#oh and Amazon didn’t post my negative review about this :’)

[bcbdrums]

One of the biggest letdowns in the world is when you order a pack of 10 pepper varieties (seeds) from Amazon and only receive five total of the 10 you paid for, only two are what you ordered, and the other three are mystery???

Bonus letdown when what are supposed to be poblano turn out to be shishito.

[transgenderteensurvivalguide]

Lee says:

I’m 8 days post-op and continuing my post-phallo supplies post series! I’ll write about which items I got, which ones I used, and which ones I found helpful. Today I’m posting about an item that I didn’t actually buy for myself but have found invaluable.

After ALT phalloplasty you’re not supposed to bend at the waist until your surgeon clears you to do so.

(For those who don’t know what ALT phalloplasty is, see this post!)

This makes it very hard to pick up things that you’ve dropped. If you drop your phone on the floor, you can’t lean over and bend at the waist to grab it like you might normally do.

Yes, you might be able to very carefully bend at the knees without bending forward at the waist and lower yourself down close enough to the floor to reach your dropped item that way.

But the knee on my donor leg is a bit swollen and painful, and it isn’t possible for me to bend it enough to reach the floor. This is also a pretty common experience early post-op.

So if you drop something on the ground, whether it’s your AirPods, cough drops, or toilet paper, it’s going to stay there until you can get your caregiver to come and pick it up for you.

That’s where this cool thing comes in:

[ID: Silver "grabber" with blue handle to squeeze which closes two blue suction cups]

When I was in the hospital, the occupational therapy team brought me a reacher/grabber, which I was able to keep and take home with me.

I found the same one I got from NYU on Amazon, and if you ask your team during your pre-op and they think that you likely won’t be provided with a reacher/grabber by the hospital I’d 100% recommend buying one for yourself!

The model I have isn’t able to pick up heavy things; it has a weight limit of 5 lbs. While this may seem like a negative thing, it’s actually really helpful because after stage 1, you’re not supposed to do any heavy lifting (over 5-10lbs) for 6-8 weeks.

So when I try to pick something up and my grabber isn’t able to do it, it helps me realize “oh yeah, maybe that gallon of milk is too heavy for me to grab anyhow”. I keep forgetting my limitations and my sensory issues mean it’s a little too easy for me to push past or not notice pain, so this grabber is a convenient way for me to check whether I can and should be lifting an item.

It’s been a lot more convenient than you’d expect; not only can I not reach the floor, I essentially can’t reach anything that’s below hip-height, including the bottom shelves of the refrigerator and my cat’s food dish and water bowl in their stand. So even if you’re not as clumsy as I am and don’t drop as many items, it’s still going to be helpful to have.

[Relevant advice: In the week before your surgery date while you’re still pre-op, you should go around the home and move all the items that you use to places where you can reach them without bending!]

[ID: My hand holding the handle but not squeezing the grabber-trigger]

And of course the no-bending-at-the-waist thing usually means no sitting for around 2 weeks— you can only stand or lie on your back!

If you’re lying on your back, it can sometimes be hard to reach things that are just outside your grasp like a thermometer on the far end of the bedside table, for example, because you won’t be able to sit up and twist to grab it. You’d have to get up out of bed and walk over there to get them, and you may need assistance getting out of bed if you have blankets on over your lap desk.

I’ve also found the grabber useful for everyday tasks! I used to have to move my bedside table and scoot the bed a little bit away from the wall if something fell behind the headboard because I needed to have enough space to stand there and enough room for my arm to be able to reach behind the bed. Now, I can use the reacher/grabber and it saves me a lot of effort to pick up those miscellaneous sleep eye cover masks that like to collect behind my bed.

[Id: The two blue suction cups on the grabbing end]

Pros:

Can’t pick up heavy things (which is actually good!)

Stands pretty well when placed up against a wall which makes it less likely to fall over (if it falls easily then it’s useless because you can’t pick it up again which is why you need it in the first place!)

Suction cup grabbers are good for picking up small items (I even used it to pick up a dropped pill)

Good length- long enough, but not too long! (Too short & it isn’t useful, too long & it’s heavy to hold)

Helps with independence because you don’t need to call someone every time your phone charger cord drops to the floor

Can be used to grab a wash cloth and dry off your lower legs after showering

Cons:

This model doesn’t fold for travel so it’s inconvenient to transport. You could pay more for a model with this feature, but it’s up to you on whether the cost is worth the added functionality.

Needs to be leaned against a wall/bedside table/dresser/etc, can’t stand upright on its own

This model doesn’t have a locking handle so you have to continuously squeeze while you’re picking something up and carrying it because the grip releases when you do. You could pay more for a model with this feature, but it’s up to you on whether the cost is worth the added functionality.

Can’t be used to actually put on socks, only to pick up socks that fell on the floor

Where to buy it:

Other reviews:

Lap desk

Wound care supplies

Resistance bands

[bereft-of-frogs]

loki series discourse thoughts dump: (I’ve been hanging onto them)

- honestly, I’m not touching the selfcest=problematic discourse because I think you can guess my feelings (who cares, it’s hot tho right? hahaha also not the worst thing I’ve ever shipped so) and also I vehemently agree with the twitter thread that’s like ‘....y’all know this is not a scenario you will ever have to face in real life, right?’ like, this is the ultimate fantastical ship, it’s been around for years before this, I do not care that people are upset about it

- I think one of the problems, for me, with the ‘is it objectively good or bad’ discourse is that the negative takes are so negative sometimes that it genuinely makes me question my perception of reality and my ability to critically view television. like, I’m talking about the ‘the effects are the worst and amateurish and it sucks’ sort of hyperbole. (I thought for the most part the effects were quite good, which is why the couple times they were bad really stuck out to me). or ‘they had no chemistry!’ (I actually thought the chemistry was great, particularly in their first episode together, I was really surprised by how quickly I was like ‘oh but I like this dynamic). things like that where they’re either of a subjective nature or they are problems, points if I were inclined to write a larger critique I may have mentioned as well...but they’re perhaps not as big a problem as some people are making them out to be, which is what’s throwing me off.

- this also I think, comes from ‘contextual reviewing’ or in this case the lack thereof. like when I talk about it being good, I’m not saying it’s prestige television. but I’m placing it against its direct competitors - the disney+ series: The Mandalorian, Wandavision, Falcon & Winter Soldier most directly, but also its similar genre shows. for me, the series was right up there with The Mandalorian and a bit better overall than Wandavision, but was it Dark? Was it Altered Carbon? No, but if I want those things....I’m not going to the MCU for that. I was entertained, which is about as deep as I expect out of it. And yeah, the ground is soft and I’m ready to dig for those buried themes, but I’m also not super bothered because I think Loki fit really well into the MCU

(*and if you think this is just me bootlicking disney or whatever, accepting mediocrity from the mouse, I think this problem of contextual reviewing is something that exists even not talking about the mouse. like, I have different standards for a show if I know it originally premiered on SyFy or the CW, versus HBO or AMC, versus Netflix or Amazon, and I have a whole longer post to be made about why some shows are struggling in the age of prestige tv, because we’re flattening the context and holding shows that would have been perfectly well-received on SyFy to HBO standards and I do think it’s sometimes unfortunate and perfectly fun shows get raked over the coals because they’re not performing to prestige TV’s standards)

- I’m starting to see a potential evolution of my predicted conspiracy. still not as intense as tjlc just the rumblings but I gotta say. Cut it out. it is inappropriate to speculate on the personal relationships of actors. It is doubly inappropriate to with no evidence make vague accusations of an intensely personal nature. leaving this one vague. but just...speculating on accusations of a personal nature because you are disappointed in a tv show is inappropriate. stop it.

- that being said I’m also operating on the assumption that the ‘let’s get a protest mob to tom hiddleston’s house’ anon is trolling but still. stop it. seriously. it’s inappropriate. the show was perfectly fine. it may have disappointed you and you have absolutely every right to be disappointed but you do not have the right to attack people who were doing a job, even if you didn’t like the end result. they pitched a show. their pitch was accepted. they made the show. that’s it.

- speaking of, an interesting observation I’ve had throughout the show’s run is how the fandom seems to feel we’re at war with the creators. a lot of putting them down like ‘[theory] but they wouldn’t be smart enough for that’ or bitching about ‘Michael Waldron’s OCs’. Michael Waldron’s job is to write OCs. he has to make characters for Loki to play off of and to further the plot. There is no reason to assume that fanfiction writers are better or smarter or care more than original content creators. in general, canon content creators are held to different parameters than fic writers. honestly, even calling them OCs feels weird to me because creating new characters and worlds is the literal job of the canon creators? but I guess it also makes sense in a way because they are creating new characters in a world already establish but...I don’t know. it’s different somehow. further articulation on this point required.

I think that’s it for me - I probably have some more episode-specific points to contend, but I think that’s it for my general discourse opinions, just to know where I’m standing at this point. I was really entertained, I hadn’t looked forward to a weekly airing of a show this much since the second season of The Mandalorian finished up. As I said last night, looking forward to the multiverse fallout and season 2 and the other films in the lineup!

[tired-college-student-writing]

Tim’s Secret Weapon Pt.9

I’ve been slightly obsessed with @ozmav​ ‘s Damian Wayne/Marinette Dupain-Cheng pairing as of late, and just saw a post that has inspired me more than anything else has in months, so I felt the need to write it

Summary- Tim has always seen the numbers floating above people’s heads, been able to perceive their threat levels with a single glance. After being a hero for so long he thought he was desensitized to seeing high numbers above people’s heads until Damian brings a new friend home.

Part 1

Part 8

Part 9 (HERE)

Part 10

This will probably be the last update for awhile, I start student teaching this coming week and I’m nervous as all hell right now

____________________________________________

It took a good twenty minutes to calm down the Miraculous Team, during which Max had changed back and needed to feed his Kwami,  Kaalki, before changing back. 

Tim mentally edited his profile for the Horse hero, while his brother's teased the teenagers. 

Max ????- Baskerville Font Deep Golden 13, Codenamed- Pegasus. Kwami- Kaalki, the Horse. Main Power- Voyage. Time limit of Ten Minutes after using Voyage before Forced Detransformation. 

 He’d need to ask later if this time limit existed for the other heroes as well. He was also going to have to hack Collège Françoise Dupont’s register to complete these kid’s profiles apparently. 

The other heroes offered to detransform as well, but Ladybug suggested they wait until after the meeting Bruce had set up as they only had minutes before he told the other heroes to connect. 

 “Ready?” Bruce asked as he pulled on his cowl, the domino masks quickly being tossed to the correct brother as the Paris heroes exchanged looks.

 “Nope,” Bunnyx answered as she flopped down into her seat next to Viperion, “let’s get this started,” 

 The Heros of Paris all held hands as they sat on the side of the Conference table that the active camera couldn't see. The Batfamily sat across from them with Batman at the head of the table as he opened the video call. 

“Hey Bats,” Flash greets as the founders all joined the video chat, “What’s with the emergency meeting?” 

 “This is highly unusual for you, Batman,” Superman added, “Should we be heading for the Zeta tubes?” 

“While urgent,” Batman answered, eyes narrowed, “What I’m about to say isn’t exactly time-sensitive, but it is dire that we come up with a plan to assist soon.” 

Green Lantern raised an eyebrow, “That doesn’t sound good.” 

 Marinette could feel her team growing restless around her from beyond the view of the camera. After so long trying and failing to reach out, this was their chance to end things. Seeing Superman, Wonder Woman, The Flash, Green Lantern, Aquaman, and Martian Manhunter so close nearly made her heartbeat straight out of her chest.

  It was unreal…How much had her world view shifted in the last twelve hours? The blunder of a Billionaire that more closely resembled a zombie gorilla then human if woken up before 8 am was THE Batman, The nearly thirty-year-old police officer that still thought Captain Crunch was a suitable dinner was Nightwing, the man who tried to sneak in and steal macarons out of the oven only to pout when he burned himself was Red Hood, the much too young CEO who routinely did his paperwork in green crayon to anger those filing it was Red Robin, and oh not to mention her boyfriend who had sworn her into secrecy after crying during Tangled was the latest Boy Wonder. 

 “Paris has been under attack for nearly four years,” Dick answered from where he sat directly to Bruce’s right, “They’ve been fighting the threat alone, despite the villains' potential.   to destroy the world.” 

The seasoned heroes all stiffened. 

 Martian Manhunter was the first to speak, “What is the threat and who are these heroes?”

 “A villain known as Hawkmoth rose to power almost four years ago,” Batman told them, “He has the power to control those that express intense negative emotions and give them powers of varying intensity. Ladybug and Chat Noir have been fighting him back since he first-” 

 “Did you just say Ladybug and Chat Noir?” Wonder Woman cut him off, “Do you perchance mean the Ladybug of Creation and the Black Cat of Destruction?” 

 All eyes were on the princess as she stared down Batman. He didn’t move but Marinette could feel his eyes flickering past the camera and towards her, letting her make a move if she wanted to. 

 She hesitated before clicking the button Red Robin had given her to enter into the video call, “Yes. That is exactly what he meant.” 

 Wonder Woman’s eyes flew open wide as she saw the bright red outfit, arms snapping in front of her, crossed at the wrists, head bowed, “My Lady!” 

 Marinette cocked her head to the side, confused, “There’s no reason to call me my lady, honestly you just sound like Chat. I’m surprised that any of the League knew of the miraculous.” 

 Diane lowered her hands, looking up once more, “As you wish Ladybug, and every Amazon know the tales of Ladybug. After all, my mother once wore your earrings and held your mantle with Herakles as her Μαύρη γάτα.”

 Ladybug broke into a smile, “Hippolyta… Tikki has told me stories of past users, Πασχαλίτσα was one of my favorites to learn about.” 

 “Woah, Woah, Woah!” Flash waved his hands frantically, “Are we saying that she’s on par with your mother?!” 

 “Now I won’t-” 

 Diane cut her off, “Yes. All of Themyscira would follow a ladybug into battle as willingly as they follow my mother, their Queen.”

 The young heroine blushed as Chat, Bunnyx, King Monkey and Abeille laughed, Viperion Pegasus and Ryuko smiling at the shocked faces on the League’s faces. 

 “ Good to know my Lady is so highly respected,” Chat finally spoke up leaning into frame from her right. Marinette sighed, honestly surprised he remained quiet this long. Silently she clicked the button that made the camera pan out to bring her entire side of the conference table into view. 

 “As I’m sure you guessed,” She said to the gathered heroes, “I am Ladybug, and this is my partner Chat Noir. The other members of our permanent team are Abeille, the Bee of Subjection, Ryuko, the Dragon of Power, and Viperion, the Snake of Chance. On our reserve team is Pegasus, the Horse of Teleportation, King Monkey, the Monkey of Jubilation, and Bunnyx, the Rabbit of Time.” 

Wonder Woman looked worried, “So many active, your war must be devastating.” 

 Abeille scowled, “Paris would have been nothing but bloody rubble within a month had Ladybug not had her Miraculous cure. Hawkmoth, Butterfly of Transmission, and Mayura, Peacock of Emotion, have been attacking us for almost four years at this point trying to take Ladybug’s and Chat Noir’s miraculous, and our requests for help from the League have been ignored up until this point.” 

 “Requests?” Superman questioned as the elder heroes all stiffened, “What requests?” 

The Paris team gave them skeptical looks. 

“You’re kidding right?” Chat Noir asked slowly, “My Lady and I sent probably two dozen requests for aid since we were given our miraculous before being sent what might as well have been a cease and desist request that was just signed from the league because it was thought that everything that had leaked out of the city had just been fancy video editing and CGI. How could you guys not know?” 

“As one of the main reviewers of requests,” Manhunter replied monotoned even as his jaw clenched, “I never saw any of these messages.” 

“Yeah man,” Green Lantern added, “Neither did I, and I help out a lot up in communications when I’m not out on business. Plus we’ve never sent out a ‘stop calling us’ message before.”

“Well someone had to reject us,” Pegasus argued, “Logically speaking it has to be someone from the League as the other option is an unknown individual hacked into the League’s database and the only detectable thing they did was delete the messages from Paris.”

“I don’t care who it was, Find them,” Robin growled, white knuckles clutching his katana hilt, “I wish to disembowel them.” 

“You will not.” Ladybug’s voice was low and pointed, “Not only have we handled ourselves well, but I won’t condone infighting just because someone messed up. I don’t care who rejected us at this point, Paris has a strong team protecting it and the League is lending us their help now, something that might have been detrimental a few years ago.” 

“Detrimental?” Wonder Woman questioned, a twinge of hurt in her voice, “How would the League of been detrimental?” 

Flash scratched the back of his head, “Yeah, how would The League being in Paris be bad, kid?"

“Pfft,” Bunnyx just laughed, “Geez, Kids? Could you guys be more condescending? It’s not like we’re seasoned heroes in our own right by now or anything.” 

Ryuko's gaze flicked over all of them, “Your trust in us is lacking because of our age, but you want to give us a chance to show you how we operate since we have been taking care of our city. During our battle today the entirety of the Batfamily was watching us from the shadows and yet never felt like they needed to intervene with a team that already works efficiently with each other, yet you still question us.”  

“You saw us?” Jason asked a little startled, “Damn Onna-bugeisha, you’re sharp,” 

The girl smiled softly, “I appreciate the praise, however, I would suggest not wearing a large bright red bucket on your head next stealth mission. I was already on the lookout for red so it made spotting you and your family easy.” 

