#originally I planned to do an ides illustration every year but the only ideas I have are way too big to pull off in under 24 hrs

[sforzesco]

so I’m probably skipping this year for an Ides of March illustration, but I do have an Ides of March tag :)

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Watomatic, for lower Whatsapp switching costs

Any discussion of monopolization of the web is bound to include the term “network effects,” and its constant companion, “natural monopolies.” This econojargon is certainly relevant to the discussion, but really needs the oft-MIA idea of “switching costs.”

A technology has “network effects” when its value grows as its users increase, attracting more users, making it more valuable, attracting more users.

The classic example is the fax machine: one fax is useless, two is better, but when everyone has a fax, you need one too.

Social media and messaging obviously benefit significantly from network effects: if all your friends are on Facebook (or if it’s where your kid’s Little League games are organized, or how your work colleagues plan fun activities), you’ll feel enormous pressure to join.

Indeed, in these days of Facebook’s cratering reputation, it’s common to hear people say, “I’m only on FB because my friends are there,” and then your friends say, “I’m only there because you are there.”

It’s a form of mutual hostage-taking.

That hostage situation illustrates (yet) another economic idea: “collective action problems.” There are lots of alternatives to Facebook, but unless you can convince everyone on Facebook to pick one and move en masse, you’ll just end up with yet another social account.

This combination of network effects and collective action problems leads some apologists for tech concentration to call the whole thing a “natural monopoly” — a system that tends to be dominated by a single company, no matter how hard we try.

Railroads are canonical “natural monopolies.” Between the costs of labor and capital and the difficulty in securing pencil-straight rights-of-way across long distances, it’s hard to make the case for running a second set of parallel tracks for a competing company’s engines.

Other examples of natural monopolies include cable and telephone systems, water and gas systems, sewer systems, public roads, and electric grids.

Not coincidentally, these are often operated as public utilities, to keep natural monopolies from being abused by greedy jerks.

But the internet isn’t a railroad. Digital is different, because computers are universal in a way that railroads aren’t — all computers can run all programs that can be expressed in symbolic logic, and that means we can almost always connect new systems to existing ones.

Open up a doc in your favorite word processor and choose “Save As…” and just stare in awe and wonder at all the different file-formats you can read and write with a single program. Some of those formats are standardized, while others are proprietary and/or obsolete.

It’s easier to implement support for a standard, documented format, but even proprietary formats pose only a small challenge relative to the challenge presented by, say, railroads.

Throw some reverse-engineering and experimentation at a format like MS DOC and you can make Apple Pages, which reads and writes MS’s formats (which were standardized shortly after Pages’ release, that is, after the proprietary advantage of the format was annihilated).

This is not to dismiss the ingenuity of the Apple engineers who reversed Microsoft’s hairball of a file-format, but rather, to stress how much harder their lives would have been if they were dealing with railroads instead of word-processors.

During Australia’s colonization, every state had its own governance and its own would-be rail-barons. Each state laid its own gauge of rail-track, producing the “multi-gauge muddle” — which is why, 150+ years later, you can’t get a train from one end of Oz to the other.

Hundreds of designs for interoperable rolling stock have been tried, but it’s proven impossible to make a reliable car that retracts one set of wheels and drops a different one.

The solution to the middle-gauge muddle? Tear up and re-lay thousands of kilometers of track.

Contrast that with the Windows users who discovered that Pages would read and write the thousands of documents they’d authored and had to exchange with colleagues: if they heeded the advice of the Apple Switch ads, they could buy a Mac, move their files over, and voila!

Which brings me to switching costs. The thing that make natural monopolies out of digital goods and services are high switching costs, including the collective action problem of convincing everyone to quit Facebook or start using a different word-processor.

These switching costs aren’t naturally occurring: they are deliberately introduced by dominant firms that want to keep their users locked in.

Microsoft used file format obfuscation and dirty tricks (like making a shoddy Mac Office suite that only offered partial compatibility with Windows Word files) to keep the switching costs high.

By reverse-engineering and reimplementing Word support, Apple obliterated those switching costs — and with them, the collective action problem that created Word’s natural monopoly.

Once Pages was a thing, you didn’t have to convince your friends to switch to a Mac at the same time as you in order to continue collaborating with them.

Once you get an email-to-fax program, you can discard your fax machine without convincing everyone else to do the same.

Interoperability generally lowers switching costs. But adversarial interoperability — making something new that connects to something that already exists, without its manufacturer’s consent — specifically lowers deliberate switching costs.

Adversarial interoperability (or “competitive compatibility,” AKA “comcom”) is part of the origin story of every dominant tech company today. But those same companies have gone to extraordinary lengths to extinguish it.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/10/adversarial-interoperability

Just as a new company may endorse standardization when it’s trying to attract customers who would otherwise be locked into a “ecosystem” of apps, service, protocols and parts, so too do new companies endorse reverse-engineering and comcom to “fix” proprietary tech.

But every pirate wants to be an admiral. Once companies attain dominance, they start adding proprietary extensions to the standard and fighting comcom-based interoperability, decrying it as “hacking” or “theft of intellectual property.”

In the decades since Microsoft, Apple, Google, and Facebook were upstarts, luring users away from the giants of their days, these same companies have labored to stretch copyright law, terms of service, trade secrecy, patents and other rules to ban the tactics they once used.

This has all but extinguished comcom as a commercial practice. Today’s comcom practitioners risk civil and criminal liability and struggle to get a sympathetic hearing from lawmakers or the press, who have generally forgotten that comcom was once a completely normal tactic.

The obliteration of comcom is why network effects produce such sturdy monopolies in tech — and there’s nothing “natural” about those monopolies.

If you could leave Facebook but still exchange messages with your friends who hadn’t wised up, there’d be no reason to stay.

In other words, the collective action problem that the prisoners of tech monopolies struggle with is the result of a deliberate strategy of imposing high technical and legal burdens to comcom, in order to impose insurmountable switching costs.

I wrote about this for Wired UK back in April, comparing the “switching costs” the USSR imposed on my grandmother when she fled to Canada in the 1940s to the low switching costs I endured when I emigrated from Canada to the UK to the USA:

https://www.wired.co.uk/article/social-media-competitive-compatibility

Today, there’s a group of tech monopoly hostages who are stuck behind their own digital iron curtain, thanks to Facebook’s deliberate lock-in tactics: the users of Whatsapp, a messaging company that FB bought in 2014.

Whatsapp was a startup success: founded by privacy-focused technologists who sensed users were growing weary of commercial surveillance, they pitched their $1 service as an alternative to Facebook and other companies whose “free” products extracted a high privacy price.

Facebook bought Whatsapp, stopped the $1 charge, and started spying. In response to public outcry, the Facebook product managers responsible for the app assured its users that the surveillance data WA extracted wouldn’t be blended with Facebook’s vast database of kompromat.

That ended this year, when every Whatsapp user in the world got a message warning them that Facebook had unilaterally changed Whatsapp’s terms of service and would henceforth use the app’s surveillance data alongside the data it acquired on billions of people by other means.

Downloads of Whatsapp alternatives like Signal and Telegram surged, and Facebook announced it would hold off on implementing the change for three months. Three months later, on May 15, Facebook implemented the change and commenced with the promised, more aggressive spying.

Why not? After all, despite all of the downloads of those rival apps, Whatsapp usage did not appreciably fall. Convincing all your friends to quit Whatsapp and switch to Signal is a lot of work.

If the holdout is — say — a beloved elder whom you haven’t seen in a year due to lockdown, then the temptation to keep Whatsapp installed is hard to resist.

What if there was a way to lower those collective action costs?

It turns out there is. Watomatic is a free/open source “autoresponder” utility for Whatsapp and Facebook that automatically replies to messages with instructions for reaching you on a rival service.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.parishod.watomatic

It’s not full interoperability — not a way to stay connected to those friends who won’t or can’t leave Facebook’s services behind — but it’s still a huge improvement on the nagging feeling that people you love are wondering why you aren’t replying to their messages.

The project’s sourcecode is live on Github, so you can satisfy yourself that there isn’t any sneaky spying going on here:

https://github.com/adeekshith/watomatic

It’s part of a wider constellation of Whatsapp mods, which have their origins in a Syrian reverse-engineer whose Whatsapp comcom project was picked up and extended by African modders who produced a constellation of Whatsapp-compatible apps.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/03/african-whatsapp-modders-are-masters-worldwide-adversarial-interoperability

These apps are often targeted for legal retaliation by Facebook, so it’s hard to find them in official app stores where they might be vetted for malicious code.

It’s a strategy that imposes a new switching cost on Whatsapp’s hostages, in the form of malware risk.

Legal threats are Facebook’s default response to comcom. That’s how they responded to NYU’s Ad Observer, a plugin that lets users scrape and repost the political ads they’re served.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2021/04/553000000-reasons-not-let-facebook-make-decisions-about-your-privacy

Ad Observer lets independent researchers and journalists track whether Facebook is living up to its promises to block paid political disinformation. Facebook has made dire legal threats to shut this down, arguing that we should trust the company to mark its own homework.

Whatsapp lured users in by promising privacy. It held onto them post-acquisition by promising them their data would be siloed from Facebook’s main databases.

When it reneged on both promises, it papered this over by with a dialog box where they had to click I AGREE.

This “agreement” is a prime example of “consent theater,” the laughable pretense that Facebook is “making an offer” and the public is “accepting the offer.”

https://onezero.medium.com/consent-theater-a32b98cd8d96

Most people never read terms of service — but even when they do, “agreements” are subject to unilateral “renegotiation” by companies that engineered high switching costs as a means of corralling you into clicking “I agree” to things no rational person would ever agree to.

Consent theater lays bare the fiction of agreement. Real agreement is based on negotiation, and markets are based on price-signals in which buyers and sellers make counteroffers.

A “market” isn’t a place where a dominant seller names a price and then takes it from you.

Comcom is a mechanism for making these counteroffers. Take ad-blockers, which Doc Searls calls “the largest consumer boycott in history.” More than a quarter of internet users have installed an ad-block, fed up with commercial surveillance.

This is negotiation, a counteroffer. Big Tech — and the publications it colonizes — demand you give them everything, all the data they can extract, for every purpose they can imagine, forever, as a condition of access.

Ad-block lets you say “Nah.”

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2019/07/adblocking-how-about-nah

The fiction that tech barons have “discovered” the “price” that the public is willing to pay for having a digital life is a parody of market doctrine. Without the ability to counteroffer — in code, as well as in law — there is no price discovery.

Rather, there is price-setting.

Not coincidentally, “the ability to set prices” is the textbook definition of an illegal monopoly.

[lesbeet]

not to be a nerd but i accidentally just wrote a whole impromptu essay about editing ndjsdksksk im throwing it under a cut bc it's fucking inane and really long but honestly... i just want other people to become as passionate about editing as i am lmaooooo

i also recommend 2 books in the post so if anything at least check those out!

quality books about editing... *chef's kiss* a lot of the basic ones (including blog posts online n such) are geared towards beginners and end up repeating the same info/advice, much of it either oversimplified or misrepresented tbh. but i read one yesterday and i'm reading another one right now that really convey this passion for editing + consideration for it as its own sort of art and i just!!

it's such a weird thing to be passionate about lmao but i AM and i've spent a lot of time the past year or so consciously honing my craft (ik i mention this like 4 times a week i'm just really proud of how much i've learned and improved) and kind of like. solidifying my instincts into conscious choices i guess?

and these GOOD editing books have both a) taught me new information and/or presented familiar information through a new perspective that helped me understand something differently or in more depth, and b) validated or even just put into words certain preferences or techniques that i've developed on my own, that i don't normally see on those more basic lists i mentioned

btw the book i finished yesterday is self-editing for fiction writers: how to edit yourself into print by renni brown and dave king, and the one i'm reading currently is the artful edit: on the practice of editing yourself by susan bell.

the former was pretty sharp and straightforward. the authors demonstrated some of their points directly in the text, which was usually funny enough that i would show certain quotes to my sister without context

("Just think about how much power a single obscenity can have if it’s the only one in the whole fucking book." <- (it was)

"Frequent italics have come to signal weak writing. So you should never resort to them unless they are the only practical choice, as with the kind of self-conscious internal dialogue shown above or an occasional emphasis."

or, my favorite: "There are a few stylistic devices that are so “tacky” they should be used very sparingly, if at all. First on the list is emphasis quotes, as in the quotes around the word “tacky” in the preceding sentence. The only time you need to use them is to show you are referring to the word itself, as in the quotes around the word “tacky” in the preceding sentence. Read it again; it all makes sense.")

and like i said, i also learned some new ideas or techniques (or they articulated vague ideas i already had but struggled to put into practice), AND they mentioned some suggestions that ive literally never seen anyone else bring up (not to say no one has! just that ive never seen it, and ive seen a lot in terms of writing tips, advice, best practices, etc) that ive already sort of established in my own writing

for example they went into pretty fine detail about dialogue mechanics, more than i usually see, and in talking about the pacing and proportion of "beats" and dialogue in a given scene, they explicitly suggested that, if a character speaks more than a sentence or two and you plan on giving them some sort of dialogue tag or an action to perform as a beat, the tag or action should be placed at one of the earliest (if not the first) natural pauses in the dialogue, so as not to distance the character too far from the dialogue -- bc otherwise the reader ends up getting all of the dialogue information first, and then has to go back and retroactively insert the character, or what they're doing, or the way they look/sound while they're giving their little speech

and like this was something ive figured out on my own, mostly bc it jarred me out of something i was reading enough times (probably in fic tbh) that i started noticing it, and realized that it's something i do naturally, kind of to anchor the character to the dialogue mechanic to make sure it makes sense with the actual dialogue

so like. ok here's an example i just randomly pulled from the song of achilles (it was available on scribd so i just looked for a spot that worked to illustrate my point djsmsks)

the actual quote is written effectively, but here's a less effective version first:

