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glassgrasslunchtime · 3 years ago

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beginner’s guide to getting into non-fate type-moon works

Hello, hello, hello! With all the buzz about the Tsukihime Remake, I thought that now would be the perfect time to help people get into other fantastic Type-Moon works that, perhaps, have flown under many radars on account of not making billions of dollars like FGO.

Therefore, this post will list every single non-Fate Type-Moon work that I can think of, a few bullet points as to why you might like them, a more complete summary, and then detail how to find them. If you could read this post and walk away with even one more interest, then my work is a success, and I would be delighted.

A note before we get started: Where possible, I will provide links to buy these directly from Type-Moon. However, for most of these, that’s just not possible. Piracy, it has been said, is a matter of access. If Type-Moon will not provide any way to access this media legitimately, better to experience it illegitimately than not at all, I think. If Type-Moon deigns to make it accessible, that is the preferred way, and I will refrain from encouraging piracy; where they do not, I say there is no moral or ethical dilemma there.

I have checked every download myself, and they all came up clean. That doesn’t necessarily mean there are no viruses, it could be that Malwarebytes couldn’t find them. It should be safe, but exercise appropriate caution.

Oh, and if I’ve accidentally given bad or dangerous advice, feel free to yell at me and I’ll change it if necessary.

(21/08/25: Updated a couple of links, revised some phrasing in the April Witch section)

(23/12/18): Removed instructions on pirating Mahoyo in favour of official release, added link to the Tsukiweb Tsukihime browser port, added section on Melty Blood Type Lumina

Without further ado:

MAHOUTSUKAI NO YORU

Do you enjoy stories about modern day witches?

Do you enjoy period pieces about the tail end of the 1980s?

Do you like inventive monster design based on classic nursery rhymes?

Do you wanna see some of the best visuals in any Type-Moon work?

Do you want to see (a remake of) Nasu’s first novel?

Would you relate to a bad-tempered teenage witch?

Do you enjoy Suffering because many questions were left unanswered to make room for two sequels that vanished into the ether?

Then Mahoutsukai no Yoru (Mahoyo for short) is absolutely the Visual Novel for you!

Mahoutsukai no Yoru (officially anglicized as “Witch on the Holy Night” but more literally translating to “Magician’s Night”) stars Aoko Aozaki, a temperamental newbie magus with a mean streak; her mentor and best... friend...?, an icy, traditionalist witch named Alice Kuonji; and a painfully naive country boy named Soujuurou Shizuki who is endearingly oblivious and thoroughly sweet and nearly gets himself killed multiple times due to not understanding how things like “the big city” “modern technology” and “windows” work.

And they were roommates. Oh my god, they were roommates.

The story begins with Aoko and Alice living together in a “haunted” mansion on the hill overlooking Misaki Town. For the past nearly two years, Alice has been teaching Aoko (who had quite suddenly been selected as her family’s heir over her sister, who had been heir apparent up to then) magecraft. In this time they’ve formed a fascinating bond in spite of (or because of?) their clashing personalities and occasional homicide attempts. Meanwhile, Soujuurou, living on his own, has just arrived in the city from his tiny mountain town with no electricity or modern convenience at all, and is having some difficulties fitting in due to the insurmountable culture clash. Aoko... does not get along with him. At all. Firstly because she had to go to school on a day off to show him around on only a couple hours’ sleep, and then because he was simply too oblivious and sweet-tempered to notice how mad at him she was because of that.

Anyway, things happen. First, a couple of chapters of sweet slice-of-life. And then Aoko and Alice are discovered by an ordinary person while destroying the familiars of a rogue magus. The unknown person escapes before they can be identified and the witches conclude that, to keep their secrets as magi, that person will have to die. Meanwhile, Soujuurou, while out late at night, happened across what he believes to be a murder - two young girls mysteriously burning a man to death in the park...

Mahoyo is... really, truly incredible. The writing is well-done (especially the character dynamics), the atmosphere is strong, the slice of life is delightful and the action is cool... and the presentation is magnificent. I don’t think I can get across in words just how incredible it is, so please do give it a chance yourself.

The official English localization can be purchased for PS4 or Nintendo Switch on their respective digital storefronts, or on Steam at https://store.steampowered.com/app/2052410/WITCH_ON_THE_HOLY_NIGHT/

KARA NO KYOUKAI

Do you enjoy stories about mystical detective work?

Do you enjoy stories that are heavy on the buddhist and taoist symbolism?

do you enjoy stories with a lot of odd and interesting philosophy and psychology?

Do you enjoy stories examining the innermost natures of human beings and how souls are constructed?

Would you enjoy a story about what it means to live, the value of death, and the importance of compassion and reaching out?

Do you enjoy stories about fundamentally messed-up people and one normal dude struggling to get by?

Do you think Nasu’s loose grasp on how psychoactive drugs like weed actually work is really funny?

Do you want to watch some genuinely fantastic animation?

Do you think fancy-looking magic eyes are cool as hell?

Would you relate to a woman struggling to figure out her identity in the wake of a long coma and the death of her other self?

Then you should absolutely check out Kara no Kyoukai (”Rakkyo” for short)!

Kara no Kyoukai (meaning “Boundary of the Void”) takes place in the run-down and rusty Mifune City, and stars Shiki Ryougi, a yakuza princess with a catlike personality and terrifying supernatural powers, Touko Aozaki, a capricious, spiteful, duplicitous magus with extraordinary talent and skill, and Mikiya Kokutou, the aforementioned normal dude; they form a sort of supernatural detective agency called Garan no Dou. Together, they fight crime well, mostly they go broke a lot because Touko won’t stop impulse-buying useless crap on Dark Amazon.

I’m not shitting you, "Dark Amazon” is literally something Nasu has called it. Despite the name, I can’t imagine it’s less ethical than Light Amazon...

Anyway, in between going broke, they investigate and put an end to supernatural phenomena, especially dangerous people with mystic powers. The first movie/novel, for instance, is about Garan no Dou investigating a series of suicides who all jumped off the same building despite having no other relation, and whose death was mysteriously foretold by their ghosts, hovering above the building since even before they jumped.

It’s a lot of fun. It’s also animated by Ufotable, an animation studio whose work I’m sure Fate fans are quite familiar with! If you’re not, then allow to tell you that Ufotable’s work is among the best of the best. Good, good, good stuff.

If you’re coming from FGO, you’re probably at least a little familiar with Shiki, since she’s, y’know, in that game.

Be aware of explicit subject matter such as graphic violence, incest, and sexual assault.

I’ve heard the fanmade translations of the novels are not very good, but have no real frame of reference myself, so I cannot recommend for or against them. The anime adaptation, however, I can absolutely vouch for the quality of, minor flaws and the entire sixth movie notwithstanding. There’s also a manga adaptation, but having read only the first chapter, I can’t speak for its quality (and the scanlation seemed pretty bad) but it does seem to have some fun nods to Mahoyo and also Shiki wearing leather pants.

Rakkyo is strange, baffling, maddening, and absolutely beautiful. It’s a dark, twisted, and wonderful experience.

... as a side note, release order and chronological order are not the same. Watch in release order. I mean, it’s not like Type-Moon published it in that order by accident! Release order is the experience the story was designed for! Well, there are people who will probably get more out of the experience watching it in chronological, but unless you’re absolutely certain you’re one of those people, my recommendation is firmly release order.

If you want to watch Kara No Kyoukai, then you can find it on Crunchyroll at https://www.crunchyroll.com/the-garden-of-sinners

If you want to read the manga, it can be found at https://mangadex.org/title/6d4e768d-d68a-449f-8983-f7acbc160d9c

If you want to read the novels, then they can be found at https://emptyboundaries.wordpress.com/2011/07/25/kara-no-kyokai-translations-2/

TSUKIHIME

Do you enjoy stories about vampires?

Do you enjoy a story that despite its heavy death thematics is more of a Memento Vivere than a Memento Mori?

Do you enjoy stories about vampires?

Do you enjoy stories with heavy themes of personal identity where almost every character is desperately trying to rebuild their sense of identity after a tragic backstory and/or maintain their identity in spite of their fundamental nature?

Do you enjoy watching the viewpoint character repeatedly spiral in and out of complete insanity?

Do you enjoy stories about vampires?

Do you enjoy stories about a person’s whole life being upended and revealed as nothing but lies?

Would you relate to a lazy, unambitious teenage boy with an incredibly fragile and easily-influenced sense of identity?

Do you enjoy Suffering because most of the sequels and spin-offs were put on hold or cancelled until the remake comes out, and the remake was announced in 2008 and still doesn’t have a release date? NEVER MIND, SUMMER 2021 BABY

Do you enjoy Suffering because the remake will only contain 2/5ths of the original VNs routes to begin with, and no word on when the remaining three and the promised new sixth route will arrive?

Then Tsukihime might just be up your alley. Your bloodstained, corpse-filled, dead-end back alley.

Tsukihime (literally translating to “Moon Princess”) is about Shiki Tohno, a high school boy who for eight years has been cursed with a horrifying and self-destructive power. But really, he’s a normal kid - loves his foster family, goes to school each day, sits at the back of the class, hangs out with his one friend. Normal stuff, right? And then his dad (his real dad who disinherited him, not the foster dad) dies, and his little sister, the heir, calls him back to his childhood home. And one dissasociative fugue later, he’s a murderer - followed a woman to her apartment, used his powers to cut her apart. The next morning, as he’s walking to school and contemplating turning himself in, he finds that same woman waiting for him at the gates. Overnight, his life goes from pleasant to a waking nightmare, and his home, Misaki Town (Souya City in the remake), seems as if to transform from a slow, sunny place into a dark, surreal, den of monsters.

Also, if you do decide to give Tsukihime a chance, there’s something I’d like you to know: The five story routes are divided into “Near Side” and “Far Side” which are very different experiences. Unless my memory is very wrong, the VN forces you to do the Arcueid route, a Near Side route, first, but if you don’t like it, please try either the Akiha or Hisui route before you drop it entirely - as Far Side routes, they are extremely different experiences (and personally, I think they’re leagues better).

Also, if for one reason or another you cannot read the VN but still want to give it a shot, read the manga instead! They have their own individual virtues - the manga follows the Arc route (with details from the Akiha route mixed in) and is more of a complete story than any one route, but much less of a complete story than the full five, with multiple important characters left by the wayside out of necessity. It’s also, on the whole, more visually intense and appealing, with one especially notable example being the final battle’s overhaul; also, it shows a certain villain’s backstory in greater, heartbreaking detail. On the other hand, it adds a couple plot holes (but also fills in at least one of the VN’s plot holes that I can think of, mind you), and the scanlation drops massively in quality partway through. I strongly recommend the VN over the manga, but it’s a perfectly sufficient alternative (or if you have the time and patience, you could read both. Both is good.). Do not watch the anime. Do not watch the anime. If you must know why: it’s the most absurdly flaccid adaptation I’ve ever seen; the artstyle is ugly, the animation is limp, the plot follows more or less the right beats but rearranges or alters them in ways that make the story incomprehensible. It’s garbage.

Be aware of explicit subject matter like graphic violence, incest, and sexual assault. Some of which is shown in a first-person perspective due to the aforementioned spiraling in and out of complete insanity and certain other factors. (some of it is avoidable depending on player choices. Usually reasonably obvious ones)

Tsukihime is a wild ride, to say the least, and let me tell you, it’s a damn good one. Sure, it was made with a budget of two paperclips and a half-eaten pork bun, is incredibly rough around the edges, and almost completely devoid of polish, but that’s part of the charm - this is Type-Moon’s first VN! This is Type-Moon at their most heartful and raw! It’s an experience unlike anything else, and I can only hope you all will enjoy it as much as I do.

Indeed, despite the upcoming remake, I fully recommend checking out the original. The remake promises to make many changes (and not include 3/5ths of the story), and it may be fully worthwhile to know what the original was like. It’s the sort of thing I get a lot out of, anyway. And hey - maybe you’ll find you love the original and the remake separately, and wouldn’t it be grand to find two new loves? Or maybe you won’t like the original, but you’ll appreciate the remake more for knowing that. Or you won’t like either, which, hey, at least you tried something new, isn’t that something? But on the whole, I really am sure you’ll probably like one or the other.

Probably the best way to play the VN is Loïc France‘s incredible browser port fan project, available at https://holofield.fr/tsukiweb/title (make sure to fiddle with the settings to your preference! Particularly, try out the three different soundtracks to find the one you like best.)

If you’d prefer the original, instructions on how to install the VN can be found at https://pastebin.com/8P1uQGG1

If you want to read the manga, then it can be found at https://mangadex.org/title/477800d5-bae8-4adb-b422-23e6cfa7ec87

Alternately, a higher-quality version of the manga in Japanese can be read entirely legally at https://web-ace.jp/tmca/contents/2000013/

I will not be helping you watch the anime. Figure it out yourself, you masochist.

Details on playing the Remake will be added once the official localization releases.

FURTHER READING

If you enjoyed Tsukihime, good news! There’s some more! Nothing new since 2015, but, like, take what you can get, right? This got a bit long, so it goes at the very bottom of the post.

DECORATION DISORDER DISCONNECTION

Do you enjoy stories about demons and deals with the devil?

Do you enjoy supernatural mystery stories?

Do you like stories about people working for mysterious, untrustworthy benefactors?

Do you enjoy baseball-playing villains with effective tragic backstories?

Would you relate to a broke, mentally-ill, disabled college drop-out?

Do you enjoy Suffering because the three-volume light novel series has been stalled on Vol. 2 for more than a decade?

In that case, perhaps Decoration Disorder Disconnection is the thing for you!

Decoration Disorder Disconnection is the story of a mysterious, supernatural disease that preys on the neglected, abused, and forgotten - the people who’ve slipped through the cracks in society - and causes them to turn into monsters with superpowers based on their idiosyncracies and untreated mental illnesses (People with mental illnesses that are being treated or at least have a healthy environment and people who care about them are not affected). Arika Ishizue, a young man with a missing arm, a strange kind of amnesia, and a pathological inability to feel threatened, is regularly roped by his rich employer into investigating the people the public call “Demon-possessed” so that the real demons can feast on the affliction that mutated them.

DDD might sound a bit insensitive to the mentally ill, but as such a person myself, I found it a very good story (I saw it more as a critique of the way Japan treats mental illness than an attack on the mentally ill, anyway) and I absolutely think you should give it a look.

Unfortunately, the only English fan translation, from the second chapter onwards, passed through Russian instead of being directly translated from Japanese, which can seriously be a detriment to the enjoyability of the novels.

Be aware of explicit subject matter like graphic violence.

DDD is an engaging story about a colourful cast of characters painted with a strange and decaying urban veneer. It’s a fascinating novel, and I hope you all love it.

If you want to read it, DDD can be found at https://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php/2637-DDD

ANGEL NOTES

Do you enjoy bleak post-apocalyptic stories about some schmuck trying to earn his daily bread?

Do you enjoy stories about a dead-inside sniper and his chipper roommate who is also an angel who is also an all-powerful alien entity?

Do you enjoy settings where the people of Earth have struggled and obtained hard-fought victories against a legion of alien lovecraftian terrors that ultimately cannot be stopped?

Would you relate to a grizzled and depressed man just trying to make ends meet?

Do you enjoy Suffering because the official content consists of one fairly short story, two pages in an art-book, and a two-second cameo, and there’s almost no fan content either?

Then please, go ahead and read Angel Notes (technically, it’s actually called “notes.” but many people - especially the older cohort of the English-language fanbase - just call it Angel Notes)

Angel Notes is the story of the last surviving pure human on a dead Earth and his freeloader roommate who, it turns out, is the resurrected consciousness of a monster he killed. It’s the story of a weary man and an ingenue full of hope and love - Godo, a tired, depressive gun-for-hire struggling to survive in an apocalyptic wasteland far too harsh for human life and in a society designed by and for superhumans descended from living weapons, and V/V, an angelic alien born from the death of an all-powerful lovecraftian monstrosity who came into the world a blank slate knowing only love for the living things she was meant to destroy. It’s the story of how they live, as well as...

There’s barely any of Angel Notes to read, even. It won��t take you very long at all. Please read Angel Notes. It’s really good. It’s a very sweet little story. And I love those two and I need there to be more fans of them.

If you want to read it, Angel Notes can be found at https://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php/73-Angel-Notes-Translation-by-Evospace or at https://archive.org/details/manga_Angel_Notes/mode/2up

MAHOUTSUKAI NO HAKO - STARLIT MARMALADE

Would you enjoy a story about a bunch of high school girls hanging out that takes an abrupt and incredibly sharp swerve into the supernatural?

Do you enjoy stories about an inexorably optimistic (and absolutely oblivious) idiot walking up to an abusive friendship and just wedging herself in between the abuser and victim despite neither wanting her around?

Do you like casts that consist primarily of different strains of lovable moron?

Do you like cute lesbian couples consisting of one lonely tsundere and one unstoppable ball of cheerfulness?

Do you like seemingly innocent, humorous, small-scale stories that have baffling connections to the setting’s deep lore (such as one major character turning out to secretly be a living weapon created by the 27th most dangerous vampire on the planet)?

Would you relate to a dour young woman who hates marching to the beat of anyone else’s drum, lives in the shadow of her hugely popular and successful elder sister, wants to be left alone, and is just completely surrounded by a bunch of energetic and relentlessly positive people?

Do you enjoy Suffering because Vol. 2 hasn’t been translated? Or, if you understand Japanese, because it was supposed to be a three volume series but there’s been no sign of Vol. 3 since the release of Vol. 2 in 2013?

Just a quick note before we start: Hibiki and Chikagi, those two girls at the front, with the orange and green hair? They were created as the mascots of Type-Moon’s now-defunct mobile site, “Mahoutsukai No Hako” (meaning “Magician’s Box,” and referring to Cafe Ahnenerbe, the interdimensional crossroads where the protagonists work part-time). The idea, as I understand it, was that they (and to a lesser extent their co-stars Keitai-san and Sunao Sugata) would be the face, to some degree, of all of Type-Moon’s mobile-phone-related stuff.

... Those of you coming here from FGO can start laughing now.

For a while, Mahoutsukai No Hako consisted of random fluff, basically. The cast had a few hijinks, hosted variety shows starring various Type-Moon voice actors, starred in a special episode of Carnival Phantasm, and so on.

And then Starlit Marmalade wrote their backstory.

Starlit Marmalade is mainly about Chikagi Katsuragi and Hibiki Hibino, a pair of apparently pretty ordinary high school students. Chikagi, a solitary, caustic person with only one friend (and not a good friend, either, a heavily abusive friend who only cares about Chikagi as a tool to get to her sister Chidori), suddenly finds herself set upon by Hibiki Hibino, who, for reasons as clear as mud, has decided she absolutely has to be Chikagi’s friend, wants nothing more than to make Chikagi smile, and who proves to be a special kind of bull-headed where it’s hard to tell if she’s extremely perceptive as to what people need as opposed to what they say they want, or just completely incapable of listening to what people tell her.