Dick snorted, “Told you your helmet wasn’t slick,” 

Jason just glared and shot back, “Discowing,”

“We’re not speaking of that atrocity. I’m going to need eye bleach to forget it already,” Marinette shuttered before becoming serious again, “The point we were trying to make is that I and my team have your trust. With Wonder Woman, Batman and his team speaking for us, you respect our claim to protecting Paris and the fact that we are the most knowledgeable people when it comes to Miraculous and our villains. Would we hold that same respect in your eyes if you arrived when Chat and I only held our miraculous for a few months? When we were inexperienced and improvising? Or would you have swooped in here with promises to fix things while shoving us to the side, upsetting us to the point where we might have been akumatized because of how little say we were given in protecting our city and stopping the villain that threatened our friends and families?”

The league heroes all shifted a little uneasy. The girl had a point. 

Inexperienced heroes had to earn the League’s respect through hard work and proving their worth, something that could have left them open to akumatiation, giving the villain exactly what he wanted. 

“Another thing,” Ladybug added eyes scanning over their faces with a serious glare, “This is our city and we have experience with the villains here and what to avoid. With that said, I believe the only members of the Founding Justice League I would trust to be in Paris before Hawkmoth and Mayra are relieved of their miraculous are Batman, Martian Manhunter, and The Flash.” 

“What!” Green Lantern yelped, but the Paris team all nodded in understanding. 

 “Ooh Yeah,” King Monkey cringed, “The last thing I want to do is face an akumatized Wonder Woman.”

“Dude, you’d be the only one safe from an evil Green Lantern,” Bunnyx groaned, “Can you imagine the damage? It’d be like Mr. Mime on Steroids!”

Viperion turned to Pegasus and asked, “If Superman got akumatized what is the likelihood that Luck Charm would just give us a chuck of Kryptonite?” 

“Considering she’s dating a Bat,” The younger man started ignoring the bugging eyes of the League, “There is a higher chance that it will just give her an indication to use Voyage to retrieve him and the kryptonite he no doubt possesses. On the 17.85% chance, it gives us Kryptonite, I’d be worried about using it as all of the Lucky Charms are red and black. Red Kryptonite usually causes a bloodlust, or uncontrollable rage in Kryptonians, while Black causes the being to be split into a good and an evil version of themselves.” 

“Soooo,” Bunnyx  draws out, “Use Uproar to take their powers away, then the kryptonite so that we just have too really angry dudes fist fighting each other in the middle of Paris?” 

Pegasus nods, “Yes that plan holds an 85% chance of working should we be put into that situation.” 

Batman just rubbed the bridge of his nose, “Should I ask where you learned so much about Kryptonite?” 

“No.” The Paris team chorused.  

The Martian looked intrigued, “Back to the original statement, May I acquire what sets us apart from the others so much that you’d be willing to accept our help but not theirs?” 

“Easy,” Chat answered, smirking slightly at the flustered looks that still remained on the rejected heroes faces, “Hawkmoth and Mayra prey on negative emotions, whether that’s anger, frustration, fear, sadness, or disgust. The more powerful the emotion the stronger the Akuma or Amok is that we have to face is. Superman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern are known for using their emotions as strength during a fight.” 

“What about Flash?” Green Lantern barked, looking miffed, “The dude isn't exactly Mister Stoic." 

"Oh Oh!” King Monkey had his hand raised above his head, “I’ll take this one!” 

“Go ahead King,” Ladybug offered with a bemused look.

The Burly teen grinned up at the monitor, “We’ve found there are two great ways to keep from falling into Hawkmoth’s hands, thought considering everyone but Ladybug has been akumatized at least once this is mostly through trial and error. We’ve come to realize that either you need to be like Ladybug, Pegasus, and Ryuko, confident and professional to the point you don’t have time to let negative emotions, and  how Chat and I deal with it and it’s probably the same way Flash deals with the horrors I’m betting all of you deal with on a biweekly basis, if not more.” 

The speedster gave a tired smile, “An over cheerful, bantering mask?” 

Chat clicked his tongue and shot duel finger guns at the monitors, “Bingo Bongo,”

Abeille rolled her eyes, as Ladybug smacked him lightly over the head, “Nerd.” 

King just smiled wider, “Yup! We flirt, we banter, we joke around with our partners and the villains, cause it makes it easier for us to deal with after we're out of danger.” 

Superman’s eyes grew a little far away, “You pretend not to take things seriously?” 

Chat shrugged, “I mean kinda? It’s more like knowing that if everyone was serious then it would start wearing on us. We’re all people, we can’t stay serious 100% of the time, plus I know that when I crack puns the other may groan but their attacks are a little less sloppy, My lady may say she hates it when I call her Bugaboo, but it pulls her away from a bad headspace and helps her focus. It’s just our way of dealing with the dangers we face.” 

“The Heart of the Team,” Batman spoke with a heavy reverence that had each of the seasoned heroes looking over the Paris group with understanding. 

“Alright,” Green Lantern sighed, “Supes, Wonder Woman and I will stay out, but why don’t you explain what’s happening exactly in Paris. What is this Hawkmoth guy after anyways? What’s his end goal?” 

Ladybug’s eyes grew hard as her team straightened around us, “His goal is to obtain the Ladybug of Creation’s earrings, and the Black Cat of Destruction's ring. Whoever possesses both shall have unimaginable power, and the ability to grant one wish by rewriting the very essence of reality.” 

Flash let out a low whistle, “Wow, and his wish is lovely I’m sure.” 

Chat’s voice was soft, but held immense weight, “His wish could be of pure intentions and goodwill, but it doesn’t matter, because the balance must be maintained and the price is always much more destructive then one can ever imagine.” 

Ladybug nodded in agreement to her partner before taking over, “An Italian father wished for his family to never know sickness like that that took his sister from him when he was young, to live long happy lives free of sickness.  The wish came true and nothing worse then a cold touched the family, even today, but three days after the wish was made the first ship that was contaminated with the Black Plague landed in Italy.” 

“A teenager, whose homeland was riddled with war and bloodshed,” Chat chimed in again, even as the surrounding group looked sick, “He wanted for the fighting to stop, for his parents to not have to risk themselves anymore to keep their city safe, for him not to have to take up the blade in only a few short years. His wish was granted the fighting stopped and he no longer had to worry about his family dying to senseless war… because his entire city, the city of Atlantis had sunk into the sea, almost two-thirds of the population perishing as the last third realized they had an unknown ability to breathe underwater and survive the harsh conditions of the sea.” 

Aquaman looked uneasy, “So much damage for such simple wishes?” 

Chat just nodded, “Balance needs to be maintained, and each wish is a lesson in human’s foolish nature to try and fix the universe for their own needs and wants. The simple truth of the matter is no lesson is painless. Even the Kwamis can’t change that.” 

____________________________________________

“Why don’t we head to my hotel?” Abeille asked as she stretched. The call to the League had drawn to a close leaving the teens mentally exhausted but giddy, “That way we don’t need to transform again, and we can just tell our parents that we were hanging out in my room instead of each coming up with a cover story. The fact that the Waynes are also staying there just makes it easier for us.” 

“Good idea,” Ladybug agreed, “But I want to remind all of you are under no obligation to share your identity if you don’t want to, Red Robin won’t share it with the others even if  they ask.” 

“I knew Bruce’s identity for like 6 years before I broke into the cave and asked to be Robin. I think I can manage not to spill your secrets” He revealed with a little laugh as his family gave him strained looks. 

The Paris heroes laughed before Pegasus, asked for the room they were staying at, quickly opening a portal.

Alfred simply raised an eyebrow, “Well, I expect the meeting went well then?” 

Marinette flopped onto the couch with a groan as her transformation fell away, “You guys were not exaggerating with how much of a boy scout Superman is!” 

Jason snorted as the other Paris heroes agreed, “Yeah Supes always had a stick up his rear, but J’onn is looking forward to meeting you guys, the dude doesn’t get off the Watchtower much.”

“Maybe he’ll bring M’gann,” Dick suggested, “She always loves meeting new heroes, and I’m sure she and Supey would love to talk magic.”

“Change first,” Bruce ordered, ushering his children back towards the main bedroom, “Then we can hash out anything else we wish tonight.”  

____________________________________________

 Tim felt himself relax more as the transformations fell around the teens, one by one, each taking time to introduce themselves and their Kwamis to the Bats. Profiles gradually began to fill further in his mind.  

Marinette Dupain-Cheng- Cursive Soft Pink 15, Codenamed- Ladybug. Kwami- Tikki, the Ladybug of Creation. Main Power(s)- Lucky Charm and Miraculous Ladybug. Possible time limit, estimated to be 20 minutes after use of Lucky Charm

Chloe Bourgeois- Delicate Canary Yellow 14, Codenamed- Abeille. Kwami- Pollen, the Bee of Subjugation. Main Power- Venom. Possible time limit estimated to be 15 minutes after the use of Venom.

Kagami Tsurugi- Calligraphed Burgundy 13, Codenamed- Ryuko. Kwami- Longg, the Dragon of Power. Main Power- Elemental Transformations. Possible time limit estimated to be 15 minutes after the use of all three elemental transformations. 

Adrian Agreste- Bubble lettered Neon Green 15, Codenamed- Chat Noir. Kwami- Plagg, the Black Cat of Destruction. Main Power- Cataclysm. Possible time limit, estimated to be 20 minutes after use of Cataclysm

Max Kanté- Baskerville Font Deep Golden 13, Codenamed- Pegasus. Kwami- Kaalki, the Horse of Teleportation. Main Power- Voyage. Time limit of Ten Minutes after using Voyage before Forced Detransformation. 

Lê Chiến Kim - Buffon Font Grayish Brown 13, Codenamed- King Monkey. Kwami- Xuppu, the Monkey of Jubilation. Main Power- Uproar. Information points towards some type of time limit, but currently unknown

Alix Kubdel- Thin decorative font, Norwolk probably, Icy Blue 13, Codenamed- Bunnyx. Kwami- Fluff, the Rabbit of Time. Main Power- Burrow. Information points towards some type of time limit, but currently unknown. 

Finally, he turned to the snake-themed hero, the only one who hadn’t changed back yet only to have considering aqua eyes peering back. 

????- ?????, Codenamed- Viperion. Kwami- ?????, the Snake of Chance. Main Power- Second Chance. Possible time limit estimated to be 15 minutes after the use of Second chance (in a single time stream). 

The only puzzle left on the Paris team. 

“So I’m the only one you haven’t figured out yet,” He asked, a considering look flashing over his face. 

Tim shrugged, “The miraculous mess with my power so I can’t see your number while you’re transformed so yes. I haven’t figured out a thing about you yet.”

“Well,” Viperion hummed a sly grin as he leaned into The older hero’s space, “I’m not going to give you an easy answer then, Bird boy.”  

Tim couldn’t help the indignant huff, “Bird Boy? I’m older than you!”  

“Hmmm,” The smirking snake just served to make the other Bat’s share a look at the display, “Well, Bird Boy. Let’s see how fast you can find me,”   

“It’s Red Robin-”

“Yumm~” 

Tim’s cheeks burned as his brothers, Chat Noir, Bunnyx, and King Monkey cackled behind him, the other heroes hiding smiles. The younger hero finally pulled back and leaped out of the window and disappearing into the night with a final wink at the stunned hero. 

"Looks like you're following in B's footsteps," Dick teased clapping his shoulder, causing the others to laugh harder as Tim tried desperately to find his tongue. 

____________________________________________

Taglist: @vixen-uchiha @iggy-of-fans @mewwitch @roseinbloom02 @worlds-tiniest-spook-pastry @mochinek0 @royalchaoticfangirl @09shell-sea09 @mystery-5-5 @derpingrainbow @aloha-posts-stuff @hauntedfreakdeputyhero @maribat-archive @blue-peach14 @kae690 @zazzlejazzle @vincentvangoose @be-happy-every-day-please @xxmadamjinxx @celestiacq @peculiarlylostdreamer @dani-ari @melicmusicmagic @themcclan @nyctamaximoff @nataladriana9 @drama-queen-supreme @miraculousbelladonna @urbanpineapplefarmer @graduatedmelon @lexysama @hecate-hallow @ki117h3dr4g0n @vinerlover @interobanginyourmom @bluefiredemon @imanerddealwith @tinybrie @clumsy-owl-4178 @shizukiryuu @whogavemeaninternet @schrodingers25 @lunar-wolf-warrior @urbanpineapplefarmer @xxmadamjinxx @crazylittlemunchkin @littleredrobinhoodlum​ @rougemme​ @dur55​ @phantommeow12 @kand-roo​ @silvergold-swirl​ @officiallyathiana​ @completelypeccable​ @redhoodsdoll​ @nataladriana9​ @mariae2900​ @northernbluetongue​ @sturchling​ @thesunanditsangel​ @reyna-avila-ramirez-alreanaldo​ @bobothyross @taoiichii​ @magnitude101999​ @magicalfirebird​ @nataladriana9​ @panda3506​ @aquariusrunes​ @woodland-queer @sayarock121​ @mindfulmagics​ @magic-miraculous​ @my-name-is-michell @naoryllis @slytherinqueen2432 @ilovefluffbutsmutisalsogreat @captainartsypants @nanakeid @legendaryneckjudgestudent @smolplantmum @the-real-ginakid @nyaabinch @elmokingkong @gentlemanoftimetravel @whitennerdiest@imbrium-mare @tired-butterfly @corabeth11 @aestheticnpoetic @amirahevens

[rachelthompsonauthor]

Hi, everyone! It’s time to venture back out into the world which is a little scary, right? That’s where we are in Northern California – like turtles starting to stick our heads out just a little bit. We’re starting to visit family, actually going to the grocery store, and getting haircuts for everyone – a good thing since we’re all looking a bit like muppets.

Though with the latest numbers in California, who knows where we’re headed. It’s terrifying. Masks, masks, masks, wash, wash, wash.

In case you missed the last two installments of my blog posts, you can catch up by clicking here for week one and here for week two.

This week I’m thrilled to share an insider look into the mind of author Barbara Delinsky, who just dropped her latest hot read, A Week At The Shore, which immediately hit the New York Times bestseller list – her twenty-third novel to do so.

Both Pip and I enjoyed A Week At The Shore immensely.

Full disclosure: Barbara is one of my BadRedhead Media clients (and I’m supremely grateful for that!). I handle her social media, street team, blog and book review optimization, and a good deal of her book promotion.

After finishing the book (which I loved), I had a few questions for Barbara about her writing style, so I emailed them to her and she was kind enough to respond.

A Week At The Shore by Barbara Delinsky Interview

Q: I notice you don’t only use ‘she said’ for dialogue, which I personally love, though as I’m sure you know well, it’s a DEBATE.

A: I’ve actually spent a lot of time thinking about this. I don’t use half as many other words (“she exclaimed,” “she intoned,” or “she declared”) as much as I used to. Yes, there’s something to be said for simple and real. That said, the constant monotony of “she said” gets boring, so I try to find a comfortable balance. This actually ties in with your next question.

Sometimes, the sub for “she said” can express emotion, as in “she cried,” or “she dare say,” or “she whispered.” So it does add something. Still, though, not quite the “show, not tell” rule (see more on that below).  

Q: Also, the ‘show, not tell’ rule regarding feelings. You sometimes say what emotions Mallory {Ed. the main character} feels (at times). If I wrote that in my creative writing classes, my teacher would’ve jumped out a window, yet it works. Again, love. All this ‘do this, not that’ advice can be confusing for writers, regardless of genre, myself included.

A: Yes, it does work at times, at least, for me. But then, I never took a creative writing class, so maybe I just don’t know how to show rather than tell. Here, too, I think you have to be guided by common sense. If by “show,” you mean having a character “start to huff and puff,” to show upset, rather than simply to “cry in alarm,” I’d opt for the simpler.  

The image of huffing and puffing will distract the reader from what you’re saying. IMHO, the “show, not tell” rule applies to larger things, like rather than saying “her husband could be nasty,” saying something like, “her husband could see her scrubbing the dinner dishes and tell her she was made for this.” So, it’s really giving an example of what you’re saying in summary. Does that make sense?

Q: Yes, absolutely. Also, you write about the past in the present tense – I do this with memoir and blog posts, and prefer to read books or even blog posts/articles written this way. It’s more immediate. When I work with writers in my workshops, they tend to write in the past tense. I haven’t read all of your other books, so I wonder if you do this with all your books?

A: I’m actually not even aware of writing about the past in the present tense, unless it’s a bonafide flashback, in which case it would be in the present. I’ve been experimenting with different tenses book to book. My last book, BEFORE AND AGAIN, was in the first-person past tense, A WEEK AT THE SHORE is in first person present tense.  

The latter took some getting used to. And it’s possible that I botched the flashback tenses simply because I’m not ultra-experienced with first-person present. My editor didn’t catch or change anything, though. I agree with you. There is an immediacy to first-person present tense that is nice. That said, the new book I’ve started is in first-person past tense.

Q: Basic skills – I get it. This is how new writers learn. You aren’t new (after writing hundreds of books and stories), so you break rules – is that it?

A: I’m not “schooled” in writing, so I don’t know I’m breaking the rules!!

Q: You’re so skilled, Barbara. Your characters are intricate and layered. This book is a CLASS in writing. Do you ever think about young writers reading your work and learning from you?

A: You are too kind, Rachel. Seriously. I’m just muddling along, basically doing what works for me as a reader, since I have no formal training. Truly. Now I’m just enjoying it.

Barbara has written a few articles for me on my biz site about breaking the writing rules, which I hope you’ll read. She’s a true writer’s writer. I hope you’ll read her books and articles. She’s also an avid reader herself and does weekly book reviews on her blog.