“Perhaps I would, but I see no reason to kill him. He’s done nothing to me," Achilles answered coolly.

see and even with such a short snippet it's so much smoother and more vivid just by moving the dialogue tag, not adding or cutting a word:

“Perhaps I would, but I see no reason to kill him.” Achilles answered coolly. “He’s done nothing to me.”

the rhythm of it is better, and the beat that the dialogue tag creates functions as a natural dramatic pause before achilles delivers an incredibly poignant line, both within the immediate context of the scene and because we as the readers can recognize it as foreshadowing. plus, it flows smoothly because that beat was inserted where the dialogue already contained a natural pause, just bc that's how people speak. if you read both versions aloud, they both make sense, but the second version (the original used in the novel) accounts for the rhythm of dialogue, the way people tend to process information as they read, AND the greater context of the story, and as a result packs significantly more purpose, information, and effect into the same exact set of words

and THAT, folks, is the kind of editing minutia i can literally sit and hyperfocus on for hours without noticing. anyway it's a good book lmao

the one i'm reading now is a lot more about the cognitive process/es of editing, so there's less concrete and specific advice (so far, anyway) and more discussion about different mental approaches to editing, as well as tips and tools for making a firm distinction between your writer brain and your editor brain, which is something i struggle with

but there have been so many good quotes that ive highlighted! a lot of just like. reminders and things to think about, and also just lovely articulations of things id thought of or come to understand in much more vague ways.

scribd won't let me copy/paste this one bc it's a document copy and not an actual ebook, but this passage is talking about how the simple act of showing a piece of writing to someone else for the very first time can spark a sudden shift in perspective on the work, bc you'll (or at least i) frantically try to re-read it through their eyes and end up noticing a bunch of new errors -

or she talked about the perils of constant re-reading in the middle of writing a draft, which is something i struggle with a LOT, both bc i'm a perfectionist and bc i prefer editing to writing so i sit and edit when i'm procrastinating doing the actual hard work of writing lmao

it's just this side of fake deep tbh but i so rarely see editing discussed like this--as a mixture of art and science, a collaboration between instinct and technique, that really requires "both sides of the brain" to be done well.

and because of the way my own brain works, activities that require such a balanced concentration of creativity and logic really appeal to me. even though ive seen a lot of people (even professional writers) who frame it as the creative art of writing vs the logical discipline of editing. but i think that's such a misleading way of thinking about it, because writing and editing both require creativity and logic -- just different kinds! (not to mention that the line between writing and editing, while mostly clear, can get a little blurry from up close)

but like...all stories have an inner logic to them, even if the writer hasn't explicitly or consciously planned it, and even if the logic is faulty in places in the first couple of drafts. when you're sitting and daydreaming about your story, especially if you're trying to figure out how to bridge the gap between two points or scenes (or, how to write a sequence of events that presents as a logical, inevitable progression of cause and effect), the voice in your head that evaluates an idea and decides to 1) go with it, 2) scrap it, 3) tweak it until it works, or 4) hold onto it in case you want it later? that's your logic! if an idea feels wrong, or like it just doesn't work, it's probably because some part of you is detecting a conflict between some part of the idea and the overall logic of your story. every decision you make as you write is formed by and checked against your own experiential logic, and also by the internal logic of your story, which is far less developed (or at least, one would hope), and therefore more prone to the occasional laspe

but while ive seen a number of articles that discuss the logic of writing, i don't see people gushing as much about the art of editing and it's such a shame

the inner editor is so often characterized as the responsible parent to the writer's carefree child, or a relentless critic of the writer's unselfconscious, unpolished drivel

and it's like... maybe you just hate thinking critically about your work! maybe you view it that way because you're imposing external standards too fiercely onto your writing, and it's sucked the joy out of shaping and sculpting your words until they sing. maybe you prefer to conceive of your writing as divine communication, the process of which must remain unencumbered by lessons learned through experience or the vulnerability of self-reflection, until the buzzkill inner editor shows up with all those "rules" and "conventions" that only matter if you're trying to get published

and like obviously the market doesn't dictate which conventions are worth following, but the majority of widely-agreed-upon writing standards, especially those aimed at beginners, (and most especially those regarding style, as opposed to story structure) have to do with the effectiveness and efficiency of prose, and, in addition to often serving as a shorthand for distinguishing an amateur from a pro, overall help to increase poignancy and clarity, which is crucial no matter the genre or type of writing. and even if you personally believe otherwise, it's better to understand the conventions so you can break them with real purpose.

so editing shouldn't be about trying to shove your pristine artistic masterpiece into a conventional mold, it should be about using the creative instincts of your ear and your logic and experience-based understanding of writing as a craft to hone your words until you've told your story as effectively as possible

thank u for coming to my ted talk ✌️

[michelles-garden-of-evil]

Episode 24 Review: Top 5 Reasons Why the Holly Portrait Subplot Doesn’t Work

Welcome back to Maljardin, where the melodramatic master Jean Paul Desmond is God and the Devil is a snarky talking portrait.

Speaking of portraits, today we will be looking at the subplot about Tim’s portrait of “Erica” (or, rather, of Holly) and the main things that are wrong with it. This subplot is, in my opinion, the worst in the Maljardin arc and I’ve been holding off on writing a detailed explanation of why I feel that way until my review of this episode, which mostly centers around the damned Holly portrait.

The portrait, circa Episode 18. There aren’t any good shots of it from Episode 24, so I had to settle for this one.

To recap: After the death of Erica Desmond, her husband Jean Paul hired Tim Stanton, a young artist in debt to the mob, to paint a portrait of her. Erica being both dead and encased in a cryonics capsule which both Jean Paul and THE DEVIL JACQUES ELOI DES MONDES refuse to open, Tim must instead use young heiress Holly Marshall as his model until Erica comes back to life as Jacques promised that she would.

Sound like a reasonable plan? No? I didn’t think so, either, and now I shall explain why. Here are the top five reasons why I think this subplot is stupid:

#5: Holly neither looks like Erica, nor knows what Erica looked like.

This screencap is actually from Episode 13, but I’m including it because it’s relevant.

I sometimes wonder if this criticism is unfair, because the only viewers up to this point in the show’s broadcast history who would have seen Erica were the viewers of Episodes 1, 2 (where Tim shows Alison his sketch of her), and 4. In the first scene of Episode 4, the Cryonics Society froze her corpse in the cryonics capsule, meaning that anyone who started watching after that scene would not have seen her face before Tim got his assignment from Jean Paul. Even so, neither Erica resembled Holly, which makes it absurd for her to sit for it. Why not have Alison pose instead when she’s not working? After all, they are sisters and they share a strong family resemblance according to the original pilot script. Holly barely resembles either Erica beyond being pretty.

Tim’s sketch of Erica from Episode 2, with a screencap of Alison from Episode 17 for comparison. With its upturned nose and full lips, the sketch is clearly intended to resemble Dawn Greenhalgh (Alison) and not Sylvia Feigel (Holly).

Because Holly hardly looks a thing like her, Tim complains in Episode 13 that he “can’t use her for anything but position and play of light.” In spite of this, later episodes including Episode 24 show that he has painted a sort of semi-abstraction of Holly’s face, with features about halfway between those of Holly and those of Erica. This means that he’s only making more work for himself for when Jacques brings Erica back to life--if he brings her back to life--because he will need to paint over the semi-abstraction with Erica’s face. In short, he’s wasting his time.

Besides, it’s unclear why Holly doesn’t know what Erica looked like if Erica was a very famous actress and she and her husband were stalked by the paparazzi until they escaped to Maljardin (as previous episodes have indicated). Surely she would have seen a photo of Erica in the newspaper at some point, or her face on the poster for one of her plays, or something. I realize that’s not the same as seeing someone in real life, but it’s just odd that she doesn’t know.

  #4: Tim doesn’t have even a photo of Erica with him and so has to rely mostly on memory.

He even says so in Episode 13: “I have to depend on my memory of your wife and that sketch I made of her at the café,” he tells Jean Paul (or, rather, Jacques while he is possessing him). As we saw in that episode, opening the cryonics capsule and posing Erica’s thawed-out corpse for Tim is too devilish even for Jacques, so the starving artist is left with a dilemma. Jean Paul, being a fancy rich guy of noble descent, naturally assumes that any criticisms of his assignment is just a case of beggars trying to be choosers and ignores them; in his mind, he did him a favor by paying his debts and taking him to his island, so Tim should obey his every whim without question. But the truth is that Jean Paul has no understanding of how artists work, nor why Tim needs the real Erica to complete the painting, and he may not even understand the creative process behind painting a portrait.

This could make for interesting social commentary if the writers had had Tim take a good hard look at the situation and realize that Jean Paul is not just imprisoning him on the island but flat-out exploiting him. They could have made his subplot about class conflict, the establishment’s lack of empathy towards creative types, or both. However, they choose not to use the subplot for such commentary, instead going in a much more conventional direction.

#3: The Holly portrait is mostly used to drive a clichéd romantic subplot.

Two people meet and hate each other at first sight--or at least pretend to--although they are clearly attracted to each other. They argue, bicker, treat each other indifferently at best and abuse each other at worst, until one day they realize that they have fallen in love. When was the first time you read or saw this story? Do you even remember the first time? Most likely you don’t, because the exact same plot has been used and reused so many times since Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing premiered that Western media is saturated with it. It’s not a bad plot in and of itself, but it’s been overused so much that you can usually see it coming from a mile away. When Tim and Holly first bickered over her being too young to order booze, I predicted that they were setting up a romance between them. There are many signs: Tim confesses to Vangie that he feels sorry for Holly, Elizabeth suspects that he’s hitting on her, and, while she claims to dislike them both, Holly seems slightly less irritated by Tim than by her former captor, Matt Dawson. Ian Martin was clearly setting up a romance between the heiress and the artist, who are gradually bickering less and less: a telling sign that they are getting closer to falling in love.

As creepy as it is and as much as I don’t want them to get together, I actually find the Matt/Holly subplot more interesting to watch than Tim/Holly. Danny Horn of Dark Shadows Every Day may have written about how “groovy priest attracted to the beautiful young girl that he wants to take care of” is an old soap cliché, but I’ve seen it done far less often, which I suspect has something to do with all the church scandals in the past twenty years. The Belligerent Sexual Tension plot, on the other hand, is still very popular, so it feels less fresh to me than Matt and Holly’s subplot. (That doesn’t mean that I don’t still think he should leave her alone. Personally, I ship Reverend Dawson with his right hand and I think they ought to stay together.)

#2: The use of the Holly portrait on the show doesn’t connect to the show’s use of portraits for symbolism.

This one is really nitpicky and based mostly on my personal interpretation, but bear with me. Although far more complex than the Dark Shadows ripoff that many critics reduce it to, Strange Paradise nevertheless relied on many of the same tropes and themes, including the way its writers used portraits. On Dark Shadows, the writers often used a trope that Cousin Barnabas of the Collinsport Historical Society blog calls the “Portrait as Id,” meaning the use of paintings to symbolize and illustrate the truth about whatever character they represented. We see this in Strange Paradise as well with the portrait of Jacques, who tells Jean Paul that he is “the man you are, the man you might have been,” implying that the ostensibly good Jean Paul is not so different from his evil ancestor. Later on after Robert Costello becomes producer and the show becomes more like Dark Shadows, we’ll meet another character whose portrait does not turn out as intended because of the evil in said character’s heart, which also connects to this idea of portraits reflecting hidden reality. Although the conjure doll also resembles and represents Jacques, he does not generally use it to communicate with Jean Paul the way he does with the portrait. This makes sense, given that the doll and silver pin ended his life, while the portrait was painted at some point while he was alive.

In contrast to the portraits mentioned above, Holly’s portrait does not convey any additional information about either her or Erica. Because it represents the late Mrs. Desmond in name only, the Holly portrait says nothing about Erica’s id, her personality, or the state of her soul. It doesn’t even say very much about Holly. Instead, it’s mostly just used as an excuse to force Holly and Tim to interact with each other and bicker until they can finally admit that they’re in love.

#1: It goes (almost) nowhere.

And when it does finally go somewhere, it’s only relevant for a few episodes before it’s forgotten about. Holly’s participation in the portrait sittings soon becomes completely irrelevant, much like so many of the show’s early subplots which Late Maljardin’s headwriter Cornelius Crane chose to ignore. I suspect that the Holly portrait would have eventually became more significant in the main plot had Martin not been fired around Week 9. We may never know how it would have become so, nor how significant it would have become in his original outline. Who knows? Perhaps Martin would have crafted a shocking plot twist involving Holly that justified its existence. Perhaps he would have connected the portrait and its eventual fate somehow to the nightmare she had about Tarasca, having it reveal some terrifying truth about Maljardin’s past. At the very least, he might have used it to cement the romance between Tim and Holly. But instead the subplot ends with little payoff.

Tim on his subplot.

Still, despite the focus on the Holly portrait, this episode isn’t entirely a waste. Raxl saves it with her pleas to the Serpent and her attempt to contact the Conjure Woman, in all her scenery-chewing, melodramatic glory. There’s also a scene where Holly pressures her to read the two Tarot cards--the King of Swords (whom Matt identifies as Jean Paul) and the Queen of Cups (whom he interprets as Holly)--that she dropped on the floor earlier in the scene “just for kicks,” and she refuses, shouting “No!” repeatedly. If you love Raxl like I do, you’ll enjoy her scenes. They’re not Best of Raxl material, but they’re fun.

