, whose phone numbers are saved as favorites? I don’t tag any of my contacts as favorites.

Who was your most recent outgoing call to? I can’t recognize the number, so it was probably a Transportify driver that I called to give him directions to my house.

Who was your most recent incoming call from? I also can’t recognize the number, but this time he was most likely a Grab driver.

Who was your most recent missed call from? Again, can’t recognize the number HAHAA

Why did you miss that call? On purpose? Were you sleeping? Busy? My phone is on silent 24/7, so I must have missed it while I was working.

Who is your most recent voicemail from and what's it regarding? We don’t have voicemail in the Philippines.

What was the last thing you Googled or searched on your phone? Candle tunneling and how to fix it.

What music app do you use? Apple Music? Spotify? Something else? I use Spotify, but I also availed of a 3-month trial on Apple Music earlier this year just because. I think it’s supposed to end soon but I have no plans to shift.

What playlists have you made on there? I have playlists called, “robyn discovers kpop,” “winding down,” “angst,” “not my loss,” and my personal favorite, “paramore but fuck you.”

Lastly, what is the most recent song/album you've added to your collection? What Type of X - Jessi.