#people that memorize recipies scare me

[lucatielenjoyer]

As time goes on I realize that the only things I feel like bragging about are my ability to build very elaborate models (like the plywood shit that you see in souvenir shops), build minecraft castles, and parrying in Dark Souls Remastered, none of which mean anything outside of my funny little consoles and my poorly lit room.

[wonderofwillows2]

Assembly Lines

     Many people never forget specific things, very often those things are designed to be memorable and it is always towards the young those experiences are directed. It’s by design really. Culture perpetuates because the young are targeted and their memories marked by some event or another. They ascribe meaning to this and comfort as they face the march of time and its unknown destinations. This is ever more the case with a shared event that is somehow intimate and yet the same for all. So it was with my cutting. It is true that no one knows exactly how the ritual started in my culture. It is true also that it was said that foreigners brought it too us. That didn’t matter that day, when we were called to undergo our ceremony. The day when the nurses and doctors came from the cities to interrupt the quite serenity of our country life. They came with many vehicles while we had two tractor to fifty farms an they came with books and notepads while we had only chalk and slate.

    I was called with most of the young men nearing our second decade in age. We were no longer considered boys and most of us had worked with our parents on the farm for some time. Still we were used to obedience and when told to meet the small army of helpers we went willingly though with apprehension. They had erected a small town filled with tents and beds. We had none of these, they seemed new to us. Like the shinning machines on the covers of pulp comics and novels that had filtered out to us in the country. Many of our grandparents had never even attended school. It was an exciting time to meet these visitors from another world. When we had all gathered the head of the operation, a doctor with a wiry frame and sunken eyes stepped up to a podium and announced that this would be the first of an effort towards a mass circumcision. No more would the old ways prevail. We’d be cut in a sterile environment and we would be healthy.

    We were herded off into groups. Young doctors and nurses their blood pumping fast with caffeine and adrenaline gathered us into groups and took our ages, names, height, weight, and other measurements. Then we were separated further and herded off into tents. We were made to lie on beds divided by curtains and unable to identify our compatriots in the rite who appeared to us as just moving silhouettes behind the barriers. We were together in abstract and together for one purpose. All of us scared and shivering slightly. All of us unwilling to flinch before the young doctors and most importantly the pretty nurses. We were to be men that day and though we were men already it did not feel like it. We had all wondered why our parents had not had us cut earlier. It turned out they were merely waiting for a better, safer way.

    I will never forget the happy eyes and cheerful voices of the nurses who cut me. At that time they seemed divine with flawless skin, starch white uniforms. and smooth neatly coiffed hair. These were only products of their middle class life in the city but to us they seemed sent from higher places to make us better men. They did not merely take our foreskins, they made us modern with their precision clamps, red iodine, and painful but mercifully brief injections. They made us the recipients of a new rite with new techniques for a new purpose beyond the old. A calculated purpose whose outcomes could be measured. We would all be marked the same way and have neat straight scars unlike our fathers and grandfathers. The nurses would assure us all that our future wives would be happy. I know I prefer to think that mine is, though she might disagree on other things. She does say she feels cut men are better partners with more stamina. We initiates were all pioneers that day. I can think of few happier times in my life and times and that is something all the others i spoke too agreed on.

    In the end not every young man stayed among us and lived as a farmer as his parents had but I did. I know despite my interest in living in the old ways I would never consider having my sons cut in the traditional way. I love the neat straight scar those nurses gave me as they laughed and joked and tried to distract and comfort me all at once. I loved the massiveness of it and the way we all were together and apart at the same time our identities dissolved to measurements and numbers, mere parts of sheets and schedules. I loved the neat modern lines of the tent and shinning instruments. I felt then like a voyager and it has been a wonderful voyage since. I wonder how many others feel like me and know with pride that it is many. We sacrificed together as one and it will always be for the best we did. I hope you enjoy my brief diatribe and my experiences of being a young man made to feel like a boy once again.

[anangelicday-mrwolf]

Wolfsbane : Noblesse Fanfic (post-ending)

(previous chapter)

Chapter 30 – Wrong Start

“I give you 10 seconds for you to confess, whoever it is.”

Muzaka’s statement resonated in the air, left unanswered by his closest and most trusted warriors.

None of the four warriors could fancy what was in their lord’s head, and they were busy exchanging looks among themselves, until Garda, as the most experienced of all warriors, decided to be the vanguard.