So long until my next review, which will cover Episode 25, followed by Week 5′s long overdue Bad Subtitle Special. I know that this is a change of pace from my usual recap-style reviews, but I really wanted to go into more detail about why I don’t like Tim’s subplot. I hope you enjoyed this post and I’ll see you again soon.

Coming up next: Elizabeth continues her attempted seduction of Jean Paul as we explore inter-generational conflict on Maljardin.

{ <- Previous: Episode 23   ||   Next: Episode 25 -> }

[brandonk10]

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1MOAmdC3rcX7WNTQMGAZaNS_FMNDZI7oD

Above are the Images I did this summer that I’m really happy with!

So as a TLDR for the post,

-Animation Compilation below, has OC's in it, whom are credited to the creators.

-My favorite images from this summer that I did, either for commissions or fun, are in the comments with an additional image showing all the character models I made or tweaked in the past year, which tallied to 68.

-I'm fixing the storyboards for Jade's trailer to begin production once I get to college.

-JADE is moving from Remnant to a new world of my creation. They aren't RWBY OC's anymore. Answers to any questions you might have are possibly located in the FAQ part of the post that I'm sharing.

-I'm not going to stop posting here, since it does not break any rules, and have spoken with an admin on a schedule. I will be able to keep my weekly schedule since it is only one post per week, and isn't diverting the group from it's primary focus. But if I do stop posting, then most likely I broke a rule.

Hello Everyone!

So I’ve reached the last week of my summer break before going back to College!  So I’ve got a couple of things to get to.

First of all, I have compiled all the animations from this year that have been posted on this page, but not on my youtube channel.  The finish date has been posted.  I’ve also attached the 3 Commission Animations that I did for Recent Commissions!

https://youtu.be/h0iylBttnTY

Second, here is all the quality images that I have completed this summer!  It contains plenty of OC’s that I did for either Commissions, or as fan art for my friends!  The OC’s and their owners shall be listed below!  On top of that, I did a tally image of all the models I have worked on, or modeled from scratch and rigged in the past year.  That tally reached 68 Models.  Now those OC’s will be listed with their owners below if they do not belong to me.  Now if we were to count models that weren’t rigged I technically have over 100 models, because of some fun requests I did around a year ago.

Thirdly, I am currently working on fixing up the storyboards to be easier to read in terms of poses and action.  I will be finishing up the storyboards over the next few days, and should be able to finish the animatic before going back to College.

Finally, next week I will be releasing a poster to announce the production beginning on Jade’s Trailer.  Now with that will be a visual reveal of something that’ll change how the series functions.  JADE is jumping ship from Remnant, and will no longer be considered “RWBY OC’s”, instead they are going to be characters in a world that I am currently creating.  It isn’t fully completed in concept, but the events of Jade’s trailer will be easy to pin in this world since the concepts of this new world that’ll be present in Jade’s trailer have already been planned out.  There are several reasons for me doing this, firstly, I really adore these characters and would love to make the series to it’s full completion, but unless I work for RT, they green light the show (Which their internship pages have illustrated that they are not looking for a new show concept, unless if you are a higher-up in the company, which is fair), and I’m given creative control on the project, I cannot create the show as into the future as I would love to, while being able to sustain myself without simply infringing on copyright.  Which is, again, a fair point.  Secondly, I am doing this because it would allow me to be more creative with the world, and improve my writing abilities by forcing myself to do research overload, a task I find oh so exciting.  Thirdly, it would probably be more appropriate for the series in reflection, because all drafts of any script or outline for JADE since beginning making RWBY OC’s in general involved me conceptualizing new ideas for Remnant ranging from locales, cultures, aura systems, and aura abilities making those drafts’ only attachment to RWBY seem to be the color team name, aura, dust, and semblance.  

To address some questions before they do come up, as they are fair points.

-I will be doing my best to separate JADE from RWBY as much as possible.  In fact, their team name was never based on a color in it’s origin, it’s actually an inside-joke amongst them.  So if I decide to keep the joke, I’ll keep the name, but if I don’t then the name will vanish.  As a warning for the future of this update, I will be using the Remnant counterparts to the systems in this world.  

-The “Aura” of the world, will not feature a primary defense mechanism, and is currently being conceptualized as an idea that groups people into various classes of combat, and life in general, since it can be used to determine personality.  I’m going to try to enhance upon that so I can differentiate between this culture and Remnant’s.  

-The “Dust” of the world, will not have lead to man’s creation, will not be explosive, will have additional types that will differentiate it from dust, and will need further tweaking to properly distinguish it.  

-The “Semblance” of this world will not be based on a personality trait, but a flaw, since a theme of the story will be about self betterment, or achieving perfection.  So the power is designed to counter-act that key weakness in their character, forcing them to begin to change, but not get the instant answer.

-The “Grimm” of this world, are different in every way I can imagine, as they were designed to, and will take on a more natural approach, as opposed to silhouette-like designs.

-Characters will not be named after colors, there will be birth reasons for it that aren’t related to colors.  Sadly, this is an idea I only realized was an issue recently, so I will be making an effort to properly think this through so it won’t be subject to an accusal of plagiarism.

-All-in-All I’m going to try to make the world as far from Remnant as possible.  

If you decide to stop supporting this project, I hope I’ve entertained you with my Animation, and that you have a fantastic life, and if you haven’t already, go watch NYON Episode 2, it’s just so much fun! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_nXYbPGqVjA&t=447s

All OC’s to the best of my Ability from Left to Right in that Group Image:

From Left to Right (As Best I can):

Auburn Perrault: Aundreya Garcia 

Avena Sharpe: Garrett Calvery 

Noirie, Niya and Mella Mavros, and Jade Tengu: Gabe Chestnut 

Ivori Levina: James Wright II

Dage: Nico O'Gorman 

Marian Loreli: Kristopher Kernan 

Venus Rosebind: Jayden King 

Lavender Fairclough: Dre Taylor 

JC Avatar: https://twitter.com/jcthedawn

Rocco Obsidia: Kyle Duffy 

Kobolt Walthers: Michael Lopez 

Rai Tempest: Jezreel Deity Tuldague 

Artemis, and Yue Hinto: Demetri Li 

Verdell Hydra (Also Chibi), Elroy Minos, Nigel Harbour, and Magenta Rachnera: EL Austria 

Mourvédre Rolandé Vinvalier, and Regynt Richelle: Nico O'Gorman 

Vera: Maevis Tobi Richardson

Silver, Lavender, and Violet: Scott Callahan 

Mika Anuna: Christian Perez 

Grey Korudo: William Raymond 

Mallaithe o'lFreann: Sara Rhys Whipple

All Models were modeled, textured, rigged, and posed/animated by me.

All "Jade" Characters belong to me

I do not own RWBY, all ownership belong to Monty Oum, and Rooster Teeth Productions

If you're interested in seeing my Animations, my YouTube Channel is here: 

www.youtube.com/user/StopMotio…

If you want to be updated on things elsewhere, such as WIP's and Progress, here's my Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/TeamJADEAnimation/

[mercerislandbooks]

Birds, Books, and Botany

In much of the country, the month began with roaring winter storms, but that wasn’t the case here. Our early March was a lamb, so gentle and solicitous that it brought mint jelly with it and invited Northwesterners to tie on a bib. I accepted the offer and bit into the fair weather with gusto, hitting the trails and boardwalks at the Nisqually National Wildlife Refuge in south Puget Sound. This protected estuary is home to all manner of creatures—my hiking buddies and I glimpsed deer and coyotes hidden in the tall grass—but it’s the birds that are the big draw. Bald eagles, horned owls, great blue herons, and cackling geese compete with smaller, brighter-plumed redwings and wigeons for the attention of amateur gawkers and long-lensed professional photographers.

It’s a quietly spectacular show, one that inspires me to do a bit of research before I take it in again. There are many good options available, but for some inexplicable reason I’m drawn to The Crossley ID Guide, so a copy of that will be in my pack on my next excursion.

I’ll also be bearing the knowledge of how fragile and ephemeral such opportunities are. While the Nisqually Refuge is a success story, a thriving stretch of territory reclaimed for nature, there are dwindling numbers of places like it. Sorting through the photos from my walk, I remembered the cautionary account of another wetland that appears in The Moth Snowstorm by Michael McCarthy:

Saemangeum in South Korea: the biggest destruction of an estuary that has ever taken place ... 40,000 hectares ... which at various times of the year hosted so many waders that it was by far the most important shorebird site in Korea ... perhaps in all of Asia. It was phenomenal. It was one of the wonders of the bird world. Now it is gone, snuffed out by a giant engineering vanity project, the building of the world’s biggest sea wall; a whole ecosystem annihilated. And standing here gazing upon it, at what it has become, I find welling up in me an unaccustomed emotion which I register with shock as rage.

McCarthy’s memoir/manifesto is at times a painful read, laying out the brutal extent of the environmental losses we’ve suffered, but it’s also an exhilarating one. Some years ago I wrote about how rare it is to find non-fiction that rises to the level of literature. This is one of those rare books. It speaks with an impassioned, personal voice, convincing with its argument and stunning with the beauty of its writing. You’ll leave it with a renewed sense of wonder and a desire to improve your surroundings, not because it’s the right thing to do, but for the sheer joy of it.

Of course, some people—better souls than I—don’t need to read a book to find that wonder and desire. They live with it every day and write their own books about it. Among the first to do this was Aldo Leopold, the early environmental advocate whose classic collection A Sand County Almanac will turn sixty next year. His essayistic journey through the seasons on his farm in central Wisconsin had a seminal influence on the conservation movement akin to that of Thoreau’s Walden, and his homestead is today a National Historic Landmark.

Leopold was by no means alone on the land. He lived there with his wife and five children, who came to share his deep ecological awareness—all of the Leopold offspring had notable careers in one field of environmental science or another. Youngest daughter Estella brought the family tradition to the Northwest, becoming a professor at the University of Washington in the 1970s. She shares an appealing child’s-eye perspective in her memoir Tales from the Leopold Shack, and elaborates in an interview:

It was fun being out in the shack. There was so much to experience. We witnessed seasonal changes—birds migrating, the succession of plants. We learned about the ecosystem, like which plants were invasive versus native, which plants deer liked and which ones the rabbits ate. We planted hundreds of baby pines and prairie plants. But it never felt like work, even when we were working to improve the Shack or managing and rehabilitating the land ...

I hope people today understand the importance of giving our youth close, immersive experiences in nature. Having a family cabin in the country, owning or adopting some land as a community or family, even camping—something that helps you connect with nature.

I hope my father’s ideas also encourage parents to be less apprehensive about letting their children explore the outdoors, ask questions and come to love nature. Our entire future rests upon it.

Those sentiments about the necessity of getting children into nature may sound obvious, even clichéd, but I for one don’t mind hearing them. As someone who grew up without ever spending a night in a tent, I need prompting before I dare the great outdoors. And even though I’ve seen the benefits of free-range play with my own children, it’s still something I find easier to write about than to encourage every day.

While I struggle to make time for occasional park visits, third and fourth generation Leopolds are putting these invaluable lessons about healthy growth, both personal and environmental, into practice. Scott Freeman is a UW biologist who, along with his wife Susan Leopold Freeman, has taken on the project of restoring a waterway on the Olympic Peninsula. They started by purchasing eighteen acres of disused, damaged farmland and have spent the past decade clearing, planting, and expanding their holdings in an attempt to bring the land back into balance. Through their efforts, and with the assistance of their children, they’ve brought fish and other wildlife back to where they always belonged. Their book, Saving Tarboo Creek, written by Scott and illustrated by Susan, describes the good they’ve done for the land and for their family by turning fallow fields into forest:

Years later, virtually all of the trees that survived their first few years in the pasture finally began to get broad enough to start shading out the grass below. It will still be many years before the canopy closes in the pasture and the grasses begin to be replaced with shade-loving forest herbs, shrubs, and ferns. But now, the seedlings’ roots are thick and broad enough to provide a strong foundation and win the competition for soil nutrients and water. We no longer have to maintain the restoration; it maintains itself. At the tipping point when the saplings begin to win and the grasses and invasives begin to lose, restorationists say, “The trees are free to grow.”

I like that phrase. It’s a goal in land stewardship that’s parallel to the goal Susan and I had as parents. We wanted to raise our boys, like these trees, so they got to that tipping point and no longer needed our care. Thereafter, they were strong and independent. They were free to grow.

Stake a few plants for the sake of my kids? I can get behind that. I’m not promising to transform the landscape the way these writers have (and I don’t plan to cut down my reading time) but I hereby pledge to get some dirt under my fingernails. Right now I only have a window box to work with, but that’s a start.

--James

Originally published by NW Book Lovers. Great blue heron image courtesy of Fleagle Photo Service.

[sweet-star-storybook]

Hey all, back at it again with the random posts, aha. I have been working on something that will formally address the month long art / comic hiatus I’ve been on, but that’s taking a bit longer than I expected. So as a break (I guess?) I took it upon myself to update what I call my Original Stories Timeline, i.e. a chronological list of all of my story ideas (as of October 2019 anyway). I have not posted this list anywhere, but I like to update it on my laptop every now and again.

There is a bit of ambiguity with some of the years that these were made, as sometimes there’s a difference between coming up with the title or lead character for a story versus actually making it a “thing” with an idea or scenes attached. As an example, Moth to the Flame technically began when I first drew Kiida in April of 2015, but aside from a snippet of reasoning for why she was an archer, the story as it is now did not start to take form until I drew Zander in December of 2017. Other times I flat out can’t remember when some of these stories were made, and digital files don’t always have the correct dates. 