Meanwhile, students at their school have been disappearing under mysterious circumstances...

Starlit Marmalade is... one hell of an anomaly. It’s a very, very silly and sweet story, but because it takes itself just the right amount of seriously - not seriously enough that it comes off as unaware of how silly its being, but serious enough that the silly things come off as, for lack of a better word, “real” - it manages to get away with having some surprising tonal twists and lore connections It’s pretty delightful. I’d certainly recommend checking it out.

... oh, by the way, apparently Sunao - an character who makes her debut toward the end of Vol. 1 - appears in one Fate/Extra drama CD as the Nameless Archer’s master and dies in battle against Leo Harway. What the hell?

Anyway, a translation/summary of the first drama CD can be found at https://heavens-feel.com/starlitmarmaladevol1disc1translation.html

the manga can be read at https://mangadex.org/title/e850e497-2d50-40cc-a0da-186e3857e33a

FIRE GIRL

Have you ever wondered what the result of the author of Fate/Requiem doing something ~kind of~ similar to an isekai (except instead of reincarnation it’s more like... spelunking but with an alternate dimension instead of a cave, I guess?) would be?

Do you enjoy parallel universes that have the same name as a popular hazelnut spread for some reason?

Do you think Wasei-Eigo related mixups are hilarious? Because there’s a real big one involving the word ‘trans’ in the second volume.

Would you relate to a mildly narcoleptic, apathetic, over-imaginative teenage girl?

Do you like stories about both literal and figurative exploration of the unknown and pushing boundaries?

Do you enjoy Suffering because the English translation only goes up to near the end of the second of three volumes?

For the Japanese-fluent, I don’t know, there might not be Suffering involved this time, but I wouldn’t hold my breath.

Fire Girl is about a high school girl named Homura Hinooka, who joins a kinda shady club at her school dedicated to exploring and studying a mysterious alternate universe called “Nutella,” which can only be reached by people between the ages of 9 and 19 (limited further by law to those in the last few viable years).

This so-called “Imaginary Earth,” which operates on rules that are occasionally suspiciously video-gamey, presents numerous mysteries of physics and history: despite being far, far larger than Earth, Nutella’s environment is still Earth-like; magic is a legitimate possibility there, utilized not only by human explorers but even some select specimens of the wildlife; humans who travel there may find themselve metamorphosized into demihuman forms like elves, demons, or slutty cat-boys (to be clear, the only thing added there was the ‘cat’ part. ‘Slutty’ and ‘boy’ were already part of Saho’s character); and most mysteriously, although numerous ancient ruins have been found, not a single other trace of sentient life has been found.

By the way, you might think the ‘tella’ in ‘Nutella’ is an Engrish-ization of ‘terra,’ but the rings around the planet are referred to as ‘The Bagel,’ so maybe Meteo is just being funny.

I can’t give a complete opinion on Fire Girl, owing to my incomplete experience, but I really did enjoy the time I had with it.

If you want to read it yourself, it can be found at https://firegirlthetranslation.wordpress.com/

TSUKI NO SANGO

Do you like stories about stories?

Do you like soft-Sci-Fi renditions of classic fairy tales?

Do you like the tale of Princess Kaguya?

Would you like to read a story about a dying earth, and the importance of love and patience and the inevitable victory of emotion over reason?

Do you like stories about machines becoming human, even when it costs them their wellbeing?

Would you relate to an emotionally crippled princess, who is being pressured to marry but really just wants to do her own thing?

Or, would you relate to an emotionally dead young man with auditory dyslexia, whose only wish is to be left alone?

Tsuki no Sango (”Coral of the Moon”) is a loose adaptation of the folktale of Princess Kaguya, designed as a quote-unquote “Tsukihime 3000.” It is the story of three people, in total: the protagonist, known only as the “Storyteller Girl”; her ancestor, known only as the “Girl of the Moon”; and the person that the Girl of the Moon loved, referred to as the “Man of Earth.”

Some 1000 years from the present day, in a decaying world where the spirit of humanity has been all but extinguished, and people are barely husks of their former selves with only scraps of drive and emotion, the Storyteller Girl lives as princess of an island of fifty people. Many people come to her island seeking her hand in marriage, for one reason or another (such as the Prince of Arishima, who believes her island is “the hope of humanity,” being less affected by the decline of man than the rest of the world). The Storyteller Girl, having no understanding of love, seeks to have her suitors define it for her, by presenting them with impossible tasks. She believes that, should someone somehow succeed, and then be willing to trade such an impossibly valuable thing for her hand, it will prove the measure of love. Naturally, no one has yet succeeded.

One day, a tiny, machine-like merchant riding a strange flying craft appears. Being a merchant, he wants to trade goods - more specifically, he would like the princess to write down the story of her distant ancestor, who legend says came from the moon.

The novel can be found at https://kisalnarchive.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/tsuki-no-sango/

The manga can be found at https://mangadex.org/title/a0880b76-9d26-40b6-94a0-740fe31ead50

CANAAN

Do you enjoy depictions of synesthesia that I’m pretty certain are wildly inaccurate?

Do you enjoy adorable fluff about a hardened mercenary and a bubbly photojournalist?

Do you like cool gunfights and other such action movie spectacle?

Do you like comic-book-y pseudo-science mutants?

Are you one of the, like, five English-speakers who read 428: Shibuya Scramble? Because this is a sequel to that.

Would you relate to a troubled, bull-headed, serious mercenary who lacks a strong sense of self and is on a quest for revenge?

... Yeah, does Canaan even count? Nasu and Takeuchi did do the writing and designs, but it’s a sequel to a visual novel (which I can’t tell you anything about... it’s on my backlog, though) that is definitely not a Type-Moon work. But it’s specifically a sequel to a scenario from that visual novel which was written by Nasu, so... Anyway, here it is.

... also, it’s been a while since I watched it, so sorry if I’m not covering it as well as I should be.

Canaan is about a woman named Canaan and her quest for vengeance against the person who killed her mentor Siam - a terrorist named Alphard, who was once another orphan taken in by Siam before Canaan. Alphard’s organization, Snake, possesses a deadly bioweapon capable of causing horrific mutations (or just death), the Ua Virus. Canaan battles Snake across Shanghai, both in the name of finally killing Alphard, and in the name of...

It’s also about a girl named Maria Oosawa, an aspiring photojournalist, and Canaan’s only friend. She’s in Shanghai to cover a big anti-terrorism conference, and very quickly gets wrapped up in the whole affair with Snake. Canaan prioritizes her safety over everything else, and will stop at nothing to protect her.

At the end of the day, Canaan and Maria’s relationship is probably the anime’s main draw, because they really are adorable, and in-between the action sequences, there’s a lot of just them hanging out and being cute and in love. It’s pretty great.

Canaan can be viewed at your preferred anime piracy site, if you have one. If you don’t, then I happen to use 9anime,me, but cannot vouch for its safety. Be sure to take appropriate measures, such as adblockers.

ROOM OF THE APRIL WITCH

A short one-shot published as Type-Moon’s annual April Fools joke in 2011.

“Shigatsu no Majou no Heya” (”The April Witch’s Room” or “Room of the April Witch”) is the story of April, an immortal witch with the power to grant any wish. Having suffered for her powers, April long ago retreated into her sanctuary, and sealed it away so that no one could ever enter and hurt her again.

But, she was still human, and she still desired human contact. So, one day out of every year, she unlocked the door. Over the many hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, a great many people arrived, with a great many purposes. Some sought to help April, some to hurt her. Some came only to make a wish for themselves, some came for no reason at all. None ever came a second time. Except...

Can be read at https://forums.nrvnqsr.com/showthread.php/308-Room-of-the-April-Witch?p=27884&viewfull=1#post27884 or at https://bimyou.blogspot.com/2011/04/room-of-april-witch-type-moon.html

CLOWICK CANAAN-VAIL

Published in the same anthology as Angel Notes, Clowick Canaan-Vail tells the story of an android courier named Gabriel, who lives in a barren, apocalyptic world that has long since lost the capacity to repair a machine like her, and how she spends the last five days of her life.

Can be read at https://imgur.com/gallery/ZcbYG

TSUKIHIME FURTHER READING

Plus Disc

Basically a collection of little extra stuff. If you just want to follow the storyline, you only really need to worry about the Alliance of Illusionary Eyes sidestory, which introduces a new character and has some nice character moments for Shiki in the climax.

Instructions on how to install can be found at https://pastebin.com/1Z1ibay0

Kagetsu Tohya

A direct sequel... of sorts... to Tsukihime. Kagetsu Tohya (roughly translating to “Ten Nights of the Singing Moon”) is a dream of one endlessly repeating day, Shiki seeks to learn what happened to him and how he can return to his real life - in between a whole lot of cute, fluffy slice of life. Since it’s all a dream, not much actually happens per se - it can basically be summed up as “Shiki gets a familiar” (it’s still a very nice story, mind you) - but there’s some good character stuff (although on the other hand, there’s also a lot of parts where characters are flattened and exaggerated for comedic purposes), lots of fun fluff and comedy, and the sidestories are pretty good - Dawn is a sad little story following a (formerly) unnamed background extra from Tsukihime (and is also the first published work by the author of Overlord!), Red Demon God gives some nice backstory and expands on the Nanaya clan as well as posthumously developing the character of Kiri Nanaya, Crimson Moon does the same for Roa and Brunestud, A Story For The Evening is an extended epilogue to Tsukihime’s Akiha route, and Drinking Dreaming Moon is just magnificent and ought to be required reading for any Tsukihime fan.

... you may want to use a guide. The path to the ending is otherwise a bit of a labyrinth. I think the download I’m linking comes with a flowchart? Although, the game has a built-in help function, and I’d recommend making use of it first. If the help function doesn’t work, and the flowchart isn’t getting you anywhere, here’s a step-by-step walkthrough.

Instructions on how to install can be found at https://pastebin.com/DNRx6RC3

Melty Blood

A fighting game, (in)famous for being played in bathrooms, parking lots, gazebos, and other unlikely locales around the world. As you might be able to tell from the frankly ludicrous dedication of its fanbase, it’s a pretty damn good fighting game, too. As a side note, many of those fans are getting rather sick of the bathroom jokes, so it may be best to refrain from them in future.

Melty Blood’s VN-like story mode takes place the summer after Tsukihime, when an Egyptian alchemist named Sion Eltnam Atlasia comes to town searching for and hoping to put an end to her ancestor, a terrifying vampire poised to wipe out the whole city - naturally, Shiki lends a hand.

Incidentally, while the game’s route map only shows five endings, some of those ending squares can be reached in multiple ways, and actually have entirely different endings for the occasion.

There’s a manga adaptation you can read, if you prefer. Like the Tsukihime manga, it mixes the routes a little while primarily following the “main” route. It also has a sequel manga, ”Act 2,″ adapting the joke endings.

Anyway, unless you’re really keen to see the gameplay in its rawest state, don’t worry about playing Melty Blood, because:

Instructions on how to install can be found at https://pastebin.com/BxPtZwQs

The manga can be read at https://mangadex.org/title/36999805-52e9-451f-94de-ca50e8e7e873

Melty Blood Re-Act

Everything that was in Melty Blood with a new coat of polish, plus a new story, featuring a mysterious villain creating living Jungian Shadows from some of the cast and hypnotizing some of the others.

Instructions on how to install can be found at https://pastebin.com/8QCU3Ayt

Melty Blood Act Cadenza

Most of this is retelling previous stuff. Don’t worry too much about Act Cadenza.

The only story progression is White Len contracting Shiki Nanaya, one of the phantoms she created, as her Master, creating a bizarre perpetual motion machine of Master/Familiar bonds

Installation instructions can be found at https://pastebin.com/ucChcXGS

Melty Blood Actress Again

Ever get that feeling of deja vu? It seems some mysterious enemy is somehow causing the events of the previous summer to repeat themselves - naturally, Shiki and Sion and a miscellany of others head out to get to the bottom of this.

Also, Sion’s Swedish paladin wife comes back from the dead after cameoing in Sion’s evil alternate self’s super move in every previous game!

Also also it’s just a really good fighting game. If you want to get into Melty as a fighting game rather than as part of Tsukihime’s story, this is the one you’re going to want to get. That said, I would, in that case, have to recommend taking a look at the fanmade “Community Edition,” which is the usual standard for online play on account of having rollback. That said, it’s technically piracy, so as there’s a legitimate alternative, I’m going to leave you to find it for yourself.

One thing that’s worth noting is that the official localization is... uh, wonky. For example, translating one of Aoko’s lines as referring to “my little sister” (something Aoko doesn’t have) when it was actually “the little sister” (I.E. what people who only know Akiha through Shiki keep calling her). I’d recommend taking a look at Mirror Moon’s unfinished fan translation, but I’m not sure if it’s compatible with the Steam version. I think it’s compatible with the Community Edition, though.

Actress Again can be purchased on Steam at https://store.steampowered.com/app/411370/Melty_Blood_Actress_Again_Current_Code/

Carnival Phantasm

Comedic fluff consisting primarily of short, standalone comedy sketches. Crossover with Fate/Stay Night. HibiChika are in one episode.

Carnival Phantasm can be viewed at your preferred anime piracy site, if you have one. If you don’t, then I happen to use 9anime,me, but cannot vouch for its safety. Be sure to take appropriate measures, such as adblockers.

Take Moon and Ahnenerbe No Nichijou

More comedic fluff.

Many segments in Carnival Phantasm were adapted from Take Moon.

Ahnenerbe no Nichijou (”Daily Life at Ahnenerbe,” roughly) revolves around the main heroines of Tsukihime, Fate/Stay Night, and Kara No Kyoukai hanging out in the titular cafe and getting involved in humorous shenanigans, often involving their respective extended casts. Also, HibiChika are in it sometimes.

Take Moon can be read at https://mangadex.org/title/c728b682-514e-4490-b099-a43eb9077b40

Ahnenerbe no Nichijou can be read at https://mangadex.org/title/b4101937-158d-496d-95c7-03c540032ed5

Melty Blood X

A comedic spin-off manga that acts as a sequel of sorts to Actress Again. Sion’s attempts to improve her living conditions go extremely awry and nearly get everyone killed.

can be read at https://mangadex.org/title/daf449f6-9f05-480e-858d-4597c9908a1e

Koha-Ace

A super-deformed comedy manga starring Kohaku and Akiha. Mostly consists of self-deprecating shots at Type-Moon.

Long-lasting compared to the rest, bafflingly.

Is actually the source of multiple Servants in FGO - most notably Okita and Nobunaga, who were originally joke characters created specifically for this manga (Okita, in particular, being a recolour of Kohaku). Fate/Red Line is actually an adaptation of Koha-Ace’s one semi-serious storyline, with the rest of the nonsensical comedy and all Tsukihime elements removed.

Can be read at https://mangadex.org/title/223f03db-b8fa-4087-8dfe-9bb04efecd3b

Melty Blood Back Alley Alliance Nightmare

A somewhat bipolar half-comedic half-serious manga acting as a sequel of sorts to Actress Again. Sion and her friends attempt to visit the beach, only for her to get abruptly thrown into a Fate/Grand Order crossover where she is repeatedly forced to experience the lives of her alternate timeline counterparts, who never meet happy ends, while also being harassed by the ghost of Olga Marie Animusphere.

There’s also a subplot about Lev trying to escape from Hell The Great Cats Garden (which is probably a worse place to be anyway).

... a fairly large chunk of the manga has been rendered nonsensical thanks to the Fate Worlds/Tsukihime Worlds retcon. What? No, I’m not still bitter about that shitty goddamn retcon.

He said, bitterly.

can be read at https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/16jgRv-WneCDBF324U_MFsuguPFTt2J0S (thank you @shadouko for the updated link)

Hana no Miyako!

A lighthearted spin-off manga taking place five years after Tsukihime. Hana no Miyako! (Something like “Miyako of the Flowers!” or “Flowery Miyako!” I think) features the misadventures of Shiki Tohno’s foster sister Miyako Arima as she attempts to make it through high school without getting into too much trouble. And fails. A lot. At least she gets a girlfriend very-close-friend-who-is-also-a-girl-but-not-her-girlfriend-she-swears out of it

Also for some reason one of the most major antagonists is the daughter of Caster and Kuzuki from Fate/Stay Night. She’s very in love with Miyako. It would be cute if she had any sense of boundaries.

Got cancelled halfway through. The author continued it as a doujin work with Type-Moon’s approval, but hasn’t released a new chapter in literal years. Hope you enjoy Suffering.

Can be read at https://mangadex.org/title/9a07cfcf-858f-4e4d-befe-34522a896e46

Melty Blood Type Lumina

The newest iteration of Melty Blood, updated to the Remake’s setting. A sort of out-of-continuity prequel with a pared-back cast, some cool additions like the Remake’s new midboss Vlov Arkhangel, and some less-than-welcome guests. In addition to the standard arcade ladders, it also has a story mode, added in a later update, but I haven’t checked it out yet because I’m still too blown away that they managed to make me actually angry that one of my favourite literary characters ever is playable in a fighting game I like to go back to it.

Can be purchased for PS4 or Nintendo Switch on their respective digital storefronts, or on Steam at https://store.steampowered.com/app/1372280/MELTY_BLOOD_TYPE_LUMINA/

#type-moon #fate/stay night #fate/grand order #fate series #tsukihime #kara no kyoukai #mahoutsukai no yoru #angel notes #decoration disorder disconnection #melty blood #starlit marmalade #fire girl #carnival phantasm #tsuki no sango #room of the april witch #fgo #fsn #kinoko nasu

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dreaminginthedeepsouth · 3 years ago

Link

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

September 11, 2021

Heather Cox Richardson

On the twentieth anniversary of the day terrorists from the al-Qaeda network used four civilian airplanes as weapons against the United States, the weather was eerily similar to the bright, clear blue sky of what has come to be known as 9/11. George W. Bush, who was president on that horrific day, spoke in Pennsylvania at a memorial for the passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 who, on September 11, 2001, stormed the cockpit and brought their airplane down in a field, killing everyone on board but denying the terrorists a fourth American trophy.

Former president Bush said: “Twenty years ago, terrorists chose a random group of Americans, on a routine flight, to be collateral damage in a spectacular act of terror. The 33 passengers and 7 crew of Flight 93 could have been any group of citizens selected by fate. In a sense, they stood in for us all.” And, Bush continued, “The terrorists soon discovered that a random group of Americans is an exceptional group of people. Facing an impossible circumstance, they comforted their loved ones by phone, braced each other for action, and defeated the designs of evil.”

Recalling his experience that day, Bush talked of “the America I know.”

“On America's day of trial and grief, I saw millions of people instinctively grab for a neighbor's hand and rally to the cause of one another…. At a time when religious bigotry might have flowed freely, I saw Americans reject prejudice and embrace people of Muslim faith…. At a time when nativism could have stirred hatred and violence against people perceived as outsiders, I saw Americans reaffirm their welcome to immigrants and refugees…. At a time when some viewed the rising generation as individualistic and decadent, I saw young people embrace an ethic of service and rise to selfless action.”