What I’m Reading Now

I’m now reading the third book in the Discovery of Witches series, The Book of Life, and it’s fabulous, just like the others in this series. I’m not going to spoil it for you if you haven’t read these. Harkness is a wonderful writer, and she weaves history, passionate love, and the supernatural together in a way that carries you into other worlds. Even though it’s vampires, witches, and demons, it’s not glowy, corny vampires and evil witches on broomsticks. Harkness’ stories are wholly imaginative.

When I found out Sundance made the first book into a series, I paid for the app ($5.99/month – totally worth it) and watched the entire series in one day. SO GREAT. Perfectly cast, well-acted, leaving me yearning for more. I’m now re-watching it.

What Else I’m Watching

I never did see Being John Malkovich so I watched it with my daughter. Weird flick. Good, but super weird. Definitely takes the, ’15 minutes of fame,’ motto and turns it on its head. Speaking of heads, I’ve never seen such horrible hair in any movie.

Have you seen it? What are your thoughts?

Space Force just came out on Netflix and it’s hilarious. If you’re super conservative, you may not like it, so beware (though they poke fun at both parties). If you can laugh at the ridiculousness of government, please watch. Carrell is great, as usual, and the relationship dynamics are brilliant (and there’s John Malkovich again – great, as usual).

Vanderpump Rules I mentioned previously that this is the one reality show I watch with my 20-year-old daughter, Anya, and we watched the reunion shows – all three of them. I know, ridiculous. Jax is such a joke (his blatant homophobia disgusts me, though he says he supports gays – what?), Jax and Brittany together are just ugh, and Max makes me want to vomit (breaking news – he just got fired – ha!).

And honestly, could Vanderpump be any more white? We’ve been saying this for years.

SO much has happened since last week – wowzers. They’ve fired four people as of this writing for making racist remarks. Either the show will be retooled or canceled. I’m sad to see the epitome of white-girl whiteness Stassi gone – she was at least honest about her privilege. What do you think?

I’d be pretty much done with this show if it wasn’t for my daughter begging me to watch with her (we do watch movies and other shows as well). I’m glad Pumpy fired their asses, otherwise, I’d be done DONE.

Compassion

What’s missing from most reality shows is compassion, which is why I don’t enjoy watching them. We see (and hear, loudly and repeatedly) the negativity, toxicity, and the worst in people because that’s what the editors and producers know will keep viewers coming back – drama.

There are flashes of compassion, e.g., when dealing with the death of a loved one, coming out, infidelity, or mental health issues. I appreciate when Bravo, for example, handles these issues well. I don’t appreciate it when they have not – and they have not in many cases. An overall lack of compassion appears to be missing from many of these people’s lives; however, using The Four Agreements, that’s an assumption on my part; we don’t see behind the scenes or when the cameras are off.

I do have compassion for the casts of these shows who have decided money is worth more than their privacy. They are adults making decisions about their lives, and all that comes with it, as any celebrity does. Now, they’re dealing with the fallout.

“Make good choices!” as Jamie Lee Curtis’s mom in Freaky Friday admonishes a young Lindsay Lohan’s Anna (and we all know how that turned out). Oh, Lindsay. Honestly, she’s such a product of dysfunction, it’s truly sad, but that’s a whole other post.

If only people would listen to their Hollywood movie mothers…

Products Supporting Black Lives Matter

In no particular order, here’s what I’ve bought and am loving:

YUBI: The original fingertip makeup brush is amazing. Worth every penny. How did I not know about this?

Pat McGrath Real Makeup: I’m a sucker for a great eye shadow palette. McGrath’s are pricey but fab-u-lous. Why so spendy? All her products are highly-pigmented so you don’t need much; they’ll last a good long time. Here’s the one I purchased on Amazon. For when, ya know, I actually have somewhere to venture out to.

Body Butter Lady: Lip stuff and of course, body butter. Affordable, smells amazing, and will last a good, long, time.

LipBar: Lips for days, tons of colors and textures to suit anyone.

LipSlut: Awesome colors, and 50% of all proceeds go to support women and children’s charities all the time. Right now, they’re supporting Black Lives Matters. 50% towards charity, 100% against tyranny. Cruelty-free, Vegan.

Their newest shade, F*ck Trump on pre-order, will support civil rights organizations specifically targeted by the Trump organization – I mean, administration. Oopsies.

Here is my current personal selection (F*ck Kavanaugh is a favorite – a pretty brownish-red that wears well):

  ***

So that’s it for this week. Would love your feedback on COVID-19, books, movies, shows, makeup, racism, or whatever you want to discuss. Thanks for stopping by!

Read more about Rachel’s experiences in the award-winning book, Broken Pieces.

She goes into more detail about living with PTSD and realizing the effects of how being a survivor affected her life in

Broken Places, available in print everywhere!

        The post Venture Out Of Quarantine With Me appeared first on Rachel Thompson.

via Rachel Thompson

[notwhelmedyet]

More than Meets the Eye, beginner’s guide / resources

This guide is long. Use the headings to find the information you need & if you’ve got resources this post lacks send them along!

Has anyone pitched the comic More than Meets the Eye to you yet? It’s a very gay action-adventure comedic drama with robots and you would probably love it (especially if you’re lgbt and/or have good taste). Here’s a few posts/articles that will tell you why you’d love it:

This article review/retrospective was what got me to read MTMTE. (warning - it has a bunch of spoilers, that didn’t bother me but might bother you)

My semi-jokey MTMTE sales pitch

@zzxid’s salespitch with dancing rats

This full entire page of radical space socialist philosophy

15 Reasons Why MTMTE/the sequel is The Best Transformers Comic (warning - has spoilers, though some will prob go over your head as a new reader)

Kiss me, Chromedome - retrospective article by The Guardian, contains some spoilers

How/Where to Read

Okay, maybe you’re convinced. Now you want to know how/where to read MTMTE. Got you covered:

Detailed guide by @gaymilesedgeworth: How to start reading Transformers Comics

My very short answer: just read MTMTE in trade paperback form. That way all the issues are in order and you get all the extra stuff (there are prose stories after a couple issues that are very important so don’t skip them!) They’re available that way as both physical and digital books.

Here’s some ways to get access, legally (US centric, sorry):

If your local library has Hoopla (digital library subscription service), you may have access to some of the MTMTE trades that way. They’d be here; but check if you library has Hoopla first.

Your local library very well might have physical copies, so check their website!

If not and you’re very patient you can often request inter-library loans (your library borrows the books from another library) or request your library purchase materials.

You can buy digital trades via either IDW or Comixology. Comixology also includes the first 5 volumes in their comics subscription service. I’ve seen the series go on sale on both of these sites at least 4 times in the past 6 months, so keep an eye out! (Sometimes IDW participates in humble bundles, which are great, but those sales are far more infrequent)

You can also buy them in trade form from wherever you can buy books/comics. US links: Amazon, B&N, Comic Store Locators

Character Guides

So you’ve picked up this comic and oh boy there are a lot of robots. You’re a little intimidated. Maybe you’re having a hard time telling them apart.

If you have the paperback, there’s a guide to the characters on the back cover/the last page of the digital volume. See a copy here.

It’s okay if you keep reading not knowing who these robots are. For real. You’ll get the hang of it. Don’t worry if it takes you awhile and you’re confused. Everyone’s a little lost the first time through.

Some helpful posts in case you’re struggling:

Here’s a guide that matches appearance -> name, and one that matches name -> background info (both spoiler free for issues 1-22)

A visual guide by @squireofgeekdom​ and @kscinewt​: here

Another helpful visual character guide by @bluering8: here

If you’re confused and need help, please ask! I’m willing to answer questions, I know @gaymilesedgeworth has volunteered to answer new reader questions. (Willing to help out new readers? Lemme know and I’ll make this a list)

Lore & Background Info

Okay, so maybe now you’ve gotten into it. You want more information, you want to know all the background lore, you want to dig deep. Awesome! Got you covered!

The holy grail of Transformers information, TFwiki. A slightly snarky, overly-minutely-detailed wiki for the digital age.

They’ve also got a tumblr if you’ve got questions.

And Chris McFeely, one of the main editors, runs a Youtube series called The Basics where he explains characters/concepts across continuities

The podcast Sound.wav has episodes talking about every issue of MTMTE in great detail.

The writer of More than Meets the Eye, James Roberts, answers fan questions on his twitter. I’ve archived a lot of those questions at @jrtweetsindex​.

More than Meets the Eye has a soundtrack, because of course it does. People have made playlists collecting it on spotify and youtube.

Further Reading

I finished MTMTE, what’s next?

If you want the direct sequel to MTMTE, go straight to Lost Light, the sequel series. It’s still ongoing and (as of right now) 12 issues have been released. There are spoilers for it EVERYWHERE on Tumblr, fair warning.

There are also a bunch of other series within the IDW comics universe, depending on what you’re interested in.

@zandergb has a chronological listing of all the IDW comics

TFwiki summarizes the IDW comics line

alt chronological guide

another guide/reading order.

You don’t have to read all the books! If you want to just read Lost Light/MTMTE, you can do just that.

There’s also a bunch of animated series, which don’t exist in the same continuity as the IDW comics. Some of them are well liked.

@ponett has a guide that’ll help you decide which you’d enjoy

And here’s a brief guide by TFWiki

There’s also the Michael Bay movies which are awful and so is he. Not gonna recommend watching them, but if you wanted to learn about film theory by listening to Lindsay Ellis dissect them, there’s a youtube series for that.

Fan Stuff

Okay...but what about fan content and fanfic and art and community events?

First thing to know: Transformers content is posted on tumblr under the tag Maccadam. (more detailed explanation why) A lot of mtmte content is also under ‘mtmte’, so look there too. I only use Maccadam if I think a post deserves to be seen by a lot of people but opinions vary.

Second thing to know - the sequel to MTMTE, Lost Light is still being published and you will see ALL SORTS OF SPOILERS for it on Tumblr. To mitigate the damage, try blocking “LL Spoilers” “Lost Light Spoilers” and “Wednesday Spoilers”. You cannot avoid it all, so if you don’t want anything spoiled, get caught up on both MTMTE and Lost Light before browsing around Tumblr.

Fanfiction:

Warning! A lot of Transformers fanfiction is smut. Please take a moment to integrate this fact into your understanding of the universe. If you can handle that, go ahead to AO3.

If you’re curious about all the terminology used in those fics, here’s a guide to it (not every writer uses every word, but this will get you started)

If you’re not into the idea of robots having sex, here’s a link to AO3 with my personal best-effort safe-search (no guarantees, relies upon people tagging properly)

And here’s a blog dedicated to recommending good sfw transformers fanfiction

If you want to know more about Transformers fanfic, I did a whole statistical survey of it, cause I’m a dork.

Here’s an old-school Transformers-only fanfic archive (I don’t see a category for IDW comics but maybe you can find somehing)

Fanart&Fanfic Events/Zines/Gift Exchanges/Collaborative Projects:

As many active projects as I could find - I’ll try to keep this one updated

Fan Artists:

(same warning as the fanfic - there’s a goodly amount of transformers pornographic art, be aware of that and block ‘nsfw’ if necessary)

There are a ton of active fanartists who draw IDW Transformers art. If you search a bit under ‘Maccadam’ you’ll find them.

@iaconlibrary reblogs a great deal of fanart & is a great place to start browsing

Roleplay:

If you’re into roleplaying on tumblr @teletrans-comm-unit runs a master list of active rp blogs

Transformers: Lost and Found is a long-running independent game set on the Lost Light

TF:Galaxy appears to be a forum-based tf roleplay game

My Favorite Jokes:

The best amazon review

Emotional labor (nsfw-ish warning)

Bros with Vows

Hands

Conventions:

There are Transformers-specific conventions, which is pretty cool! I know nothing about them but tfwiki has some info: Official and Unofficial conventions.

Regrettable Opinions:

hey this is just a quick guide of things not to do so you don’t hurt other people in the community

Do not compare Megatron to Hitler. The comparison is both vapid and offensive, as Jewish members of this community have pointed out time and again.

Don’t say transphobic/homophobic/racist/antisemitic/sexist things. You’re better than that!

Don’t attack the creators of the books/harass them on social media/make bizarre unfounded accusations of them acting in bad faith

we’re really lucky that JRo and the other creators interact with us & answer questions and don’t you dare screw that up, I’m trusting you.

on a less serious but useful etiquette note: don’t tag creators into negative reviews of their work/people complaining about their work. It’s rude to the creator & the reviewer.

That was a short list but remember to also treat other people with respect & that it’s okay to disengage with content/people that upset you.

Fandom:

There’s a guide on Fanlore, but it’s freakishly outdated and doesn’t even mention the comics. If you’re a informed tf fan maybe you should update it. 😉

Tumblr!

MTMTE is a pretty small community on Tumblr, but there are a few cool folks. Remember, ‘maccadam’ and ‘mtmte’ are your tags of choice

Various websites!

Since the transformers fandom is super old, there are a bunch of dedicated websites with traditional forums to chat on. (most of these are news sites that also contain forums) idk anything about them but maybe forums are your thing:

TFW2005 - big site with a large community but be warned there appear to be more than a few alarmingly bigoted people on that site

TFormers

Cybertron.CA

Allspark.com

Seibertron

I’m gonna throw the IDW TF reddit on this list rather than make a new section

Discord!

there’s at least two active discords at the moment. I know nothing about them or discord, but maybe one of them would be to your liking:

#1 - run by @zzxid

#2 - run by ??

The community is, like all fan communities, is a mix of good and bad, awkward and friendly, opinionated and goofy, self-serious and offensive. You won’t like or agree with everyone and there are some folks you should probably block.

Just find some people who share your general outlook & are interacting with the books in the same way you want to 💕

-Lynn. I have no qualifications to write this guide, I am not an authority of anything. I just really want you to love these books. Last updated on Dec 24, 2017, click through to check for any updates.

image descriptions below cut:

[image 1: Panel from MTMTE of Rewdind and Chromedome kneeling and holding hands while Chromedome says “Rewind, my love, it’s not for me to say.”]

[image 2: Fortress Maximus covered in small brightly colored robots shaped like various animals saying “Don’t worry, my friend, all taken care of.]

[image 3: Swerve holding a cartoonish drawing of Prowl and pointing at it, saying “No! Prowl with the head spikes and the cruel mouth and the - cross all the time! Epically, preemptively, existentially cross! And cold! Supercilious and cold! Imagine Ultra Magnus without the warmth and people skills. How can you not know who Prowl is?”]

[image 4: Trailgate in holomatter form, holding the first issue of More than Meets the Eye and saying: “Besides, I didn’t say I didn’t like it - I just don’t understand all the words. And it presumes a degree of familiarity with the Autobot/Decepticon war that I still don’t have...I suppose there’s always the wiki. Or tumblr...”

Cyclonus from off panel: “I told you to stay off Tumblr.”

Tailgate: “You’re right: spoilers. I want to enjoy it issue by issue - it only goes up to 43.”]

[image 5: Drift smiling a big fake smile and saying: “Anyway - let’s move on.”]

[image 6: A panel of Cyclonus gazing out the window in his dark and empty bedroom with a panel of narration: “Of course we’re not the only ones. This ship is a refuge for the emotionally inarticulate.”]

[blueeyeswandering]

Off-Leash Adventures

I want to start this blog post off by saying first and foremost - I am not a dog trainer. I have read countless articles, been in training classes, and worked one on one with trainers before....but that doesn’t make me qualified to say my method of training is the best & only way. All dogs are going have their own set of challenges (or lack thereof) when it comes to training, and therefore not all methods will work the same for each dog. I am writing this because I want to share my experiences leading up to comfortably letting my dogs roam off leash and what it took to get us where we are today. I’d also love to share tips for being responsible owners of off leash dogs. So...we begin.

I assume most of you are here because you either know me personally or follow my dogs on Instagram; but for those who may have somehow stumbled upon this somewhere else, I’ll quickly introduce myself & my pups. I’m Julie, I’m 25, I live in Denver with my boyfriend Jake, our 2 year old Siberian Husky Tucker, and our (probably) 2 year old muttbutt Leo, who DNA testing claims is half Chesapeake Bay Retriever, and other half mostly Siberian Husky with a pinch of Staffordshire Terrier (for the record, I believe this 100%). We spend a lot of our time out hiking, which is why training our dogs to be reliable off leash has been a big priority since having them. I feel it’s also important to add that we have had Tucker since he was a puppy, and adopted Leo at around a year old, which has made each of their training a little bit different.

Start Early

Something I tell people who reach out to me on instagram about off leash training is that it starts the minute your new puppy (or dog) comes home. I personally believe a solid recall is the most important thing you can teach your dog - it is for the safety of both of you; whether you want your dog off leash while you are out hiking, or just to call your dog back to you when it is time to leave the dog park. That being said, I’ll start with how I began Tucker’s foundation of a reliable recall at a very young age. We would work on basic obedience at home along with puppy classes - “sit, stay, come,” learning his name, and learning to come over to me when I called him. This happens by having a massive puppy party with toys and treats whenever he would come when called. If you have a puppy at home, I recommend always having treats on hand - you never know when there might be a positive behavior you want to reward. For Tucker, his motivation for training has always been food, and still is. But being a husky, he is picky about what he defines as a good reward. Those bags of small “training treats” just didn’t cut it for him. If your dog is food motivated, find that treat that really gets them excited. That treat that smells so bad you can’t even believe your dog likes it. Find that treat, and set it aside as your high value reward, and use it ONLY for recall training.