“Pardon me, my lord, but... I am afraid we have no idea what you want to discuss with us.”

“Isn’t it obvious? I mean, can I make it any more obvious?”

Muzaka sighed from the bottom of his guts, as if he just encountered the gravest tragedy he has ever witnessed.

“Don’t you hear that? Our little girl throwing a raging, hissy fit as we speak.”

Oh.

No mouth in the area ever moved, but an identical sound rang in their heads in synchronization.

In fact, questions had been ringing in their heads even before Muzaka summoned them.

‘What on earth had happened to Lunark?’

‘Why is she so mad?’

‘Shouldn’t we stop her? At this rate, she’ll blow up at least 10% of our land.’

By the time damages caused by Union’s biological weapons were almost as good as gone, out of the blue thundered new cacophony undeniably from a work of destruction.

It turned out Lunark was to blame, slashing and trashing like a bull that has spotted a red flag, as reported by two rookie warriors that were dispatched to find out the cause of it.

And she was doing one hell of a job, so vicious that they could not even get close, let alone ask her what was wrong.

“But it seems her reasons are still functioning. She’s wreaking havoc at that infamous forest. But really, does anybody have any idea what’s gotten into the girl? Whether it is condolence or understanding or reprimand that she needs, I’ll be able to choose one only when I find out why she’s doing... All that. Anybody? Please?”

Nobody moved a muscle to Muzaka’s inquiry-slash-request, for they were just as clueless as he was.

That is, all except one.

Garda learned about Lunark’s rampage from new warriors, who were already throwing a talk party of their own regarding the grey-haired warrior’s behavior, and she ran to the spot right away to check what was going on.

And she could pick up Lunark’s voice even before reaching the forest, from which the former usually stays away.

“Aaaaaaaaaagh!!”

She managed to catch a glimpse of the younger warrior from afar, who was screeching an array of unrecognizable vowels and syllables, with her hands shifted into battle stance as she was hurling towards whatever she could reach, air, trees, or leaves afloat.

Garda had no choice but to retreat, partially because she got scared for her own life, and partially because she was beyond puzzled, never having seen Lunark so unbridled.

Luckily, she could spot Lunark’s face right before she turned away, which left a concerning impression in her head.

‘It looks to me she isn’t mad. She’s whipping up embarrassment from the depth of her soul. Just what could mortify and set her off like that?’

*****

Few days later, Frankenstein’s island

‘Just what did he do?’

The white-haired man had been asking himself ever since the lord of the island returned at last.

He did remember that Frankenstein said he would be visiting wolfkind; however, he was wondering whether he ate the Dark Spear on his way.

Because the atmosphere from the blonde human was so dark, so violent.

That was when 3rd Elder’s experience with mind games from Union kicked in, and he attempted to analyze Frankenstein’s mental state based on what he could make out of his islemate’s facial expressions.

As a result, he could identify a number of emotions: extreme irritation, fury just as extreme, remorse greater than either of the two, and, most importantly, self-hate.

Because of which, 3rd got highly conscious of his every breath and step, despite the fact that he was lodging on this island upon Frankenstein’s permission and consent.

On the other hand, unbeknownst to the scientist, he terrified that the former could have noticed his alliance with Helga.

So he ended up asking Frankenstein if there was something troubling him, ready for a lethal slap in the face.

It’s nothing.

Came a reply with a face that THERE IS DEFINITELY SOMETHING, before the speaker fled the scene.

That did not do any good to relieve 3rd Elder of his fear, but at least he was convinced that the reason behind Frankenstein’s foul mood lay not with him.

When he walked away, Frankenstein’s steps were immediate, rushed as if he never wanted to talk about it ever again.

‘That just made it more curious for me, but I guess it’s none of my business, whatever it is. What matters is that Frankenstein knows nothing about my deal. Speaking of which, looks like the recorder and tracker in me really didn’t work.’

He already knew the answer; had they worked properly, upon his return Frankenstein would have cornered him almost as if he were going for a round of a full torture.

So all in all, regardless of what had taken place with the wielder of Dark Spear, 3rd Elder could not deny that it was all good for him.

It was so good to know Helga’s promise came with a reason.

It was very good to find out her accomplice was truly talented.

‘And I’d say she’s also talented, having discovered and won over such competence, especially considering the original alliance of the said competence.’