Today’s commemorations of that tragic day almost a generation ago seemed to celebrate exactly what Bush did: the selfless heroism and care for others shown by those like Welles Crowther, the man in the red bandana, who helped others out of danger before succumbing himself; the airplane passengers who called their loved ones to say goodbye; neighbors; firefighters; law enforcement officers; the men and women who volunteered for military service after the attack.

That day, and our memories of it, show American democracy at its best: ordinary Americans putting in the work, even at its dirtiest and most dangerous, to take care of each other.

It is this America we commemorate today.

But even in 2001, that America was under siege by those who distrusted the same democracy today’s events commemorated. Those people, concentrated in the Republican Party, worried that permitting all Americans to have a say in their government would lead to “socialism”: minorities and women would demand government programs paid for with tax dollars collected from hardworking people—usually, white men. They wanted to slash taxes and government regulations, giving individuals the “freedom” to do as they wished.

In 1986, they had begun to talk about purifying the vote; when the Democrats in 1993 passed the so-called Motor Voter law permitting people to register to vote at certain government offices, they claimed that Democrats were buying votes. The next year, Republicans began to claim that Democrats won elections through fraud, and in 1998, the Florida legislature passed a voter ID law that led to a purge of as many as 100,000 voters from the system before the election of 2000, resulting in what the United States Commission on Civil Rights called “an extraordinarily high and inexcusable level of disenfranchisement,” particularly of African American voters.

It was that election that put George W. Bush in the White House, despite his losing the popular vote to Democrat Al Gore by more than a half a million votes.

Bush had run on the promise he would be “a uniter, not a divider,” but as soon as he took office, he advanced the worldview of those who distrusted democracy. He slashed government programs and in June pushed a $1.3 trillion cut through Congress. These measures increased the deficit without spurring the economy, and voters were beginning to sour on a presidency that had been precarious since its controversial beginnings.

On the morning of September 11, 2001, hours before the planes hit the Twin Towers, a New York Times editorial announced: “There is a whiff of panic in the air.”

And then the planes hit.

“In our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment,” Bush said. America had seemed to drift since the Cold War had ended twelve years before, but now the country was in a new death struggle, against an even more implacable foe. To defeat the nation’s enemies, America must defend free enterprise and Christianity at all costs.

In the wake of the attacks, Bush’s popularity soared to 90 percent. He and his advisers saw that popularity as a mandate to change America, and the world, according to their own ideology. “Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists,” he announced.

Immediately, the administration focused on strengthening business. It shored up the airline industry and, at the advice of oil industry executives, deregulated the oil industry and increased drilling. By the end of the year, Congress had appropriated more than $350 billion for the military and homeland security, but that money would not go to established state and local organizations; it would go to new federal programs run by administration loyalists. Bush’s proposed $2.13 trillion 2003 budget increased military spending by $48 billion while slashing highway funding, environmental initiatives, job training, and other domestic spending. It would throw the budget $401 billion in the red. Republicans attacked any opposition as an attack on “the homeland.”

The military response to the attacks also turned ideological quickly. As soon as he heard about the attacks, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked his aides to see if there was enough evidence to “hit” Iraqi president Saddam Hussein as well as al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden. In fact, Saddam had not been involved in the attack on America: the al-Qaeda terrorists of 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates.

Rumsfeld was trying to fit the events of 911 into the worldview of the so-called neocons who had come together in 1997 to complain that President Bill Clinton’s foreign policy was “incoherent” and to demand that the U.S. take international preeminence in the wake of the Cold War. They demanded significantly increased defense spending and American-backed “regime change” in countries that did not have “political and economic freedom.” They wanted to see a world order “friendly to our security, our prosperity, and our principles.”

After 9/11, Bush launched rocket attacks on the Taliban government of Afghanistan that had provided a safe haven for al-Qaeda, successfully overthrowing it before the end of the year. But then the administration undertook to reorder the Middle East in America's image. In 2002, it announced that the U.S. would no longer simply try to contain our enemies as President Harry S. Truman had planned, or to fund their opponents as President Ronald Reagan had done, but to strike nations suspected of planning attacks on the U.S. preemptively: the so-called Bush Doctrine. In 2003, after setting up a pro-American government in Afghanistan, the administration invaded Iraq.

By 2004, the administration was so deeply entrenched in its own ideology that a senior adviser to Bush told journalist Ron Suskind that people like him—Suskind—were in “the reality-based community”: they believed people could find solutions based on their observations and careful study of discernible reality. But, the aide continued, such a worldview was obsolete. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore.… We are an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The 9/11 attacks enabled Republicans to tar those who questioned the administration's economic or foreign policies as un-American: either socialists or traitors making the nation vulnerable to terrorist attacks. Surely, such people should not have a voice at the polls. Republican gerrymandering and voter suppression began to shut Democratic voices out of our government, aided by a series of Supreme Court decisions. In 2010, the court opened the floodgates of corporate money into our elections to sway voters; in 2013, it gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act; in 2021, it said that election laws that affected different groups of voters unevenly were not unconstitutional.

And now we grapple with the logical extension of that argument as a former Republican president claims he won the 2020 election because, all evidence to the contrary, Democratic votes were fraudulent.

Today, former president Bush called out the similarities between today’s domestic terrorists who attacked our Capitol to overthrow our government on January 6 and the terrorists of 9/11. “There is little cultural overlap between violent extremists abroad and violent extremists at home, “he said. “But in their disdain for pluralism, in their disregard for human life, in their determination to defile national symbols, they are children of the same foul spirit. And it is our continuing duty to confront them.”

In doing so, we can take guidance from the passengers on Flight 93, who demonstrated as profoundly as it is possible to do what confronting such an ideology means. While we cannot know for certain what happened on that plane on that fateful day, investigators believe that before the passengers of Flight 93 stormed the cockpit, throwing themselves between the terrorists and our government, and downed the plane, they all took a vote.

---

Notes:

https://www.cnn.com/2021/09/11/politics/transcript-george-w-bush-speech-09-11-2021/index.html

https://web.archive.org/web/20050205041635/http://www.newamericancentury.org/statementofprinciples.htm

http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=project_for_the_new_american_century

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

#9/11 #September 11th #Letters From An American #Heather Cox Richardson #GWOT #G.W. Bush #forever wars #corrupt GOP #criminal GOP

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beeblebrox-be-damned · 5 years ago

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Silohouette (Part 1: Fertilization)

Dark!Bucky Barnes x Reader

I didn’t intend to start another series so soon after Drive Him Crazy, but here we are. As always, suggestions and ideas are adored.

TW: Stalking

“Got any change?”

You jumped a bit in your seat, glancing up at the man standing beside you. “Sorry, what’d you say?” The bar wasn’t loud, but it the drone of voices and the dazed state you were in did well to make sure you couldn’t hear anything unless you were concentrating.

“I asked if you had any change. For a fiver, I mean.”

You dug out your wallet. “One’s or coins?”

The man handed you a five dollar bill. “One’s would be great.”

Without a word, you handed him five dollar bills. He took then graciously and tucked one into his pocket. The other four he slid to the bartender. “Rum-and-coke for me and the lady, please,” he said.

You glanced over at him. “Thanks.”

He shrugged, taking the seat next to you. “Don’t mention it. Not many people would be so kind to a stranger.” His voice was rough, but kind. You shrugged.

“Change is nothing, don’t worry about it.” You brushed it off. You were about to leave and weren’t very keen on conversing at the moment, but you didn’t want to seem rude. The bartender handed you your drink. You noticed he made sure that the man next to you didn’t touch it. Sad that in this day and time you couldn’t trust anyone.

The man shrugged. “Used to, people were always like that.” His tone was almost wistful. “At least, that’s what I’ve heard,” he finished quickly. You looked at him quizzically for a moment then took a sip of your drink.

“Well, considering everything that’s going on nowadays, I suppose it pays to be guarded in some ways.” You tapped the ice in your glass, watching idly as it bobbed in the amber liquid.

He nodded. “Very true.”

You lapsed into silence for several minutes, both of you unmoving asides from the occasional sip. Once you reached the bottom of your glass, you stood with a brief stretch. “Well, thank you for the drink. It’s getting late.” You shrugged your jacket on. “I’d better be getting home.”

The man looked at you with an unplaceable expression. “Have a good night, then. Stay safe.” He gave you a brief smile. “Don’t want to be late for work in the morning.”

You nodded and shoved your hands in your pockets, turning and making your way out of the building. The cool night air hit your face. It was raining, you realized with a grimace. You pulled up your hood and walked quickly down the sidewalk.

This late at night, the streets were nearly silent. You loved it when it was like this. It was one of the reasons you always stayed at your old haunt so late into the evening- so you could enjoy this solitude after you left. Puddles glinted orange in the dim streetlights, leaves plastered to their depths.

It was late, but you were unafraid. Confident, really. These were your streets. You’d seen the way people shied away from you, and you loved it. You could go anywhere any time you wanted here. Nobody would bother you.

Sometimes it paid to be unapproachable.

Which made it rather odd that someone had spoken to you in the bar. You’d gone there for years to people-watch and nobody had ever had the balls to speak to you. Especially not someone so handsome.

Handsome? Since when did you look at other people that way? You snorted at yourself, shaking your head. But you had to admit, he was rather attractive.

Oh well. People didn’t like you. You didn’t like people.

You walked onwards in the rain.

He’d noticed you the first time he walked into that bar. The grim set of your mouth. The way you glared blankly at everyone. The way you never spoke accept to order a drink and thank the bartender.

You were attractive, even in your sullen demeanor. He found himself draw to you, mind always wandering back to that nameless, silent woman in the bar. Each night he went there, there you were, in your same spot. It perplexed him. Surely you had friends or a significant other to be with. But then again, perhaps not. You seemed like a true loner.

It had been an innocent thing at first, it really had. He’d simply been searching for a quiet, uncrowded place to spend his free time. Perhaps that’s why you were there too. He found himself wondering about you; what you liked to drink, what made you smile, what you liked and disliked. He watched you for weeks before he finally got up the nerve to talk to you.

Of course, he knew striking up of conversation wouldn’t be easy. He’d have to go about this slowly. So at first, he started with a simple request, just asking a favor of you. Not only would he seem unthreatening (after all, maybe you didn’t trust people easily) but he would also get a better grasp on what your personality was like.

He smiled. It couldn’t have gone better. Sure, it was only a handful of words, but it meant the world to him. He meant what he said; not many people would be so kind.

You were like a geode. Your exterior was hard and cold and grey, but he knew that once he chipped that away, you’d shine. He could almost imagine seeing a smile quirk your lips.

He didn’t even know your name and yet he’d fallen for you, hard. Which is why, he supposed, he was so worried when you left.

He’d said be careful. He meant it. There were tens of thousands of hungry predators roaming the streets of New York, each one of them waiting with dripping jaws for a lone woman like you. Of course, you looked like you could hold your own, but what if?

He debated the ethics of what he was about to do for an entire two seconds before he slid off his stool and followed after you. Your foot had hardly even left the threshold.

You walked with your head up and your hands jammed into your pockets. You were confident, but even confidence couldn’t protect you from the worst of the worst this city had to offer. The longer he followed you and the dimmer the streetlights became, the more confidant in his own decision he became. You’d be safe with him watching over you. Anyone who tried anything would meet a swift and just punishment.

He stayed several yards behind you. His steps were nearly silent, any sound he did make muted totally by the rain. This part of town was a quiet one, he realized, but even so, you could never be too careful.

You reached your apartment with no interruptions. You dug out your key and jammed it in the lock. It took several tries before the door would open, and one good kick. You sighed as the maligned gutters high above your head dripped dirty rainwater down your back as you stepped inside.

You switched on the light, sighing as the dingy room greeted you. You tossed your soaked jacket onto the chair by the door, your purse following soon after. Your shoes took their place beneath the chair. Hopefully they’d dry before morning. Going to work with soggy shoes was a drag.

You changed into sleep clothes, a baggy t-shirt and sweatpants, and brushed your teeth in the tiny bathroom. You stared at your haggard reflection in the mirror, sighing. You knew you shouldn’t stay out so late, but it was better than being here.

It was good to have a roof over your head, but sometimes it was hard to be grateful for your lot in life. You were smart, could’ve had so much better. You were barely through your first semester of college when it happened, the Blip.

Your parents, gone. Relatives, gone. Most of the people you’d known all your life, all gone in an instant. Some of them hadn’t turned to dust. The aftermath of so many disappearances left many dead. Driverless cars careened off the roads with passengers or hit other vehicles and killed those in them. Airplanes dropped out of the air like shot birds, their crews gone. Doctors and nurses gone from hospitals, leaving their patients to die. Emergency rooms were overloaded with the injured, not enough people to help them.

Without your parents, schooling became impossible. You had been able to finish out your first semester, but after that you couldn’t continue. The money your parents had in the bank was locked up, not enough people to deal with the rush of pending legal matters to be seen to. The house and cars were repossessed, leaving you in the streets. By some stroke of luck, you’d found work as a taxi driver, but hours were long and paid little.

In the end, this was all you could afford. With a heavy sigh that was almost routine now, you sank into the lumpy couch, dragging your blankets over yourself. Even with the lights switched off and the outside world darkened by rain, light still poured in the windows. You hid your face beneath the pillow and hoped to get a few hours of rest.

Bucky’s heart had dropped to his feet when he saw where you lived. No wonder you spent so much time at the bar. A seedy apartment complex was no place for someone like you. It was obvious the locks had issues too. He grimaced. Anyone could break in there and steal everything you owed or do something even worse to you if you were home.

He stood on the sidewalk for a long time. He could see your silhouette through the thin curtains as you moved through your tiny abode. Eventually the lights switched off. He turned with a heavy sigh and trudged back up the street. it would be a long walk back to his part of town, but it was worth it to know you were safe.

Surely you hadn’t grown up like this. Not with the way you spoke and held yourself. No, you must’ve been one of the victims of the Snap who hadn’t died. You’d been one who’d been left to fend for themselves.

He walked for a long time, thinking. It weighed heavy on his heart to think about you living in such a decrepit place. Not only were the living conditions awful, but you ’d be in constant danger.

Finally he reached his home. It was a modest place, but larger on the inside than it looked outwardly. He unlocked the door with a key-code and a fingerprint scan. All Stark technology. The house had originally been Steve’s but he’d practically given it to Bucky when he’d decided to move closer to the Tower.

Bucky loved the house. It had an old-timey air to it, but it had been specially built at Steve’s request. Once Bucky had been cleared of coding in Wakanda, Steve had requested a house be built for he and Bucky away from the center of the city where Bucky could feel safer while he worked through the mess his mind had been left in.

The lower levels were where Bucky had formerly resided. In order to keep him from fleeing and accidentally hurting someone, there was only one entrance, a heavy door that locked mainly from the outside. There was a lock on the inside too, but at that time only Steve’s prints had been in the security system. The door was heavy enough that even Bucky would have difficulties breaking through it. If he had even tried, Steve would have been notified and been able to monitor the situation remotely via camera.

Now with Steve moved out, Bucky had the upper floors to himself. It was nice, and he felt safe here. It was an odd feeling, sometimes, feeling truly at home. It had taken a long time for him to get to that point, but he had, and he was proud of himself for it.

He lay in bed that night, thinking. An idea wormed its way into his brain, planting himself deep in a dark recess in the corner of his mind. Perhaps this could be home to someone else too someday.

#dark!bucky #dark!bucky x reader #dark!bucky barnes #dark marvel #stalking #bucky barnes #bucky barnes x reader

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and-then-there-were-n0ne · 4 years ago

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In a way, the trail for bio-fabricated animal fabrics is already at least somewhat blazed for Modern Meadow. Unlike with clean meat, some people are already beginning to buy lab-grown animal-based garments, many of which utilize comparable technologies to those employed by some of the companies discussed in this book. For example, California-based Bolt Threads is growing in vitro spider silk (what their webs are made of), starting with yeast cells that have been engineered to spit out the proteins naturally found in the extremely durable arachnid product. Unlike the more common silk from worms-who’ve been domesticated and bred for silk production over the course of many centuries-spider silk is far stronger, some types being even sturdier than Kevlar, all the while being as soft as, well, silk. The problem with trying to produce it commercially is that spiders don’t do so well when we try to farm them, typically eating one another in the crowded conditions needed for insect farming to work. Cannibalism just doesn’t lend itself to profitability. (A team in Madagascar did succeed in producing a farmed spider silk garment in 2009, but only after four years offering a lot of spiders.)

With $90 million in venture capital raised, in 2017 Bolt Threads announced its first commercial product-a necktie that retails for $314, and were only made available to fifty lucky individuals who won a lottery to buy them. The company also inked a deal with Patagonia for its arachnid-free spider silk garments. A Japanese competitor named Spiber (as in "spider fiber") is doing the same thing and in 2015 partnered with North Face to produce the so-called Moon Parka, a durable winter coat containing their lab-grown silk that is, at the time of this writing, available for sale in Japan and retails for $1,000. And shoemaker Adidas is already starting to use lab-produced spider silk, called Biosteel, manufactured by a German competitor of Spiber named AMSilk. The company boasts that “a spiderweb made of pencil-thick spider silk fibers can catch a fully loaded Jumbo Jet Boeing 747, with a weight of 380 tons.” […]

Second, as GFI’s Bruce Friedrich points out in a blog on the topic, clean meat at scale won’t happen In a laboratory-all processed food started in a food lab, even Corn Flakes and peanut butter, for example. But no one asks, "Would you eat lab-produced Corn Flakes?” Rather than being produced in a lab, clean meat would be produced in a factory (or call It a brewery if you prefer), where the majority of food sold In supermarkets Is produced. Food companies, of course, have R-and-D teams laboring away in labs, but once they get their recipe down, the actual food production moves to a factory. Similarly, clean meat factories will be a far cry from a laboratory; they’ll have massive tanks in which the meat will be cultured on a huge scale. [...]

Not everyone will convert, needless to say, but enough will likely do so to make a difference, and, presumably, a profit. As well, even if only twenty percent of meat-eaters were willing to switch, that would still make clean meat a multibillion-dollar industry. […]

Hansen is right that predictions have been made for years about cultured meat coming to fruition, and yet the meat industry largely hasn’t felt that threatened. But things do seem to be changing in the wake of high-profile product unveilings by the likes of Post and Valeti, and certainly the investment from Cargill. Gone are the days of clean meat being purely a theoretical daydream of environmentalists who want a more sustainable way to produce meat. With commercialization looking increasingly likely, we won’t need to rely on pollsters to tell us how consumers may react when clean meat is available to them. People like Hansen and Nestle may not want to eat meat if it didn’t come from a slaughtered animal, but how many others will share their repugnance at such a thought?