When Tucker was getting close to a year old (might be important to note Leo was not in the picture yet), I bought a long 20 ft lead and started bringing him out to parks in Chicago where we lived at the time, and we would just work on his recall. Not for long periods of time; I would keep training short & interesting, using the high value treats I knew he loved, and worked every couple of days to get him to REALLY understand what I was asking of him by saying, “Tucker, come.” They say practice makes perfect and I am here to tell you that yeah....it does. But practice takes patience, and patience is sooo important in training a dog. And sometimes just when you think you’ve got it all figured out, you decide that another dog is just what you need. 

Hello, Leo!

So, in comes Leo. By this time, Tucker was about a year old, and my crazy self was ready to introduce a rescue dog of the same age into our little family who had little to no training himself. Tucker’s basic manners and obedience were pretty solid by this time, but my confidence in his off leash skills were not quite there. While focusing on getting Leo comfortable in his new life, I’ll admit my once laser focused training with Tucker started to slack. Once Leo had mastered basic obedience, it was time for me to take on recall training for both boys so they could enjoy off leash freedom. After some research, I discovered the training tool that would solidify both Tucker & Leo’s recall: the e-collar.

E-Collars - the good, the bad, the ugly 

If you’ve read this far knowing that I am now going to talk about e-collar training, then hopefully you are either in the group that believes e-collars are an amazing training tool when used properly, or you have an open mind on the matter. If you are anti e-collar, then hopefully I can at least help you understand why they can be so beneficial to others. I found this quote that pretty much sums up my opinion on the matter:

“A shock collar is a training tool which applies a negative stimulus to the dog. It can be used in the correct fashion to train a dog. It can be used improperly to cause a dog extreme pain. A leash can also be used properly as a training tool and improperly to cause extreme pain. The important word is "improperly". Used properly, a shock collar is no different than a leash as a training tool.”

I don’t exactly like that they used the term “shock” collar, because in itself that sounds abusive, but I can move past that because the point is simple. I’ll also admit e-collar training is not going to work for every dog, especially those who may have a rocky or abusive past. But as I mentioned at the beginning of this, I am only sharing my experiences and what has worked for me and my dogs.

That being said, here is where I want to share my mistakes in hopes that those of you reading will not make the same ones. Yes, I did my research on e-collars and made the decision that this would be a great way to solidify my dog’s recall training when distractions were present. What I did not research was e-collar brands - I simply did what any person this day in age would do: got on Amazon, found something affordable, skimmed a few reviews, decided they look good, and pressed order. Well, I am thankful for the “vibrate” mode these sh*tty, $75 Petrainer brand e-collars had, because after feeling the shock mode on myself there was no way I would be using that on my dogs. After training them on these collars using the different levels of vibrate (I’ll get into the training method I used soon), I made the mistake of leaving the remote out in the rain while camping one night. This broke the remote, leaving me in need of a new set of collars. Thankfully by this time I had heard of brands that yes, were a little more expensive, but it is because they are the real deal. My advice when selecting an e-collar? If it is under $100....it is too good to be true, even for one collar. Do not make the same mistake as I did and buy something because it is cheap; spend the money for a quality product that will last (oh yeah, and one that won’t harm your dog).

For those interested, the collars I currently use are here, and you can check out my full review on the Mini Educator collars here.

Training

My plan was to take this on myself, using resources I had found on the internet (great idea, Julie). Thankfully this worked out well for me; one google search, picked the top article, read it three times, and off to the park I went with the boys that afternoon. By then, both Tucker & Leo had a solid “come;” just needed reinforcing when we were out and distractions were present, which was why I made the decision to e-collar train.

I don’t feel there is a need for me to go into great detail about e-collar training for recall when it is all in this lovely article that I will link below. Maybe this entire blog post just needed to be a link to this article, so here is what you’ve been waiting for!

This is not an article for skimming - if you are serious about e-collar training yourself, please read it through and through again. And if you feel this isn’t something you want to take on yourself, I highly recommend hiring a professional trainer to help with e-collar training.

Link:  Lou Castle - Training the Recall

Keep in mind this isn’t something that will be picked up overnight. It takes practice and patience to perfect (say that 3 times fast) and some dogs may catch on faster than others.

I am lucky that Tucker and Leo both responded well to e-collar training, and most of the time now I can trust them without using the e-collar at all. But, when we are out and I have them off leash, their e-collars are on for that extra safety net. When it comes to recall, and ALL training in general, training never ends.

After practicing recall with the e-collar in safe places like large dog parks, we slowly started bringing Tucker and Leo out on hikes and letting them off leash. Honestly I couldn’t believe how well they responded to the training - all of the time spent and smelly treats given were finally worth it. 

Don’t be that person

So maybe you’ve reached the point you believe your dog is ready to be off leash and will come back whenever you call them, wherever you are. YAS!!! This is one of the best and most freeing feelings for both you and your dog! But of course, being with a dog off leash brings it’s own set of new responsibilities.

This mostly applies to hiking with your dog, but these tips can be beneficial in any situation where your dog might be off leash.

Do not let your off leash dog approach any person OR dog without permission. Sure, your dog may be the social butterfly who can play well with any person or dog, but that may not be the case for all. The last thing you want is for your dog to approach a reactive dog and a fight to begin. It is YOUR responsibility to keep your dog under control at all times, and if you don’t think they can pass another group without having to say hello, leash them up as you pass. Most of the time when I am out hiking and see a group ahead, I will holler, “are your dogs friendly?” or “do you guys mind dogs?” which can keep potentially bad situations from happening.

Be aware of wildlife and how your dog may react. This is kind of self explanatory. If you are in an area where wildlife may be present, stay on alert and have a leash handy at all times. If your dog has a high prey drive, working on “leave it” alongside training recall will create a solid combination to keep your dog from chasing those damn squirrels.

Batteries can die - have treats along just in case. We all know batteries like to die at the worst time. I have never had a problem with my e-collars battery lasting, but in the event it does, or some kind of malfunction (like, idk, leaving the remote in the rain), bring along those high reward treats in case.

So...

For those who are STILL reading (hey hey!!!) I really hope you found this informative. I love being able to let my dogs enjoy life off leash and I would love if it could be that way for everyone! If there is anything you believe I missed, would like me to go into more detail about, or if you have a questions please feel free to shoot me an email - tuckerleohuskies@gmail.com

xx Julie

[wickedbananas]

Getting Real with Retail: An Agency’s Guide to Inspiring In-Store Excellence

Posted by MiriamEllis

No marketing agency staffer feels good when they see a retail client getting reviews like this on the web.

But we can find out why they’re happening, and if we’re going above-and-beyond in our work, we just might be able to catalyze turning things around if we’re committed to being honest with clients and have an actionable strategy for their in-store improvements.

In this post, I’ll highlight some advice from an internal letter at Tesla that I feel is highly applicable to the retail sector. I’d also like to help your agency combat the retail blues headlining the news these days with big brands downsizing, liquidating and closing up shop — I’m going to share a printable infographic with some statistics with you that are almost guaranteed to generate the client positivity so essential to making real change. And, for some further inspiration, I’d like to offer a couple of anecdotes involving an Igloo cooler, a monk, reindeer moss, and reviews.

The genuine pain of retail gone wrong: The elusive cooler, "Corporate," and the man who could hardly stand

“Hi there,” I greeted the staffer at the customer service counter of the big department store. “Where would I find a small cooler?”

“We don’t have any,” he mumbled.

“You don’t have any coolers? Like, an Igloo cooler to take on a picnic to keep things cold?”

“Maybe over there,” he waved his hand in unconcern.

And I stood there for a minute, expecting him to actually figure this out for me, maybe even guide me to the appropriate aisle, or ask a manager to assist my transaction, if necessary. But in his silence, I walked away.

“Hi there,” I tried with more specificity at the locally owned general store the next day. “Where would I find something like a small Igloo cooler to keep things cold on a picnic?”

“I don’t know,” the staffer replied.

“Oh…” I said, uncomfortably.

“It could be upstairs somewhere,” he hazarded, and left me to quest for the second floor, which appeared to be a possibly-non-code-compliant catch-all attic for random merchandise, where I applied to a second dimly illuminated employee who told me I should probably go downstairs and escalate my question to someone else.

And apparently escalation was necessary, for on the third try, a very tall man was able to lift his gaze to some coolers on a top shelf… within clear view of the checkout counter where the whole thing began.

Why do we all have experiences like this?

“Corporate tells us what to carry” is the almost defensive-sounding refrain I have now received from three employees at two different Whole Foods Markets when asking if they could special order items for me since the Amazon buyout.

Because, you know, before they were Amazon-Whole Foods, staffers would gladly offer to procure anything they didn’t have in stock. Now, if they stop carrying that Scandinavian vitamin D-3 made from the moss eaten by reindeer and I’ve got to have it because I don’t want the kind made by irradiating sheep wool, I’d have to special order an entire case of it to get my hands on a bottle. Because, you know, “Corporate.”

Why does the distance between corporate and customer make me feel like the store I’m standing in, and all of its employees, are powerless? Why am I, the customer, left feeling powerless?

So maybe my search for a cooler, my worries about access to reindeer moss, and the laughable customer service I’ve experienced don’t signal “genuine pain.” But this does:

This is genuine pain. When customer service is failing to the point that badly treated patrons are being further distressed by the sight of fellow shoppers meeting the same fate, the cause is likely built into company structure. And your marketing agency is looking at a bonafide reputation crisis that could presage things like lawsuits, impactful reputation damage, and even closure for your valuable clients.

When you encounter customer service disasters, it begs questions like:

Could no one in my situation access a list of current store inventory, or, barring that, seek out merchandise with me instead of risking the loss of a sale?

Could no one offer to let “corporate” know that I’m dissatisfied with a “customer service policy” that would require me to spend $225 to buy a whole case of vitamins? Why am I being treated like a warehouse instead of a person?

Could no one at the pharmacy see a man with a leg wound about to fall over, grab a folding chair for him, and keep him safe, instead of risking a lawsuit?

I think a “no” answer to all three questions proceeds from definite causes. And I think Tesla CEO, Elon Musk, had such causes in mind when he recently penned a letter to his own employees.

“It must be okay for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen.”

“Communication should travel via the shortest path necessary to get the job done, not through the 'chain of command.' Any manager who attempts to enforce chain of command communication will soon find themselves working elsewhere. A major source of issues is poor communication between depts. The way to solve this is allow free flow of information between all levels. If, in order to get something done between depts, an individual contributor has to talk to their manager, who talks to a director, who talks to a VP, who talks to another VP, who talks to a director, who talks to a manager, who talks to someone doing the actual work, then super dumb things will happen. It must be ok for people to talk directly and just make the right thing happen. In general, always pick common sense as your guide. If following a 'company rule' is obviously ridiculous in a particular situation, such that it would make for a great Dilbert cartoon, then the rule should change.” - Elon Musk, CEO, Tesla

Let’s parlay this uncommon advice into retail. If it’s everyone’s job to access a free flow of information, use common sense, make the right thing happen, and change rules that don’t make sense, then:

Inventory is known by all store staff, and my cooler can be promptly located by any employee, rather than workers appearing helpless.

Employees have the power to push back and insist that, because customers still expect to be able to special order merchandise, a specific store location will maintain this service rather than disappoint consumers.

Pharmacists can recognize that patrons are often quite ill and can immediately place some chairs near the pharmacy counter, rather than close their eyes to suffering.

“But wait,” retailers may say. “How can I trust that an employee’s idea of ‘common sense’ is reliable?”

Let’s ask a monk for the answer.

“He took the time...”

I recently had the pleasure of listening to a talk given by a monk who was defining what it meant to be a good leader. He hearkened back to his young days, and to the man who was then the leader of his community.

“He was a busy man, but he took the time to get to know each of us one-on-one, and to be sure that we knew him. He set an example for me, and I watched him,” the monk explained.

Most monasteries function within a set of established rules, many of which are centuries old. You can think of these guidelines as a sort of policy. In certain communities, it’s perfectly acceptable that some of the members live apart as hermits most of the year, only breaking their meditative existence by checking in with the larger group on important holidays to share what they’ve been working on solo. In others, every hour has its appointed task, from prayer, to farming, to feeding people, to engaging in social activism.

The point is that everyone within a given community knows the basic guidelines, because at some point, they’ve been well-communicated. Beyond that, it is up to the individual to see whether they can happily live out their personal expression within the policy.

It’s a lot like retail can be, when done right. And it hinges on the question:

“Has culture been well-enough communicated to every employee so that he or she can act like the CEO of the company would in wide variety of circumstances?”

Or to put it another way, would Amazon owner Jeff Bezos be powerless to get me my vitamins?

The most accessible modern benchmark of good customer service — the online review — is what tells the public whether the CEO has “set the example.” Reviews tell whether time has been taken to acquaint every staffer with the business that employs them, preparing them to fit their own personal expression within the company’s vision of serving the public.

An employee who is able to recognize that an injured patron needs a seat while awaiting his prescription should be empowered to act immediately, knowing that the larger company supports treating people well. If poor training, burdensome chains of command, or failure to share brand culture are obstacles to common-sense personal initiative, the problem must be traced back to the CEO and corrected, starting from there.

And, of course, should a random staffer’s personal expression genuinely include an insurmountable disregard for other people, they can always be told it’s time to leave the monastery...

For marketing agencies, opportunity knocks

So your agency is auditing a valuable incoming client, and their negative reviews citing dirty premises, broken fixtures, food poisoning, slowness, rudeness, cluelessness, and lack of apparent concern make you say to yourself,

“Well, I was hoping we could clean up the bad data on the local business listings for this enterprise, but unless they clean up their customer service at 150 of their worst-rated locations, how much ROI are we really going to be able to deliver? What’s going on at these places?”

Let’s make no bones about this: Your honesty at this critical juncture could mean the difference between survival and closure for the brand.

You need to bring it home to the most senior level person you can reach in the organization that no amount of honest marketing can cover up poor customer service in the era of online reviews. If the brand has fallen to the level of the pharmacy I’ve cited, structural change is an absolute necessity. You can ask the tough questions, ask for an explanation of the bad reviews.

“But I’m just a digital marketer,” you may think. “I’m not in charge of whatever happens offline.”

Think again.

Headlines in retail land are horrid right now:

The mall crisis is secretly morphing into a full-on Armageddon - Business Insider

America’s ‘Retail Apocalypse’ Is Really Just Beginning - Bloomberg

Retail Wreck? Over 1,000 Stores Close in a Single Week - NBC

8 Companies Amazon is Killing - Investopedia

These major retailers have closed more than 5,000 stores in 2017 - Clark.com

If you were a retail brand C-suite and were swallowing these predictions of doom with your daily breakfast, wouldn’t you be looking for inspiration from anyone with genuine insight? And if a marketing agency should make it their business to confront the truth while also being the bearer of some better news, wouldn’t you be ready to listen?

What is the truth? That poor reviews are symptoms smart doctors can use for diagnosis of structural problems. What is the better news? The retail scenario is not nearly as dire as it may seem.

Why let hierarchy and traditional roles hold your agency back? Tesla wouldn’t. Why not roll up your sleeves and step into in-store? Organize and then translate the narrative negative reviews are telling about structural problems for the brand which have resulted in dangerously bad customer service. And then, be prepared to counter corporate inertia born of fear with some eye-opening statistics.

Print and share some good retail tidings

Print your own copy of this infographic to share with clients.

At Moz, we’re working with enterprises to get their basic location data into shape so that they are ready to win their share of the predicted $1.4 trillion in mobile-influenced local sales by 2021, and your agency can use these same numbers to combat indecision and apathy for your retail clients. Look at that second statistic again: 90% of purchases are still happening in physical stores. At Moz, we ask our customers if their data is ready for this. Your agency can ask its clients if their reputations are ready for this, if their employees have what they need to earn the brand’s piece of that 90% action. Great online data + great in-store service = table stakes for retail success.

While I won’t play down the unease that major brand retail closures is understandably causing, I hope I’ve given you the tools to fight the “retail disaster” narrative. 85% more mobile users are searching for things like “Where do I buy that reindeer moss vitamin D3?” than they were just 3 years ago. So long as retail staff is ready to deliver, I see no “apocalypse” here.

Investing time

So, your agency has put in the time to identify a reputation problem severe enough that it appears to be founded in structural deficiencies or policies. Perhaps you’ve used some ORM software to do review sentiment analysis to discover which of your client’s locations are hurting worst, or perhaps you’ve done an initial audit manually. You've communicated the bad news to the most senior-level person you can reach at the company, and you've also shared the statistics that make change seem very worthwhile, begging for a new commitment to in-store excellence. What happens next?

While there are going to be nuances specific to every brand, my bet is that the steps will look like this for most businesses:

C-suites need to invest time in creating a policy which a) abundantly communicates company culture, b) expresses trust in employee initiative, and c) dispenses with needless “chain of command” steps, while d) ensuring that every public facing staffer receives full and ongoing training. A recent study says 62% of new retail hires receive less than 10 hours of training. I’d call even these worrisome numbers optimistic. I worked at 5 retail jobs in my early youth. I’d estimate that I received no more than 1 hour of training at any of them.

Because a chain of command can’t realistically be completely dispensed with in a large organization, store managers must then be allowed the time to communicate the culture, encourage employees to use common sense, define what “common sense” does and doesn’t look like to the company, and, finally, offer essential training.

Employees at every level must be given the time to observe how happy or unhappy customers appear to be at their location, and they must be taught that their observations are of inestimable value to the brand. If an employee suggests a solution to a common consumer complaint, this should be recognized and rewarded.