For this post (and for curiosity’s sake), I wanted to add up and categorize them to see just how many stories I have in this brain of mine. It was actually quite a fascinating exercise, so I thought I’d share! I might as well list the titles for each category too, even if some of these are only titles at this point. I’ve renamed a few over the years and others are still working titles, but if any pique your interest at all, feel free to send me an ask about them! I love chatting about this stuff. :)

This got quite long once again so I’ll put it under the cut. Enjoy!

Stories that are old and/or need revamping: 6

Titles in this category:  Pasha & Marley (2003), Sonora (2004), Billy and the Rainbow Fish (2005), Spirit Fire (2006), The Darkest Light (2013), Polarity (2013).

These are stories that I’ve either had since I was a kid and would need overhauls to make them usable, or are simply dormant stories that I haven’t touched in a while and may need similar upgrades. This doesn’t mean that I will revamp all of them, but either way they serve as an interesting look at my progression as a story writer and character designer. My oldest story dates back to around 2003, and to put that into perspective, I was 8 years old that year.

Stories that are just titles / a smattering of ideas right now: 10

Titles in this category:  Fletcher (2016), The Dragons of Kitevale (2016), King Ace (2017), Ochako & Mai (2018), Psychanimate (2018), Mage Lights (2019), Trickster’s Gambit (2019), Switching Gears (2019), The Owlands (2019), Goodnight, Starlie (2019).

I always have too many of these for my own good, but this happens a lot if I have stray character designs that I think could maybe go together, and then before I know it the gears start turning in my head to add something more. I’m also really good at coming up with titles and logos to make me love the idea even more, even if there’s not much else to it. I guess you can blame my affinity for wordplay and clever puns for that, haha. Coming up with titles is really fun, but at this point I don’t know what kinds of stories these will be if I choose to develop them, so I gave them a separate category. Making this timeline reminded me of how many logos I still need to make!

Short films / animatics that I could also make into short comics: 7

Titles in this category:  The Aurora’s Child (2016), Blue (2016), Harpy (2017), Hearth & Lantern (2017), Leif & Shel (2018), The Healer (2019), In Your Orbit (2019).

My background in animation has afforded me the skills of writing for animation, specifically short films. I have always loved short films that communicate their story through little or no dialogue, and using the character’s actions and emotions to do the talking instead. Unfortunately my dreams of making a short film during school did not come to fruition, but that doesn’t mean the ideas have to go away, regardless of what form they take. I’ve made too many at this point to stop now anyway! I will likely do both a comic and an animatic for each one I decide to flesh out, as I want to practice both kinds of storytelling and they each have their advantages. Plus I could potentially make a comic anthology of these shorter stories in the future. Much like the animatics, the comics would likely be “silent”, in that they communicate more with action than dialogue.

Things I call “illustration worlds”: 2

Titles in this category:  Fruit Bats (2017), Lucky Stars (2019)

This one is a bit strange to explain, honestly. I picture these as more of a series of character interactions rather than a cohesive narrative, i.e. snippets of ideas carried out in a bunch of individual scenes, portrayed via illustrations. I am reminded a lot of the character interactions that exist in concept art for games and movies (the ones from Spyro: Reignited Trilogy come to mind). These illustrations would feature characters that could be in any sort of environment or setting, and we learn more about their personalities through each one, whether it’s a simple domestic scene or a fantasy world. There may not be anything much deeper than that, but there doesn’t have to be. A great deal of energy and expression can still be shown with these, and I love illustrations that have their own little stories contained within them. I could even compile them as a series of themed illustrations, hence why I still gave them titles (and once again, titles are fun).

Novels / story ideas I don’t plan on making into comics: 2

Titles in this category:  Shining Trigger (2014), A Mightier Pen (2017)

I’ve always loved writing long-form prose ever since I was a kid, and based on how many words these posts end up having, I can’t say much has changed! As such, I’ve always wanted to write a novel someday, but it does require a different skill set than script writing. With my background in animation and my new love of comics added in, I’ve done a bit of both. I might do novelizations of some of my comics later on, but these stories are, for the most part, better suited as written prose in my mind. They focus more on the characters and dialogue, rather than an imagined visual design. Not to say that novelists can’t paint detailed pictures of a character or world’s attributes, but it is communicated differently via words than pictures, especially when you consider the mind’s eye of a novel reader. That “design” has to be malleable enough for the mind’s eye to interpret, but clear enough so the reader knows what it is. I’d have to make sure that any reader could picture what I’m describing with my writing alone, and that’s a difficult balance to strike for a primarily visual storyteller such as myself, but a challenge worth taking nonetheless.

Large comic stories that have big worlds, a lot of characters, etc.: 3

Titles in this category:  Starglass Zodiac (2015), Id Pariah (2015), Feather Knights (2017).

I call these “The Big Three”, as they are the stories that will take the most world building, character creation, and story development to complete. They will have multiple chapters, expansive lore, several character arcs, you name it. I am very excited to tackle all of this development of course, but I want to make sure these are given the time they need to come to fruition. These projects will take me years to complete, which is why I choose to balance them with smaller projects in between. The potential these stories have is not something I want to squander, so even if the production moves slower, I feel it’ll be worth it in the end.

Smaller comic stories with fewer characters, simpler concepts, etc.: 5

Titles in this category:  Moth to the Flame (2015), The Onomancer (2015), Demon Exchange (2018), Take Wing! Emilia’s Tale (2018), Ashes (2018).

This is worded kind of strangely, but this category is meant for stories that have a smaller “scope” than the larger comic stories I mentioned. That doesn’t mean I love them any less or that they’ll be less developed, but they are far simpler in concept and rely less on the development of a massive world and lore and more on individual character experiences. I feel like any creator needs these smaller projects to tackle every so often, especially when tackling the behemoths gets tough. These stories will also have a faster turnover when it comes to completion, and I hope to complete one of these stories in the near future. These will also help me practice writing good foundations for stories, like proper character motivation, pacing, and relationship development that would translate into investment for the reader. There’s a great degree of skill required to do this correctly for any kind of story, but starting smaller in this regard is usually better.

Smaller stories that are supplements or spin-offs of other stories: 3

Titles in this category:  Counting Hearts (2019), The Serpent and the Sun (2019), Riders of Eldrigar (2019).

I know it probably seems a bit early to be thinking about stuff like this, but I do like thinking about the extended stories or supplements that I could add to my pre-existing projects, especially with characters or ideas that would best be told separate from the main story, be they backstories or another perspective on something. I also like the idea of stories that could exist in the same worlds, but can function independently of them as well. It’s a lot of fun to see how these could connect with each other, like having your own equivalent to a cinematic universe. This category currently only has smaller supplements to my comic stuff rather than fully fledged sequels, but who knows what might happen later on? I need to make the beginnings of these stories first!

And with that, the grand total is: 38!

-me after reading this total and spending way too much time on this post-

In all seriousness though, while it is a bit daunting to see just how many things my brain keeps tossing at me and how much that number has increased in recent years, it does make me excited for the future, even if I panic about time a lot. It tells me that I always have stories to tell, and new ones could be right around the corner. I’ll always have something to work on at least! I might periodically update this post as I edit the timeline as well, but for now, thanks for coming along on this little journey with me! :D I hope it was at least entertaining, haha.

[pupfresh]

Pup and Coming: Ends Meet

Ends Meet Genre: Punk Hometown: California x New Jersey

How did you become a band? 

Mike: We’ve known each other for 20+ years. Growing up in Middletown NJ, we had a sort of extended group of core punks that always played in bands together, played shows in small clubs and basements, generally just having fun in the scene doing our own thing. Ironically, over those 20+ years we never actually played in a band together. Instead, we would go into the studio or go into Casey’s shed and just jam – we’d work on riffs separately and pick a time and date and roll the tape and see what happened. Around 2011, we started working on riffs and song ideas via email because with my crazy work schedule, family life and commitment to another band it was the only way I could do it. The stuff he was sending me was so good, I couldn’t pass it up and I saw it as an outlet for trying out new and slightly weird things musically – my own take on what modern punk guitar playing could be. Looking back, that was sort of the genesis of what we’re doing now.

Fast forward to 2015 – we had sort of paused on things just due to distance and life changes and all the rest – and Casey re-sent some stuff we had worked on that he had been polishing and it just sparked something in me that I just needed to commit to this and make it work. As we started locking down songs, it just became super clear to us that we were making the music we always wanted to make and we just kept at it. We both have a deep connection to punk rock, particularly 90’s-era melodic skate punk and hardcore, and we both realized Ends Meet was the outlet we needed to put our own spin on things and put some music back into the world as a sort or tribute to the bands we grew up listening to and who shaped our lives. I won’t say it's the easiest thing in the world to do this sort of long distance, remote songwriting and recording. But it’s so uncommon to have the kind of musical connection Casey and I have – we literally can finish each others songs without even being in the same room (or state), and that was something I wasn’t about to pass up. There’s a level of trust between us that runs over 20 years deep and with “Making Music, Making Enemies” we just wanted to put it all to the test and put it out there – and do it 100% DIY. And I couldn’t be more proud of it.

Casey: We had talked about jamming all the way back in the 90's but things never came together. Then we finally started something in '02 and BOOM, Mike's moving to California. So we discussed the possibility of stitching everything together through emails and I'd mix everything down once it was completed. Never had time. We would jam over the holidays when we were in the same time zone every year but that was it - a few hours to unload all our ideas and aggressions over the past 300 + days. Then in 2011, with no current projects, I set up my drums and mic’s in my mom's basement one weekend and just went off. I sent the raw files to Mike, who loved them, and he ran with it. Mind you, these were literally 2:30-3 minute pieces of time where I pressed record and just pounded out some fast, punky stuff. I wasn't too stoked on any of them but wanted to build regardless. When I got the guitar tracks back I was blown away. I plugged in my bass and did basic follows of his root notes and mixed it down and sent it back to him. Both of us really dug it but didn't quite know where to go with it.

Cut to September, 2015. I own a house, have built up a decent recording space, got a nice Pro Tools workstation and am again bit by the bug. I plug in those old tracks and line them to a click track. I like it. A lot. So I set my drums up and record them to a clicked out version of those old tracks and give it a listen. Now I'm really stoked. I call Mike to bring him up to speed and tell him how good it sounds by using old, half assed thrown together tracks. "Now imagine what it would sound like if we were to take a serious crack at it." I thought it was gonna be a tough sell on him. He's a busy dude. Successful in business, a family man, a surfer, a skater... I'm just some lonely dude with a jam space and ambition. To my surprise, he takes to the idea. I'm stoked. I head to the basement the next day and pound out another 2 old beats/songs. Email them. He writes guitars. Emails me. I write bass lines. Email him. He records vocals. Emails me. Load it into my timeline and get cracking. The result is "Making Music, Making Enemies" and I am damn pleased with how it came out for a myriad of reasons. But above all I am proud to be able to make good, focused music in the vein that he and I both have been itching to do for well over a decade. He is my brother in music and together we are accomplishing EXACTLY what we set out to do.

Where did the band name originate from?

Casey: I was pining over a bunch of names at a Frank Turner show in NYC. I'm watching him play (and damn does he play) and I text Mike "We should get Frank Turner to sing on our songs, that would really tie it together" or something to that effect. That leads my thoughts to coming up with a name that illustrates how far we have come in our lives, our goals, our ambitions, and our music, and yet how far apart we truly are. How can we tie all of this together? How, in a simple and concise way, can we package what we're doing and what we have done? How do we make all these ends meet? Bingo!

Mike: I was totally drawing a blank on band names. Casey was texting me random names here and there, and some of them seemed cool but nothing was super inspiring. Then one day he sent over a few potential names that played off of the theme of long-distance, connections, stuff like that. As soon as I saw “Ends Meet” the “X” logo popped into my head. I sketched it out and sent it to him and we knew instantly that was the one – the name and the symbol were perfect for what we were doing.

Where do you guys draw your influences for your music? Mike: I could write a novel on this, there are so many influences I owe a debt to. I’ll start by saying that my cousin Jeff (aka JJ, currently the lead signer of the legendary Discharge) got me into punk rock pretty early - I was around 10 years old. He had me listening to the Dead Kennedy’s, Sex Pistols, The Exploited, Crass, Subhumans, Germs, The Clash – real classic, raw, first wave punk. Soon after, I wandered my way into the “new school” punk scene through skateboarding and found Pennywise, Bad Religion, NOFX, DRI, Strung Out, Lagwagon, Rancid, Good Riddance, RKL, Offspring, Black Flag, Propagandhi, No Use For A Name, Face To Face, Pulley, Bouncing Souls, Butthole Surfers, Gorilla Biscuits, Unwritten Law, Green Day, Rise Against – tons of Fat Wreck Chords and Epitaph bands. To this day they are the bands that have shaped my musical core and continue to influence my guitar playing. There’s an awesome sort of unstructured randomness to a lot of that mid-90’s punk, nobody really knew the formula yet. I did my best to channel a lot of that random, non-traditional song structure and style into what I’m doing with Ends Meet. Some late-era influences would include bands like A Wilhelm Scream, Pears, Thrice, Glassjaw, letlive, H09909, Useless ID, The Flatliners, The Sainte Catharine’s, None More Black, Implants, Mute and Against Me. And that’s barely scratching the surface of what I’m inspired by.

Casey: The 90's. In my head, I'm still there. Being a Jersey boy I have always had a passion for the New Brunswick scene (Lifetime, Endeavor, etc.) but also had the privilege to play out with some of my other favorite locals over my musical career like The Postman Syndrome, Catch 22, OCG, and a bunch of others. The NJ scene is as varied as it is talented and I'm proud of that. Everything else I draw from is completely California skate punk: Strung Out, Pulley, NOFX, Face to Face, Lagwagon, NUFAN... pretty much anything on Fat Wreck. Then there's the geographic anomalies like A Wilhelm Scream (MA) and a lot of the stuff going on in Gainesville, FL. But first and foremost... yeah. I like the 90's.