Kristopher Gasteratos, founder of the Cellular Agriculture Society (created in 2016), is more optimistic. He believes animal agriculture is so inefficient that humanity will be forced to abandon it, at least for the bulk of our protein production, or we’ll pay the price. His analysis of the situation doesn’t pull any punches: “Factory farming of animals will end one way or the other. The real question is this: if we don’t find an alternative to factory farming soon, will we as a civilization end with it?”

Gasteratos is convinced that the public will come to accept clean meat because there’s such an existential necessity for it. But his view is also informed by a study he conducted over the course of 2016 with the assistance of both New Harvest and the Good Food Institute. In the study, Gasteratos led a team of researchers who asked thousands of survey respondents their views on the topic. Based at Florida Atlantic University, the project ultimately surveyed more than thirty-two hundred undergraduate students and about fifteen hundred adults both in the United States and Australia (the two nations with the highest rates of meat consumption on a per capita basis). Unlike the aforementioned surveys, which largely asked if people would eat "meat grown in a lab:’ Gasteratos took a deeper dive, wording his key question in a way that provided respondents with more context: “Scientists are working towards producing meat by using animal cells instead of living animals. This new method of harvesting meat is called “cultured meat” and will likely be available to the public within the next decade. It is important to note that cultured meat is real animal meat, so it should not be confused with current meat substitutes which are made from plants. If cultured meat is proven safe by long-term research, tastes the same as current/conventional meat and is priced affordably, would you eat cultured meat?”

Upon simply being asked this question, without any discussion of clean meat’s benefits, 61 percent of the university students claimed they’d either “probably” or “definitely” eat it. After being told some of the benefits, either ethical, health, or ecological, that number spiked to 77 percent. Among the fifteen hundred adults, the numbers were similar: 62 percent were willing to eat it without knowing its benefits, while 72 percent were willing once they knew of those benefits.

Other interesting findings from Gasteratos’s work include some pretty fascinating results about just who is most interested in eating this meat. “People still seem to be generally unaware of this topic, but what really shocked me was our finding about how higher self reported meat consumption correlated with higher cultured meat acceptance. Basically, the people who say they eat the most conventional meat tend to be the most receptive toward a cultured alternative, while people who say they eat little meat, and especially vegetarians and vegans, are the least interested.

In other words, clean meat probably isn’t for the people shopping at the farmers’ market or their local co-op, It holds far less appeal with the natural-foods crowd than the crowd going to KFC. But that's okay. In fact, it may even be for the best considering that the number of people who eat conventional meat is far, far larger than those who frequent their local farmers’ markets.

Comments left by respondents offered some good qualitative insights into the general perception. "I don’t care where the meat came from so long as it’s safe and tastes right;’ explained one respondent, echoing a widely held sentiment among participants. Others expressed some qualms about meat-eating but thought cultured meat could be the answer to their concerns: "I heard meat is really bad for global warming;’ one respondent wrote. "this would sort of absolve me of that guilt.”

- Clean Meat: How Growing Meat Without Animals Will Revolutionize Dinner and the World, Paul Shapiro

#clean meat #vegan #veganism #fashion #leather

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tinyshe · 3 years ago

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COVID Noncompliance Now Labeled Top ‘Terror Threat’

When you think of potential terror threats, what comes to mind? Did opposing irrational and/or illegal COVID measures make your list? Well, it recently got top billing on the Department of Homeland Security’s list of potential terror threats as we approach the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

Over the past 18 months, COVID countermeasures have become increasingly tyrannical, and we now appear to have reached a new high (or low, depending on your perspective). The U.S. government is actually viewing citizens who exercise their Constitutional rights as domestic terrorists, enemies of the state.

Dehumanizing Discrimination Against Unvaccinated

As reported by Daisy Luther with The Organic Prepper,1 “Shocking and dehumanizing discrimination against the unvaccinated is about to make life VERY difficult.” She is, of course, referring to the media and government narrative that if anyone gets infected with SARS-CoV-2, it’s the fault of some germ-ridden disease-spreading unvaccinated person.

Public officials and media pundits alike are seemingly intentionally fanning the flames of unveiled hatred against those who choose to not participate in the world’s largest medical experiment and get a novel injection that programs your body to produce a disease-causing protein, the full ramifications of which won’t be known for years.

Getting the shot is a patriotic duty, we’ve been told, and opting out is nothing short of a traitorous act, according to some. This kind of narrative is extremely dangerous, yet no one seems to care — not even the departments responsible for keeping this the land of the free.

As noted by Luther, the rhetoric now hurled at unvaccinated people would under normal circumstances be considered hate speech. Now, it’s promoted as virtuous, and reporting a statistic or published medical finding that counters the official narrative that masks work, lockdowns are effective and the COVID shot is safe and effective is considered hate speech.

Can You See the Psychological Operation at Work?

It’s important to realize that this insanity is not accidental. It’s by design, and part of a sophisticated psychological operation to drive people mad. I wrote about this last week.

The article is no longer available, as all articles are removed after 48 hours, but you can still view the video I featured, which explains how mass psychosis is induced using fear, waves of increasing threat, isolation and other dehumanizing tricks of the psychological trade.

Once a population has sufficiently lost touch with reality and embraced a “magical rationale” where irrationality is justified, they become capable of unthinkable horrors and abuses against people believed to be responsible for their ongoing anxiety.

By convincing everyone that unvaccinated people are to blame for the never-ending pandemic, the pandemic industrial complex prevents the masses from identifying and turning on the real culprits — the string-pullers and beneficiaries of the psychological breakdown.

“It has happened many times in history: when human beings were used as slaves and property, when human beings were the subject of horrific experiments when the media and people in power deliberately manipulated human beings to believe that other humans weren’t like them, and therefore, it was permissible to mistreat or abuse them,” Luther writes.2

“As the saying goes, those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it. And repeat it, they are. I think, regardless of our stance, we can all agree that fervently wishing for bad things to happen to those who believe differently and dehumanizing them for their beliefs is pretty awful.

Don Lemon of CNN believes the unvaccinated should not be allowed to buy food or work. Does this mean he believes that they should starve to death? …

CNN medical analyst Dr. Jonathan Reiner says that unvaccinated people shouldn’t go to bars and restaurants. A doctor pondered the ethics of whether he could refuse to see unvaccinated patients in The New York Times.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s Big Kahuna of COVID, blames those not vaccinated for a new spike in cases … Alabama Governor Kay Ivey wants everyone to blame the unvaccinated for any cases of COVID that happen to occur …

That’ll really be helpful if someone unhinged loses a loved one to COVID and decides to seek vengeance on some ‘unvaccinated folk.’ After all, the governor said it was their fault. Speaking of which, Nick Cohen of The Guardian said that it was only a matter of time before ‘we turn on the unvaccinated.’”

Concerns for Lack of Vaccination Are Highly Irrational

Those who continue to pressure everyone to get vaccinated have simply failed to look at the most recent data, which clearly demonstrate that those who are vaccinated are actually FAR more likely to get COVID, and worse, contribute to the process of creating variants.

As recently reported by Israeli National News,3,4,5 recent data show Israelis who have received the COVID jab are 6.72 times more likely to get infected than people who have recovered from natural infection.

Among the 7,700 new COVID cases diagnosed so far during the current wave of infections that began in May 2021, 39% were vaccinated (about 3,000 cases), 1% (72 patients) had recovered from a previous SARS-CoV-2 infection and 60% were neither vaccinated nor previously infected. Israeli National News notes:6

“With a total of 835,792 Israelis known to have recovered from the virus, the 72 instances of reinfection amount to 0.0086% of people who were already infected with COVID.

By contrast, Israelis who were vaccinated were 6.72 times more likely to get infected after the shot than after natural infection, with over 3,000 of the 5,193,499, or 0.0578%, of Israelis who were vaccinated getting infected in the latest wave.”

Penalties Large and Small Are Being Proposed

In addition to the penalties for lack of vaccination already mentioned in the quote above, Luther lists a number of others in her article, such as requiring unvaccinated people to:

Get tested daily at their own expense

Docking people’s paychecks

Charging students nonrefundable quarantine fees

Denying medical care at hospitals

Canceling private insurance or raising premiums by thousands of dollars a year

Suspending gun permits and driver’s licenses

Denying access to loans

Withholding government assistance and federal benefits like Social Security, VA benefits, subsidized housing and pensions

As noted by Luther, “The rabid contempt for those who think differently can lead nowhere good. For those who believe we should all get vaccinated or not, are you okay with this kind of dehumanization?”

youtube

In the video above, Project Veritas’ James O’Keefe exposes yet another double-standard that has become norm. Project Veritas has been accused of unethically doxing the rich and powerful, yet CNN a few weeks ago did the exact same thing to me.

CNN reporter Randi Kaye filmed herself ambushing staff at our corporate headquarters in Cape Coral, Florida, without blurring out the suite number. She then went to my home. As noted by O’Keefe, mainstream media routinely dox “the non-powerful” whose right to privacy is actually greater than government and media officials.

Project Veritas recently got banned from Twitter for publishing a video in which they confronted Facebook vice president Guy Rosen outside his home, asking questions about Facebook’s hate speech policy. So, to recap, Project Veritas got banned from Twitter for doing the exact same thing CNN did to me — but didn’t get banned for.

Artificial Intelligence Is Part of the New Battlefield

In mid-July 2021, surgeon general Dr. Vivek Murthy issued a public advisory,7,8 calling COVID misinformation “an urgent threat to public health” that undermines “our ongoing work to end the COVID-19 pandemic.” The advisory calls for software algorithms to be deployed by social media platforms to “avoid amplifying misinformation” and strengthening monitoring of misinformation.

Similarly, at a recent Health Information Management Systems Society conference in Las Vegas, Hans Kluge, Europe region director of the World Health Organization, called for the use of ��digital health” and artificial intelligence to fight misinformation. Artificial intelligence could also be used to identify communities with low COVID jab rates so that “swift assistance” can be launched in those communities.

According to STAT News,9 Kluge has “established a WHO unit focused on behavioral and cultural insights to understand the drivers of vaccine hesitancy and develop programs to counteract it.” Such programs include community outreach programs and identifying “champions” for the COVID jabs within religious communities, youth communities and the media.

Already, Kluge’s team is working with an artificial intelligence tool called EARS (Early AI-supported Response with Social listening tool). It mines blogs, news articles and online forums in 20 countries and analyzes the narratives it finds.

It can then anticipate how the information will spread, and what the effects of the information might have. While not stated in the STAT article, it seems reasonable to assume EARS is also capable of predicting which narratives would most effectively counter the concerns people express on these mined platforms.

Chosen propaganda narratives can then be pumped out using bot farms, such as the one imaged below.10 It may be shocking to some to realize that many of the “people” who are in favor of the official COVID narrative are not real people at all.

There are tons of fake profiles run by bot farms on all social media platforms that generate massive amounts of propaganda, including accounts with blue checkmarks.

The blue checkmark is supposed to designate that a user’s identity has been verified by Twitter and is “of public interest,” but clearly, the authentication process lacks in some of the basics, such as making sure the user actually exists in physical form and has physical control over the account in question.

Anti-Digital Hate Group Promotes Digital Hate

A central cog in the network fanning the flames of hatred and attacks on people whose only sin is the desire to make decisions for themselves is a group called the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH).

It’s founded by a British national and unregistered foreign agent named Imran Ahmed, who is also a member of the Steering Committee on Countering Extremism Pilot Task Force under the British government’s Commission for Countering Extremism.

According to Ahmed, anyone who questions the rationale behind lockdowns, mask wearing or the safety and necessity of a COVID-19 injection may be prone to violent extremism, and the reason CNN trekked hundreds of miles across central Florida in search of me is because Ahmed has labeled me a top COVID misinformer.

According to its website, the left-wing Center for Countering Digital Hate prides itself on ‘researching, exposing, and then shutting down users and news sites it deems unacceptable in the digital sphere’ … That seems potentially dangerous, considering we know very little about the CCDH. ~ The Drill Down

In the CCDH’s initial report, “The Anti-Vaxx Playbook,”11 I was identified as one of the six most influential “anti-vaxxers” online that must be silenced. This was followed by “The Disinformation Dozen”12 and “Disinformation Dozen: The Sequel,”13 in which the list of targets doubled from six to 12.

These last two reports are what everyone — politicians, attorneys general, social media platforms and “blue checkmark influencers” — are now using to “prove” I am the most-dangerous and prolific superspreader of misinformation on the net.14

Whose Interests Does CCDH Protect and Promote?

When you think about it, isn’t it rather curious that government officials are actually targeting and violating the Constitutional rights of American citizens based on the opinions of an unregistered foreign agent who runs a tiny little “pop-up group” funded by dark money?15 As noted in a July 20, 2021, Drill Down article:16

“When a report goes viral in the news cycle, it only makes sense to question where it came from — especially if that report has influence all the way up to the Oval Office, affecting public health policy, while also having dangerous implications for free speech.

The Center for Countering Digital Hate … released a bombshell report earlier this week. It was picked up everywhere and had the following revelation: The majority of COVID misinformation came from just 12 people … But could this be a wily gambit by outside interests to justify the Biden administration’s censorship partner-up with Big Tech?

According to The Federalist, ‘The Center for Countering Digital Hate is an obscure international group reportedly based out of the United Kingdom and Washington, D.C., that works as an adviser to multiple governments and elite-run institutions about digital technology and regulation.

Users and news sites it deems unacceptable? That seems potentially dangerous, considering we know very little about the CCDH.

Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) expressed his concerns on Twitter with the following post: ‘Who is funding this overseas dark money group — Big Tech? Billionaire activists? Foreign governments? We have no idea. Americans deserve to know what foreign interests are attempting to influence American democracy’ …

No one knows who funds them. No one knows who is driving their research. But their findings are being used in censorship efforts under the guise of controlling misinformation?”

Violating Bioethical Principles Puts Lives at Risk

The sad irony is that government officials are really the ones contributing to unnecessary death and suffering by not adhering to bioethical principles that are enshrined in law. These laws exist for a good reason. They protect people from unnecessary harm and unwanted medical risks.

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,17 since the COVID shots are not yet licensed,18 rather than providing a package insert, the FDA directs health care providers to access a lengthy online “fact sheet” that lists clinical trial adverse events and ongoing updates of adverse events reported after emergency use 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 vaccines authorized for emergency use separately on the FDA website to access those fact sheets.19

Adverse event risks must also 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.

Failure to disclose these adverse effects, which is likely occurring in nearly every COVID injection case, results in an inability to give true informed consent as the person was never informed of all of the already well-established risks.

As just one example of many, Marie Follmer, in an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.,20 said no one ever warned her there was a risk of myocarditis. Her athletic son, Greyson, took the shot and is now unable to do much of anything and she fears he might die.

She admits not doing any of her own research, blindly trusting what she was told. Now, she distrusts the whole process, including doctors, as all have so far refused to acknowledge that there might be a link to the shot, and no one knows how to make him better.

Most importantly, the acceptance of an experimental product must be fully voluntary and uncoerced. Enticement is forbidden. It’s downright impossible to argue that the public messaging and incentives ranging from free junk food to million-dollar lotteries do not constitute coercion.

At the end of the day, if you decide you want to participate in a medical experiment, whatever it might be, that’s up to you. But everyone else also has that same right to choose.

If you find aggression mounting against an unvaccinated friend or family member, thanks to the current indoctrination that encourages savage and irrational behavior, think of something you absolutely don’t want done to your body, and then imagine being forced to do it just to maintain your right to enter a grocery store, buy insurance or keep your job.

Source: COVID Noncompliance Now Labeled Top ‘Terror Threat’, Analysis by Dr. Joseph Mercola August 25, 2021

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north-brisbane · 3 years ago

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Cash For Cars - Get Rid of That Unwanted Car

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If, however, you are still tied to your car after a while, you will need to consider paying a small fee in order to get a free towing away of your automobile. Before you pay a fee, however, you should make sure that the company you are considering offers free towing away cars in North Brisbane. You can do this by researching which companies are located near your home and making a list of those companies. Next, contact each company to inquire about whether they offer this service free of charge. If you do not hear back from any of the companies, look elsewhere for a tow away company that offers free towing in Brisbane.

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#cash for cars brisbane northside #Car Wreckers Brisbane

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douchebagbrainwaves · 4 years ago

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WORK ETHIC AND NOTICING

And it seems even odder to say that you have lousy judgement. They're not just beautiful, but strangely beautiful.1 Good design solves the right problem. But the non-gullible majority won't stop getting spam until they can stop or threaten to stop the gullible from responding to it.2 My wife thinks I'm more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish. A thousand Leonardos and a thousand Michelangelos walk among us. The dangerous thing is, faking does work to some degree on investors. It was really close, too.3

Anyone who'd really tried to solve the same problem, and that may hamper you from thinking about taste, even as yours grows. The deadline has now passed, and we're sifting through 227 applications. Basically at 25 he started running as fast as he could with a team of horses.4 Going to or back to school is a huge predictor of death.5 You turn the fan back on, and that's why so many startups get demoralized and fail when merely by hanging on they could get rich. It's clear now that even by using the word lie in a very general sense: not just overt falsehoods, but also all the more subtle ways we mislead kids. So far, we've reduced the problem from thinking of a million dollar idea to thinking of a mistaken question. And, like anyone who gets better at their job, you'll know you're getting better. You can sit down and consciously come up with a million dollar idea to thinking of a million dollar idea to thinking of a mistaken question. But if a kid asks you Is there a God?

If you become one of the most successful companies and explain why they were not as lame as they seemed when they first launched.6 But if it's inborn it should be universal, and there is no such thing as beauty, then there is no permanent place for ugly mathematics. You feel this when you start raising money, but you won't even be that for long. Nature uses it a lot, which is usually unanimous. If you'd proposed at the time the acquirer gets them, they're not drifting. And more to the point, nobody knows you're 22. After a while this filter will start to operate as you write. Apple as evil.7 A startup is so hard that working on it can't be preceded by but. So far so good.8 I feel like we're at a tipping point here.

So it may be just as well to go work for a company; we did. It would be closer to the truth. Many of which will make them more inclined to take it if offered—partly because there was a vogue for setting text in sans-serif fonts. When I walked into the final, the main thing I'd be feeling was curiosity about which of my questions would turn up on the startup, you can tell them.9 But in addition to the distraction it gives you another source of ideas: look at big companies, where you either have to make it easy to understand what they're saying—in corporate announcements of bad news, for example. This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of evil machines, and one that would have been delighted if I'd realized in college that there were parts of the real world, wealth is except for a few specialists like thieves and speculators something you have to give advice, you can have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best programmers won't work for you without giving them options likely to be worth something. So we should expect to see ever-increasing variation in income is a sign of the way things are going, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly, online. That one succeeded. Can you do more of that?