Finally, customers must be given the time to air their grievances at the time of service, in-person, with accessible, responsive staff. The word “corporate” need never come into most of these conversations unless a major claim is involved. Given that it may cost as much as 7x more to replace an unhappy customer than to keep an existing one happy, employees should be empowered to do business graciously and resolve complaints, in most cases, without escalation.

Benjamin Franklin may or may not have said that “time is money.” While the adage rings true in business, reviews have taught me the flip side — that a lack of time equals less money. Every negative review that cites helpless employees and poor service sounds to my marketing ears like a pocketful of silver dollars rolling down a drain.

The monk says good leaders make the time to communicate culture one-on-one.

Tesla says rules should change if they’re ridiculous.

Chairs should be offered to sick people… where common sense is applied.

Reviews can read like this:

And digital marketers have never known a time quite like this to have the ear of retail, maybe stepping beyond traditional boundaries into the fray of the real world. Maybe making a fundamental difference.

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[theunderdogwrites]

Trout Mouth & Freedom of Speech

The building I currently live in has been having an increase in break-ins to our underground parking. Storage cages are being forced open to gain access to bikes (easy to pawn for quick cash) and car windows are being smashed when valuables can be seen from just looking inside. There is now noise within the complex, with people screaming that they want cameras installed and a security guard to patrol the parkade during the early morning hours.

While this MIGHT help the situation there is no guarantee that it will stop these wanton crooks from their dastardly deeds. One, because they can simply cover their faces from the cameras and avoid the security guard. And two, because the real issue of security isn’t being addressed – people are not taking any responsibility for the safekeeping of their own building. Not waiting for the large parkade doors to close before leaving the property. Buzzing up SkipTheDishes drivers instead of going down and meeting them at the front doors, therefore allowing anyone to follow them into the building and gain access to the parkade. Leaving their key fobs in their cars where they get stolen. And caring only about themselves to the point where they fail to report any strange activity around the property.

The lack of personal accountability is a real problem. And not just in my building.

The definition of Freedom of Speech as given by Dictionary.com is as follows:

“the right of people to express their opinions publicly without governmental interference, subject to the laws against libel, incitement to violence or rebellion, etc.”

Let me Coles Notes a few things here:

-    Wednesday January 6, 2021 Trump gives a “spirited” speech at a rally in Washington that manages to provoke his feistier followers into marching down to the Capitol Building and storming inside using force. Five people died and dozens were injured.

-    Within a week Trump is banned from Twitter, Facebook, suspended by Instagram for two weeks and Parler (social media app used by many vocal extremists, Trump supporters and conspiracy theorists) was booted by hosting services such as Amazon, Apple and Google.

-    Trump is reduced to only being able to use the Amazon product reviews section to intimately reach his supporters

-    Uproar over censorship/freedom of speech begins.

Below is a link to the transcript (and video) of Trump’s “Save America” speech he gave just before the attack on the Capital Building. It’s long of course, but I encourage you to skim through it, or put the video on and listen while you’re doing other things. You may think it’s not significant and you don’t want to hear the ramblings of #45, but it IS important if you care about freedom of speech and the obligation we have to not be total raging assholes with no regard for morality or law and order.

https://www.rev.com/blog/transcripts/donald-trump-speech-save-america-rally-transcript-january-6?cjevent=47b9f152576311eb8162015f0a1c0e10&cjdata=MXxOfDB8WXww

Since the election Trump has been peddling his theory that the election was stolen from him by way of shifty voting and ballot counting procedures and a conspiracy to turn Trump votes into Biden votes. He’s been pushing this idea hard and without reprieve despite no creditable evidence and despite his hand-picked Supreme Court ruling against his claims. I don’t feel anyone with a brain thought he was ever going to go quietly if he lost. You don’t spend your first term in office talking about how they should allow for three or more terms if your plan is to exit with grace.

I never had a problem with Trump wanting to challenge the election results. Whatever floats your boat Cheeto. I didn’t like that he asked for donations from supporters during all this and managed to gather over 200 million dollars. Something I feel he did just to fill up his own coffers with zero respect for those putting their money behind him. But I digress…

Without tangible proof, Trump is now hawking these inaccuracies to his supporters, of which there are MANY. And breeding within those MANY are the extremists. And within those extremists are those who just love the chaos.

“Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.” Alfred Pennyworth, The Dark Knight

Yes, I just quoted a Batman movie.

You can say that Trump has been telling lies for over four years and you’d be right, but the difference now is this latest set of fabrications has inspired some of his supporters to engage in acts of violence (it’s being called domestic terrorism) against their own democracy. These individuals are currently being hunted down and arrested and WILL be charged with a number of offences while Trump throws them under the bus and takes no responsibility for anything. Oh, and he blamed the Democrats for causing all this anger.

Side note: One day people will listen to me about this… one day.

Below is a link to the trailer for a Netflix documentary titled ‘GET ME ROGER STONE’. Roger Stone is a political strategist with over 40 years on the Washington scene. He is credited with inventing negative campaign attack ads among other diabolical maneuvers. He is also partially responsible for Donald Trump’s effectiveness in winning over voters and his ability to seemingly get away with everything. I’ve been yelling about this guy for four years, but he is so slick. He was recently indicted in connection with the Russia investigation. Trump issued him a full pardon. He has this thing called Stone’s Rules (with regards to operating within politics) and one of those rules is:

-          Never admit to any wrongdoing

-          Deny. Deny. Deny.

-          Go on the attack.

Does that sound like anyone you know? Maybe someone who was just impeached for the second time for something he won’t admit to doing, has adamantly denied and blamed on others?

 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5IPyv4KgTAA

I am 100% for freedom of speech. I believe you should be allowed to say whatever you want to say, whenever you want to say it.  If you wish to chant at the top of your lungs, “Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!” you have every right to engage in comedy. If you wish to strip down to your soft cotton bush pants and yell, “the President personally invited me here!”:

 Then you’re probably this guy who is quickly learning that actions often have consequences, as does freedom of speech.

While you’re allowed to use your voice to express your opinion, there is this little pesky caveat that comes along with speaking freely and that is – you will be held accountable. And rightly so.

Do you remember the old school yard mantra – sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me? Am I the only one who never bought that baloney? Words can hurt. The power of words is far greater than that of sticks and stones. Words spoken, no matter how hard your try, cannot be taken back. You can’t put them back in your mouth. Or back in your head. Once they’re out, they’re either doing some good or they’re doing some damage. Speak freely and speak often, but know your audience and take some fucking responsibility for the ripple effect your words might create.

Was banning Trump from pretty much all social platforms the right thing to do? Or is it a scary precedent that threatens freedom of speech?

For starters, Trump was banned by COMPANIES, not the government. These companies therefore reserve the right to ban anyone from using their platform who they consider to be in violation of their terms and conditions (user agreement). Within that wordy legal document that we all barely skim over is usually a part about not using the application to abuse and harass others and not posting anything that incites violence or brings harm on groups or individuals. In other words, don’t use a service like Twitter to spread bullshit amongst your unhinged supporters who then get filmed at the Capital Riots chanting “the President sent us!!” as they throw fire extinguishers at the police.

Over the course of four years Trump sent out an estimated 56,000 tweets. I have a Twitter account. I tweeted once then gave up, so I have to give it to the old guy, those early morning toilet tantrums on Twitter really added up. During that time, he was fact checked A LOT and to the surprise of NONE he lied MANY times. My one and only tweet was also a lie. I believe I said something along the lines of “Happy to be here!”.

During the 2020 election year many of his tweets were flagged and labelled as misinformation. He wasn’t banned until after the Capital Riots out of fear he would continue to ramp up his extremist supporters and provoke them into further acts of violence. Without Twitter and Facebook etc. Trump has been deprived of his oxygen – his ability to intimately interact with his followers. Because when you strip back all the yelling and flag waving and crying about the right to say whatever the fuck you want… you are left with a simple lesson we all (should have) learned when we were children. If you choose to behave badly, then the consequences you shall suffer.

Here is a link to a list of all the platforms that have banned Trump. Whether it be hashtags or online shopping stores, companies are taking a serious stand NOW on the spreading of anything Trump: (you should read this as it goes into context as well)

https://www.axios.com/platforms-social-media-ban-restrict-trump-d9e44f3c-8366-4ba9-a8a1-7f3114f920f1.html

It’s funny how some people believe they deserve to be able to use and abuse a free service like Twitter for their personal needs such as attacking others, but don’t believe in things like universal health care, equal pay, unicorns, Covid-19, love, climate change and the possibility that Walter White is still alive.

I personally have never broken any online platform user agreements with regards to abusive speech. In person, most definitely. I’m rarely inspired to battle online people who are looking for a fight because by not engaging with these keyboard warriors I am performing acts of charity for the cerebrally challenged. In the real world, well, you know what they say – it’s hard out here for a pimp.

Trump has behaved poorly for years now. His Republican party members (looking at you Mitch ‘melty face’ McConnell) hid behind him like the bottom feeders they are and got fat with power in his wake. The GOP will never be the same again. Trump’s grip on this party is akin to that of an uncatchable boa constrictor lost in high rise building’s plumbing. Slithering around deep in the bowels of the structure threatening to re-emerge as something far worse. If you lived in that building, you’d never be comfortable again. Your whole existence would be based on fear. Fear, which just so happens to be an effective weapon when trying to control others.

There is another concern floating around right now and that is the power of the big tech companies to control what we can see and what we can’t see. I’ve not given this enough thought yet to be able to provide any coherent ramblings. BUT it is definitely something we all need to be aware of and watching in our very near future.

I’m left with one question – was Trump responsible for the Capital Riots?

It would be so easy to blame him, as many have. And now that he is literally on his way out, getting those final kicks in is giving many people a stock pile of delight. So, the most satisfying answer is – fuck yes. But let’s not forget all the Republicans that have remained silent for the past four years as Trump went on TV’s around the globe and called Africa and Haiti “shitholes”. Mocked a disabled reporter. Stated that Americans who died in wars were “losers and suckers”.

And all of this:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/01/28/upshot/donald-trump-twitter-insults.html?_r=0

If you are a parent or a care taker of children are you prone to sitting silently and allowing those children to run amuck in a restaurant yelling at people and causing havoc in hopes the manager will give you free ice cream to shut that child down? Is it that child’s fault you refuse to discipline them out of fear they’ll replace you with a more agreeable parent? Are you getting my point?

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope.” — Robert F Kennedy

One final thing…

Let’s not forget not all Trump supporters agree with what happened at the Capital. Over 74 million Americans voted for him because they believed he made their life better. And maybe for some of them, he did. Within those 74 million voters, are good people. Individuals who didn’t vote for insurrection, but for hope for their future.

[seriouslycromulent]

Justice League Review & Recap (Warning: Get comfortable)

Soooo, if you’ve ever visited my blog in the past, you know I’m a DC comics fan. I’m not anti-Marvel, mind you. But I love me some DC. With that in mind, it’s important to note that I’m not your average DC fan or DCEU fan or DCtv fan. I tend to like a lot of things others dislike, and dislike a lot of things others like. That’s not me being contrary. I’m pretty much that way about most issues in life – politics, music, travel, etc. 

I’m telling you this to prepare you for my fangirl rantings. You might agree with some of them. You might think I’m loony about others. But understand, I’m not trying to convince you to agree with me. I’m simply expressing my opinion. I say nothing out of malice or a desire to run down someone or something any person loves. That’s not my style. I’d rather spend my time gushing over the things that bring my life joy than dedicate a lot of time and energy to tearing down things that don’t. (Case in point: I started typing a review of Thor: Ragnarok 2 weeks ago after I saw it, but decided not to continue and didn’t post it.)

With that said, let’s jump right in:

Warning: Spoilers be below, so I’m using a cut tag out of courtesy. And seriously, you might want to grab a snack because I’m going all in. 😊

If you’re looking for a mild or hate-filled review of the Justice League, you might want to stop now. I loved the film, and I already plan to buy it when it comes out on digital release. I currently own 2 DCEU films: Man of Steel and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. I’m attending the ACE Comic Con on Long Island in December, and I plan to see JL multiple times before then. I’ve already seen it twice. I’m a fan. So if you were hoping for an all-negative review or you’re not interested in the details of what I liked and didn’t like about the film, stop now.

Also, these points are not in chronological order of the film. Let’s do this:

What I Liked

Sassy Alfred is back! That dig about Bruce not dating was not missed, sir. Not missed at all. Alfred, never change.

Barry not knowing which direction was East = Me as a superhero! 🙄😏

When we came back from the theater, BvS: Dawn of Justice was on HBO. Both my mother and I said we didn’t even notice they put a photo of Pa Kent in the coffin with Clark at the end. So kudos to the continuity team for remembering to include it in Justice League. And shame on me for not noticing that before. Also, when the photo fell into the amniotic fluid during the resurrection scene, I can’t help but think that was meant to symbolize Clark losing a valuable part of himself in the process of coming back to life. (But hey! I was an English major. I see symbolism everywhere.)

I respect the fact that the DCEU acknowledges all the advancements in the digital world we live in today, but Commissioner Gordon is still sticking with the tried-and-true analog Bat Signal with the lever and the thick wires and the sparks every time he needs to beckon Batman to a rooftop. Jim, never change.

The line: “Yeah, something’s definitely bleeding.” - Batman (This was both funny and in character.)

I liked the subtle and not-so-subtle references to a world in a continual state of despair and upheaval littered throughout the film. We hear Alfred say, “I do not recognize this world.” And Ma Kent talks about having trouble even listening to the news anymore. I think someone else references the anger and bitterness that’s around us everywhere we go these days. I know most of these scenes were filmed before 2 years ago, but I swear that dialogue could easily fit in with many of the statements I hear every day in conversations with my family, friends and people online. Once again, Snyder dials into that realism that makes the DCEU feel rooted in the world we live in today. Plus, Arthur’s recognition of “people who don’t have anywhere else to go” is a much appreciated acknowledgment of the current refugee crisis, but its done in such a way that it won’t feel dated in the future.

Billy Crudup delivers more in his two short scenes than most actors do in entire films. He’s now one of the reasons I’m really looking forward to the Flash solo film.

While I’m handing out kudos for acting, I want to say I’m proud of Ray Fisher and the job he’s done on bringing gravitas to Victor/Cyborg. I saw some DCEU-hater videos a few months ago imply that he might tank the film because audiences didn’t know his work before JL, which is absurd. Most of us didn’t know Hugh Jackman’s work before X-Men, but we gave him a chance and now y’all crying over him leaving the role after Logan. Ray did a wonderful job conveying the struggle Victor’s going through without making us feel like we missed so much backstory we couldn’t follow his emotional journey. He was the right casting choice.

I appreciated the Amazon fight with Steppenwolf to keep him away from the Motherbox so much more on the second viewing. The details, the logistics, the combat strategy were so much easier to take in once I knew how the battle was going to end. If you were like me and didn’t quite grasp how well that was shot, please watch the movie again.

I really liked the end credit scene and the appearance of [REDACTED]! It was not the end credit scene I was expecting (the Trailer-bait scene with Alfred talking to someone off-screen was the one I wanted), but I’m not mad. [REDACTED] is no man’s poor substitute.

Me learning new things: I never knew Supes was as fast as Barry. I knew they would race each other all the time, but I never knew he could literally see him moving inside the speedforce. That’s news to me, and it made that scene feel even more awesome!

Commissioner Gordon’s comment about the amount of structural damage Batman caused at the Gotham Harbor made me chuckle. I appreciate them hanging a light on that constant complaint.

Now, I, too, kind of want to know if Superman has ever fought a hippo. I’m kind of mad Supes never answered that.

So glad I saw the film a second time because I completely missed the confirmation that the Lanterns helped defeat Steppenwolf the first time he attacked Earth. Diana said that nearby visitors from other planets helped them drive Steppenwolf into retreat, but I was too busy trying to take in all the details and I missed the oh-so-important green ring that falls off the guy’s finger. Lantern Corps confirmed!

I appreciated that Barry recognized that his attempt to get a fist bump from Victor could be considered racial charged. That’s why it’s nice when we see Victor finally giving Barry a fist bump at the end while the team looked out on the safe® nuclear power plant area.

I liked how they showed that Bruce does have bruises and gets hurt in his battles against the others. I know we didn’t get to see much of it, but those bruises were important to his story and his journey, just as his comments about knowing he can’t do this forever. 

What I Loved! 

Lois Lane is “the Big Guns.” You damn right she is!!

Aquaman/Aquamomoa really was wielding that quindent like it was an extension of himself. He flipped that thing around like it was nothing. And knowing Jason like I “do,” he put a lot of work into making it look fluid as possible. It’s kind of hard to miss with all the action on the first viewing, but when he’s fighting Steppenwolf alongside Diana, you can really appreciate how well he works the weapon to give himself a fighting chance with an enemy twice his size.

Diana calling Resurrected!Clark Kal-El. Bruce calling Resurrected!Clark Clark. This was me each time:

Absolute favorite scene: Everyone fighting Resurrected!Superman. Not only because it’s well done, but because of this: It did a great job of showing how much of a threat Supes is going to be in the future. He had just woken up from a dirt nap, so he was in no way running on all cylinders and they still couldn’t really take him. Imagine how much of a threat Superman will be to the others when he’s at actual full power? Granted, Diana was holding back and Arthur was out of practice/rusty in the ass-kicking business, but even at their best, I think it’s clear they’re not going to be a true match for Supes when he is at his best. That was a clever “sneak peak” of a story to come.

Also, Superman catching Diana’s arms before she can clash her bracelets together, then headbutting her. Then her headbutting him. Then him holding her wrists, raising in the air, and headbutting her into the pavement. That was so awesome! It made me suddenly want to buy the video game and pit Wonder Woman against Superman over and over again.