What sets you apart from all the other bands out there? Casey: Heart. And lack of band members. Who else writes music from opposite sides of a continent and plays several instruments on each song?

Mike: In addition to Casey’s points, I think we embody DIY more so than a lot of bands. We literally do every single thing ourselves – write, record, mix, master, design + artwork, release, promote. Casey recorded the drums, bass and mixed and mastered in a basement. I recorded guitars in a garage and recorded some of the vocals parked in my car in Oakland and San Francisco. My personal mission is to prove that we can make good-sounding music with good production value  by ourselves - with nothing but the some grit and determination. We don’t need a ton of fancy equipment or studio space to do it. We purposefully decided not to send out a demo to record labels for our first release because we wanted this to be 100% ours. Will that be the case forever? Who knows. But I’m very proud of the fact that we did it.

What’s your favorite part about being in a band? Mike: Having an outlet for creativity and a partner in crime to make it real. I can get an idea, record it, send it to Casey and in a few days we have the foundation of a song. It’s literally one of my favorite things in the world to download a drum track, plug in my guitar and just let it rip.

Casey: The gratification of building something that hasn't existed in the universe before you made it so.

What are the bands future plans?

Casey: Make great records.

Mike: Making more of the music we want to hear in the world, and somehow figuring out a way to play some live shows that leave an impression on people.

What was your favorite cartoon growing up? Mike: Danger Mouse. Look it up.

Casey: Man, that's a tough one. "Growing up" happens in stages. First it was He Man and the Transformers, then came The Ninja Turtles, then there were things like Dexter's Lab and Johnny Bravo, and then anything Space Ghost was in. If I had to call it, I'd probably lean Ninja Turtles. That one had the longest and deepest impact on me. I actually have the first 4 seasons on DVD. They're hilarious.

Favorite pizza topping?

Casey: Pepperoni and mushroom. You buying?

Mike: Plain. A slice of plain NJ pizza is heaven in the shape of a triangle.

If you could have one superpower what would it be?

Casey: To be able to fall asleep whenever I needed to and wake up completely refreshed on demand.

Mike: To be able to do things simultaneously by being in more than one place at the same time.

What is the first album you ever bought?

Casey: Cassette: Nirvana "Bleach" CD: Offspring "Smash" Mike: I literally have no clue. It was probably like MC Hammer or some shit in the 80’s. The first CD I remember buying that really changed my life was the self-titled Pennywise album – I never looked back after that one.

Anything else you’d like to say?

Mike: Yes, but I ran out of words. So, next time. Casey: I like turtles.

[nancydhooper]

Seth Godin Answers 12 DuetsBlog Questions

It all started here, nearly ten years ago now, with our inaugural DuetsBlog post called Dr. No and the Parade of Horribles. We used a Seth Godin post called Looking for Yes as our launchpad.

The rest is history. Seth revealed himself a fan of the blog on our 4th birthday, what a surprise. He generously has engaged with us since then, weighing in on topics ranging from branding to trademark bullying to Velcro’s fear of trademark genericide, with so much more in between.

Recently, Seth generously agreed to answer the 12 questions below. What should we ask next?

Steve Baird Interviews Seth Godin:

Baird: As you know, Duets Blog was designed to facilitate a more graceful collaboration between lawyers and marketers. What do lawyers need to understand most about marketers, and vice versa?

Godin: Begin with: Lawyers ARE marketers. Of course you are. You are using ideas to change behavior. That’s what marketers do. You seek to tell a story that will motivate a client or a judge or an examiner to alter behavior. That’s what marketers do.

Too often, marketers with a capital M get in a negative loop, a race to the bottom. They believe that they are entitled to strip-mine attention, to shade the truth, to interrupt and to selfishly annoy.

That doesn’t work in the long run, and lawyers have a role to play in giving these Marketers some boundaries.

In my experience, some IP lawyers hide behind arcana, or strict rule-based approaches, or superstition in working with clients to get them to change.

(“All rights reserved” anyone?)

The alternative is to find the empathy to realize that your clients don’t know what you know, don’t believe what you believe and might not want what you want. Given that, how can you go to where they are and help them use your skills and insights to achieve their goals?

  Baird: What change were you hoping to make by revealing yourself as a reader of DuetsBlog on our 4th Birthday, almost six years ago now? What keeps you coming back to engage with us? What would you most miss, if we were gone?

Godin: It’s one of my favorite blogs! I’ve been an amateur trademark and copyright person since our trademark lawyer got us into trouble with some nuns in 1983. Long story.

DuetsBlog is erudite, refreshing and more far ranging than most people realize.

  Baird: How much does the “who would miss you if you were gone” question drive the extraordinary and prolific nature of your day-to-day work that advances the projects and causes you choose to pursue?

Godin: I view my platform as a privilege. I’ve had headstarts my whole life, and I have the attention and trust of a bunch of people.

I’d rather not waste it on trivia.

  Baird: Virtually every set of corporate trademark use guidelines on the planet forbids the “verbing” of a trademark (to avoid the risk of genericide), what say you about this risk/instruction, from a marketing perspective, and is following it a good trade-off or a mistake?

Godin: I think aggressive trademark guidelines are a mistake for a few reasons:

1. Aloha Poke! It doesn’t pay to own a name if that name is going to be hated.

2. It can be expensive.

3. Your brand should be so lucky as to be Kleenex or Hoover. The thing is, your enemy is probably obscurity, not genericness.

4. When in doubt, the real win is this: Use trademark the way it was intended. As the origin of goods or services. If people have a good reason to want YOU, the one and only, the better one, then you’re going to have the trademark winds at your back. But if you’re hoping for a legal protection for your generic commodity product, it’s not really much help.

  Baird: What brands are most remarkable to you, and why?

Godin: A brand is not a logo or a word. It’s a promise and an expectation. If Nike opened a hotel, we’d know what to expect. They have a brand. If Hyatt made sneakers, we’d have no clue. They have a trademark, but no brand. Switch the signs in front of another hotel and we’d never know.

So, the question is more like: what humans are doing important and useful work?

  Baird: Thinking about your Make Better Tacos blog post, under what circumstances do you believe a trademark is important and a valuable asset worth protecting? Any examples to illustrate?

Godin: I think a good trademark is a symptom of a good brand, not the cause.

  Baird: What brands have visual identities that can truly standalone without words, and why? And, in thinking about these brands, could it be that the use of non-verbal logos adversely impacts “word of mouth” and the spread of ideas about those brands, or not so much?

Godin: I love non-verbal logos. What an achievement. It’s confirmation that you’ve made something worth remembering, and that you’ve told your story in a way that people want to hear more about it.

I don’t think you need a fancy designer to do this. I think you need longevity, frequency and emotional import. Most people can identify the flag of the country they grew up in.

  Baird: As an alumnus of your AltMBA program, which emphasizes the importance of “making a ruckus,” if you were a lawyer, how would you most likely seek to make a ruckus? From your perspective as a marketer, what change would most improve marketing of the legal profession?

Godin: Stop being a commodity! “You can choose anyone and we’re anyone” is not a strategy.

What is the thing you do that others actually CAN’T do? I know that most lawyers didn’t sign up to answer this question, but it’s the secret to your happiness.

  Baird: In your 2016 interview on #AskGaryVee, Episode 185, Gary never gave you the chance to answer his question: Where did you learn empathy? Could you share your answer with our readers now? What about another admirable trait of yours, generosity: Was that learned in the same way?

Godin: Empathy means not only realizing, but EMBRACING the idea that other people don’t know what you know, don’t believe what you believe and don’t want what you want. And being okay with that.

I think we each can learn it in no time. What we have to do is choose to want it. Which means setting aside so much of our insistence on being right, at least in service of helping us engage with others.

  Baird: “Footprints on the Moon: What Changemakers Know,” described a scene that could have been right out of a movie — a cold October night around the campfire with Neil Armstrong; what was your most significant take-away from that out-of-this-world experience?

Godin: If there are footprints on the moon, is the next little argument you’re planning to spend an hour on really the best you can do?

  Baird: Thank you for the opportunity to read an advance copy of your brand new book THIS IS MARKETING. It’s fabulous and brilliant. If I may repeat two questions that you’re famous for asking, and now ask them about your brand new book, “Who’s it for?” and “What’s it for?”

Godin: Who’s it for: Anyone who wants to change things for the better and is willing to learn how to do that better.

What’s it for: To give you a handy way to teach those around you that it is, in fact, possible to do work you’re proud of.

I made it into book form so that my readers could use it to teach their peers.

  Baird: What thoughts about marketing, brands, or life in general, most consistently bring a smile to your face?

Godin: That people in every line of work, even lawyers (!), care enough to challenge the status quo for non-selfish reasons. To make things better.

Seth, thank you for your very kind words in support of our effort to keep making a ruckus!

Dear readers, here is where you can pick up Seth’s new book launched today, it’s a must-read: This is Marketing — You Can’t Be Seen Until You Learn to See.

The post Seth Godin Answers 12 DuetsBlog Questions appeared first on DuetsBlog.

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[virtualfaceengineer]

Facts About Website Hosting Guide Revealed

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[jwest-idtms-blog]

12.4.1 Week 4 Discussion

1)  How has each course contributed to your personal and professional development as an instructional designer?

Mastery: Personal Development and Leadership This course served to ease me back into being a student. I used this month to establish good project management procedures which I practiced the entirety of the program and will continue to use post graduation.

Strategies for Learner Engagement This course gave me terminology for instructional design (ID) models I was already following – I just did not know the processes had names. Being able to communicate as an ID professional increases my marketability as a freelancer.

Visual and Verbal Communication in Instructional Design This course introduced me to Adobe Illustrator. I have used this software almost every day since completing the work for this class, for either work or personal needs. I have used it to supplement work presentations and created custom wedding invitations. It has proven very useful.

Corporate Training and Motivational Development This class presented a challenge in having to appear as a competent presenter on camera and handle all the behind-the-scenes production. If anything, it reinforced the importance of time-management and knowing how to minimize project components to avoid becoming overwhelmed.

Instructional Design and Evaluation This is the class demonstrated the difference between and instructional designer and a media specialist. I learned what it really means to implement the ID models covered in earlier classes and gained an appreciation for the amount of work that goes into the analysis phase.

Digital Media and Learning Applications While this course focused on coding, the more important lesson was on developing effective assessment questions. I now put a lot of consideration into just what the goal of my lessons should be. This makes it easier to craft assessment questions that measure how effective I am at achieving those goals.

Music and Audio This course introduced me to GarageBand. I have used it several more times in later classes and found it to be useful in polishing audio for video projects. There has not been an opportunity for me to use it professionally as my work is PC-based.

Filmmaking Principles This course has provided me with a skill set I will use continuously in my current job. We often host webinars and we now have the ability to edit the recorded versions. It will also be useful in creating new tutorial videos – a project I plan to launch mid-summer.

Game Strategies and Motivation This course helped me to clarify the difference between gamification and game-based learning. I have always tried to incorporate games or game elements into my trainings. Now I have the academic terminology to justify this approach.

Learning Management Systems and Organization This course forced me to consider instruction from a new perspective. I am used to live presentations where I control the visuals. Taking a lesson I am familiar with and adapting it to a new delivery platform where the control is the trainees was a valuable learning experience.

Media Asset Creation This course was a complete test of all the skills the rest of the program had helped me to develop. I feel confident that, were a need to arise to develop a multi-asset learning module in my professional career, I am well prepared to deliver a quality product.

Final Instructional Design and Technology Project This course has got me thinking about my strengths as an instructional designer. I am prepared to streamline my portfolio with a bent towards marketing myself as a freelance designer. I want to showcase the work I have done that makes me a front-runner for the work I want to do.

2) How well were you able to utilize the concepts and techniques you learned from the program (theories, systems design, interface styling, and the creation of multimedia content) as you designed, developed, and implemented your Final Project

The final project required me to draw on the majority of the skills that I developed as a result of completing the Instructional Design and Technology program. I chose an original project, preparing a thorough needs analysis that factored in research from subject matter experts, assessments based on the needs of my target audience, and learning objects developed with modern instructional theories as their base. I was able to design all of my graphics in Adobe Illustrator to create cohesion between resources and I was able to utilize almost all of the software that was introduced through the program (GarageBand, iMovie, QuickTime, PowerPoint). The end result is a project I am proud of and hope to see come to fruition as a training initiative at my job.

 3) Describe your most outstanding personal triumph in each course.

Mastery: Personal Development and Leadership I am proud of the paper I wrote for a week two assignment. It had been nearly a decade since I had done any academic writing and I was nervous about this particular component of graduate coursework. While this was not my highest scoring paper, I did well enough to know I could keep on doing it. This was one challenged mastered, one difficulty overcome.

Strategies for Learner Engagement This class provided the first opportunity to work as a team. My default position in most group projects is “organizer” so I consider it a triumph that I was able to take a step back in week three, taking on a supportive role instead of trying to run the show. Choosing to trust others, especially when we had so little time to learn each other’s work habits, was a big leap for me but one I am glad I made. Working together, my team delivered a strong project and we built a bond that has stayed strong the entire program. 

Visual and Verbal Communication in Instructional Design My world changed when I learned how to use Adobe Illustrator. I no longer need to glean Google for free-use images or lament the fact that the visual I want either does not exist or is not free. Now, I can create almost any visual I could want and my work has improved exponentially since I was introduced to this program.

Corporate Training and Motivational Development My greatest achievement for this course was looking directly at the camera. I speak in public often, sometimes to crowds of 50 or more, and I love it and have been told I am good at it. However, it turns out I am shy about on-camera work. Once I realized the best product could only be achieved by acting as confident on camera as I do in front of a classroom, I was able to overcome this roadblock and create a quality video.