They'll lie to you on this one. They're smart; they're working in a promising field; and they just cannot give up.10 I learned from painting: you have to do something weird at first. Whereas acquirers are, as of this writing, extremely fickle.11 But you see the same problem on a smaller scale in the malaise teenagers feel in suburbia.12 Most people prefer to remain in denial about problems. They want to feel safe, and death is the ultimate threat. And it works.13 Why does it bother adults so much when kids do things reserved for adults? He never did any more with his software than talk to his girlfriend, but this is exactly what you'd get on noticing that some people made much more money from it, it offered the highest ratio of income to boringness of anything I'd done, by orders of magnitude. Extracurricular activities, check. Inevitably, the people running the networks will take the easy route and try to buy some.14

So stop looking for the trick. How casual successful startup founders are. Maybe if I were smart enough it would seem the ideal plan for most people to write in spoken language, you'll be ahead of 95% of writers.15 It would set off alarms. If even big employers think highly of young hackers who start companies, why don't more do it? But only 66% of companies in the current batch have the. Taste. As usual, by Demo Day about half the startups were doing something significantly different than they started with. I've never done another startup.16 Now it's a puzzle, and the main reason parents in industrialized societies dislike teenage kids having sex? So what they do, apparently, is note down the age and race and sex of the person, and guess from that who they voted for. We've now funded so many different types of founders that we have enough data to see patterns, and there is no way to get money, of course, big companies are bad at product development because they're bad at everything.

Anyone who's worked for a few vestigial domestic tasks.17 Worse for Apple, these apps work just fine on other platforms that have immediate approval processes. Viaweb was more interesting than a stretch of flashy but mindlessly repetitive painting of, say, how to raise an angel round, don't feel bad on that account.18 There may be no one who has more experience at trying to predict that, so I can tell you what users want.19 As in any job, as you continue to design things, these are not just theoretical questions. The Matrix have such resonance.20 So even in the smartest companies. Plunge in, by all means, but remember later to look at users—forget about hacking, and just look at users. Much Renaissance art was in its time considered shockingly secular: according to Vasari, Botticelli repented and gave up painting, and Fra Bartolommeo and Lorenzo di Credi actually burned some of their work.

Notes

Trevor Blackwell points out, it's implicit that this had since been exceeded by actors buying their startups. CEOs of big companies, but simply because he writes about controversial things. It rarely arises, and configure domain names etc.

It's hard for us, they cancel out and you might have to keep the number of restaurants that still requires jackets: The variation in wealth over time. Most smart high school, and b the local stuff. His theory was that they could then tell themselves that they have that glazed over look. But a lot about how things are different.

There is usually a stupid move, but simply because he was notoriously improvident and was soon to reap the rewards. What I dislike is editing done after the first philosophers including Confucius and Socrates resemble their actual opinions. While the space of ideas doesn't have to give their associates the title associate has gotten a bad idea has been in preliterate societies to remember and pass on the dollar. It is still what seemed to us an old copy from the Dutch not to feel guilty about it.

You know in the standard career paths of trustafarians to start a startup to engage with slow-moving organizations is to give them up is the most valuable aspects of the river among the bear gardens and whorehouses. Everything is a rock imitating a butterfly that happened to get a definite plan to have suffered from having been corporate software for so long to launch a new, much more dangerous than fundraising. We Getting a Divorce?

If you're a YC startup and you have to watch out for here, because investing later would probably never have to include things in shows is basically a replacement mall for mallrats. Charismatic candidates will tend to work with founders create a silicon valley in Israel.

Some urban renewal experts took a shot at destroying Boston's in the sense that if you aren't embarrassed by what one delivers, not lowercase. Pliny Hist. Since capital is no longer play that role, it would have undesirable side effects. And they are to be free to work your way.

It's hard to say now. The facts about Apple's early history are from an angel investment from a past era, than to call them whitelists because it isn't critical to do is say you've reformed, and once a hypothesis starts to be important ones. The fancy version of everything was called the executive model. Steve Jobs tried to motivate people by saying Real artists ship.

Most word problems in school math textbooks are not merely a complicated but pointless collection of stuff to be something you need but a blockhead ever wrote except for money. The golden age of economic equality in the US.

As usual the popular image is several decades behind reality. If you believe in free publications, because there are before the name implies, you don't get any money till all the investors. Investors are fine with funding nerds.

Not all were necessarily supplied by the government. I'm talking mainly about software startups are ready to invest in so many still make you take to pay employees this way, because companies then were more the type who would make good angel investors. You should take a conscious effort.

In this essay. Letter to the same town, unless it was spontaneous. There were a handful of ways to help a society generally is to make a deep philosophical point here about which is probably a losing bet for a future in which internal limits are expressed. Or rather, where w is will and d discipline.

So 80 years sounds to me too mild to describe the worst. Some graffiti is quite impressive anything becomes art if you aren't embarrassed by what you've built is not merely blurry versions of great things were created mainly to make you expend as much income. The reason you don't get any money till all the poorer countries. Jessica Livingston's Founders at Work.

San Jose calls itself the capital of Silicon Valley. Because we know exactly what they're doing. We once put up with much food.

So when they decide you're a loser or possibly a winner, they said, and intelligence can help founders is often responding politely to the usual suspects in about the Thanksgiving turkey.

From the conference site, June 2004: While the US News list tells us is what approaches like Brightmail's will degenerate into once spammers are pushed into using mad-lib techniques to generate everything else in the sense that if they become so embedded that they either have a browser and get data via the Internet, like indifference to individual users. It does at least on me; how could it have meaning? Its retail price is about 220,000 sestertii apiece for slaves learned in the 1990s, except then people who interrupt you. For these companies substitute progress for revenue growth.

When I was writing this, but I think lack of transparency. There were several other reasons. A round.

But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly about the size of the things startups fix. So as a consulting company is common, to mean starting a company.

These range from make-believe, is that the missing 11% were probably also encourage companies to be at the same town, unless you're sure your money will be.

I've observed; but as an asset class. Everyone's taught about it wrong. Html. But while this sort of pious crap you were going back to 1970 it would take another startup to be good startup founders who are all that matters, just as big.

But if they don't yet have a definite plan to have invented. Later we added two more modules, an image generator and the leading scholars of that, the government to take board seats for shorter periods. Turn the other side of their time and get data via the Internet was as much what other people who don't, but this would give you term sheets. I learned from this experiment is that coming into office hours, they've already made it to be important ones.

Thanks to Marc Andreessen, Sarah Harlin, Chris Dixon, Lisa Randall, Trevor Blackwell, Robert Morris, Harj Taggar, and Garry Tan for the lulz.

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tothediaspora · 7 years ago

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Economic Power of #blackgirlmagic (Pt. 2)

Over the years, I have experienced a transformation in thought, behavior, and emotion. I’ve had the chance to learn about my hair, my ancestral traditions, and grown in conviction about my body being mine to portray as I see fit. I have now understood that the male gaze doesn’t define who I am and how I present myself to the world. In truth, along with many young women, I placed an immense value on how males viewed my body in my formative years. After ten years within the Natural Hair Movement, I increasingly have developed my self-image independent from others’ perception of me. I felt the freedom to change my appearance, the way the hair on my head and body grow, the different ways I express my style and personality. No one has enough influence to change the way I see myself. I also accept that others will do as they please with their own body and with their own hair. Over the years, there has also been a fluctuation in how I have been perceived by the people around me; I allowed myself to subconsciously connect with my ancestors and accept the certain attributes I chose not to change. There were many unexpected changes within my story from the movement being considered a more obscure “Afro-centric” trend of natural beauty to a very striking mainstay and economic powerhouse. I found that one of the objectives that I inadvertently learned during my stake in the Natural Hair Movement is my influence within a collective of other black women and our very own economic power.

My progress in self-knowledge accelerated in the summer of 2008. A few months after my “big chop”, I had more time to explore my hair — hair I’ve always had but never learned how to care for it. Gone were the days of multiple ponytail braids, barrettes, and ribbons I sported in Haiti as a little girl. I no longer wore a perm and felt a bit uneasy about the learning curve of taking care of my hair unaltered by chemicals. Without the corrosive chemicals, I slowly found that I began to limit other very toxic products in my life. I looked up “how to take care of “natural hair” online. In one of the very few links, Nappturality members shared scores of knowledge on African-derived concoctions. I became aware of raw African black Soap. This soap made washing my short hair an ease. After living in dorms for two years, I had sublet an apartment that summer, my first time living alone. I took some of that opportunity to experiment with homemade recipes of fair trade shea butter I ordered online. The products were made in Ghana by other black women that have known about it all of their lives. I felt that I had missed out on this common knowledge and was purposefully miseducated. I had part of my childhood in Haiti and some in the States; in both spaces, I used petroleum-laden hair grease, pomade, Pink Lotion, and Mane n’ Tail products marketed to black women with problematic and toxic ingredients. I realized that my mother and aunts might have been miseducated as well. I then found “Hair Story: Untangling the Roots of Black Hair in America”. This book on black hair history opened my eyes to the amalgamation of African hair tradition, compartmentalized European ideal standards of beauty, and the politics of simply existing with a black body. It sickened me to know how experiences of self-hate entrenched expectations in my family and culture without my people’s knowledge or full awareness.

While perusing message boards and online forums, I learned of other recipes derived from West Africa. I later learned of Whitney White’s YouTube page, Naptural85, she shared simple recipes with oils, raw African black soap, and raw unrefined shea butter. Raw African black soap was now my body wash and sometimes face wash after finishing the last bits of my bottled liquid soaps. My face glistened when I followed a wash with a drop of vitamin e oil and any acne began to dry up. My skin loved this ancestral treatment. I felt free; I was no longer a victim of basic elements of nature. Like many black girls, I was forbidden to go out in the rain, even with an umbrella, if I had just gotten my hair permed. As a child, maintenance in chlorinated water was covering my head with a swim cap over a heaping handful of conditioner streamed through my hair by my mother. At last, I could let the sudden Florida rainfall on my hair without my mood and especially my mother’s mood changing sour. As I learned more, I purchased mostly indie brands. I used the money I saved little by little to travel in the summer of 2009. I no longer needed plenty and regular supply of plastic bottles for shampoos and body washes. I became accustomed to cutting small blocks of raw African black soap from a large brown speckled loaf. With the new knowledge I had acquired, I would quickly put back on the shelf those products I used ritualistically since childhood after one quick reading of the label.

Over time, I began to learn that many products specifically formulated to be marketed to black women have toxic chemicals. I used the internet as a constant resource for information on chemical compounds included in the beauty products that I used regularly. As I read more, I aimed to pick up products that reflected simplicity. I actively avoided over-produced and loaded items in hair products and body care. I began to use tea rinses and heavy oils to replace the moisturizing effects of conditioners. I washed my hair with raw African black soap, rinsed my hair with cooled tea, then used heavy raw unrefined shea butter and oils to keep my damp hair soft and supple for days. I adopted this reductionist routine and sought simplification.

I now understand that women, in particular, have been sold to the huge campaign of commercial beauty products (not to mention apparel, toiletries, seasonal home decor, and even menstrual products). In 2008, While searching for natural products that fit my values, it had been really difficult to find items that weren’t full of artificial ingredients. When I looked up the toxic ingredients, many were correlated with cancer. There were products that claimed to moisturize on its label, yet, the second ingredient on the back was alcohol. Increasingly, the market has improved on the quantity and quality of natural hair products. These products are marketed to women with natural hair that seek natural ingredients in what they use on their skin and hair. I have divorced the idea that I need to be a “product junkie”, well-stocked with hair and skin goods, to be deemed beautiful. I have challenged my role in my assigned gender that dictates that I should have long straight hair that fits with what media deems as standard beauty. Many other black women experienced this with me and many did before me online on sites like Nappturality, with books, and through fellowship with other black women. Through my research, I’ve been introduced to women creating content for other black women who seek it. Women such as Nikisha Brunson of Urban Bush Babes, Dawn Michelle of Minimalist Beauty, Francheska Medina of Hey Fran Hey contribute their recipes and opinions.

Before Instagram sponsored content, natural beauties, black natural hair conferences, and Youtube product giveaways, there were black women sharing recipes and traditions solely for the purpose of sharing knowledge within our community. Though the variety of options now are astounding, helpful, and useful, I prefer simplicity. When in need of convenience and specific styles, I support quality indie brands products free of animal ingredients often from Quemet Biologics and Oyin Handmade. I reflect back on how my mother found good hair stylists; she simply asked other black women with beautiful hair who’s work it was. And as we have done before, in this interwoven network of black womanhood, I want to continue to support my own. These include black hair salons, black women’s hair bundle businesses (if hair sources are ethical), black-owned indie hair care. Black women have immense purchasing power. We not only need to be aware of this power but also realize that supporting other black women is supporting ourselves. Economic power is often misunderstood as solely wealth accumulated through corporate work, stock exchange and trading. I claim economic power as being aware of simply the exchange of resources. I often ask myself, for what purpose is my money being used for? I have been doing this throughout my life as I’ve become aware of the socio-economic power I have in my pocket. When it comes to natural hair and the many products on the shelves, I choose what I want as a consumer with every single dollar as one vote. I want products that do not have ingredients that have parabens. I also do not want those products to replace those parabens they advertise on the front with other detrimental items on the ingredients list that I don’t yet understand as harmful. I do not want products that put me at risk of any adverse health effects. I want products that are safe, effective for what I am using it for, and improve the health of my hair and skin. I want to know that I am supporting my community and fueling my belief that #blacklivesmatter by including the edict that black entrepreneurs matter, black business matters, black independent livelihoods matter, black women matter, and black bodies matter. I want #blackgirlmagic to not only encompass the physical beauty of black womanhood but the holistic power of black women in all aspects of life.

Contrastingly, advertisers of large white-owned corporations are increasingly responding to this growing self-love and knowledge by including black women in their advertisements. The intention is not empowerment but tapping into a market that spends a lot on hair. Black women too can support each other though exercising purchasing power for the benefit of other black women and the black community as a whole. Instead of benefiting large white-owned corporations marketing to black women, we can generate more economic solidarity within our community by investing in black people and their creations. How beautiful is empowering than supporting one’s own community of women through a self-love movement? We all know that supporting black women means that we’re supporting black community as a whole. According to an IMF profile, women in general “make institutions more representative of a range of voices” and women provide benefits for children “as a result of more spending on food and education”. Over all, women with economic power provide “greater provision of public goods”. Black women entrepreneurs are sure to spread the wealth to the black men and children in their lives may it be their fathers, mothers, partners, brothers, and their kin.

Furthermore, power also translates to autonomy and self-expression. Self-named “Naturalistas” such as Mahogany Curls, creates beautiful hairstyle ideas for other black women. Meanwhile, Fro Girl Ginny’s “Nia the Light” social media influencing gathers black women in different parts of the world to create unity and to sustain the Natural Hair Movement. This movement is beyond a trend. With the recent media troubles of Dove and Nivea, it is known that corporations often falter in including women of color in a good light. Corporations join in on the movement solely for profit and hardly for the health, wellness, and unity of black women. These corporations also exploit the buying power of black women. Even SheaMoisture, a brand originally created by a black woman has encountered scandal with a lack of representation in a recent ad. Many black women on social media commented on the lack of tact and representation in the brand’s shift to a wider white market. With $1.2 Trillion in spending power for black people over-all, women have purchasing power (including influence) of 70–80%. Influence in the sense that when a woman isn’t paying for a product with her own dollars, she is often the influence behind someone else’s purchase. This means black women as a community have approximately $960 billion at their disposal. Nielsen’s research breaks down the statistics thoroughly. With this purchasing power, we are able to change how products are made, what we spend on, how much money is directed towards the community resources that matter to us the most, and if the owners of the products we use are black-owned.

Before many corporations joined into the Natural Hair Movement and the #blackgirlmagic that ensued, we were here as black women with more knowledge of our roots. I have experienced an overwhelming transformation of thought and behavior from a seemingly trivial decision. I discovered that I could save on financial resources on the things that mattered more to me by making my own recipes with bulk West African ingredients and now supporting many favorite local brands such as Beijaflor Naturals and Soul Ingredients. Once again, here I am, 10 years after beginning my journey within the Natural Hair Movement. As other black women are repeatedly disenfranchised, we are also notoriously resourceful in fulfilling our own needs. We are able to change what we consume as a whole. No matter the restrictions, despite passing trends, we can build each other and our entire community up.

#blackgirlmagic #economicdevelopment #intersectional feminism #naturalhair #black women

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easyfoodnetwork · 4 years ago

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There Really Is No Ethical Restaurant Under Capitalism

Building an equitable restaurant — where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and work without discrimination — will require undoing the way most restaurants are run

The only ethical restaurant I have ever heard of is on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I have never watched the show, but my partner has excitedly explained this particular vision of utopia to me at least three times. The restaurant is named Sisko’s Creole Kitchen and exists in New Orleans in the 24th century, on an Earth that has abolished prejudice, money, and hunger. Though you could press a button and conjure any ingredient, the aforementioned Sisko still finds a desire to provide hospitality, so every night he cooks gumbo and jambalaya and presumably gives it away for free, just because he wants to.

We have not figured out how to replicate matter, nor have we abolished money, so even in our most progressive and sustainable restaurants, the food has to come from somewhere and must be paid for by someone. But we all know the restaurant world has more immediate problems than the lack of a Star Trek society. Building an equitable restaurant, a place where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and can work in an anti-discriminatory environment, is going to take a near-undoing of the way most restaurants are run.

Currently, most restaurants, whether they are high-end or hole-in-the-wall, family-owned or corporate-run, operate in much the same way. There is an owner, or owners, who either own the property the restaurant is on or lease it from a landlord. Sometimes the chef is also the owner, or sometimes they are hired by the owner. In the kitchen, there is a hierarchy. It may not always look like the traditional French brigade system, with its focus on militaristic efficiency, but the chef manages, and makes more money than, the line cooks. In the back of the house, dishwashers, bussers, and cooks are often paid the minimum wage, while in the front of the house, in most U.S. states, servers and bartenders are paid lower wages with the expectation that customers will make up the difference in tips. Many states permit employees to be fired at will. And the lower down the line you are, the less likely it is you’ll be making decisions about how your workplace functions.

It’s not glib to say that eradicating capitalism is the surest way to build equitable restaurants. Living in a country that provided universal health care, federally mandated paid child leave and sick leave, and a living minimum wage, as well as incentivized sustainable farming, encouraged unions, and got rid of at-will employment, would go a long way toward creating environments within restaurants (and all businesses) where workers had power over their own livelihood.

But that is a tall order for restaurants to take on alone, so barring revolution (though fingers crossed), upending everything we assume about how restaurants are run is the necessary step toward an actually ethical restaurant industry. Other options already exist — nonprofits, workers collectives, unions, volunteer-run restaurants — that create models for a fairer and more just workplace. But what does it even mean to be an equitable restaurant? And can simply changing the ownership structure provide that?

Kirk Vartan, co-owner of A Slice of New York pizzerias in the Bay Area, understands that phrases like “collectively owned” or “workers cooperative” can inspire panic and confusion. It’s like, what, everyone has to vote every time you place a produce order? Is it going to lead to the drama of the Park Slope Food Coop deciding whether or not to carry Israeli products? “People think that it’s hippies, and everyone’s going to smoke weed, and sit around in a circle and just love and peace, and whatever,” he tells Eater. “And the reality is, this is a very real business model.”