Loved the head-nod to canon about Batman already thinking of contingency plans should they not be able to control Clark once he’s resurrected. 

I’m extremely happy with the inclusion of Victor as the linchpin to defeating Steppenwolf. I know a lot of people questioned his inclusion as a member of the Justice League, but he’s honestly a great addition. Not only because of the Motherbox technology, but because of his understanding and access to digital technology. In 2017, the Justice League needs to have someone on the team who can handle the digital aspects of a fight. Maybe it wasn’t as big of a component to fighting the good fight back in the 1980s, but it definitely is now. Cyborg is a perfect addition/update to the Justice League concept. It just works. Anyone still pushing back on this after seeing JL doesn’t really have a solid argument.

Favorite Aquaman moment: When Arthur finally joins the fight and helps the team under Gotham Harbor. When he came in and used his quindent to hold the water back long enough for the others to escape… I damn near jumped out of my seat with applause. You go boy! Talks to fish, my ass!

I love a good argument. That is, when writers create an argument between characters where it’s difficult to choose a side, I love that! That’s why I love how Bruce shuts Diana down about her trying to tell him to move on after Clark’s death. I understood her trepidation about using the Motherbox to resurrect Clark, but Bruce was 100% on the money when he said she’s the last person to tell anybody they need to move on after suffering a loss considering how she shut herself off for almost a century after losing Steve Trevor. Sure, Victor calls Bruce an asshole, and Barry said that they’d cover for Diana if she killed Bruce, but Bruce was still right.

This moment: Superman: “I knew you didn’t bring me back because you liked me.” Batman, awkwardly stammering: “I don’t … not …”

Everyone has a small character arc that doesn’t get ignored at the expense of the action or storyline. I love it when storytellers do that! By the time the credits roll, 1) Diana learns to come out of the shadows and own her role as a hero. 2) Barry learns confidence in battle, even if he isn’t as strong or as sure-footed as the others. It’s clear by the end, he understands that his skills will come in time. Plus, friends. 3) Victor begins to see his condition/situation as something other than a curse, and we can see his relationship with his father start to mend. 4) Arthur starts to find his way back to interacting with the world as someone up other than an outcast from both sides of his family. 5) And, well, Clark comes back from the dead, and after letting off some steam, decides to forgive … eventually. 6) Maybe Bruce doesn’t have much of an arc since he spends most of the film trying to right a wrong he made, but I think that’s enough on his plate for now.

The scene that tugs at my heartstrings the most: Bruce acknowledging to Alfred that the team needs Clark. And that it’s Clark’s humanity that makes him remarkable. Not his powers. Not his abilities. The fact that he was willing to only use those abilities to help others, but also try to live a normal life with a job, a girlfriend and a desire to make the world a better place even without those powers is what made him special. I swear that whole speech just made me want to hug the writers.

One word: Booyah!

What I Didn’t Like

No Perry. Not even a cameo. 😣

Where’s my Clark accepting Lois’s “Yes” for his proposal in absentia scene from the trailer?! Trailer-bait is mean, Snyder. Just mean. I don’t know if this is Whedon’s doing, but … yeah. Not happy.

Poor Barry tripping over his feet. 😟 I understand why it’s necessary to show him as a greenhorn, but it still makes me feel sad. 

I did feel as if the pacing in the beginning was a bit rushed. It was as if they were really quick to jump into introducing the team/convincing them to join. But I chocked that up to the studio over-editing Snyder’s work again. And I quickly put it out of my mind about 15 minutes into the film. Like any good DCEU fan, I figure the director’s cut will fix it, so I’m not too bothered.

I know the Russian family of four was just supposed to represent the host of families that have sought out the nuclear power plant area for refuge, but are now in danger of getting killed in Steppenwolf’s wake, but constantly going back to that one family made me feel like they were the only family in danger. I think it would’ve been more effective to include shots of a couple of other families bordering up their homes in fear of the parademons. It’s not like they didn’t have the budget.

When BvS came out, I said I think I would’ve preferred a clean-shaven Bruce Wayne/Batman. I was wrong. He looks better with the stubble. Much better.

Barry was at the beginning of his journey, so I understand the use of humor to cope with his new situation, but sometimes I felt like he was a little too much comic relief. Not that it was out of character for him. He was/is a guy desperate to make friends, so keeping it light even in serious moments does kind of fit him at this stage. But it did sometimes feel a bit much. I mean he is still struggling to get his father out of jail, and trying to get his life on track. His joviality felt a little too much at times. I love his geekiness, but I don’t want to see him not be taken seriously by the audience going forward. Hopefully, they will avoid that in future films.

The CGI for Victor looks brilliant, just like I said it would. I saw nothing wrong with it at all. It had weight and density. It appeared cutting edge without appearing unreasonably implausible. The complaints about it when the trailers came out were completely unfounded, just like I said. But … the CGI on Cavill’s face sometimes looked … no. Just no. That definitely could’ve been better. At times, he looked like his face was uneven in terms of depth. And others, he looked like his skin was too perfect. For a film with this budget and with their schedule, I expected better.

Unpopular opinion: I’m still unsure about Amber Heard’s casting. I’m trying to give her the benefit of the doubt, but based on the few films I’ve seen of hers in the past + the one scene she has in Justice League … I do not feel hopeful. I mean when I compare Billy Crudup’s big scene with Amber’s scene, I’m like, “How did she get cast in this franchise?” I’m on board with all the casting choices so far except hers. I’m going to try to give her more rope, but I’m not going to pretend to be a fan because other people are.

I still feel like people are going to walk out the cinema and go: “So what can Aquaman do?” It’s clear he’s strong, agile and fearless. And after bodysurfing a parademon through a building, it’s obvious he doesn’t bruise easily. But I still think people are going to go, “But what can he do?” We literally saw him use a quindent to hold back umpteen gallons of water, but folks are still going to talk trash. SMH. I wish the film did more to alleviate that prospect.

This, That & The Other

There was a lot more swearing than I expected. No judgment. It was just more realistic given the situations they were in, and since the general public seems to be bothered about the DCEU feeling realistic, it was more than I expected. I figured with all the clamoring to make things all light and bubbly as possible, swearing wouldn’t be as much of an option for the franchise anymore.

That joke Clark made about wishing he were dead after helping rip apart the Motherboxes: Too soon! It honestly made me feel uncomfortable. I’m still trying to unpack why, so I didn’t include it with the things I didn’t like in the list above. But honestly, it kind of deserves to be there.

Unpopular opinion: If they do bring in Green Lantern, I hope they choose John Stewart over Hal. If they go with Hal Jordan, everyone is going to compare him to Ryan Reynolds. Save us all from that unnecessary fandom war, and just go with John Stewart! Plus, you get to add another DC hero of color, and frankly, John was a better Green Lantern than Hal. Yeah, I said it!

I walked in to Justice League excited to see the upcoming origin films in this order: Aquaman, Flash, Cyborg. I walked out excited to see the origin films in this order: Flash, Cyborg, Aquaman. I still love Momoa, but I’m actually more interested in seeing Barry’s origin story more now than Arthur’s.

Why couldn’t Bruce just buy the farm back from the bank? Why did he have to buy the entire bank? Bruce is so extra.

To Sum Up/Overall:

I don’t want my overall review of the film to be a reactionary one. By that I mean, I’m not interested in arguing or refuting others’ rumors, reactions or feedback. I feel like it taints the genuine impression I walked out of the theater with after seeing the film (both times). So I’ll say this:

I thoroughly enjoyed Justice League. I’m not upset, aggravated or disappointed in any way more than I was after watching Batman v Superman. I don’t think the film was as strong as Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, but it was a good solid film about a team coming together for the first time who were in very different headspaces to fight an enemy who is the precursor to the ultimate Big Bad we’ll see in Justice League 2. I thought the film did fine mixing heart, humor and story without sacrificing character development and purpose. It is not set up to deliver the same emotional impact as BvS, so I can’t genuinely complain if it does not do that.

I’m aware they had to, for lack of better phrasing, “dumb it down” because so many people felt lost while watching BvS. I didn’t feel lost watching BvS, but I respect the fact that not everyone is me, and I actually prefer films that don’t insult my intelligence. BvS was the first – and frankly, only – comic book movie that hasn’t insulted my intelligence. Justice League had to play to an audience that consists of more than just me so it’s structure is overly simple and easy to follow. Literally no one should feel like they didn’t understand what is happening in this film. 

There’s more humor, which is fine by me, but at times, it did feel out of place. That is not to say they aren’t allowed to be making jokes, but it felt out of place because you can tell when it’s not Snyder’s “voice.” And subsequently, it doesn’t feel like Superman’s “voice.” But again, I’m willing to overlook those moments because they were minor beats that didn’t detract from the film’s impression. It’s like having a few scratches or dings in the bumper of a vintage Shelby Mustang cobra. You wish the scratches weren’t there, but the car is still a work of art. 

Thankfully, I saw this film with my mother. My mother is a lifelong comic book fan. (My stepfather is also, but he had to work and couldn’t see it with us.) And I’m very lucky to have her perspective on these films because as a hardcore comic book nerd who has a ton of knowledge of the DC/Marvel universes, but doesn’t partake in any of the internet fandom infighting and overly dramatic social media scream fests, she allows me to see the film from the perspective of someone who just wants comic books to come to life on the big screen in an amazing way. She doesn’t dig for slights. She’s not interested in one-up-manship. She wants all the films to do well, whether they’re Blade, HellBoy, X-Men, Fantastic Four, Avengers or Justice League. And I think some of us you who spend a lot of time on the internet supporting your fandoms need to have someone in your lives who can do the same thing for you. Seriously, some of the reactions I’m seeing online are so tainted by this arbitrary competition and need to have everything “just so,” I really think you’re missing out on the joy these films are meant to bring you.

Yes, I’m excited to see the director’s cut of Justice League. Yes, I prefer my Superman having a more time-realistic coping process after having been dead for so long. But that doesn’t mean I can’t enjoy watching a freshly resurrected Kal-El take down a not-quite-gelled team of superheroes without expending too much effort. Seriously, that entire sequence was fantastic and I will probably re-watch it multiple times. (Do I really just want to see other superheroes fight Superman? What does that say about me? Hmmm.)

Anyway, if I had to make a major gripe about the film is that it’s missing that “something.” That soul that Zack Snyder brings to this franchise. And by that I mean, Man of Steel feels like Zack’s movie. BvS feels like Zack’s movie. But Justice League, although primarily directed by Zack, doesn’t quite feel like Zack’s movie. And I miss that. It works fine since this is the first time the team has come together and their still finding their rhythm, especially Arthur, Victor and Barry. But my hope is that by the time JL2 comes around, the studio will let Zack do what he does and give the film its soul. 

The DCEU films work for me because they feel much more grounded in reality, which is the hallmark of DC comics (yes, even the Atom). And although there is some element of that in Justice League, it doesn’t come across as well as it did in Zack’s other films. I can only assume it’s because the studio had him change certain details and the editing job Whedon did kind of imbued the film with a style that didn’t quite gel with Zack’s. Don’t get me wrong. Whedon can do realism, but his realism isn’t the same as Zack’s, and I feel like Justice League should have Zack’s realism from start to finish (at least within the same film). He’s the one who got us here, and he’s the one who will make it feel like its ours. Not the studio’s, if that makes sense.

No, the film wasn’t perfect. But literally none of the comic book movies have been perfect, even the good Marvel ones. They all have flaws. But I don’t need a film to be perfect to be a delight that I want to see over and over again. This film didn’t need a lot of twist and turns. The most important takeaways are 1) bringing the team together, 2) resurrecting Superman, and 3) testing their mettle against an agent of Darkseid. And that’s exactly what it accomplished. Was Steppenwolf on the same level as Lex Luthor? Hell no! But he’s not supposed to be. Steppenwolf is a club. Lex Luthor is a scalpel. Each film should have a villain that suits the desired outcome for the film itself. 

No civilians were killed, which apparently is a thing people only care about in DC films, but conveniently forget about in Marvel films. The fight scenes were epic. There was no room for ambiguity. And we got to see a team go on their first full mission together and begin to recognize why they’re better together than apart. Superman might’ve been able to defeat Steppenwolf on his own, but he didn’t have the tech skills to do what they needed Cyborg to do with the Unified Motherboxes. We saw Batman save the Flash. We saw Wonder Woman save Aquaman. The Flash helped save civilians. Superman helped save civilians. We saw all of them handle themselves well, but not perfectly. And that to me is exactly what we were meant to see this time around.

I give the film a solid B+, but only because I suspect the director’s cut will be an A-.

That’s it. The end.

[mybookplacenet]

Featured Author Interview: Rob Shackleford

Tell us about yourself and your books.: Hi, My name is Rob Shackleford and I live on the Gold Coast in Australia with Deborah-Jane, my partner. We each have a son and a daughter and, because they are living away from home and have not yet decided to have kids, we are in that sweet spot in time when we can, and do, travel when we can. I have written a few books but I have only one, Traveller Inceptio, that is published so far. Traveller Inceptio is a blend of Science Fiction and Historical Fiction which examines what could really happen if we placed 21st Century researchers into 11th Century Saxon England. If you were placed there, would you survive? How do you think you would fare with the food, the clothes, the language or the superstitions? What about the lack of law and order and the threat of violence? My inspiration came after I was ripped off by a dishonest business partner and I sat on the beach and was forced to look at my options. While there I looked at the buildings around me and imagined what the location would look like 100 years in the past, then 200 years when white explorers first arrived, then 1000 years ago. A story began to form, which became Traveller Inceptio. Inceptio means "Beginning" in Latin, the religious language spoken in the time. I had to add that part of the title because, have you seen how many books there are with the title, 'Traveller'? Dozens! Do you have any unusual writing habits? I generally write in the morning. If I have a flash of inspiration, that means I can get up as early as 4am. After a few hours we go for a walk and a coffee. By midday I gym and then sometimes play the Play Station while I think about my research or seek inspiration while I am killing zombies or whatever. I do research a lot! With Traveller Inceptio I lacked the confidence to write so I thoroughly researched for about a year before I dared write anything. I live in terror of having wrong information, of a historian saying - "Oh, this is rubbish because xyz!" My local library banned me at one stage as I had a really good book on Saxon history out for 6 months. The most unusual thing is how sometimes I can write and it doesn't feel like I am writing, where the story develops in ways I had not anticipated, where I go, "Wow! I didn't know that was going to happen!" What authors have influenced you? There are so many! I admire the beautiful descriptive writing of 'The Life of Pi's Yann Martel, 'Shantaram's Gregory David Roberts, or Colleen McCullough's superb series of novels on Rome. I love brilliant imagination and the ability to story-tell as shown in the warped imagination of Steven King, Tolkien and even the simplicity of 'The Martian's Andy Weir. I am also astounded by the pure brilliance of the research undertaken by historian Simon Sebag Montfiore and his range of excellent novels, and of course Bernard Cornwell. Last but not least I adore the Science Fiction greats - Arthur C Clarke, Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, Greg Bear and so many others who make our imaginations soar beyond the stars. And these are but a few. I will post this and then say - "How could I have forgotten ...?" Do you have any advice for new authors? 1. Persist. I heard a cheesy saying from an author I can't recall, which goes: "The successful Author is the one who persisted." Take some hope in that most authors have had to scarper naked through the valley of death. 2. Being an author is about being commercially viable. Modern publishers want to make money off you, web sites want to make money off you, the various nebulous publishing services do too. Be judicious about where you spend your money and understand this is a business like the music industry. In the end you will have to watch out! 3. Be true to yourself. You work is your work, but also accept that sometimes a suggestion might be good for you. The first time I had Traveller Inceptio edited it was by a grumpy old bastard of an Englishman who tore off my arm and beat me over the head with it. Thanks to his bemoaning of my abilities I was compelled to relook at what was written, removed some chapters, cut the length of my manuscript, and essentially was forced to concede that I had a lot to learn. He also hated one of my characters as it reminded him of a kid who bullied him when he was at school, which was brilliant! It meant my character development touched a chord in him, even though it might have been negative. 4. Each literary masterpiece started with the first written word. Start your work and don't be too hard on yourself. Let the work emerge when it will, but write something! It is easier to edit than to make the first utterance. Good luck and have fun!! What is the best advice you have ever heard? Don't believe everything you think! What are you reading now? I am about to embark on a journey in India, so I am reading "The Story of India" by Michael Wood while delving into the darkly realistic world view of Chris Hedges in his brilliant "America - The Farewell Tour." What's your biggest weakness? I have a tendency to self-criticism / self deprecation that can lead to negativity when it concerns me. Perhaps not the smartest weakness for a self-motivated author. What is your favorite book of all time? No fair! I like too many books to make such a distinction. Some fav's are "Dune" by Frank Herbert, The Harry Potter Books, The Lord of the Rings set. What has inspired you and your writing style? I do like books that have me engrossed in the world the author creates. As I am a lover of History and Science Fiction, it perhaps was logical that I would find joy in blending the genres. But I don't have a calculated, premeditated style where the story is already know. The first draft of my books is essentially a story I am telling. The frequent rewrites then allow me to better define my language and the imagery I hope allows the reader to become immersed into the universe I have created. My inspiration can be attributed in part to the great authors I read and to my love of the topic on hand. What are you working on now? Traveller Inceptio lends itself to a sequel, so I have completed Traveller Probo - to Prove - which delves more into the political machinations that would eventuate in the world with the Transporter - the device that allows researchers to be sent back 1000 years. there are more locations, some of the old characters, and what I believe would be the logical continuation of the story. Traveller Probo has been polished to be worthy of an editor, while part 3 - Traveller Manifesto - is the conclusion (!?) and is also under final review by me. I have also written a couple of novels that are not part of the Traveller universe which are under review and edit. What is your method for promoting your work? I have a Publisher - Austin Macauley - and to a certain extent I rely on their promotion of my work. Alas, modern publishing also relies on the efforts of the author, so I am compelled to engage in Social Media, where I must engage daily in Instagram, Facebook, Linked In, Twitter and Pinterest. Perhaps most beneficial is my engagement with almost 1000 literary bloggers in whom I have trusted to review Traveller Inceptio. That has been an interest process of highs and lows, for no work will satisfy everyone who agrees to review it. Yes, there have been tears, but I have also received validation that my work is good enough to withstand commercial scrutiny. Next step: Looking for a Literary Agent! What's next for you as a writer? Next is the commercially positive outcome for Traveller Inceptio that will allow the publication of Book 2 - Traveller Probo. Meanwhile I will continue to market, engage in book signings, and write. I am not sure of there is room for a 4th Traveller novel - I am thinking a set of short stories from the universe - so I will analyse that while I engage in other projects. How well do you work under pressure? I place myself under pressure but prefer the pressure not to be external. In the creative field of literary writing / storytelling I prefer to let myself be the taskmaster. The best motivation for me would be to be assured my work would receive a welcome review. How do you decide what tone to use with a particular piece of writing? I try to be realistic in my tone - which means the tone would vary with the circumstances. Most humans tend to have a sense of humor, so the most serious of circumstance could have the note of light-hearted banter. In times of fear, violence, or despair the tone becomes shorter and sharper, for the human mind has little need or patience for frivolity. These moments are reflected in my mood and I find I become upset and even angry when faced with violence, especially against women. Author Websites and Profiles Rob Shackleford Website Rob Shackleford Amazon Profile Rob Shackleford's Social Media Links Facebook Profile Twitter Account Instagram Account Pinterest Account YouTube Account Read the full article

[terminallydepraved]

2. Favorite part of writing? 12. How do you deal with self-doubts?
13. How do you deal with writers block?

2. Favorite part of writing?

Probably either losing myself in the story and getting immersed in it as I write? It’s a great way to pass the time and keep me connected to what I’m doing. That or you know, the big reveal where I post or publish. I adore getting to see everyone’s reactions.