Instructional Design and Evaluation The project for this course was a beast. Initially, I was frustrated by the assignment and dreaded the time I had set aside to work on it. Eventually I was able to turn this frustration into motivation, determined that I would not be beaten by this assignment. This worked so well, and I did such a good job, that Dr. Deason asked if he could use my final project as an example for future classes.

Digital Media and Learning Applications My most outstanding triumph for this course was customizing the interactive quiz we had created following a Lynda.com tutorial. It is one thing to follow step-by-step directions, it is quite another to figure out how to freestyle a design when very little of the earlier instruction explained the cause and effect of specific actions.

Music and Audio I am very proud of the final project I created for this course. Developing a story from limited resources to match predetermined visuals, building a soundscape, and performing voice work were all new to me. I feel my final cut could absolutely be used as a learning tool at the historical park featured in the video.

Filmmaking Principles My most outstanding triumph in this class was overcoming complacency and forcing myself to reshoot footage. Through personal observation and peer and instructor feedback, I saw there were flaws in the original material. Even though what I had could have been fine with a little editing, I chose to go for quality and put in the extra effort to get fresh material that I incorporated into my final draft.

Game Strategies and Motivation The game I created for this course is my piece de resistance for the entire program. It was a concept I had started developing several years ago and I love how I was able to refine my ideas and create what I believe is a marketable training game. The next step is to create a prototype so I can test it with real trainees.

Learning Management Systems and Organization My triumph in this course was integrating an existing lesson into a new platform. To become a well-rounded instructional designer, I needed to learn to work outside of my comfort zone (live presentations) and embrace distance-learning techniques.

Media Asset Creation The interactive infographic is the best thing I created for the final project. I designed 10 original graphics to represent individual college expenses, wrote clear, comprehensive copy for each one, and blended everything into a clean, attractive design that incorporated rollover pop-ups. It perfectly illustrates my design aesthetic and attention to detail.

Final Instructional Design and Technology Project My triumph for this final course was having a portfolio to be proud of. In looking back at my collection of projects, I see how much work I have put in this last year. If anything, I can say I have earned this master’s degree. I look forward to sharing this with my family, friends, and coworkers who have supported me through the entire process.

[franz163-blog]

Ship Handling

Author-David j. House

David House is currently engaged in the writing and the teaching of maritime subject, with his main disciplines being in the Seamanship and navigation topics. Following a varied seagoing career in the British Mercantile Marine, he began a teaching career at the Fleetwood Nautical College in 1978. He also commenced writing at about this time and was first published in 1987 with the highly  successful "Seamanship Techniques" now in its 3rd edition and distributed worldwide.

Since this initial work, originally published as two volumes, he has writen and published fourteen additional works on a variety of topics, including:Heavy Lifting Operations, Helicopter Operations and more. This latest publication is designed as a training manual, to highlight the theory and practice of ships handling procedures, relevant to both the serving operational officer as well as the maritime student.

Preface The reality of handling the ship is a world apart from the theory. No publication can encompass the elements of weather and features of water conditions to make the practice and theory one and the same. The best any book can hope for is to update the mariner with the developments in hardware employed to effect modern-day manoeuvres.

Since the demise of sail, machinery and manoeuvring aids have continued to improve and provide additional resources to the benefit of Masters, Pilots and others, charged with the task of handling both large and small power-driven vessels. Maritime authorities are united in establishing a safe and pollution-free environment. Internationally, it is these interests that provide the desired protection for operators to conduct their trade in some of the most active and busiest areas of the world.

The theory of a manoeuvre may be ideally suited for a certain port at a certain time, but the many variables involved may make the same manoeuvre totally unsuitable at another time. Ship handlers and controllers must therefore be familiar with the capabilities of the ship, while at the same time be flexible in the use of resources against stronger currents or increased wind conditions. Knowing what to do and when to do it: in order to attain the objective is only half of the task. The reasoning behind the actions of the ship handler will tend to be based on the associated theory at the root of any handling operation. Such knowledge – coupled with main engine power and steering, anchors and moorings, tugs and thrusters, if fitted – can be gainfully employed to achieve a successful docking or unberthing.

Practice with different ships, and fitted with different manoeuvring aids, tends to increase the experience of the would-be ship handler. Training for junior officers to increase their expertise in the subject is unfortunately extremely limited. Unless Ship’s Masters allow 'hands on' accessibility, few have the early opportunity to go face to face with a subject which is not an exact science. The theoretical preparation, the advance planning and the execution of any manoeuvre will not materialise overnight. And an understanding of the meteorological conditions may not initially be seen as a relevant topic, but ship handling against strong winds with a high freeboard vessel is somewhat different to manoeuvring with a large fully loaded tanker with reduced freeboard in calm sea conditions. The purpose of the text, therefore, is to combine the hardware, with the theory in variable weather and operating conditions. Ship handling is not a stand alone topic and, by necessity, must take account of the many facets affecting a successful outcome. Knowing the theory is necessary, putting it into practice is essential.

Summary This book has been created to widen the subject of ship handling procedures and the varied equipment assigned with the task or job. This book is not meant to provide every answer to every problem which exists in the ship handling service. Nor can it possibly put the months or years of experience on the newly qualified Master. It is written to provide some idea to the theory, which supports an ever so practical topic for today’s handlers of the world’s ships. It is a sad indictment of our training techniques that many Chief Officers gain their rank and have little opportunity to obtain ‘hands on’ ship handling practice. Yet as soon as that same Chief Officer is promoted to command, he is immediately expected to handle the manoeuvring of the vessel, as if he had carried out the task for years. This element of the marine industry continues to race through change with new innovations in hardware being developed on virtually a daily basis. We saw the changes coming slowly with the advent of the Controllable Pitch Propellers. However, since that dawn, major inroads into azi-pods, thrusters, high performance rudders, new hull forms, increased speeds and improved steering concepts have changed the so-called norms of manoeuvring ships. It is hoped the text and illustrations of this volume will go some way to help the young sea-going officer move towards the experience of the established Master. References

References

https://books.google.com.ph/books?id=99C9Wa_hGkAC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q=Learned&f=false https://www.google.com.ph/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://dl.kashti.ir/ENBOOKS/Ship%2520Handling%2520-%2520David%2520J.%2520House.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwjWhciLtsTVAhUJVrwKHZc3Av0QFggjMAA&usg=AFQjCNFvNGExJSBpTgmYx96jBejn-O5iRA https://www.google.com.ph/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=http://dl.kashti.ir/ENBOOKS/Ship%2520Handling%2520-%2520David%2520J.%2520House.pdf&ved=0ahUKEwj-jq7wtsTVAhXEWrwKHehrABkQFghsMAs&usg=AFQjCNFvNGExJSBpTgmYx96jBejn-O5iRA Lesson Learned

This book is very important its contents are very accurate in giving tips or lessons. By reading this book i learned many ways how to handle ships in different conditions and situations.For me David House created this book for the purpose of the maritime industry. Many seafarer's have trouble because of their work. i observed from many sites that this book is very important for the world of seafaring

[rebeccahpedersen]

Top Ten: Condo Rules You May (Or May Not…) Disagree With

TorontoRealtyBlog

Living in a condominium means living with rules, some of which you may abide by, some of which you might loathe, and some you think are unique to your stupid, annoying, awful building.

Over the years, both living in condos and selling to clients, I’ve come to learn which rules irk people the most, as well as which are common and which are not.

Let me provide some context on the top ten rules condo-owners disagree with, which of course, some of you might argue serve a purpose…

Honestly folks, I feel like I’ve already written this blog.

Ten years, 2,000+ blog posts, and while I know I’ve covered “condo rules” many times, part of me thinks I may have touched on this subject before.

We’ve talked a lot in the past about condo rules.

I wrote a blog in 2014 called, “Five Rules That Residents Of Your Condo Are Breaking.”

In 2009, I wrote, “Ignore The Rules,” again, about broken rules.

And on a related topics, in 2015 I wrote, “Top Ten Subtle Annoyances For First-Time Condo Owners.”  That was a doozie!

So while we’ve covered the ideas below before in passing, today I want to dedicate an entire post to the rules that most residents disagree with, and those that do agree with them, really think they’re necessary.

I welcome your feedback on all of these, and whether you agree or disagree, and of course, why.

10) Closing the outdoor common elements for the season.

It seems reasonable, at least to most people.

I had a client once who disagreed, and took this issue as far as he could take it.

He told me, “I’d love to be able to enjoy a fine Cuban cigar outside, on the rooftop terrace, staring at the CN Tower and city lights.  But the goddam condo insists on closing the terrace from November to March.”

He wrote letters, he solicited legal opinions, all the while, basically being the only person in the building who wanted to use the rooftop terrace, in -15 degree weather.

Sometimes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

But sometimes, the fact that one person out of 200-some-odd residents is complaining about a rule, simply reinforces the appropriateness of that rule.

If you’ve served on a board of directors, you know that the common elements are closed because of insurance reasons.

There’s not as much maintenance, and virtually no “risk” attributed to the elements, in spring and summer.  But come winter, management would have to salt every square inch of the rooftop terrace or other common areas, not to mention mop the hallways and stairs leading to and from the common areas, as drunk party-goers aren’t going to clean up after themselves.

Add in the higher insurance premiums associated with an outdoor space, in the winter, with high foot traffic, and just about every condominium in Toronto closes their terrace for the winter.

But as I alluded to above, there will always be people who disagree.

9) Maximum visitor parking passes issued for each unit, per month.

I know I’ve told this story before.  I just can’t find the blog…

At our condo AGM a couple of years ago, a resident stood up and said, “What’s with the maximum monthly visitor parking passes?  My girlfriend lives with me, and I’m only allowed seven passes per month?  What the hell is this?”

Agree or disagree with the rule about a maximum number of monthly visitor parking passes, but you can’t deny that the quote above illustrates exactly why the measure is put in place.

In the case above, if the girlfriend lives in the building, and wants to park her car there every night, then she should rent a parking space.

Visitor parking is for visitors, and the potential for abuse is massive.

8) Concierge cannot open door for residents.

This is a new one, eh?

Imagine coming home and carrying a dozen grocery bags, with your shoulders aching, fingers about to fall off, and smiling at the concierge – who you see every day, looking for he or she to open the door.

Then imagine the concierge – Jake, or Cathy, or whoever you see, day-in, day-out, shaking their head to say “no.”

This is how some buildings in Toronto operate.

Every resident must use their key-FOB to access the building, regardless of day, time, circumstance, or being “known” to the concierge.

It’s an across-the-board, no-room-for-grey-area approach that some management companies and/or board of directors’ have implemented to avoid the concierge having to make a decision on who they know, who they don’t, and who they might.

7) Cannot walk pets through front lobby.

A family member of mine lives in a building with this rule.

You cannot, at any time, under any circumstances, walk your pet through the front lobby.

You can however, walk your dog (or cat, or bird…) through the back lobby.

You can also, amazingly, carry your pet through the front lobby.

The rules basically boil down to the feet touching the tile.

You’re not allowed to “walk” your pet through the front lobby, but you can “bring” them through, so long as they’re being carried.

If you’ve got an 8-pound Maltese, you’re good.

If you have an 80-pound Rottweiler, you’d better have been working those biceps at the gym…

6) No storage on terraces.

This is an interesting one, since it can take many shapes and forms.

Some condominiums specifically outlaw storage units, and I’m not sure why.

A client of mine bought a condo with a large storage shed – the kind you see sitting in the parking lot on display at Home Depot, and the unit was used by the previous owners for as long as they had lived there.

Upon moving in, and using the storage shed, he received a note from his property manager saying that storage units weren’t permitted on terraces, balconies, or any exclusive-use common elements.

To make matters worse, when he refused to remove it, they fined him, and debited his bank account!

A storage shed is one thing, but some condos don’t allow any storage, ie. bicycles, winter tires, or whatever else you might store for a day, or a winter.

There’s a level of subjectivity to this too, so you don’t really know what management will have a problem with, often, until they make it your problem…

5) Gym is closed for cleaning at set times, daily.

Most condominiums with gyms have a time, every day, where the gym is closed for cleaning.

This makes sense, right?

You want a clean gym, and you want to enjoy the space.

You’re happy that the property manager is making this a priority, and rather pleased with the overall condition of the facility whenever you use it.

However, that doesn’t mean that when you see the gym is closed every day from 12pm to 1pm, that you’re going to abide by the rules.

Every man, woman, and child in the condo suffers from the same hypocritical contradiction: they want the gym cleaned, but not when they want to use it.

Let’s be honest: you don’t need to shut down the entire gym, when you need to clean it.

If you’re the cleaner, and you’re wiping down the dry sweat on the stairmaster, why can’t a guy be doing squats 200 feet away?

If you’re on the treadmill running a 5K, does it bother you that somebody is cleaning the adjacent yoga room?

This is one of those rules that just about nobody abides by, for what it’s worth…

4) Certified funds required to book moving elevator.

When you go to book the moving elevator in your building, for moving in, moving out, or for a delivery, you almost always have to provide a deposit cheque.

This makes sense, right?

No objections here.

Any time you’re turning a couch up on its side, and trying to ensure it doesn’t slam against the glass walls that surround the inside of the elevator, I think it’s fair to say you risk causing damage.

I don’t know many people who would object to the “deposit cheque necessary to book moving elevator” rule.

But what about when the deposit cheque has to be certified?

That takes things to a whole new level.

For one thing, the amount is arbitrary, and differs significantly from one building to the next.

In my building, it was $75.00 for five years, until all of a sudden, it increased to a whopping $500.

So what if a resident needed that $500 in certified funds?