Though Helga did relay to him the course through which her accomplice had agreed to act as an accomplice, 3rd Elder was still mystified.

‘Anyways, I’d say nobody knows about my ‘betrayal.’ Which means I should focus on my job and do it right, on the day she mentioned.’

*****

Time never stopped its magic, and at last came the day marked on everyone’s calendar.

<I was wondering whether we could make it...>

<But here we are.>

“Haha, amen to both of you.”

Tao, who had found himself in front of computers for once, laughed at the screens hosting virtual conversation with four recipients at once.

Nonetheless, the man’s face held a hint of anxiety, and Adne somehow detected it like an X-ray.

<Mr. Tao, was it...? There’s no need to be so anxious.>

“Haha, was it that obvious? How embarrassing. And I have been calling myself an expert, with tons and variety of experience when it comes to computers.”

Tao laughed, scratching a side of his head, when Adne offered a word of comfort.

<Experiences does not really grow on par with poise. Besides, anxiety is not so bad, although this is from someone who just told you not to be so anxious. It’s a proof that you are responsible and conscious of the weight of your task.>

“My, I’m starting to feel small in your presence. We should be calling you the real expert.”

<An expert? Me? That’s preposterous. I am no expert.>

But I wanted to be one.

Tao blinked, wondering if he had just heard the werewolf doctor whispering.

Before he could ask if he had said something, however, Adne beamed in satisfaction.

<Most importantly, Mr. Frankenstein recommended you. And that’s more than enough reason for me to trust you.>

“Aww, come on, boss! You should really stop being a proud daddy.”

<I dare you to shout that in my face one more time.>

Tao felt his body turning rigid as a biting voice speared his eardrums.

So did Takio and M-21, watching the scene right next to his chair.

Frankenstein’s face, lighting up an entire monitor that was assigned to him, was brimming with annoyance.

<Thanks a lot, Tao. I’m already starting to think that I really shouldn’t have volunteered as an audience.>

“Aww, don’t be so mean, boss. There’s no way we’re leaving you out for the grand premiere of the event.”

<I would like to second that.>

Said Lascrea, who had been listening like a rock until then.

Because she was standing next to Yuhyung, who decided to be the operator for Lukedonia, only part of her face was visible.

The only one who has not spoken was the doctor from KSA.

Or rather, he decided not to speak, overwhelmed by the presence of werewolves, nobles, Frankenstein, and a group of people who had shared with him blood and sweat in battles.

But of course, that did not mean KSA would be left unspoken for the duration of the event, though it was because Tao directed a word to everyone at the scene.

“So, are we all ready? Status report, please.”

<Yep! All set!>

<Uh, same here...>

<...I believe we are ready as well.>

Adne was the last to send an okay, after a bit of delay, to which Tao responded with a nod completely void of a smile.

“So, shall we begin?”

Right on cue, Yuhyung took the invisible mike from Tao.

<Now, please follow the instructions I had left for you. First, run the program I installed for you.>

Tao’s fingers danced across the keyboard, for he had fully memorized Yuhyung’s instruction manual; and Adne and KSA’s doctor followed suit.

The two humans provided feedback whenever things were lost or stuck in the middle, and they reached step by step closer to the initiation of the QuadraNet.

By then M-21, Takio, and even Lascrea were having a hard time hiding their excitement.

“Okay, we’re almost there! Just a little bit more!”

Tao’s encouragement fueled everybody to the last stage.

<Now, once this file is activated, all four servers will be linked. And like I told you a number of times, we must activate the file at the exact same moment.>

“On a count of three. One... Two...”

Three.

Four fingers stabbed the enter key in unison, and not long after they held their breath in waiting, pleasing hum of machines and blue light began their duet.

<...Well? It looks like things went okay here.>

Asked a voice from monitor connected to the KSA’s headquarter, somewhere between anticipation and concern.

<W-w-we’re okay!>

<Uh, same here...>

Came voices wild with wonder, and Tao was about to laugh in reply, when an eerie whirring noise, pitched so high and so ominous, began to bore through everyone’s ears.

The fact that it took place just when they were literally less than an inch away from completion was horrifying enough, but they had yet to realize the real horror was yet to reveal itself.

Beep. Beep. Beep.

Beep-beep-beep-beep.

BEEEEEEEEEP!!!!!!