Vartan actually took inspiration from, of all places, the corporate world. While working for NBC, he was given stock options. “It’s not a lot of stock. It’s like this little itty-bitty micro-bit of the company. But it changes your attitude when you actually own part of it,” he says. After leaving to start a New York-style pizza shop in San Jose, he was determined to create a similar business structure. He says his employee-owned model was at first discouraged by a corporate attorney, who said it wouldn’t work for a restaurant. But Vartan continued to bring it up with employees, and eventually worked with Project Equity, an organization that advocates for and consults with companies to pivot to employee-owned models, to become a worker cooperative.

A Slice of New York allows employees to become co-owners after they’ve spent at least a year at the company; as of now, about 45 percent of the employees are co-owners. Operationally, the model doesn’t change much. There are shift managers who make the immediate calls about who does what day-to-day, and Vartan remains the general manager. The restaurant’s governance is what’s really affected: Every co-owner has an equal share of the business and a vote on a board. Board members all have an equal say in decisions about benefits, safety procedures, menu changes, and issues dealing with the general financial wellbeing of the company. “In a traditional ownership model, whatever is not spent on people goes to an individual,” Vartan says. Instead, in a cooperative, members decide how to spend, save, or split profits, “so there’s no incentive to try and not take care of the people immediately.”

Vartan credits the co-op model with helping A Slice of New York both stay in business and keep employees safe during the COVID-19 pandemic. The worker-owners voted to mandate masks and social distancing policies weeks before the state did, and to do away with slices, even though they were a huge part of the business, because they’d be harder to serve safely. “We did that not because we were trying to maximize our profit. We did that because we were trying to maximize the safety of our team,” says Vartan. “People are seeing and making decisions, not just [thinking] ‘I want this.’ It’s, ‘How are we taking care of each other? How are we taking care of the business?’ And that mindset is why this is the right model going forward.”

“What we can’t do in wages, we try to make up for in being a basically decent and respectful place to work.”

There is no one way to be a co-op. Owners can decide how long employees must be at the company before they’re eligible to become a co-owner, how much it costs to buy in, how much of the profits to split, and how much to save for a rainy day. But the ability for those questions to be a conversation, and not a top-down mandate, is enticing. The model “increases the likelihood that the business will stay locally owned and operated, gives workers a greater equity and turns what might otherwise be a low-paying blue-collar job into a more rewarding career,” writes Melissa Lang in the San Francisco Chronicle.

Cara Dudzic, co-owner of the cooperational Charmington’s cafe in Baltimore, says the restaurant’s worker-owned setup means employees often stay for years in an industry where the standard is months, and they have the opportunity to buy into health care benefits, something most restaurant jobs don’t offer. “What we can’t do in wages, we try to make up for in being a basically decent and respectful place to work.”

No matter how kindly run and community-focused a restaurant’s structure is, wages are often the sticking point. After all, it’s a job; getting paid is the goal. And as much as co-op or nonprofit structures help with the overall work culture, they do not solve the problem so many restaurants face: It costs money to pay people a living wage. The industry typically relies on tipped wages for servers, which allows restaurant owners to pass the burden of ensuring servers make a living wage onto customers. Everyone admits it’s a bad (and racist) system. But doing away with tipping has proven to be a hard sell for customers and workers alike. Danny Meyer, whose Union Square Hospitality Group restaurants famously ended tipping, initially faced customer sticker shock, and staff leaving because they could make more with tips than on an hourly wage. The group reinstated tipping this June.

Vartan says employees at A Slice of New York start at $16.50 an hour, $4.50 above California’s minimum wage (and almost a dollar over San Francisco’s), because, since no one owner is trying to make a profit above anyone else, wages can be lifted across the board. And employees there can still accept tips. But becoming a member of a cooperative does require buying into a long-term plan, in an industry that has by design courted short-term commitment; giving up a portion of one’s wages to be part of a worker-owned collective, or forgoing $300 a night in tips so everyone can make $15 an hour, is not as enticing if you’re not planning on being there long. Even for longer-term employees, given the relentless nature of the work, it’s hard to give up the “every man for himself” mentality, especially during an unprecedented recession.

Charmington’s began with 11 partners in 2010, and is now down to just three. “Some people hired as regular staff did want buy-in, and did by accepting a few hours of compensation as shares rather than wages every pay period,” Dudzic says. But other staff didn’t want to forgo wages, didn’t plan on staying in food service that long, or just didn’t have the time or energy for the “fairly stressful early meetings and email chains” that being a co-owner of a restaurant entail. “The main thing that gets in the way of providing everything we want is income,” she says, noting that the opening of a food hall a few blocks away in 2016 has continued to cut into their lunch business. Sales being what they are, Charmington’s base wage is the Maryland minimum wage of $11 an hour. The reality is, even though Charmington’s is paying as much as it can while ensuring it can stay afloat, workers could probably make more elsewhere.

Wage equity is part of a larger conversation among the industry as a whole about creating a better future for restaurants: Regardless of what the rest of the business model looks like, it’s something that, should the owners desire, can be solved almost immediately. “American society or business schools say it’s profits over everything, but we’re always saying that it’s community over profits,” says Yajaira Saavedra, co-owner of La Morada in the Bronx. To that end, every employee of the restaurant — regardless of their role — receives the same wage. For a long time, that wage was $17 an hour, but this summer, it was boosted to $20 with a grant from the city.

La Morada, it should be noted, is not a co-op — it’s owned by a family of undocumented people, and has made a name for itself as not just a restaurant, but a community center and haven for immigrants and other undocumented people. Saavedra says that prioritizing fair wages and treatment has led to high retention rates among workers and a loyal following in the community, which is more important to Saavedra than taking home a bigger cut of the profits. “Even if we [close], we want to make sure that the community is stable, and we have fought for the better,” she says. “And we left it in a better standing than when we were there.”

In his book The Third Plate: Field Notes on the Future of Food, Dan Barber, an owner of Blue Hill Farm and the longtime chef at its two associated restaurants, quotes naturalist John Muir: “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” Which is to say, when it comes to restaurants, it’s hard to change one thing unless you’re changing everything.

“The organic movement was about an organism, why everything is connected,” Barber says in an interview. “It got dumbed down into, do you use pesticides or not? But really, the origins of the organic movement were about the community which produced your food, the community that got the food to you, and the community that was cooking the food and enjoying it together.” It isn’t organic unless the humans involved aren’t being exploited. It doesn’t matter if your steak was grass-fed if the person who butchered it can’t afford rent.

The ethics of Blue Hill come at a price — a socially distanced picnic at the fine dining Blue Hill at Stone Barns currently costs $195 a person. In any restaurant, Barber explains, “it’s rent, food costs, employee/insurance costs,” and while there may be wiggle room, a lot of those costs are set. “When I talk about buying ingredients that are treating the environment right, rightfully so, a lot of chefs are like, ‘Well, I would love to do that, but I literally don’t have room in the budget to be doing that like Blue Hill does.’” (Weeks after we spoke, Barber announced that he plans to step away from chef duties, and pivot both Stone Barns and the NYC location of Blue Hill to a chef-in-residence program that he hopes will help combat “racial and gender inequities” in the industry, something he and Blue Hill have been criticized for perpetuating, most recently by chef Preeti Mistry).

“We’re not changing our quality, and we’re not going to screw our people. So the only knob left to turn is pricing.”

Of course, not every meal can realistically be $195 per person. The cost of providing every employee with a living wage and benefits — not to mention paying rent and insurance, and serving a good product affordable enough for most people — is nearly impossible with the way restaurants, co-op or not, must run. Vartan says about 45 percent of A Slice of New York’s costs are labor costs, which he describes as one of a restaurant’s three knobs; the other two are quality of food and pricing. “We’re not changing our quality, and we’re not going to screw our people. So the only knob left to turn is pricing,” he says. Yet, he’s gotten complaints that his pizza is more expensive than a pie you could get at Pizza Hut. No matter how much better his product, or better-treated his employees, some customers aren’t willing to, or flat out can’t, afford it.

The problem of “good” food being prohibitively expensive can’t be completely solved by restaurateurs turning those knobs. Depressed wages and inflation are problems for everyone, not just restaurant workers. And if it isn’t going to be addressed by an increased minimum wage, it has to come from customers rethinking their own priorities where able. Which many of them are doing.

The COVID moment has perhaps opened some diners’ eyes to just how precarious things have been for food-service workers. In the short term, consumers are stepping up and filling gaps by donating to GoFundMes, buying gift cards, or just tipping well. Elsewhere, mutual aid efforts aimed to address the widespread hunger caused by the pandemic and the recession have inspired many to think critically about what role restaurants should play in that aid. During the pandemic, La Morada has served 1,000 free hot meals a day, and used its longstanding relationships with local farmers to help solve the problems of food waste and hunger. “Small farmers, organizations we have those relationships with ... now trust us to actually do the mutual aid work and have volunteered either their time or their produce,” Saavedra says.

For many diners, the value of eating out is now not just about the immediate experience, but everything, including the people, that make it what it is. It’s always been that way to a certain extent — the way that $195 Blue Hill meal is worth it not just because the food tastes good, but the knowledge that it was grown thoughtfully, cooked by experts, and served to you in a perfect pastoral setting. Now, “value” can include not just customer experience, but the knowledge that employee well-being is part of the plan.

What the pandemic has strengthened, and what anyone who has ever felt the comfort of having a local knows, is the idea of a restaurant as a community. The risk of losing the coffee shop where you read the paper every Saturday, or your favorite date spot, or the bar where the bartenders always give you a shot for the road, has galvanized people within the restaurant industry to think through what a better future looks like, and those outside of it to care as much about the people working at the restaurant as the restaurant itself. “Once you are attuned and aware of it, it becomes part of the fabric of the culture,” says Barber. “It doesn’t go back.”

It is with that momentum that models like workers collectives, mutual aid, and legislation advocacy can thrive. As food-service businesses have been struggling through the pandemic, “worker co-op models are being pitched to municipalities, on the basis of maintaining wealth and equity for oppressed communities,” says Jeff Noven, executive director of the nonprofit grocery store Berkeley Student Food Collective. The student food collective is a cooperative success story, but its unique place within the university community means many of its methods are not replicable. Most obviously it operates without the burden of labor costs: Noven is the only full-time employee, with his and four part-time employees’ salaries subsidized by grants. Most of the labor comes from 150 volunteers, who elect the board from within that membership. That can’t be the path forward for the vast majority of restaurants.

There’s also the issue that many groups doing the work might not be eligible for government aid or alternative business models. For La Morada, applying to be a co-op or a nonprofit requires citizenship paperwork they don’t have, and while according to Harvard Law School, federal law doesn’t “expressly prohibit undocumented immigrants from working for a business that they own,” the laws are also pretty unsettled. Saavedra says they also had issues converting to a soup kitchen, as they couldn’t apply for 501(c)(3) status. But that hasn’t stopped La Morada from its commitment to mutual aid. “We still have all the same values,” says Saavedra. “You don’t necessarily need [to be] a co-op or a not-for-profit tax. You carry ethical work.”

Instead, there are other ways for businesses to adopt parts of the co-op model, or other equitable models, that work for them, and those actions are already in progress. The unionization push throughout restaurants and grocery stores continues to advocate for better working conditions, especially as many were deemed “essential workers” as lockdowns began in March. Restaurants continue to do away with tipping, and to incorporate mutual aid into their business models. But everything restaurants can do on their own is a few drops in a bucket compared to what government support in the form of things like universal health care, or real aid for small businesses, could achieve. Vartan is working with local legislators to incentivize businesses to organize as workers collectives, and noted the 2018 Main Street Employees Ownership Act as a step toward federal support. And restaurant workers continue to push and protest for things like a fair minimum wage, federally mandated sick leave, and support for independent restaurants struggling during the pandemic.

Prioritizing community over capitalism has always been an option. But now, more people than ever have a desire to seek out food made in equitable spaces, to learn about the inner workings of their favorite restaurants and see how they can best support them, or just leave a 30 percent tip because they know times are tough. That won’t go away once we have a vaccine.

Sustained change will take a greater understanding of what “equity” means, and what it will require from both restaurants and customers. As bad as the pandemic has been, it has put us in a great position to do that sort of reevaluation, and reimagine a restaurant as a place where success doesn’t mean profit, but rather that the whole community, farm-to-table, is cared for. And to maybe even fight for a day when it won’t be the responsibility of restaurants to solve these problems at all.

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3lHHb3U https://ift.tt/3jAmYea

Building an equitable restaurant — where all workers are paid fairly, have benefits, and work without discrimination — will require undoing the way most restaurants are run

“What we can’t do in wages, we try to make up for in being a basically decent and respectful place to work.”

“We’re not changing our quality, and we’re not going to screw our people. So the only knob left to turn is pricing.”

from Eater - All https://ift.tt/3lHHb3U via Blogger https://ift.tt/3hOi255

#Blogger #cooking #Eater #food #recipes

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sockparade · 5 years ago

Text

ill at ease

I can still picture the grin on Milan’s face that day as he walked into the office with a Starbucks frappuccino in hand. I have a hard time remembering a day when Milan didn’t arrive at the office with a Starbucks frappuccino in hand. So it wasn’t out of the ordinary. But it was noteworthy that day because the week before a video went viral of two Black men being arrested at a Starbucks in Philadelphia because a white employee was uncomfortable with them asking to use the restroom and sitting in the coffeeshop while they waited for a business associate to arrive. Something non-Black folks do all the time. People were calling for a total Starbucks boycott.

I raised my eyebrows at his drink, and he shrugged saying, “Look, I’m not going to let the actions of some racist white people take away my freedom to get whatever drink I want.”

And like, yeah, I objectively understand how that’s an imperfect political stance and maybe an ineffective strategy to create change, but also, man, I really felt that. In order to protest Black men being arrested for sitting in a coffeeshop (read: for being Black), was I really going to try to tell a Black man about where he should or shouldn’t get his substandard (ha) coffee fix? Try to convince him about the importance of voting with his dollar? Can’t a person just live?

I just didn’t have it in me to disagree.

I often think about that exchange whenever I hear a call to boycott such and such corporation or a call to cancel a celebrity. I mean, listen, I do believe in the power of an organized boycott or protest. There is concrete historical evidence and contemporary examples of how people have bossed companies and the government into doing what we demand. But I don’t want to keep pretending that it’s an easy switch to flip or that it’s a cost-free way for people of color to fight against the inequity in the world.

That Starbucks incident was just one in an endless number of incidents in which a white person says or does something that reveals their racism, forcing people of color to do the emotionally taxing, unending math, of just how much caucasity we’re willing to stomach.

This is a really old story. Marginalized groups of people have always had to bear the brunt of publicized racist behavior. For every racist incident, there are generally three major phases of emotional labor that people of color in the United States have to work through. At first I could only name two but then I realized it’s actually three. Let me walk you through them.

First, before any explicitly racist incident happens, we have to contend with the fact that there are generally such slim pickings in terms of choices that will allow us to exist ethically and stay true to our convictions. How do we earn a living? Where do we grocery shop? What authors do we read? Whose music do we listen to? Are there ANY electronics that are manufactured in an ethical way? Do we wear checks or not? Are the non-white teachers at this preschool treated with respect by the white owners of this preschool? How do I reduce my purchases on Amazon? Is this restaurant gentrifying the neighborhood? Wait which banks have divested from fossil fuels again? Can I truly be myself at this church? What athleisure brands haven’t been accused of overt racism yet? Where are the influencers that look like me?

When it comes to the consumption of and participation in… well, almost anything, we constantly have to make concessions because we live in a place that’s simply not built for us. It is so hard to name a single sphere of life that I enjoy that isn’t dominated by whiteness or the white gaze. I think my MO for some time now has been to assume that no brand, company, restaurant, actor, or celeb is truly *safe*. I’m generally always waiting for the other shoe to drop while also trying not to think about it too much. It’s a lot of mental gymnastics.

I was at a lecture a few years ago on the topic of the “doctrine of discovery” and the systematic oppression of Native American nations. It was a large auditorium in Berkeley full of neoliberal mostly white folks. The lecturer read a rather dismissive opinion rejecting the Oneidas attempt to reclaim land that was criminally stolen from them in violation of U.S. treaty (Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation, 2005) as a shockingly recent example of how this oppression has continued. And then theatrically, he revealed the author to be none other than Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg. There was a loud, audible, collective gasp from the audience.

I mean, no, I didn’t know the Notorious RBG had that in her. But also, I’m not over here clutching my pearls. I’m not saying I’m proud of my jaded mentality. I’m just accustomed to it. As Tressie McMillan Cottom says in her essay “Know Your Whites” in Thick: And Other Essays, “I am not disappointed. If you truly know your whites, disappointment rarely darkens your door.” I’ve been seeing more and more of this language with the virality and frequency of racist actions being caught on video and circulated on the internet. People will say, “I’m not surprised, but I’m mad.” It’s too overwhelming to feel shock and pain every single time. So we steady ourselves for the eventuality, we brace for the pain. Know your whites, y’all.

The second phase of emotional labor is related to the actual injury. We feel the deep pain of injury even if we don’t know the person that was harmed or the person who caused the harm. I think people are sometimes quick to dismiss the behavior of rich and famous people as irrelevant and reduce discussion of it as simply celebrity gossip. But I think there’s pain whether it’s a murder, an arrest, or a racial slur. I know it can be hard to tell by the overwhelming amount of white tears shed on social media after each viral incident but the marginalized group targeted by the offense carries the pain so differently than anyone outside of that group. Try as we might to muster our empathy and our vague-ass Christian lament, it’s just. not. the. same. It’s not. Sometimes it’s so painful that I don’t even fully let myself go there. I haven’t been able to bring myself to read in detail about the recent hate crimes against Asians since COVID-19. I feel squeamish about it. I feel pain when I read stories and see pictures of families being separated, detained and deported but I know for a Latinx person that pain must be so much deeper. And I absolutely cannot fully imagine the pain that Black and Indigineous folks in America endure living in this place.

And then finally, there’s the third phase of labor. This is the part when we’re called upon to react, call it out, bring awareness, advocate for change, and make swift changes (big and small) in our own lives. Sometimes I feel judged (by others and by my own conscience) when I don’t boycott or abstain. And sometimes I just try to skip to this third phase because I don’t want to deal with the grief of the second phase.

After this past week’s twitter feud, lots of folks are ready to cancel Alison Roman for the trash comments she made about Chrissy Teigan and Marie Kondo in her recent interview in The New Consumer. It feels like there’s a sudden clamoring to point out just how white Alison Roman is, and how there’s new evidence that she’s racist. And I guess what I want to say is, um, it’s not really much of a reveal nor is it brand new information. Right? Roxana Hadadi in her recent article titled, “Alison Roman, the Colonization of Spices, and the Exhausting Prevalence of Ethnic Erasure in Popular Food Culture” gives a pretty detailed explanation of just how unshocking it is.