First of all, it means the resident can no long say, “Oh shoot, I have a fridge coming from tomorrow, I’d better go down and book the elevator.”  Now they have to plan in advance to get to the bank, stand in line, dole out $8.00 for a bank draft, and do so before the elevator is reserved.

But isn’t $500 a lot to some people?

Aren’t there a lot of people in Toronto living month-to-month, especially those who rent, and complain that prices and rents are too high?

Maybe you’re only taking that $500 from your bank account for two or three days, but I think for some people, that’s a huge ask.

So what are the pros and cons of this approach?

Well personally, every time I write a cheque to book the moving elevator in my building, I do so on an account that has been cancelled for three years.  Not because I’m trying to stiff the condominium corporation in the event that I damage the elevator, but because that’s the cheque book that happens to be in our hall table.

So using my own situation as an example of where things can go wrong for the condominium corporation, are they within their right to ask for certified funds, or is this being over the top?

3) Must book a security guard for any usage of the party room.

Note the word “any.”

As in, if you want to use the space to play Warhammer with your old high school buddy.

As in, if you want to use the room for eight minutes, with one person, you need to book a security guard.

Oh – and perhaps we should add “Three Hour Minimum” to this rule, just for fun.

So imagine being a parent who lives in a condo with two kids, wants to use the party room for them to run around for ten minutes, and being expected to book a security guard for $28.60 per hour, for three hours.

This is how a lot of condominiums in Toronto function, and residents hate it.

Living on the floor that’s down the hall from the party room, I can tell you that I believe all parties with 20, 30, or 40 people should have a security guard standing in the hall to ensure that drunk morons don’t engage in a “who can shout louder” contest at 12:30am.

But where do you draw the line?  Do you say, “More than ten persons requires a security guard?”  Then how do you enforce that?  What if the person booking the party room says there will be eight people, but another dozen show up?

This is why the rules is often so hard-and-fast.

It goes back to the “no grey area” school of thinking with the concierges not buzzing anybody into the building.

You want to use the party room?  Book a security guard.  For one hour, or the whole night.  For your two kids, or your 40 friends from work.

Not every condominium has this rule, but many do.

2) Concierge does not accept or hold keys.

This is it, folks.

This is the rule that irks the most condo owners, and is the most disagreed-with in the city.

But it’s not the most controversial, and most talked about, and thus why it sits at #2, and not #1.  And I think you’ll see in a moment why #1 is #1…

Of course, if you’re on a board of directors in your building, and you had a hand in bringing this rule about concierges not holding keys to your building, then I’m sure you’ll post your displeasure below.

But at the risk of not remaining unbiased, let me say that I wholeheartedly disagree with this rule, for the same reason we’ve discussed over and over: a concierge is supposed to help.  The word “concierge” comes from a French root word, meaning “help.”  Or you might say it comes from the Latin “conservus” which means “fellow slave,” but either way, I believe a concierge is supposed to help residents.

Holding keys – for the dog-walker, the cleaning lady, or your mother, comes with risk and liability.  I understand that.

But unlike closing the terrace in the winter, I don’t think that refusing to hold keys for residents is reasonable, given that every resident, at some point, will want a key held.

Toronto’s downtown core is full of dog-owners, and they all have dog-walkers.  The city is also full of lazy and/or busy people who need cleaning services.  There are countless other reasons as to why you might need a key held at concierge, and this further illustrates just how important it is that a building does allow front desk, concierge, security, and the like, to hold keys.

1) No short-term rentals.

Two years ago, I don’t know that we’d even be talking about this.

And while I don’t want to think that my building is being used as a youth hostel to people who plan to stay in the unit for one night, and couldn’t possibly care less how they leave the unit or treat the building, there are a LOT of downtown Toronto residents who want to lease their unit by the night.

This point could be an entire blog post, so at the risk of being too brief, I think enough has already been said.

But there isn’t a “rule” in Toronto condos today that’s under more scrutiny than the Anti-AirBnB rule being referred to as “no short-term rentals.”

And I’d love to know your completely biased thoughts on this.  Let me know if you’d prefer to live in a building where AirBnb is allowed.

The post Top Ten: Condo Rules You May (Or May Not…) Disagree With appeared first on Toronto Real Estate Property Sales & Investments | Toronto Realty Blog by David Fleming.

Originated from http://ift.tt/2wKOdKK

[gfm97-blog]

Redd Web Development

Task4: Home Page:

Here I’m going to describe the function of the home page: At the top right corner you can find the follow us link in order to follow the website and receive notifications, if you click on any of the social media icons it will direct you to the original website and account. As you click on the photo shown in the page it will refresh the news and provide new news. On the part next to the photo that I referred to above where there’s the live score presented you can scroll on in order to be able to see all the matches that are being played. In this website while visiting the live score page I tried to do a grid instead of writing the live scores in a linear way.

News Page:

When you click on the news page important or old news will pop up. You can go to the next article by clicking on the provided arrows, one place on the left and the other on the right. The follow us link can be also accessed in this page.

Gallery Page:

As you click on the gallery option photos will be presented and if you click on the desired photo it will pop up and get larger in order to be observed better. On the top right of the image selected you can see cross button in order to exit the photo and choose another one. As the photo pops up there are arrows on both left and right to go to the next or previous image. Below each photo there will be the name and theme representing the photo. The follow us link can be also accessed in this page. In the empty space below the images I tried to insert more images but I couldn’t manage.

About Us Page:

The about option opens up in a page that tells information about the website and what does it contain. The follow us link can be also accessed in this page.

Contact Us Page:

The contact us option leads you to a page where its divided into two. You can add comments in your reference and see information about the opening hours of the company. The follow us link can be also accessed in this page.

Home Page Code Errors:

In the <section class=”col-md-6” Id=”box”> I had an extra id box so I deleted the id part in order to become like this: <section class=”col-md-6 box”>.

News Page Code Errors:

In the <section class=”col-md-6” Id=”boxnews”> I had an extra double id box so I deleted both id’s and left them as a class in order to become like this: <section class=”col-md-6 boxnews”>.

Gallery Page Code:

I had a double <body> code as an error and removed one of it as there should be only one <body> In the code. In the code ... I had to add alt=”” as I had an error and the photo remains there.

In the About us and Contact us pages I had no errors in the code. 

Main.css Code:

In this code .submit_btn I had two options that do not exist so I had to delete them from the main code.

Process: 

Home Page:

News Page:

Gallery Page:

About Us Page:

Contact Us Page:

Main.css:

In the past years I did some html and CSS when I used to attend another Mcast branch at Paola and also designed some websites but I wanted to refresh my memory. I also viewed some videos on YouTube and I got some examples from W3schools. Redd gave us some exercises that we had to do by our self such as a Facebook page and started creating a Facebook page from scratch with the search box, home button, name of account, Facebook logo, etc and I got more confidence. I decided to use Atom as a text editor as our lecturer started to show us how it works. First if all I created all the HTML files plus the CSS and a folder containing images that I was going to use. After I decided to change my plan, removed the ‘competitions’ page and added the ‘contact us’ page as in my opining I thought it would make more sense. As I started coding the website I found it difficult because id didn’t know everything. The teacher helped us with our difficulties along the lessons. I also watched some videos in order to try to be more confident with the building of the website. The teacher helped me by teaching me how to use “Inspect Element” so I could fix my errors. I learnt most of the coding from previous websites that I used to test on and used some of their coding in my new website. Even though I had few time to build the website as I had another assignments to do I really enjoyed doing it as its very interesting and Im satisfied with the final work I managed to do.

Cons:

Time management

Problems with the code errors

Gallery structure

Prons:

User friendly

Tried to use good colour scheme in order to not affect the eye

Easy to use the galler

Task 3: Started creating my website:

I decided to use Atom as a text editor as our lecturer started to show us how it works. First if all I created all the HTML files plus the CSS and a folder containing images that i was going to use. After I decided to change my plan, removed the ‘competitions’ page and added the ‘contact us’ page as in my opining i thought it would make more sense.

In the header I included the logo with the name of the website and made social media buttons such as facebook, instagram, google + and youtube in order to provide a link of my website so visitors could follow.  I took some ideas regarding the logo from the website Goal.com. 

First I created the logo at the top left corner and then I created the menu subdividing into all the buttons(pages).After I made every page active so when you click it it will remain active with the white colour in the background.

I created a hover element with the white colour as a background like the previous one and after the footer with the copy right symbol in it and the year it was created 2017.  I decided to use red as a background colour, made a copyright symbol and the date at the middle of the footer while being active on every page selected.

Starting to learn HTML and CSS

In the first week of this unit, our teacher showed us  how to design a website from scratch step by step. In the past years I did some html and CSS when i used to attend  another Mcast branch at Paola and also designed some websites but I wanted to refresh my memory. I also saw some videos on YouTube and on the Web. By the second and third week our lecturer Redd started to show us how to code step by step and how to write the “Hello World” in the html code and display it on  Google chrome. He then gave us some exercises such as a Facebook page and started creating a Facebook page from scratch with the search box, home button, name of account, facebook logo, etc while the other lecturer Andrew helped us to design our website with wireframes on illustrator so it could be easier  for us to work acting as a guide.

Task 2

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8HZM5zIiGvRRjZtSXdNTk5YeFE

Task 1   

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B8HZM5zIiGvRX0k0VFlwUFlUNms

[viralhottopics]

Neil Gaiman: I like being British. Even when Imashamed, Im fascinated

The books interview: The award-winning author on his new book of Norse mythology, Brexit and being an Englishman in New York

Neil Gaiman wanders into the Crosby Hotels colourful parlour in lower Manhattan looking like the Platonic ideal of himself. Hes all wild hair and gracious manners, dressed in a lived-in black wool coat, which he keeps on throughout. He loves this hotel, he says, not least because the concierge writes a comic about Houdini with the former concierge.

Gaiman started out in comics, reading them as a child and eventually writing them too, including his famous Sandman series. So does this happen to him often, his very presence tempting out underground comics enthusiasts all over the globe? I wish I could say yes. It would be a much more interesting and sort of Pynchon-esque world. But no, its just here.

Gaiman looks a little tired. He has just come from feeding breakfast to his toddler youngest son, the progeny of his second marriage to the singer-songwriter Amanda Palmer. (He has three children with his first wife, Mary McGrath.) His creative life is a whirlwind of projects. The television version of his 2001 novel American Gods is to air in the US in April. He has also been at work on an adaptation of his 1990 collaboration with Terry Pratchett, Good Omens, for Amazon and the BBC, on which he is serving as showrunner. Meanwhile, there is the matter of writing books, the latest of which is Gaimans retelling of Norse myths in the straightforwardly titled Norse Mythology, out this week.

It has clearly been a struggle to find the time. I would look up every now and again and go, OK, I have a week. Good, I will retell a story. These are drawn from the 13th-century source texts for many Norse myths, the Prose Edda and Poetic Edda, which he first read in his 30s, after absorbing the superhero stories inspired by them in Marvel comics as a child growing up in West Sussex. With such a haphazard schedule, it has taken around eight years to write the book, the idea for which was first floated by his American editor at Gaimans birthday lunch in 2008.

Listing all of Gaimans achievements could fill a book on its own. In addition to the comics, he is the author of novels for adults and children including Neverwhere, The Graveyard Book and The Ocean at the End of the Lane. He has written original screenplays and seen his work adapted by others, too, such as the 2009 stop-motion version of Coraline. He has been nominated for and won countless awards, including the Hugos, Nebulas and Eisners.

An illustration from Neil Gaimans The Graveyard Book

Gaimans love of Norse mythology surfaces frequently in his work, not least in American Gods, which captures a battle between Odin and Loki. But in embarking on the retellings in Norse Mythology, Gaiman found himself faced with new limitations, as much information about the gods is missing. On Greeks and Romans, for example, we have scads of stuff, but the Norse werent writing it down, he explains. They were telling the stories, so everything we have was written down after the event. The holes and the contradictions that result from the oral tradition presented creative choices, but he felt an acute responsibility to be faithful to the traditional versions.

I have to play fair with the Norse scholars and I have to play fair with kids who pick up the book and read it and think they know the stories. And so I may add colour, I may add motivation, Id go and put in my own dialogue. I may draw inferences, he says. All that stuff Im allowed to do, but I feel like Im not allowed to just go, OK, theres a patch of canvas missing here. Im going to draw something in

Even so, Gaimans personal sensibility is apparent in the text. His affection for Loki, for instance, shines through: Loki is very handsome. He is plausible, convincing, likable, and far and away the most wily, subtle and shrewd of all the inhabitants of Asgard. It is a pity, then, that there is so much darkness inside him: so much anger, so much envy, so much lust.

Gaiman attributes his love of Loki to his novelists eye. You always end up fascinated by who changed, and how they change, because the engine of fiction is who are you at the beginning of the story and who are you at the end. Thor, bless his heart, has no narrative arc: he is the same person all the way through. He is not the brightest hammer in the room, but hes good hearted, and you know he will die at the end, but he dies the same person hes been all the way through. In contrast, Loki is both the devil and the saviour of the gods. Almost every story where theyre in trouble, its because Loki got them into it. Also, an awful lot of the time, hes the only one smart enough to get them out of it.

He declares a real joy in passing these things on. Its like being given something that belongs to humanity and polishing it and cleaning it up and putting it back out there.

Gaimans enthusiasm for myths also extends to the Egyptians and the Greeks. He can reel off similarities between ancient stories, and says he doesnt just tell the stories, he feels them on some emotional level. The glory of some of these myths is that they feel right, he explains, although he also concedes that every now and then youll hit a myth and go, No, I cant really get behind that. Really, we get licked out of the ice by a cow? OK, if you say so. (Hes referring there to the myth of Audhumla, which he includes in Norse Mythology, despite his scepticism.)