12. How do you deal with self-doubts?


Oh man, I didn’t have self-doubt before I started publishing books. I had so many negatives thoughts during the writing and revising of Brontide and they didn’t really disappear until after the amazon reviews came in and I saw that I really had written something that people wanted to read. The way I see it, the moment you realize you can’t please everyone, the easier it gets to stop doubting yourself. You have someone who gushes about your writing? Right there, that is the person you’re now writing for. You don’t write for the ones who criticize your style, or your character’s behavior, or even how you decided to structure your story. You write for the people who fall in love with what you’ve done and want to see more.

I deal with self-doubt by picking my audience and knowing that no matter how much I may question myself, they will adore what I’ve written for them.

Also, if I’m doubting the writing itself, just telling yourself that you can rewrite it alleviates so much stress. Never tell yourself that you have to get it perfect the first time. Rewrite it if you don’t like it, but do it after the rest is done. Keep pushing until you’re where you need to be, and then go back to make it the way it needs to be.

13. How do you deal with writers block?          

I don’t get blocks very often since I’m pretty good at keeping myself working all the time, but when I get them they tend to last a week or more and it’s just miserable.

Firstly, I tell myself it’s okay. It’s okay to be locked up, and there’s no rush to get back to what I’m doing. Sometimes you need a break and you don’t want to admit it and this is the stars aligning to make you slow your roll and rest.  

Secondly, I do something else. Just because I can’t write new content doesn’t mean I can’t revise or edit, or even reread old works to try and jumpstart myself back into the swing of things. If you’re wanting to be a writer, you have to realize that there are a thousand other things that are important to the writing process aside from writing. Stopping to focus on those for awhile doesn’t mean you’re getting nothing done. You’re just working on another important aspect that would’ve had to have been done eventually anyway. Work on an outline for the next chapter or work, revise what you’ve already done, or just reread things and try to see phrases, structures, or potential plot twists that could develop into something you didn’t see before. Keep busy, just don’t focus on what you can’t do while doing it.

Thirdly, ten to one when I’m on a block, it’s because I’m uninspired by what I’m working on. Inspiration works differently for every person out there, but I tend to read fics for things I don’t write, or I look at art, movies, or history elements in hopes of finding something that sparks my interest. If I’m still able to write but just locking up on a chapter, I’ll just skip to the next part in the story that excites me and write there for a bit before coming back to tackle what I skipped. That honestly is my go-to method and usually works for me. I don’t know why people are so married to the idea of writing things linearly, but breaking away from that tends to help out a lot.

Conversely, I try to inspire others. I tell them about my project, about the characters and the plot and the twists and turns and I get them excited. Sometimes that’s enough to get my brain thinking, and in turn it helps me power past whatever it was blocking me in the first place. I know there’s a whole thing about spoiling the story for a friend, but if they’re cool with it, it’s the best way to get you pumped again. Trust me.

If none of this works though, I just don’t write. I watch lets plays for the week or I busy myself with my other hobbies. Forcing your way through a block rarely works. I try not to let it bother me and I wait it out until I feel that itch to try and get back into things. There are tons of tips and tricks to jump starting things but ultimately, you have to realize that blocks are just a factor of life and coming to peace with them is going to save you a lot of anguish in the long run. It’ll end eventually, so just be patient.

[ask me writing questions]

[kane-and-griffin]

I'm really sad about something I don't understand and was hoping you could explain. Why do people block without giving a reason to? I don't why it first seems like it's all going so well then the next you're blocked and you don't know why or what you did or said wrong? It's happened twice now and to say it hurts is an understatement.

Oh, my precious Kabby babies.  Circle up, it’s time for some firm butgentle life advice from Mom. 

First of all, unless I personally am the person who blocked you (whichI’m obviously not since we’re having this conversation!), in a very real sensethe short answer to this question is that you know I can’t actually answer thisquestion.  You’re asking me to tell youwhy a person I don’t know did a thing for which I have no context, and forwhich there could be a thousand reasons. So in a concrete, specific sense, my answer is: I do not know.

However.

(You knew there was going to be a however.)

Social media is a deeply personal avenue for self-expression and it’s also aworld where many of us spend a great deal of our time, which means that we havethe full and free right to customize it into exactly what we want it tobe.  The things that you post are personal reflections of you, which is  why it bums you out when someone mutes or blocks or doesn’t followback; it feels on some level like a personalrejection.  But the space you curate is also a personal reflection of you.  You have the rightto post anything you want and other people have the right to choose not to seeit.  Both of those rights are equal, eventhough you’re only on one side so naturally the other one feels like it’s insome way “wrong.”  

I’m speaking with zero context for what your preexisting relationship withthese people was beforehand (like obviously if it was a close friend and theyblocked you out of nowhere, you’re going to have to sort that out with themdirectly, I can’t advise you there), but it’s important to remember that theremay be no “right” and wrong” in this scenario.  It’s fully possible forboth of these things to peacefully coexist at the same time:

1) your absolute right to feel a little bit rejected and hurt that astranger on the internet made the choice that they didn’t want your socialmedia sphere to overlap with their social media sphere,

and

2) that other person’s absolute right to say “if something or someone makesme feel even the tiniest bit ‘nope’ I am purging it out of this space so it isexactly what I want and need it to be.” 

They don’t need to have a reason.  That sucks, when you’re on the receiving end of it, which all of us have been - it truly and genuinely sucks - but it’s also reality.  One of the hard truths that incidents like this make us sometimes have toface - and we don’t want to face these things, because they can feel reallyicky and vulnerable and ping all the little gremlins in our brain  - is this:

nobody on the internet owes you their time or attention foranything you do or say.

This sounds mean and brutal, and I don’t mean it to be, because you know mom loves you, but it’s incrediblyimportant, so I’m going to say it again to make sure that if nothing else, thisgets through:

nobody on the internet owes you their time or attention foranything you do or say.

The celebs you stan don’t owe you a response to your tweet, justbecause you want one.  The people you tag in meta don’t owe you rebloggingit to continue having that conversation with you forever, just because you wantto prove you’re right.  The fans of the fic you write for your mostpopular ship don’t owe you crossing over to give you hits on yourrare-pair fic if they don’t feel like it.  Nobody owes you a certainnumber of followers, nobody owes you a response to every anon you send them,nobody owes you finishing that fic you like in time for them to read it whenthey feel like reading it.  We owe each other one thing and one thingonly: basic human decency.  That’s it.  Everything else is freelyoffered to the world, and freely taken by the people who want it.  It’snot a transactional exchange.  If you make art or write fic and you put itout there into the world, you’ve done a cool thing, and whether it gets tenhits or thousands it was still worth doing.  There will be people whoaren’t interested, but if you get hung up on feeling rejected by that, it willparalyze you.

Social media is personal. That’s unavoidable.  It’s an extension of ourselves.  When someone is cruel to you or to one ofyour friends on the internet, even if it’s an anonymous stranger, it feelsshitty.  When you express an opinionabout something and a ton of people reblog it and the tags are full of “OMG YESTHISSSSS”, it feels great.  We all experiencethat in different ways.  Society has always selected arbitrary measures for young girls and women tolive up to in order to feel like they’re popular or they’re approved by thecool kids, and right now it’s things like “how many followers do you have” and “didyou get an RT from a celebrity” and “how many likes on your posts”.  So ona primal level, maybe having someone you thought was a friend block you on Twitter or Tumblr hits you in the same deep coreplace as having the cool kids not come to your birthday party.  That feeling is super real!  It brings upalllllll that deep stuff we try to hide and pretend that we’re aboveexperiencing, but we all have those squishy vulnerable inner selves that justneed the cool kids to like us and we feel bad when they don’t.  

I had this exact conversation with my therapist a few weeks ago when she wasgiving me a hard time because my book has 60 reviews on Amazon, of which likethe majority are 5 stars with two negative ones, and I have both the negativeones like memorized.  And she was like “CLAIRE.  WHAT THE HELL.  WHY DO YOU DO THIS?  58 POSITIVE AND YOU CANNOT QUOTE A SINGLEONE.  TWO SHITTY ONES AND YOU KNOW THEMVERBATIM.  THAT IS NOT HEALTHY BEHAVIOR.”  And I was like “… . okay fine when youput it that way, yes I do sound like a crazy person.”  So like my advice to you – advice which I havejust proven I am absolute garbage at taking myself, so like I may have justeroded my own credibility in my efforts to help – is to remember that you probablyhave a lot more than two followers so honestly this is probably not a badcollective ratio, and there may be lots of people who are very interested inwhat you have to say but you’ve focused a lot of your energy on these two people andit’s worth giving some thought as to why that is.

My question for you is this: what is the net negative impact of having thesetwo people block you on social media? Like in an actual, concrete way, separate from those sort of core gut “Ifeel unloved in this moment” feelings, what is the effect on your life?  You might be surprised.  It might be zero.  In which case, let yourself feel thosefeelings, experience them as valid, and then breathe through them and move onand keep on doin’ you. 

I’m pushing backon you a little bit here very gently because it feels, reading this anon, likeyou’ve made a determination of hurtful intent on the part of the person whoblocked you, or at the very least a certainty that this choice that made wasabout you and not about them.  That the fact that things seemed to be going fine and then they blocked you means you were somehow intentionally misled or mistreated.  Be really, really, really carefulabout deciding the cool girl didn’t come to your birthday party because she’s abitch who wanted to make you feel terrible and is sitting somewhere cackling atthe thought of your sad lil’ face waiting by the front door; maybe she didn’tcome to your birthday party because she has depression and it’s hard for her toleave the house sometimes and she knew your party would be loud and wild and crazyand too much for her brain to handle right now. Be careful about presuming negative intent with no proof it exists.  The internet makes this so easy, the internetconditions us for this, and itconditions us to respond in kind. The worst thing you could do here is to, like,make a callout post or subtweet in the hopes that it will get back to them andthey’ll feel bad, or to sic your other followers onto them, because that turnsthis into a situation that really doeshave a right and wrong; and since you don’t know if they were trying to makeyou feel shitty, or just went on a big block/mute purge to whittle their listdown for mental health reasons that are totally their own, once things escalateyou can’t put the horse back in the barn. It’s too late.  Now it’s A Thing,when maybe it never really needed to be A Thing.  And in almost all situations for almost allpeople in almost all ways, Kabby Mom’s advice is going to be, “please thinkcarefully before you make this A Thing.”

This got long, I’ve been having a lot of thoughts lately about theconversations I’m always having with fandom folks the way we let social mediapermeate and shape our sense of self, in good ways and bad, so I apologize formy verbosity but also not really because that’s how things roll over in KabbyMom’s Advice Corner.  But I will sum upin bullet points for those of you who have been skimming, to bring you up tospeed:

Everyone has the right to curate their own social media spacehowever they see fit, and they don’t have to explain their reasons.

They aren’t obligated to include you in that space even if you want themto.

None of that is an objective measure of your worth as a person or a signthat you should stop being you on the internet.

Your feelings of rejection come from a real place and you get to feelthem, as long as

You are striving to move through them without permitting them to paralyzeyou, and finally

You never use someone else’s choice to curate their social media sphere as ajustification for treating them like crap.

Focus on your positive interactions instead of negative ones – your friends,creating stuff and putting it out into the universe – whether it be art, fic,opinions, a podcast, gifsets, crackposts, whatever – and your social mediaworld will be a better place.

In the immortal words of the great Michael J. Fox, “What other people thinkof me is none of my business.”

[ericschumacher]

A new post, (Christian Sloths: Lazy Reviews (and Review-Readers)), is available at Eric Schumacher

New Post has been published on https://www.emschumacher.com/christian-sloths-lazy-reviews-and-review-readers/

Christian Sloths: Lazy Reviews (and Review-Readers)

This post is part of an on-going series examining sloth in Christian communities.

Someone once said that Christians are a “people of the book.” It’s true (or, at least, it ought to be). We take our faith and practice from the pages of Scripture. The doctrine of “sola scriptura“—the belief that the bible is the sole inerrant authority for faith and practice—was at the Protestant Reformation’s center.

It is equally valid (or, at least, it ought to be) that Christians are a “people of the books.” In his last letter, the Apostle Paul asked Timothy to ���bring the books” when he visited. In the 2,000 years that followed, books served to instruct Christians in the faith and spread Christian ideas. It is no less so today.

Of course, given the number of books published (not to mention the access to information provided by the internet), it is impossible to a fraction of the books published today. Who should we read? What should we read?

Book Reviews

One apparent solution is found in book reviews. Reviews consume the material (or are supposed to) and then tell us whether it is worth our time and money.

Good reviews, rightly used, can spare us time and resources. Bad reviews (or the wrong use of reviews) can rob us of new insights, silence helpful critiques, and ensure that valuable contributions never see the light of day. Bad reviews and its twin, the wrong use of reviews, are often sloth’s children.

“The golden rule of book reviewing,” writes Andy Naselli, “is to judge a book based on what the author is intending to do—not based on what you would do if you were the author.”

Slothful Reviewers

From Naselli’s correct and straightforward observation, it becomes apparent that a quality book review is hard work. One must labor in self-control to interact with the book itself, not with one’s perception of the author, the topic, or hopes for the book. It is hard work to summarize the author’s purpose, methodology, argument, conclusions, and skill in a way that the author would recognize as her own—and then critique the book on how effectively the author executed. 

Much easier is to approach a book with expectations and demands—”The book should be structured in this way, deal with these ideas and sources, and come to these conclusions.” Disappointed that the author didn’t do what you wanted in the way that you would have, you can critique them severely and give them a lower rating. Likewise, being with pleased that the author came to the conclusions you hoped in the way you wanted, you may ignore a plethora of deficiencies in how they wrote or handled data, to dish out high praise and five stars. 

Anytime you read a review in which the bulk of the reviewer’s critique and conclusion rests on what they wish the author had done, what the author didn’t do or the conclusion, you are likely dealing with a slothful reviewer—sheer laziness.

Spotting Sloths in the Wild

Dan Reid, writing from years of experience as an editor (who reads reviews), outlines several sloths in book reviewing:

“The author failed to write a different sort of book, the sort of book that I prefer; and so I dislike this book.” 

“The author is an evangelical (or liberal or feminist or …), and we all know what they are up to. So this book, which barely deserves my attention, is a very bad book indeed.”

“The author presumes to know quite a bit about her topic, and there is evidence that this is the case. However, I happen to know a lot about the topic brought up in the last paragraph of chapter six and virtually nothing about the content of the other chapters. So let me take this platform to talk about a narrow slice of the book and judge the whole on its basis.”

“The author takes no account of my work on this topic. This is regrettable, and I shall now condemn the book on the basis of my being slighted—but not before I take the opportunity to tell you all about my thesis.”

“I have never liked this author. In fact she blocked my bid for tenure. So this is pay-back time. Oh yeah.”

“I have a deep-seated need to show my superiority, not least in my area of expertise. And so I will point out certain small but unforgivable failings in this book that will subtly cast it in a bad light.” 

“It is clear to me that anyone who holds the views represented in this book has questionable or possibly bad (or racist or misogynist or _) motives, so I shall ferret out and expose those motives and then attack them.”

“I believe in reading for authorial intent, but that applies only to Scripture. In this review I shall employ a hermeneutic of suspicion and tell you what I think this book is saying despite the explicit protest of the living author to the contrary.” 