Prior to reading this interview in The New Consumer, did anyone really think Alison Roman had an astute analysis of her white privilege and her accompanying habit of cultural appropriation that she’s benefitted from her entire career? No! While certainly gross, was I shocked that she mocked imperfect English (regardless of whether it was in reference to Marie’s accent or a Eastern European cookbook)? No! Am I shocked when any person mocks an accent? No! We’ve *allowed* it in TV shows, in movies, in corporate settings, and in social settings. I cringe every time but I’ve been forced my whole life to accommodate it. I’ve heard mockery of accents maybe most often from second generation immigrants mocking their own culture’s accents! And If I’m completely honest, I still sometimes find myself guilty of laughing along. (Curiously, Alison Roman’s lengthy apology made no mention of that part of her interview. Perhaps she, and/or her PR team, realized there was no easy way to walk that one back.) Race relations are a fucking mess in our country, y’all. Let’s please stop pretending like it’s just the occasional ultra-public celebrity slip-up.

Hear me when I say I’m not defending her fuckery. What I’m taking issue with is the lack of nuance and the self-righteousness in how we respond to these public brouhahas. Both the shocked reactions and the gotcha reactions expressed by people feel equally tiresome to me. This reflection, written by Charlotte Muru-Lanning, is one of the few three-dimensional, unflattened, and self-searching reflections written by a person of color on this whole drama. While I don’t agree with how defensive she is of Alison Roman, I appreciate the way she refuses to act as if she doesn’t exist in the world that she’s critiquing and I love that she recognizes the complexity in herself as a woman of color.

I’ve become pretty comfortable in my understanding that everyone white in our country is racist. I say racist in the fullest, most comprehensive definition of the word. Some are hateful in their racism. And some are actively trying to fight it even as it exists in themselves. As Ijeoma Oluo explains so succinctly and precisely in her book, So You Want to Talk About Race, racism is “a prejudice against someone based on race, when those prejudices are reinforced by systems of power.” And then she goes on to say, “Systematic racism is a machine that runs whether we pull the levers or not, and by just letting it be, we are responsible for what it produces. We have to actually dismantle the machine if we want to make change.” It’s in the water. And we are all impacted by it, no matter what part of the machine we’re in. Me included. As a Taiwanese American who grew up in Houston, Texas, I wasn’t magically immune to the anti-blackness that was/is prevalent in the Asian American community. Whether it was comments made by my parents, my relatives, my friends, or comments from acquaintances/strangers, it was pretty consistent. You don’t bake in that environment for all your formative years without it damaging a part of you. It’s something I still find myself fighting to unroot and discard from my psychology and my bias despite spending my non-profit career trying to address racial disparities in education and employment. I might spend the rest of my life working on it. We can’t keep pretending it’s an occasional affliction or it’s a disease that only Trump supporters suffer from. I suspect the people who are *shocked* at Alison Roman’s racist comments are also people who believe there are good whites and bad whites. #notallwhites?

Lots of folks have written reflections on cancel culture so I don’t feel the need to rehash it all here. Cancel culture exists for a reason. And it also has its various pitfalls. On one of my favorite podcasts, Still Processing, Jenna Wortham and Wesley Morris do an excellent job of examining the limits of cancel culture in their episode about Michael Jackson (content warning: child sexual abuse). One of their most compelling arguments against cancel culture is that while it attempts to hold an individual accountable, it can also be harmful because it allows people to look away. It allows us to skip the hard work of scrutinizing our broken systems beyond a single individual and it allows us to give ourselves a pass and not search ourselves for the ways in which we are complicit. We can’t look away. We have to interrogate what we consume and why. It’s the only way things will change.

I want to attempt to do some of that hard work here. Beyond organized boycotts, I do subscribe to the idea that there’s value in the individual choices I make to abstain from something. Not just in service of a desired economic, political or societal outcome, but because of the impact it can have on me, as an individual. So let me push past my annoyance that I even have to do this when I’ve already done two other phases of emotional labor and get to work.

A question I’ve been asking myself this week is: Did I somehow make peace with Alison Roman’s cultural appropriation for profit? And if so, why? The answer is, yeah, I think I did. And here are my thoughts on why.

I like Alison Roman’s recipes. I have both of her cookbooks and I only have three cookbooks in my kitchen so that’s something. It’s pretty rare for me to crack open a cookbook when I’m in the kitchen. I mostly just google for specific recipes I’m craving or I’ll look up what temperature is ideal for roasting cauliflower. Almost all the dinners I cook for my family consist of rice/noodles, a meat, and a vegetable and I don’t use recipes for those anymore. Each week I do like to have one “more complicated” dinner recipe and that’s when I’ll sometimes open a cookbook or scroll Instagram. I spend an unreasonable amount of time reading recipe comments (often contradicting) about modifications or adjustments they made and that’s after wading past all the comments about how excited people are to make the posted recipe-- it’s all very confusing and time consuming.

For someone who was not taught how to cook and who didn’t spend much time in a kitchen until maybe 3 years ago, I appreciated Alison Roman’s insistence that she had figured out the “best way” to make classic dishes (usually dishes I did not grow up eating, like Shrimp Louie or Shallot Pasta), the way she suggested using spices I’ve never cooked or eaten before (Aleppo pepper), and her encouragement to use new techniques that I was unfamiliar with (slow roasting tomatoes in the oven for six hours). It was kind of like finding a cooking lifehack.

While I found her IG persona mostly grating and self-congratulatory, I was charmed by her vision in her first cookbook for lowering the barrier to entry for making a really great meal that you can be proud of and her push in her second cookbook to host dinner parties that bring your friends together in a memorable way. For a generation that has relished mostly eating out all the time and then ordering in all the time, following an Alison Roman recipe could sometimes feel like permission to try shit out in the kitchen without the pressure to be a master at it. It was a good feeling when the recipes turned out well and it was fun to talk about which recipes I’d tried with other folks who were also working their way through her recipes.

Okay, and this part might sound ridiculous but I sort of thought that Alison Roman was someone who could maybe teach me how to make white food. Haha. You know what I’m talking about? Like the food that might be on a menu at a restaurant tagged as “American (New)” on Yelp. I mean yes, she has a recipe for “Kimchi-Braised Pork with Sesame and Egg Yolk” in Nothing Fancy but that kind of bastardized Asian dish has been popping up on white restaurant menus pretty consistently for some time now. But a question I’m now asking myself is why I wanted to make white food in the first place? Did I subconsciously think it was fancier and would make for a more interesting menu when hosting dinner parties?

In her introduction to that Kimchi-Braised Pork recipe she says, “I am calling this a braise, but it is really a stew (an homage to the Korean Jigae) in which meat is braised--but isn’t that most stews?” How do you react when you read that sentence? I think she avoids triggering my usual alarm bells because she doesn’t attempt to be an expert in Korean cuisine. She feints left by throwing in the homage line. She’s not aiming for authenticity in her recipe. It might actually be worse if she gave a mini lecture on Korean cuisine. I don’t know. When I read that line in the cookbook, I don’t find myself immediately questioning the proper origins of the recipe. I don’t have the same knee jerk reaction as when a white chef publishes a whole cookbook of recipes from just one specific region of the world and presumes to be the expert or the ultimate curator.

And maybe that’s the problem. Maybe I need to work harder to stay in the habit of questioning recipe creation and curation. Kind of like the way I’ve learned to question books like Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt. Fifteen years ago I wouldn’t have thought twice about white authors writing the stories of people of color. Wasn’t that the whole of literature? Or so I thought. What a gift it’s been to pivot my reading to mostly authors of color! What would happen if I demanded more from the food media I was consuming?

It gets a bit more complicated for me though. Alison Roman has a Chinese-inspired recipe called “Soy-Braised Brisket with Caramelized Honey and Garlic” that I really like. In her introduction to it she writes, “... the tangy, spiced braised beef noodles available at a few of my favorite Chinese restaurants around New York, which I’ll order every time. While not a replication, this brisket is my interpretation: salty from soy sauce, sour from vinegar, lightly spiced from a few pantry all-stars.”

I don’t even know where to start with this one. I am personally so confused by Chinese food. What is Chinese food? What is Taiwanese food? What is Americanized Chinese food? Is that still Chinese food? What was the food my mom cooked at home throughout my childhood? It took me awhile to allow myself to just fully enjoy Americanized Chinese food without feeling hung up about it. A few years ago my mom made a new dish that I loved and I naively asked her whether it was a recipe she grew up with. I think I was secretly hoping it was a family recipe that she learned from her mom so I could check that immigrant kid fantasy off my list.

She laughed and said, “Do you know where I learned it from? I learned it on YouTube!”

I mean, this is the thing with the Asian Diaspora. Things are pretty disjointed for me. I know some Asian Americans are super locked in and schooled on their origins, heritage, and culture but I honestly don’t know much. I don’t know what region or city in Taiwan my favorite kind of Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup is from. I think I’ve learned to make a version of it that I like better than anything I’ve ever eaten in a restaurant or in someone’s home. I don’t say that to brag, I just say that to point out how confusing it is to try to connect that Taiwanese dish with my heritage when it’s something I learned how to make in my thirties using a recipe I found on a stranger’s website. I feel like I’m trying to connect with a culture I didn’t really grow up in myself. I’m chasing phantoms.

You know what, I feel like some white lady in the Midwest on the Instant Pot Community Facebook group might legitimately be the world expert on the best way to make General Tso’s Chicken in a pressure cooker at home. After I made the Butter Chicken recipe from Two Sleevers, I looked up who authored the recipe and was so relieved to see that Dr. Urvashi (affectionately nicknamed The Butter Chicken Lady) was Indian. I loved that Butter Chicken recipe. I was super excited to try cooking more Indian food and I was happy that I could do it with a clear conscience. Haha, it’s all so convoluted, I know.

I think maybe I feel reluctant to hold others accountable for being more respectful of food origins because my understanding of my own cultural heritage (as it relates to food, but also in many other ways) feels spotty and incomplete. I find myself feeling unsure of what I am defending. But ultimately I think this has been a flimsy excuse. It’s not so hard to google a bit more to find a chef that’s sharing a recipe from their particular culture. I think I need to confront the hidden grief I feel about being disconnected from my culture.

In The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief, Anne Anlin Cheng puts it this way,

“If the move from grief to grievance, for example, aims to provide previously denied agency, then it stands as a double-edged solution, since to play the plaintiff is to cultivate, for many critics, a cult of victimization. So the gesture of granting agency through grievance confers agency on the one hand and rescinds it on the other. As a result, for many concerned with improving the conditions of marginalized peoples, the focus on psychical injury and its griefs is strategically harmful and to be studiously avoided. But this also means that we are so worried about depriving disenfranchised people of their agency that we risk depriving them of the time and space to grieve. A final problem is that since justice based on grievance and compensation tends to rely on the logic of commensurability and quantifiability, it is ill-equipped to confront that which is incommensurable and unquantifiable. In short, we as a society are at ease with the discourse of grievance but terribly ill at ease in the face of grief.”

So yeah, I guess the part I haven’t said is, when I read those comments made by Alison Roman in that interview, it hurt me. And when she deflected and didn’t take the initial pushback seriously, that hurt too. It was such a familiar feeling. I know that feeling because I’ve been there before. I’ve had my feelings brushed off with a laugh or a weird, unsatisfactory explanation. I’ve been told that someone was just punching up and didn’t think about it in the context I was. I’ve experienced that basic othering so many times in my life.

Okay so the theory here is that if I do a better job of facing the first and second phase of emotional labor head on… if I can somehow process the pain and grief of living in a racist society, then being a thoughtful consumer will feel less like a sacrifice. It’ll be easier for me to stand by choices I’ve made because I’ll know I’ve made them with integrity and in a way that is true to myself. And I can get to a place where that doesn’t feel like a loss of freedom but rather a true liberation. Man, I want that.

I also want to get in the habit of asking myself whether my desires, the same desires I am so reluctant to give up, are not actually just byproducts themselves of suffering in this machine for so long. Like, do I really believe it’s coincidental that I bought into Alison Roman’s brand and that I also do a good amount of my shopping at Madewell? And then they happened to do a collab together?

I need take a magnifying glass to the way I’ve been subconsciously trained to prize dominant white culture. It is so uncomfortable for me to even type that out because it feels like I’m admitting that I like white culture. Like I’m somehow admitting to an inferiority complex. I’m not saying I wish I were white. I definitely don’t wish that. But I am guilty of believing that my taste, my style, and my preferences are somehow invincible to the whiteness of million dollar marketing campaigns in this country. I like to pretend that my brain is somehow impervious to the terrifying industry of engineered social media algorithms and psychological branding strategies. And that’s bullshit. I don’t think anyone really wants to be white these days. Even white people themselves seem uncomfortable. But a white person enjoying wonderful things created by people of color? We eat that shit up. Why do we do that?

We have to spend time recognizing, no matter the discomfort, why our pleasures align so easily with the dominant culture. My hope is that when I start interrogating the way my tastes align with whiteness I’ll begin to cherish the ability I have to move into a place of misalignment. Maybe it won’t be so difficult to give up things I’ve taken pleasure in, because I’ll find pleasure in the process of detaching. Maybe it’ll eventually stop feeling like I’m abstaining and it’ll feel more like I’m just making powerful choices.

I think the shallow analysis of white supremacy and consumption in this country instructs a person of color to believe that liberation means having the freedom to consume as we please, disregarding the impact of our choices. You know, a chance to live the way many white people live. But I think a more thoughtful analysis instructs us to believe that our choices have consequences in terms of whether it supports or dismantles the machine of racism -- both in ourselves and in society.

Instead of the performative handwringing of trying to decide whether or not we buy another Starbucks coffee, hit next when MJ starts playing on a Spotify playlist, or keep cooking that Alison Roman brisket, my friend Milan has taught me over the years that it’s more important to be attentive to what we are desiring and why we’re making the choices that we make. Yeah that will often mean boycotting things or making different choices, no doubt. The difference is that it won’t be from an exhausting place of trying to achieve blameless optics. It’ll be from a genuine realignment. There’s freedom in that.

And yes, I see it too. That our pleasure and the way we experience culture is so closely tied to consumption is fodder for a whole other damn essay. Ugh.

#alison roman #chrissy teigan #marie kondo #cancel culture #cultural appropriation #food media #asian diaspora

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housepaintersbrisbane-blog1 · 5 years ago

Photo

House painting is a simple and quick thanks to refresh your home and completely change the atmosphere of your home. Fresh paint adds value to your home and makes it attractive. most of the people paint the house because the old paint is broken by the weather, but that's not the case. Read the blog to ascertain the highest 10 reasons why paints are essential to your home.

1. Add value to your house

By painting the inside and exterior of the house you'll definitely improve your property value. Indoor and outdoor paints can bring a big return on investment. Newly painted houses can have more value and attract more buyers.

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Paint a house once every two or three years will improve your visual appeal. Paint your house during a fresh and dynamic way and substitute your neighborhood.

3. Give Contemporary Look

Paint can make an honest rejuvenation of the house if you would like makeup reception . Paint trends change over time and may be painted at regular intervals to remain on time.

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The exterior surface of the house are often severely suffering from extreme weather like heavy rain or sunshine. Moisture, peeling, or cracking of the outer surface may occur. The coat of the outside paint can cover the stains and damage.

5. Prevention from Moisture

High humidity in your home can damage it and cause harmful fungi and mold. you'll prevent moisture damage by painting your home at regular intervals.

6. Indoor Air Quality gets improved

Painting indoor walls can reduce odors and smoke. Low volatile organic compounds (VOC) and non VOC type paints can increase interior air quality for people and families.

7. Economical Refashion

If the house needs a replacement look, it's not better than refreshing paint with a pleasant picture. The new paint job not only refreshes the looks but also gives color to the dull appearance.

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The peeling and cracking of the walls are disturbing and troubling. The new coat of paint helps prevent stains and peeling of the paint. Picture the inside and exterior walls will help cover the permanent marks or stains that are difficult for homeowners to get rid of .

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If you retain indoor walls, trim and other painted surfaces, you'll check dust and dirt. Older homes should use high-quality paints.

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SHOULD YOU roll in the hay YOURSELF OR A PRO? Mostly, people consider painting a reasonably easy task. Dip a roll or brush into the paint, then apply it evenly to the wall. most of the people can paint their homes if they actually need to. it's an excellent thanks to save a couple of dollars and leave and be pleased with your work. But there are other aspects of coins because there are several advantages to hiring professionals.

Here are a number of the foremost important things to consider:

1. Time is Money

Even though you'll save a couple of dollars by doing it yourself, don't forget all the time you spend on this project. It takes a couple of weeks to color the entire house alone. Work a day for hours. Obviously, it depends on the dimensions of your house, but you'll be surprised at the time you would like to draw your house properly during your free time. Are you busy because you would like to draw little amount of free time?

2. Protection

Painters consistently stand on large scales. they need to travel up the roof, rest on the windows and do other crazy things to end the work . Although 90% of the paint is comparatively safe, it lasts 10% and comforts the mother in the dark . Why would you are doing it once you can easily hire someone to try to to these things for you? Professional painters know what they are doing and roll in the hay a day . They skills to use ladders correctly and measure fatigue. they're going to not exceed their limits because they realize they're in peril .

3. No Compromise on Quality

Painting a wall isn't rocket science … but can anyone paint it? More importantly, does one skills to form the paint look better, hard to succeed in places, and the way to color the foremost important parts of your home? Experts know that certain areas of the house , like underneath the side panels or small holes on the door, are vital . If you are doing not paint these critical areas, your house is vulnerable to mold, living creatures, or other sorts of damage. Professionals won't only improve the looks of the paint but also will better protect the house.

4. Speed

Experts will probably have a minimum of three or four people performing at home. Sometimes you would like a whole crew, although there could also be 1 or 2 days to end . don't you think that you'll get things done faster than you are doing everything? in fact , you can. So rather than using it all month, you'll be sitting during a freshly painted house within every week or two. this may offer you peace of mind. Now that you simply have completed this project, you'll specialist in other tasks reception or at work.

You can certainly save a couple of dollars by doing everything yourself. But experts can save valuable time to specialist in something by processing everything faster and more efficiently. But before recruiting the primary professional architect we found, let’s check out a number of the important things an expert should consider when working with knowledgeable .

WHY you would like MASTER PAINTERS instead of REGULAR PAINTERS? Many folks are often seen to color their room themselves. Experienced professionals, however, do great things. there's a secret that they need practiced tons to urge perfection. for instance , their secrets don't shorten the image time. Painters spend 2-4 days during a medium-sized room. It takes time to organize and paint correctly. Maybe you've got some issue about time but once you will see the results, a smooth attractive and shining surface, you'll recommend it yourself.

SURFACES PREPARATION Find, then fix cracks and dents

Beside big things, an old lamp with a unadorned light bulb on the brink of the wall emits little crack, bump or nail. Master painters know, what's the simplest tool to repair cracks and dents? They know the character of the cracks and dents and therefore the materials needed to repair them (e.g. fly plaster, sanding, sponge, putty or tape). they're familiar with rough and bad surfaces of all kinds because they need experienced.