As Gaiman wrestled with these stories, he says, he had no idea he was writing a topical book. But then, as political events unfolded in the second half of 2016, he could not help but draw parallels. For me, it was Ragnark, he says, referring to the apocalyptic end of the gods. It begins with a long winter, continues with earthquakes and flooding, and then the sky splits apart.

The view that Brexit and the election of President Trump have brought about chaos and even a sense of impending doom is widely held, but Gaimans version of it is particularly eloquent. I remember the 80s and the nuclear clock and the cold war and Russia and America and [thinking] I hope you guys dont press buttons and it would be very nice to not live in the shadow of everything ending, he says. But at least at that point, what you were scared of was just one action. Now one is scared of the accretion of a million actions and a million inactions.

He says there is a strange kind of magical thinking afoot and tells me about waking up the morning after Brexit in a hotel in Scotland and checking the result, then having that sort of moment at the end of Planet of the Apes where Charlton Heston sees the Statue of Liberty … I was going, Oh, no. Are you really

Gaiman has, in recent years, divided his time between the UK and the US, but he is not an American citizen and has fallen off the electoral roll in the UK, so he wasnt able to vote in either the Brexit referendum or the US election. Im frustrated not being able to vote over here, he says. Im like, well, I pay lots of taxes to the US and the UK, but I dont want to become an American citizen. I like being English. I like being British. Even when Im ashamed, Im fascinated.

Indeed, he clearly is. He does a very good imitation of the cab drivers he encountered in London leading up to the Brexit vote, who seemed to believe that, ultimately, the thing they were about to do was of no consequence: The EUs not going to let us go … . Regarding the Trump vote, he says: At the end of the day, what I think was being voted for was change. People were saying Were fed up and were not being listened to, and unfortunately that wasnt being offered by the other side. The appeal of Bernie Sanders was he was standing up there saying This thing is fucked, and the problem with Hillary was she was standing up there and saying Things are good, theyre getting better.

Genuine worry furrows Gaimans brow, but he has plans to respond to current events. His following is huge, including 2.5 million people on Twitter and the millions who read his books and his blog and watch his television shows. He intends to use that platform to highlight the plight of refugees. He hopes, too, to double down on his longstanding activism to promote freedom of speech. I wrote an essay on my blog in 2009 called Why Defend Freedom of Icky Speech?, he says, Which just becomes more and more timely. I have a 14-month-old son, and a four-month-old grandson. I have no idea what kind of world theyre going to grow up in. Im going to do my best with the time and the intellectual effort remaining to me to do whatever I can to give them a good world, he says.

Ragnark, as Gaiman writes in Norse Mythology, is of course the end of something. But there is also what will come after the end, he adds. In his version the sun comes out. Something glitters in the grass. The gods children find a set of golden chess pieces waiting for them. They arrange them on a board, and then one of them makes a move. And, Gaiman concludes, the game begins anew.

Read more: http://bit.ly/2kt7kUP

from Neil Gaiman: I like being British. Even when Imashamed, Im fascinated

[rebeccahpedersen]

Top Ten: Condo Rules You May (Or May Not…) Disagree With

TorontoRealtyBlog

Living in a condominium means living with rules, some of which you may abide by, some of which you might loathe, and some you think are unique to your stupid, annoying, awful building.

Over the years, both living in condos and selling to clients, I’ve come to learn which rules irk people the most, as well as which are common and which are not.

Let me provide some context on the top ten rules condo-owners disagree with, which of course, some of you might argue serve a purpose…

Honestly folks, I feel like I’ve already written this blog.

Ten years, 2,000+ blog posts, and while I know I’ve covered “condo rules” many times, part of me thinks I may have touched on this subject before.

We’ve talked a lot in the past about condo rules.

I wrote a blog in 2014 called, “Five Rules That Residents Of Your Condo Are Breaking.”

In 2009, I wrote, “Ignore The Rules,” again, about broken rules.

And on a related topics, in 2015 I wrote, “Top Ten Subtle Annoyances For First-Time Condo Owners.”  That was a doozie!

So while we’ve covered the ideas below before in passing, today I want to dedicate an entire post to the rules that most residents disagree with, and those that do agree with them, really think they’re necessary.

I welcome your feedback on all of these, and whether you agree or disagree, and of course, why.

10) Closing the outdoor common elements for the season.

It seems reasonable, at least to most people.

I had a client once who disagreed, and took this issue as far as he could take it.

He told me, “I’d love to be able to enjoy a fine Cuban cigar outside, on the rooftop terrace, staring at the CN Tower and city lights.  But the goddam condo insists on closing the terrace from November to March.”

He wrote letters, he solicited legal opinions, all the while, basically being the only person in the building who wanted to use the rooftop terrace, in -15 degree weather.

Sometimes, the squeaky wheel gets the grease.

But sometimes, the fact that one person out of 200-some-odd residents is complaining about a rule, simply reinforces the appropriateness of that rule.

If you’ve served on a board of directors, you know that the common elements are closed because of insurance reasons.

There’s not as much maintenance, and virtually no “risk” attributed to the elements, in spring and summer.  But come winter, management would have to salt every square inch of the rooftop terrace or other common areas, not to mention mop the hallways and stairs leading to and from the common areas, as drunk party-goers aren’t going to clean up after themselves.

Add in the higher insurance premiums associated with an outdoor space, in the winter, with high foot traffic, and just about every condominium in Toronto closes their terrace for the winter.

But as I alluded to above, there will always be people who disagree.

9) Maximum visitor parking passes issued for each unit, per month.

I know I’ve told this story before.  I just can’t find the blog…

At our condo AGM a couple of years ago, a resident stood up and said, “What’s with the maximum monthly visitor parking passes?  My girlfriend lives with me, and I’m only allowed seven passes per month?  What the hell is this?”

Agree or disagree with the rule about a maximum number of monthly visitor parking passes, but you can’t deny that the quote above illustrates exactly why the measure is put in place.

In the case above, if the girlfriend lives in the building, and wants to park her car there every night, then she should rent a parking space.

Visitor parking is for visitors, and the potential for abuse is massive.

8) Concierge cannot open door for residents.

This is a new one, eh?

Imagine coming home and carrying a dozen grocery bags, with your shoulders aching, fingers about to fall off, and smiling at the concierge – who you see every day, looking for he or she to open the door.

Then imagine the concierge – Jake, or Cathy, or whoever you see, day-in, day-out, shaking their head to say “no.”

This is how some buildings in Toronto operate.

Every resident must use their key-FOB to access the building, regardless of day, time, circumstance, or being “known” to the concierge.

It’s an across-the-board, no-room-for-grey-area approach that some management companies and/or board of directors’ have implemented to avoid the concierge having to make a decision on who they know, who they don’t, and who they might.

7) Cannot walk pets through front lobby.

A family member of mine lives in a building with this rule.

You cannot, at any time, under any circumstances, walk your pet through the front lobby.

You can however, walk your dog (or cat, or bird…) through the back lobby.

You can also, amazingly, carry your pet through the front lobby.

The rules basically boil down to the feet touching the tile.

You’re not allowed to “walk” your pet through the front lobby, but you can “bring” them through, so long as they’re being carried.

If you’ve got an 8-pound Maltese, you’re good.

If you have an 80-pound Rottweiler, you’d better have been working those biceps at the gym…

6) No storage on terraces.

This is an interesting one, since it can take many shapes and forms.

Some condominiums specifically outlaw storage units, and I’m not sure why.

A client of mine bought a condo with a large storage shed – the kind you see sitting in the parking lot on display at Home Depot, and the unit was used by the previous owners for as long as they had lived there.

Upon moving in, and using the storage shed, he received a note from his property manager saying that storage units weren’t permitted on terraces, balconies, or any exclusive-use common elements.

To make matters worse, when he refused to remove it, they fined him, and debited his bank account!

A storage shed is one thing, but some condos don’t allow any storage, ie. bicycles, winter tires, or whatever else you might store for a day, or a winter.

There’s a level of subjectivity to this too, so you don’t really know what management will have a problem with, often, until they make it your problem…

5) Gym is closed for cleaning at set times, daily.

Most condominiums with gyms have a time, every day, where the gym is closed for cleaning.

This makes sense, right?

You want a clean gym, and you want to enjoy the space.

You’re happy that the property manager is making this a priority, and rather pleased with the overall condition of the facility whenever you use it.

However, that doesn’t mean that when you see the gym is closed every day from 12pm to 1pm, that you’re going to abide by the rules.

Every man, woman, and child in the condo suffers from the same hypocritical contradiction: they want the gym cleaned, but not when they want to use it.

Let’s be honest: you don’t need to shut down the entire gym, when you need to clean it.

If you’re the cleaner, and you’re wiping down the dry sweat on the stairmaster, why can’t a guy be doing squats 200 feet away?

If you’re on the treadmill running a 5K, does it bother you that somebody is cleaning the adjacent yoga room?

This is one of those rules that just about nobody abides by, for what it’s worth…

4) Certified funds required to book moving elevator.

When you go to book the moving elevator in your building, for moving in, moving out, or for a delivery, you almost always have to provide a deposit cheque.

This makes sense, right?

No objections here.

Any time you’re turning a couch up on its side, and trying to ensure it doesn’t slam against the glass walls that surround the inside of the elevator, I think it’s fair to say you risk causing damage.

I don’t know many people who would object to the “deposit cheque necessary to book moving elevator” rule.

But what about when the deposit cheque has to be certified?

That takes things to a whole new level.

For one thing, the amount is arbitrary, and differs significantly from one building to the next.

In my building, it was $75.00 for five years, until all of a sudden, it increased to a whopping $500.

So what if a resident needed that $500 in certified funds?

First of all, it means the resident can no long say, “Oh shoot, I have a fridge coming from tomorrow, I’d better go down and book the elevator.”  Now they have to plan in advance to get to the bank, stand in line, dole out $8.00 for a bank draft, and do so before the elevator is reserved.

But isn’t $500 a lot to some people?

Aren’t there a lot of people in Toronto living month-to-month, especially those who rent, and complain that prices and rents are too high?

Maybe you’re only taking that $500 from your bank account for two or three days, but I think for some people, that’s a huge ask.

So what are the pros and cons of this approach?

Well personally, every time I write a cheque to book the moving elevator in my building, I do so on an account that has been cancelled for three years.  Not because I’m trying to stiff the condominium corporation in the event that I damage the elevator, but because that’s the cheque book that happens to be in our hall table.

So using my own situation as an example of where things can go wrong for the condominium corporation, are they within their right to ask for certified funds, or is this being over the top?

3) Must book a security guard for any usage of the party room.

Note the word “any.”

As in, if you want to use the space to play Warhammer with your old high school buddy.

As in, if you want to use the room for eight minutes, with one person, you need to book a security guard.

Oh – and perhaps we should add “Three Hour Minimum” to this rule, just for fun.

So imagine being a parent who lives in a condo with two kids, wants to use the party room for them to run around for ten minutes, and being expected to book a security guard for $28.60 per hour, for three hours.

This is how a lot of condominiums in Toronto function, and residents hate it.

Living on the floor that’s down the hall from the party room, I can tell you that I believe all parties with 20, 30, or 40 people should have a security guard standing in the hall to ensure that drunk morons don’t engage in a “who can shout louder” contest at 12:30am.

But where do you draw the line?  Do you say, “More than ten persons requires a security guard?”  Then how do you enforce that?  What if the person booking the party room says there will be eight people, but another dozen show up?

This is why the rules is often so hard-and-fast.

It goes back to the “no grey area” school of thinking with the concierges not buzzing anybody into the building.

You want to use the party room?  Book a security guard.  For one hour, or the whole night.  For your two kids, or your 40 friends from work.

Not every condominium has this rule, but many do.

2) Concierge does not accept or hold keys.

This is it, folks.

This is the rule that irks the most condo owners, and is the most disagreed-with in the city.

But it’s not the most controversial, and most talked about, and thus why it sits at #2, and not #1.  And I think you’ll see in a moment why #1 is #1…

Of course, if you’re on a board of directors in your building, and you had a hand in bringing this rule about concierges not holding keys to your building, then I’m sure you’ll post your displeasure below.

But at the risk of not remaining unbiased, let me say that I wholeheartedly disagree with this rule, for the same reason we’ve discussed over and over: a concierge is supposed to help.  The word “concierge” comes from a French root word, meaning “help.”  Or you might say it comes from the Latin “conservus” which means “fellow slave,” but either way, I believe a concierge is supposed to help residents.

Holding keys – for the dog-walker, the cleaning lady, or your mother, comes with risk and liability.  I understand that.

But unlike closing the terrace in the winter, I don’t think that refusing to hold keys for residents is reasonable, given that every resident, at some point, will want a key held.

Toronto’s downtown core is full of dog-owners, and they all have dog-walkers.  The city is also full of lazy and/or busy people who need cleaning services.  There are countless other reasons as to why you might need a key held at concierge, and this further illustrates just how important it is that a building does allow front desk, concierge, security, and the like, to hold keys.

1) No short-term rentals.

Two years ago, I don’t know that we’d even be talking about this.

And while I don’t want to think that my building is being used as a youth hostel to people who plan to stay in the unit for one night, and couldn’t possibly care less how they leave the unit or treat the building, there are a LOT of downtown Toronto residents who want to lease their unit by the night.

This point could be an entire blog post, so at the risk of being too brief, I think enough has already been said.

But there isn’t a “rule” in Toronto condos today that’s under more scrutiny than the Anti-AirBnB rule being referred to as “no short-term rentals.”

And I’d love to know your completely biased thoughts on this.  Let me know if you’d prefer to live in a building where AirBnb is allowed.

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