“This book takes on a sacred cow of our discipline. It shakes the foundations of my academic cosmos. It quivers the posts of my sacred canopy. It shivers me timbers. It threatens to cause me to start again from the ground up. In this last decade of my academic life, I’m not about to let that happen. So here’s my fatwa.”

In his post, Reid offers commentary on several of these sloths, worth your time to read. 

Christians would do well to take the time to understand the nature of these expressions of laziness and be ready to spot them in book reviews. Of course, such sloth is not limited to reviewing books. They show up frequently in Christian critiques of sermons, churches, other people, culture, politics, etc.

Slothful Users of Reviews

The temptation to laziness is not limited to the writing of reviews. We can also be lazy in our use of reviews. It is a particular temptation because reviews are written to reduce our workload. But anything created to lighten the load can become an excuse to avoid the responsibility to work.

One sloth in the use of reviews is skipping to the bottom line. Skip the review, what does the reviewer say in conclusion. Skipping the content to cut to the conclusion gives one no way of knowing the basis or methodology for the review. (I’ve seen some quality reviewers give a few lazy reviews.)

Another lazy approach is to look at only the stars. “3-star average? I’ll pass.” Too many people approach the ranking system this way. That’s why authors and publishers encourage reviews and rankings. But, as everyone knows, the system is easy to manipulate. 

Your company makes widgets and sells them on Amazon. Your only competitor just released a new widget to compete with your new release. There are twenty-five employees in your company. On release day, each one leaves a five-star review of your product and a 1-star or 2-star review of the competitor. Each negative review mentions the same problems with the competitor’s product. Each employee then asks three members of their household to do the same. Your product has one-hundred five-star ratings within a week, while your competitor has one-hundred negative ratings, each complaining about the same problem. 

If you don’t think this happens with book reviews, you’re naive. (The screenshots from the Genevan Commons reveal at least one attempt to sabotage a woman’s book release.) It’s easy to read a book review and then post a negative review on a bookseller website parroting the concerns. Unethical? Sure—but how is a book browser to know any different. All they know is that a brief skim of the reviews will reveal that many people had the same complaint (and several were pastors!). And the book (and your neighbor) is torpedoed before even leaving the dock.

It’s a quick way to get a feel for responses. But is one truth negated by a thousand lies? Does a falsehood become a truth by repeating it a hundred times?

Work Hard

Lazy reviews and the lazy use of reviews are quick and dirty ways to silence a voice or prop up yourself. But how do such promote the exchange of ideas, learning, scholarship? Do dishonest means celebrate the truth?

Both reading and writing are hard work. They have no place for laziness. If you want to take the easy path, perhaps you should avoid books altogether.

[joeyrob1]

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Review

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Review

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Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Review. Hot on the heels of our Amazon Machine Learning Review, we decided to do a review and compare against Microsoft Azure’s offering of Machine Learning services on the cloud. In short, we find Microsoft Azure Machine Learning services quite amazing and liked it better than Amazon’s Machine Learning services.

Free Trial Access

Nothing beats free trial access to test drive the system the system for free. Woo hoo! Free $200 credits remaining. I am beginning to sing “…This used to be my playground. This used to be my childhood dreams…”

Production Pricing

But we have to get real and check the real production pricing which can be found at Azure Machine Learning Pricing and copied below. The pricing model is unique. Base fee is low and hourly experiment fee is also low. I guess the bulk of the cost would show up if one publishes the API for production use and there is substantial transactional load on those API calls.

Azure Marketplace vs Machine Learning Studio

First thing I had to realize was how rich the Azure Machine Learning offerings were. There are pre-packaged working AI models available in the Azure MarketPlace For Machine Learning and there is Azure Machine Learning Studio where one can configure Machine Learning models using graphical interfaces. These are very different toolsets for different use cases.

Azure Marketplace

For example Azure MarketPlace has  packaged services like the following, some of which might have been built using Azure Machine Learning Studio and many many more.

Customer Churn Prediction

Customer Churn Prediction is a churn analytics service built with Azure Machine Learning. It’s designed to predict the likelyhood of a customer (player, subscriber, user, etc.) ending his or her relationship with a company or service.

Text Analytics

Text Analytics API is a suite of text analytics services built with Azure Machine Learning. Just bring your unstructured text (English only), and use this API to perform sentiment analysis and key phrase extraction.

Recommendations

Recommendations API by Azure Machine Learning helps your customer discover items in your catalog. Customer activity on your website is used to recommend items and to improve conversion in your digital or physical store.

Frequently Bought Together

Frequently Bought Together is a market basket analysis API built with Azure Machine Learning. It helps your customers discover items in your catalog that are frequently purchased together. Use your purchase history to add recommendations to your website.

Binary Classifier API

Binary Classifier API is an example built with Microsoft Azure Machine Learning that fits a logistic regression model to user inputted data and outputs the predicted value for each of the observations in the data. Suppose you have a dataset and would like to predict a binary dependent variable based on the independent variables. ‘Logistic Regression’ is a popular statistical technique used for such predictions.

You can subscribe to a service in the marketplace and try to use it. For example, here we try the text analysis service.

It was very simple to set up. However, I was wondering why the supported languages didn’t include usual internet languages like Python and Ruby.

Experiment with Text Analytics

We went ahead and tried exploring the text analytics API in the browser without code.

We took some text from a Marketwatch article:

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/sp-pullback-may-be-investors-last-chance-2015-04-13

1.

Text 1: As much as the market rallied this past week, we still have not seen dissipation of the bearishness in the financial media. Most seem way too focused on corporate earnings, and believe that will be the next shoe to drop, and cause the market to drop.

Key phrases identified were: “bearishness”,”financial media”,”market”,”past week”,”corporate earnings”,”dissipation”,”shoe”

Sentiment score was: 0.287 (I believe where 0 is very negative sentiment is 1 is very positive sentiment)

2.

Text 2: The upcoming week should provide us with the answer to the question I posed in the title of this update. Keep in mind we have been looking at the last month as a consolidation setting us up for a strong rally toward 2200 in the S&P 500 and 132-136 in the IWM. So, if next week does not provide us with weakness in the equity market, and we take out the all-time highs, we are clearly heading much higher, and toward our long-time targets much sooner than later. But should the market be so kind as to provide us with one more pullback or even one more low toward 2021ES, it will likely be your last opportunity to enter for this next rally to 2182ES/2189SPX and 132-136 in the IWM.

Key phrases identified were:  “strong rally”,”weakness”,”long-time targets”,”title”,”equity market”,”us”,”question”,”time highs”,”consolidation”,”answer”,”kind”,”upcoming week”,”SPX”,”update”,”pullback”,”month”,”opportunity”,”mind”,”IWM”

Sentiment score was: 0.99 (I wonder why the score was so high?)

3.

Text 3: Oh no. The world is coming to a sad end.

Sentiment score was: 0.00 (Ok, this makes sense)

4.

Text 4: Oh yes. The world is a beautiful place.

Sentiment score was: 0.88 (This makes sense too)

5.

Text 5: Oh no. The world is a beautiful place.

Sentiment score was: 0.55 (Now, I am just fooling around and confusing everyone)

Overall, the Text Analytics service performed as I expected and is slightly better than other Text Analytics engines I have tried.

Azure Machine Learning Studio

Now, Azure Machine Learning Studio is what makes the whole experience rock. The graphical user interface is powerful and yet amazingly simple and intuitive to use. First you create a workspace like following

You can find plenty of documentations at:

http://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/services/machine-learning/

http://blogs.technet.com/b/machinelearning/

http://blogs.technet.com/b/machinelearning/archive/2015/04/09/exciting-new-templates-in-azure-ml.aspx

What is amazing is the array of samples and templates you can use for experiments eg binary classification, regression, credit risk anomaly detection, customer relationship prediction, flight delay prediction, prediction of student performance, twitter sentiment analysis, recognition of hand-writing, neural networks, online fraud detection, movie and production recommendations, time series forecasting etc.

You can see the full listing at the Machine Learning Gallery http://gallery.azureml.net/

Compared to the narrow set of possibilities at Amazon, this is where Azure really shines. Now I am wondering why I discovered Azure Machine Learning so late. Was it because I overlooked it in favour of open-source source libraries or typically open-source friendly vendors like Amazon and neglected to see how powerful Microsoft platforms can be?

Amazing UI in Azure Machine Learning Studio

The graphical UI in the Machine Learning Studio is wonderful to say the least. Feels like a sophisticated thick client but all in my Chrome Browser with animation, graphical flow charts to help you understand a complicated process.

I decided not to go easy on Azure and tried stress testing by running multiple concurrent model evaluations.

It does take quite a while to run some of the models. Filter Based Feature Selection was stuck for over 30 minutes for the Binary Classification of Twitter sentiment. The other experiments each only took about 5-10 minutes to complete which was acceptable.

The simple ability to share your results (eg on Twitter) is a nice friendly aspect great for their marketing too.

Conclusion

We have tried many machine learning platforms before from the powerful open-source ones like Python Sklearn, Mahout to open-source commercial ones like 0xData, Prediction.IO to large vendor on the cloud ones like Amazon Machine Learning and now Microsoft Azure.

In terms of being able to write code in however way you like and integrate easily into your code, Python Sklearn is probably still the most flexible but comes with a medium learning curve and only for developers. But if you want a Machine Learning service on the cloud for beginners to experts to even business users, with a powerful and intuitive user interface at a decent cost, I think Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Studio and Marketplace clearly outshines all other Machine Learning solutions on the cloud.

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RobustTechHouse is a leading tech company focusing on mobile app development in Singapore. If you are interested to engage RobustTechHouse on your projects, you can contact us here.

Microsoft Azure Machine Learning Review was originally published on RobustTechHouse - Mobile App Development Singapore

[givencontext]

2019 Annual Review, Decade Review, Turning Point

It’s the end of another year and the end of a decade. Last year I wrote my first Annual Review on the blog, and I am sticking to the same format this year with a little expansion for looking back at the decade as it draws to a close. As they say, this year has been a real humdinger. Right this moment I find myself in a sort of “grey space,” and in-between state. I’ve mentioned it before, and for now, it persists. This exercise will help me see that there is balance between the highs and the lows – and that the road ahead is paved and made smooth by everything I learned through the rough spots.

What went well this year?

Reading and Writing

Last year I pledged to read less and write more and kicked off my blog. I decided to stick with my reading goal of one book per year of my age, and I met this goal with ease but without blowing it totally out of the water. My goal was 43 books, and I read 49. I was thinking I should make a goal next year to get to gender parity in my reading and make sure half the books I read are by women authors, this prompted me to check my stats for this year and… 25 of my 49 books were written by women! That makes me feel like I am walking my talk. And I didn’t even know it. Also, I am very grateful that my tap dancing class changed nights, which has allowed me to show my face at Sci Fi Book Club again. A few of my suggestions were picked for next year’s reading list, which always feels like an accomplishment. I read a ton of non-fiction and self help this year. I thrive when I feel like I am learning and growing. I did a lot of that this year. It feels good.

This blog entry will be my 22nd post since I published last year’s review. This is only a couple more than last year, but I have kept it up, so I am giving myself credit and calling it a success. I also was officially accepted as an Amazon Affiliate and made some money from my blog. I didn’t make as much as I spent on it, but that’s okay. (Okay, I made like $1.10.) Everyone has to start somewhere.

Adventure

As I entered 2019, I was being called to the word Adventure. I knew we would be taking an Epic Cross-Country Road Trip, so it seemed appropriate to spread that sense of excitement to other areas of my life. Facebook memories reminded me that I’ve been sharing this same image with a quote from The Hobbit for the past several years on New Year’s Eve. I guess seeing the new year as an adventure is kind of a thing for me. 2019 lived up to it. I took my kids on a few trips, we even stayed in a yurt. We did some hiking. We saw the Grand Canyon and Meow Wolf. And my #1 kid drove all the way to California and back! I love road trips, but they are even more fun when I don’t have to do all the driving.

Self Care

I was hesitant to include this. I feel like there is a lot of pressure, especially on women, to make everything look effortless. To always have it together. And as much as I do feel like I have my act together most of the time, there are also the times when I just DON’T. In my life, I have already lived through stuff that no one should have to go through. I started this year on top of the world, doing BLE‘s Reboot Rezoom program. I had my longest streak of Bright Line Days and got to a new lowest weight. I was getting my nails done regularly, because after 3 years of not biting them, I still don’t know how to deal with them. Yes, I always got *SPARKLES.* I performed on stage for dance recital with my #1 kid, who (have I mentioned?) is a freaking tap dancing WIZARD. I went to several events to give Free Mom Hugs, which might seem like an act of service for others, but it’s really an act of care for myself. Then, on my #2 kid’s birthday of all days, I found out something that not only devastated my current life but also triggered my brain to relive trauma that was almost 20 years old. My heart swells with gratitude for my cousin and BFF who told me to take time off. I had to stop everything and take care of me. If I hadn’t done it then, I don’t know where I would be now. I have tons and tons of support from family and friends, but it’s still up to me to put myself first. This means something different every day right now, but I’m doing it.

What went well this decade?

Wow. Where has the decade gone? Ten years ago I was a single mother who had just lost a lot of weight and was running 5K’s and, let’s be honest, was still getting a lot of financial help from my parents despite having a “good job” and owning my own home, etc. It was Christmas of 2009 that I decided that the kids had enough (too many) toys and we should start having experiences around the holidays. We went to see Wicked in Kansas City… then of course, we went shopping! The next year we saw a hockey game in Dallas. Last year we saw a hockey game again but in Minnesota. Both of my kids have Quality Time as their primary love language, and I have to say, I feel like I have done a good job with this. It was early 2010 that we took our first trip to Savannah, GA. I think it’s still our favorite destination. We traveled a lot and took lots of road trips and especially toured lots of colleges. And during this decade I got both of my kids through high school and one through college. Oh, let’s not forget that I completed college myself. I also changed jobs. Some people do that all the time, but it was a pretty big deal for me. I guess at the end of the decade, I feel like I have grown up a lot. Oh, and I went to a LOT of cool concerts. Too many to name, but trust me, it was awesome.

What didn’t go well this year?

Time for the elephant in the room… The main thing that didn’t go well this year was my marriage. Unfortunately, I had no idea how “not well” it was going. Yes, we had the same ol’ perpetual problems, but I really never suspected to discover that depth and protraction of betrayal. My sister gave me some advice once: “Never tell a man how badly other men have treated you, because they will try to top it.” I didn’t heed that advice in my second marriage, but I had done it in my third, so my soon-to-be-third-ex-husband did not even know how much PTSD he would be heaping on top of his own hideous actions. Honestly, I had no idea that anything could ever trigger me that way. I know “triggered” has become a buzzword, but this wasn’t just feeling uncomfortable or unhappy. Just thinking about it to try and type this has my fingers shaking uncontrollably. That is the worst part for me, when my body has these visceral reactions that are beyond my control. It sort of feels like an out of body experience. It led me to take extra precautions to feel safe in my own home, not because X3 ever made a threat, but because I am never taking a chance with my family’s safety or my own. So, the marriage is over, but the divorce will not be final by the end of the year. Oh, also, have I mentioned that I have court-related trauma and anything dealing with lawyers and judges and court is… yeah… triggering. I was already struggling just hearing about some stuff coworkers were going through, and then this. I’m still struggling a lot. It’s hard to admit that. Just knowing that a court date of any kind looms in my future… even if it’s for my own good, it just takes me back to those feelings of someone trying to take my kid and accusing me of being a bad parent. Yeah, time to wrap this part up before my shaking hands turn into a full blown panic attack. Let’s just say, I’ve had better years.

What didn’t go well this decade?

Maybe it’s ironic that the relationship that is ending at the end of the decade started soon after the decade began. You might think that would lead me to say the whole decade was a waste, but that’s not how I feel. That was the longest relationship of my life and that marriage was longer than my first two put together. It’s hard to put my finger on anything that didn’t go well, because if I could live this decade over again, I think I would do things the same. I would like to point to a few things and say “change that” but I imagine the repercussions and I think this is how the decade is supposed to end. I think this was all to point me in the direction that I’m to go next. I guess I just wish I had gone to more concerts.

What did I learn?

Last year I said the key lessons were about support and authenticity. Those have continued to serve me well this year. I think a big lesson for 2019 was that I have “permission to be human.” In any given moment, I am doing my best. Some days my best is better than other days. That’s natural, and that’s okay. Some days my best is staying in bed, and that’s still okay. I also learned that having tons of support doesn’t mean that stuff doesn’t suck, and that even when you are surrounded by wonderful people, sometimes you just need to be alone and feel your feelings – and maybe burn some stuff – then burn some stuff with your friends – then spend some more time alone, you know, burning stuff. I guess the biggest lesson of the year was to always find out the REAL reason someone lost their job and never help them pay of their credit cards. Some things have to be learned the hard way.

Looking back at the decade, I would say it was a good choice to focus on experiences, and I’ve had a lot of good ones. Also, happiness is a state of mind, not a set of circumstances. That sums it up.

Conclusion

When major parts of your life are in upheaval, you have to go into survival mode and just try to get to the other side. It would be really easy to focus on the negative stuff and say 2019 was a terrible year. It hasn’t been the best year, but I trust that it is leading me to better things. Somehow all of these experiences, good and bad, are for my higher good in the long run. I know that to be true now, because it has always been true in the past. I don’t know where the next year of the next decade will find me. I know I will grow and learn and change. What more could I ask for?

Leave a comment to let me know how you wrapped up the year or the decade. What did you learn?

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