PAINT SELECTION Why should primer be powerful?

Primers aren't limited to dilute paints. they're prepared to deliver a consistent base, a robust and ensure smooth paint layers and strength.

Buy quality paint

Commonly, glassier paints are immune to stains and abrasion. However, the upper the gloss, the greater the incompleteness of the wall or paint works. Brisbane’s master painters know the sort and quality of paint to fit your needs. Different surfaces require different paint. Internal and external paints are different within the same way. The master painter can offer you a far better suggestion. Contemporary paints dry quickly and make brushing difficult. The master painter knows the answer to the present problem.

CHOOSING the proper EQUIPMENT Roller rules, Bucket use, painters rode, good paint brush

A perfect roller can contain an outsizes amount of paint, leaving the proper amount of textures, spraying, or blurring, making cleaning easy. There are many companies that sell rollers within the market. Choosing a roller is an art, and Brisbane’s specialist knows this art. Not only the utilization of buckets but also the way to choose a brush which will up the painter. Be careful together with your hair when choosing a brush. Nylon and polyester, these are two major ingredients in Synthetic brushes. It are often made with one material or with both. Poly bristles are suitable for textured or outdoor work, except for advanced inside work. Master painters know the utilization of each brush at the right place.

PAINTING IS AN ART Load it right

Ideally, you would like to place tons of paint in your brush as you'll control it without water droplets or drops. what percentage inches should your brush put during a paint bucket that only professionals know?

Cut in close

Cutting may be a complete art; There are special brushes and cutting techniques that need an excessive amount of practice. Painting a home is an entire skill to stay every moment in mind.

What is a specific sequence of labor from top to down, or right down to top? How are you able to evaluate your work either it's giving desired results or not? Painting the window is another science which demands attention and perfection. When and the way to start out it? Similarly the way to start doors? Vertically or horizontally? FINAL WORDS Master painters know the expected touch-ups and manage the items for this expected work. They work as a corporation and have some ethics of labor . Few of them discussed below

Professional services with quality work. Pro or Master painters have a team of experts and keep the records of these professionals. Provide professional advice and support when needed. The painter you select will work professionally. Selected painters respect their current environmental needs by maximizing their abilities. The selected master painter respects the businesses Code of conduct. Customer satisfaction and end results are in their top priorities

#house painting

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atemp19-blog · 7 years ago

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Practical SEO Guide: Good Business Is the Foundation of Good SEO

What is Search Engine Optimization (Search Engine Optimization)?Search engine optimization (search engine optimization) is a plethora of techniques, approaches and strategies to prepare your website to be found by major search engines. Everyone understands what Rockville MD SEO experts do, but few know how they do it. In actuality, many search engine optimization gurus fiercely disagree on the how part. Many tactics are available, but SEO is not a cheap endeavor, so one needs to be careful when allocating valuable advertising dollars to it.First, you've got to be clear on what you're trying to accomplish on the business side-focus, focus, focus! Secondly, you must reign in your zeal and get prepared for a grueling multi-month commitment that will require time, discipline, and money-be prepared to invest time in the trenches.

Finally, you need to decide which tools and techniques will produce the best return on investment (ROI). If you are looking to get yourself on the first page of Google's search results immediately, this search engine optimization guide isn't for you. Do not believe those who claim they can get you on the first page overnight in an ethical manner. Even if you can cheat the machine for a brief time, Google's anger will land upon you swiftly and never go away. If you're serious about SEO, prepare yourself and do it right-your patience and diligence will pay off. There is truly nothing complicated about SEO. Valuable, relevant, unique, timely articles will rank well on search engines.

The content has to be machine-readable in order to be found. Valuable ContentLet us begin with content that is valuable. Before you even mention the word "SEO," ask yourself, what do I need to give the world, why is it unique, and why would anyone want it? Have you got a digital strategy covering all of your digital communications channels? Bear in mind that you're competing with millions of websites. Theoretically, you can spend plenty of time on SEO and reach that first page to learn that customers do not find your content, goods, or services appealing. Don't give up. Many business owners who have products and services never get through to their audiences because they do not bother with SEO. The axiom "If you build it, they will come" stands forever false on Google.

The onus is on you, and if you don't make a compelling case to Google, it will ignore you unless you're the only one in the universe offering that superhot merchandise (e.g., you have a monopoly). Thus, produce. Ensure you provide value. You might decide to share information that your competitors may use against you. You might opt to take unique perspectives that may incite a debate or draw criticism. Do not forget that it takes time to see results one or two months, sometimes more. Your ultimate aim is to find your competitive niche and establish yourself as an authority in your field of expertise so that you can influence buying patterns.

With regard to content, make sure everything you write is well organized, clean, and free of factual and grammatical mistakes. It is generally suggested that website content be written in the grade six reading level. Sometimes it might not be possible for many industries, but do your best. Another beneficial metric is your Flesch-Kincaid readability index. It's suggested to keep it over 60 (you can use this free tool). Use humor, but be careful not to violate and cross boundaries. Keep your audience in mind. Ensure the most important information is on peak of the page so it can be easily located. Web users do not read; they skim. Make information digestible, and avoid jargon, clichés, and colloquialisms as far as possible. Ensure that your navigation structure is task oriented and friendly. Your user experience must take people through the path that is joyful.You've got content, and you are ready to proceed to the upcoming step-showing search engines and people to find it. In this search engine optimization guide, we focus on Google, since it has the biggest search market share, but this is just as applicable to other search engines. It's probably safe to say that if you rank well on Google, you will rank well on search engines.

There are SEO techniques, but we prefer to focus on some that have been tested and demonstrated in action:Organically maximize the amount of inbound links from websites with high domain name and page authority. Make your webpages machine-readable by applying consistent search-engine optimization to your key pages. Building Inbound LinksThis technique causes a great deal of confusion and debate in SEO circles but for no valid reason. It's very straightforward and is based on the following assumption-counting quality links pointing back to your own website is the most effective way for Google to determine the value of your website.

Google's logic here is completely simple-if reputable and relevant websites link to you, your content has to be valuable. One important caveat here is that the link building has to be organic. If you've got a rapid increase in backlinks over a period of time, Google may perceive this even if your efforts are legitimate. Spread your efforts. Make certain to avoid link farms and spammy techniques. Do not post a comment on someone's website merely to add your link. Comment with a link only if everything you need to say is relevant to the conversation and the link can be useful to the audience. These are sites purely created for link building functions. Adding your website to web directories and listings is fine, but make sure you work with reputable websites.

Earned links are the cream of the crop in the SEO world and will create more SEO juice (ranking power) than any other medium. An earned link is simply a link made by a third party without your involvement or persuasion. Google has algorithms to figure out which links are got. In our experience, high-quality earned links are challenging to get, but that's the standard. The best thing to earned links is high-quality unearned links, which can be put on web directories, articles, blog posts, and shared media sources. It's absolutely essential that the primary aim of the backlinks you add to your articles is to provide supplementary content which helps readers delve deeper into your get and articles various thematically related components.

Link quality is quite important in the procedure. Reputation of this link server (domain)-the website where your link resides. Google has its own proprietary way of determining the reputation of a domainname. We utilize the Mozbar Chrome plugin to determine DA for our sites. The metric's value can change over time, so ensure to check it right when you need it. With respect to SEO, we prefer to not put links on any website which has a domain authority under 50. We believe this is where price and benefit intersect. This certainly poses some challenges and makes our search engine optimization work more expensivenonetheless, it gives our clients peace of mind and ensures their links bring in high-quality search engine optimization juice (ranking power).

You will need to make your own determination on what you consider a respectable website, as this certainly will affect your search engine optimization expenses, but we advise that you not use anything with a DA under your own, and we urge anything you use be at least over 25 (especially if you pay for it). Be selective of where you place your links. If the host website has been penalized by Google for questionable search engine optimization tactics, this may affect you. Another important consideration is the composition. An anchor is a text link which links back to a webpage. It is very important that the link text is in sync with the keyword and meta information in your landing page. That is how Google determines link significance. By way of instance, a link called "all about hamsters" pointing to a web page about "disco music" will surely not rank well in organic search results.How can you get high-quality inbound links from respectable websites?Content marketingContent is truly king and even more so with the Google Hummingbird algorithm revolution.

Google's ingenuity became more evident in the simplicity of this approach-provide precious, engaging, timely articles and you will rank. Just a couple years ago, Google couldn't afford the luxury of humanizing content analysis because of the lack of computing power, but with the advance of technology and the reduction in hardware prices, Google can now afford to test material deeper and build logical, intelligent connections between various web elements. Gone are the days of stuffing. Content marketing is simply an ongoing effort to promote and syndicate your articles via various publishing channels. The content-value and industry-relevance principles apply here.

One way is by publishing articles, blog posts, and news releases on relevant websites. Some are free, and some are paid. We've had experience with PR Web, MyPRGenie, Social Media Today, and Ezine Articles, all of which have DAs. If you are able to make it on those sites, the SEO-juice quality is really supreme.ConclusionThere are lots more Rockville MD SEO techniques available, but we highlighted the ones that we believe provide the best return on investment. Ultimately, you will have to decide for yourself exactly what SEO work is manageable for you in the long term. Do not turn SEO into your primary activity. Bear in mind that your primary aim is to concentrate on what you do business.

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bloojayoolie · 5 years ago

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America, Animals, and Asian: PS-Thommay sena yOu al photo of us so you know l'm a real person and not a robot or telemarketer Hi Stacy! This is Audra with Mary Kay. I don't think we've met but Kaitlyn that text is the best way to reach you! She was gifted with two $25 gift cards with a complementary facial and wanted one of them to go to you! Should I text or call you with the details? But we forgot said to snap one, so feel free to ask Kaitlyn about the fun we had! Hello, my name isn't Stacy but I do know Kaitlyn! I believe you have the wrong number! Ha!! Nope, my fault!! Savannah somehow autocorrected to PS-I normally send you a photo of us so you know I'm a real person and not a robot or telemarketer But we forgot to snap one, so feel free to ask Kaitlyn about the fun we had! that's not Stacy embarrassing at all lol It's okay! I actually don't use products that test on animals Oh perfect! I think we'll be a great match! If you're an animal lover, I think you'll love this message from our CEO Darrell Overcash... We were also one of the first companies to work directly with the dermatology experts used by the Chinese government in their review rocess of alternative testing in lieu of animal testing for cosmetic roducts. In fact, we sponsored a symposium for dermatologists in China on he use of human clinical methods for product safety in 2007. We conducted an educational forum for the Chinese Society for Toxicology in 2009 to again share information on alternative testing methods. Mary Kay is one of only two cosmetic companies listed as scientific contributors to the first book in Chinese describing alternative principles nd applications. We have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the Center for Alternatives to Animal Testing at Johns Hopkins University s you can see, finding alternatives to animal testing has, and will continue to e,a top priority for Mary Kay You might be asking yourself, if this is such an important issue to Mary Kay, hen why doesn't the company simply leave China? There are several reasons. ncouraging the Chinese government to consider alternative testing methods. But, if we're no longer doing business in China that means ve're no longer at the table and the Chinese government will not be nterested in what we have to say. And, if we did leave that means this extremely important issue would be left to those who do not care as much or t all. We at Mary Kay are passionate about the elimination of animal testing nd our actions and our record speak to that Some of you may have seen or heard news coverage regarding a decision y PETA (People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals), the animal ctivist organization, to change the status of Mary Kay and other cosmetics companies on its website, moving us from its list of "Companies That Do Not Test on Animals" to its list of "Companies That Do Test on Animals." First, we have an impressive record We want to be extremely clear about the facts and ensure you have all the information: Mary Kay is deeply committed to the elimination of animal testing and our actions and our record speak to that. We have been a longstanding leader on his issue. Our policy has not changed. Let us say again we do not conduct animal testing on our products or ingredients, nor ask others o do so on our behalf, except when absolutely required by law. There is only one country where we operate where that is the case and where we are required to submit our products for testing China. You can be assured hat none of the products you purchase in the United States (or Canada, Latin America, Europe and most all other Asian countries, for that matter) are ested on animals. That commitment has not changed or wavered and it never will. Darrell If you test on animals in China, you animal test. But thanks again. For more than 20 years, we have been a global leader in the commitment to end animal testing. We are working very closely with the Chinese government o demonstrate that alternative testing methods ensure safe and effective roducts. In fact, Mary Kay is the first founding member of the nternational Outreach Consortium of the Institute for In Vitro Delivered Sciences. Inc. (IIVS). created to promote internationally the principles of Sends a screenshot saying they only test on animals in China to convince me that they’re cruelty free.

#funny #lol #humor #memes #meme #memehumor #dank memes #funny pics #rolf #lmao #America #Animals #and

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doggrowth · 7 years ago

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A guide to animal testing 🐰🌸✨

Hello! I’m hoping that this will help answer various questions people have about going cruelty free. All of this is based off of my own research, knowledge, and biases, feel free to message me if I got anything wrong. Warning: this post contains some potentially disturbing images.

This is a part one, explaining what it is to people who don’t know or understand it. My part two will come out soon telling what brands are and aren’t cruelty free as well, what I would recommend.

What is animal testing?

Animal testing is when live animals undergo experiments to test whether the product is suitable for humans. Whenever I tell people about this they think it sounds ridiculous and say things like “you can’t contour a bunny” and “it’d be ridiculous to put mascara on a cat.” That’s not what animal testing is. Animal testing is when they test the chemicals on the animal to make sure they’re safe.

Why is this a bad thing?

Because the chemicals usually aren’t safe.

When an animal goes through animal testing they are injected with chemicals, force fed harmful substances, exposed to radiation, exposed to toxic gases, and usually left dead by the end of the tests. They are often dissected too. They spend their entire life in a cage. Commonly used animals are bunnies, monkeys, and mice but there are many more.

Why would someone test on animals?

As far as I can tell, the main reason that companies test on animals is for profit and branding.

PETA (not always a credible company, but they have some good information on animal testing) says that one reason is to back companies up. An example would be someone complains “this product injured me” and they can use “we’ve tested this to make sure it’s safe” as an excuse. They don’t share the test results, they just say that it was tested.

But the main reason is for profit. Obviously, there would be a huge profit to be made in Mainland China (which excludes Hong Kong). But in Mainland China, it is a requirement by law to test your products on animals. So many brands choose to get that profit.

Something tedious with brands that claim to be cruelty free is that in their cruelty free policy they have the words “we only test on animals if required by law.” This is difficult because then it can be hard to figure out if they sell in China.

EOS is a brand that is like that. They are one of the many that paint on the lie of “we’re cruelty free” by putting it everywhere. But a popular cruelty free blog (logicalharmony) emailed EOS a lot and eventually they came out and said that they were selling in China.

The last reason is much more understandable, that the test results weren’t meeting up to governmental standards and couldn’t be sold without having more solid proof that it’s safe.

What products are tested?

Without knowledge, a lot of your daily products were tested on animals. Makeup, skincare, cleaning products, shampoo, baby care, deodorant, candles, perfumes, toothpaste, menstrual products, pet food, vaseline, tissues, and more. This doesn’t mean that all of these things are tested on animals, but examples of what can be.

That’s an overwhelming list. People will have different opinions on this, but there are certain products that are harder to find cruelty free alternatives than others. Especially if you have certain skin type or condition, you live in a place where there aren’t many options, or you don’t have much money. I personally use some products that are tested on animals (toothpaste, cleaners, soap, deodorant) because it’s extremely hard to find cruelty free versions of those. Also, since I’m young, I don’t buy most of those. But I firmly believe that there isn’t any reason that someone would buy makeup that isn’t cruelty free other than they weren’t aware. It’s easy to find cruelty free makeup and often the makeup is better quality or cheaper!

Parent companies

A parent company is a large company that owns smaller companies. A very common one is L’Oreal. They are a massive company that own Urban Decay, Lancome, Essie, NYX, Maybelline and more. How this relates to animal testing is that L’Oreal is a not a cruelty free company. But NYX and Urban Decay alone are cruelty free. So when you buy a product from one of those brands, a little bit of that will go to L’Oreal which is why a lot of people choose not to support brands with parent companies that test.

But a lot of people do support those brands, I am one of them. They see their dollar as a vote. So when L’Oreal is looking back at all of their sales for their brands, they may see that NYX and Urban Decay suddenly made way more than Essie and Maybelline (i’d hope). And when they ask themselves why they can see that these brands are cruelty free and may consider going cruelty free themselves.

What alternatives are there to test the chemicals?

According to PETA, there are a few alternative ways to test the cosmetics. Many of them are with technology. Realistic body dummies that mimic the way a human works, chips that work similar to bodies, computers that simulate human biology, and more. Another way is with human volunteers. Lush does this, where people volunteer to test the products. This is safe because it’s trusted and known that the ingredients Lush uses are natural.

How to switch over

Switching over to cruelty free cosmetics can be difficult and requires a bit of research. Start by looking at blogs and lists that say what brands are and aren’t cruelty free (i recommend x and x). Then recognize symbols like the PETA bunny and the Leaping Bunny. A useful thing is PETA’s search bar where you simply search up a company name and it will tell you if it’s cruelty free or not. I used this a lot but when I learned that they aren’t 100% accurate I started looking at blogs who do their own research on brands.

The PETA bunny is probably more recognizable, as well many more companies are in PETA’s system of brands. But they do have some brands that unknowingly sell in China, as well don’t say whether or not they have parent companies that test. PETA’s forms are said to be not very strict. Leaping Bunny however, have a much more detailed application form to be certified with the Leaping Bunny.

Leaping bunny → PETA → CCF Rabbit

It’s important to know the big names. The ones that appear in every store. I’m talking about both cruelty free and not. Or at least have an internet connection so when you’re out shopping you can quickly look it up :)

I hope this post helped or convinced someone. Once again it was made with my own knowledge, research, opinions, and of course bias. My goal was to change people’s minds on what cosmetics their buying. Or at least make people more aware. I hope this was helpful :)

Resources and photos: Alternatives, PETA search, What is, L’Oreal brands, 8 products, why, crueltyfreekitty

First image: crueltyfreeinternational.org // Second image: theirturn.net // Third image PETA // Fourth image: ethical elephant // Fifth image: pixabay

#october 2017 #cruelty free #animal cruelty #animal testing #against animal testing #cruelty free guide

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clementina723credits-blog · 5 years ago

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How do i get free imvu credits without downloading anything test today

How To Make IMVU Credits Speedy

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IMVU Inc. is an on the internet metaverse and site. IMVU was founded in 2004 and was originally backed by venture investors Menlo Ventures, Allegis Capital, Bridgescale Partners, and Best Get Capital. IMVU members use 3D avatars to meet new folks, chat, build, and play games. IMVU had more than 4 million active customers in 2014. Existing number of active players are unknown, and at the moment the web site has the largest virtual goods catalog of more than 30 million things. The organization was previously positioned in Mountain View, California. It was also recognized as one particular of the leading practitioners of the lean startup strategy.

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