Monitors linking Lukedonia, KSA, and wolfkind also emitted similar noises, and soon Tao found his screens being painted with tiny numbers and alphabets one by one.

“Tao? What is it?”

“What’s going on?”

Barked Takio and M-21 in alarm; they did not define themselves as computer-friendly type, but they had enough knowledge to tell that such phenomenon takes place usually when there is a technical issue or its sort.

Not to mention Tao’s face was all they needed to see that something has gone terribly wrong.

“No, no, no...! Our server...!”

Tao yelled as he was slamming the keyboard with his entire fingers.

And right then Murphy’s Law decided to spit in their faces.

Pzzt...!

Everyone’s face blinked off as if promised, and instead the monitors were refilled with noises that made the RK’s eyes bleed just by staring.

“What the heck is going on...?!”

*****

“Tao? Mr. Jang? Doctor? Dr. Adne?”

Frankenstein was almost wailing for everyone’s name as well.

To no avail, of course.

“What is it? Just tell me what the hell it is!”

Frankenstein’s cry scattered into an echo unreciprocated, as he was clutching onto his monitor.

So he had no idea there was a pair of blue eyes watching him from his back.

‘Stage 1 is complete.’

Cause disturbance with everyone’s server the moment QuadraNet comes alive.

Therefore, make sure no one can pay attention to anything other than the sudden technical chaos, including what he and Helga will stir up in the future.

It was not an easy task, but they made it.

The 3rd Elder silently removed himself from the back of the stage, his mind winding back to the face of their accomplice, who happened to be featuring on one of Frankenstein’s monitors just a while ago.

(next chapter)

Perhaps it would feel a little rushed to bring about trouble so soon, when the previous chapter featured Frankenstein and Lunark’s first kiss, but now things will start taking the wrong turns. I mean, it’s no fun if there are no troubles or challenges in a fic lol. By the way, I started adding links on each chapter that can take you to previous/next chapter (you can find the link to previous chapter at the top, and the link to the next chapter at the bottom). I’ll add the links to all previous chapters very soon!

[malecsecretsanta]

Merry Christmas, @forensicsisabelle!

Read on AO3

******

Your heart is bigger than our Christmas tree

“Magnus!” Alec shouted. “Where are the lollipops?”

“In your hand, darling? Magnus said slowly.

“No, I’m talking about the reindeer shaped lollipops.”

“Oh!, I saw them a minute ago. Wait.” Magnus’s eyes scanned the long table full with candies.

They were filling Christmas stockings with candies and little toys for the kids in the orphanage. “There” Magnus said when we found the bag with the lollipops.

“Thanks.”

The Christmas stockings were courtesy of Magnus’s magic. Alec smiled when he saw that Magnus had sent money to the store.

And though that was solved with magic the couple decided to fill the stockings with their hands. It was fun.

The large table had 64 Christmas stockings and Alec and Magnus already had filled 39. Alec had said to Magnus that he would finish the task while Magnus cook.

Magnus had the stove and oven full. He already baked Christmas tree shaped cookies and he was waiting for them to get cold. He also had his hands in the turkey and there was pasta and cooked ham with maple in the stove.

Alec had made the dessert the night before and it was already in the fridge. Magnus screamed when he saw his cooking timer didn’t sound and he hurried to open the oven. Alec went to the kitchen.

“Are you okay?”

Magnus checked all the food. Nothing was burned. Perfect cooking.

“Yes, everything is fine.” Magnus winked.

“Okay.” Alec didn’t ask and he disappeared and went to his work.

He had found his rhythm. He grabbed a stocking and walked around the table while grabbing the candies. At the end he chose a toy. Though he wasn’t a big fan of candies he felt like a little kid with all those bags full of candies. There were lollipops, chocolates, bubblegum, hard candies, skittles, mints, etc.

Magnus and Alec had went on candy shopping. They chose everything they liked and a thing or two more. They were both excited, it wasn’t the first time they did something like that but every time felt exciting.

Magnus used to donate money or cook for people in refugees. About two years ago he decided to make something different, to give to the kids a proper Christmas. Alec was more than happy to help.

He had smiled when his boyfriend had told him the idea. He felt so fortunate for having him in his life. He was a beautiful person.

Magnus took a break and went to see how was his boyfriend doing. He found him singing a Christmas carol in quiet voice. He smiled. What a sweet sight. Alec was doing his work with concentration so he didn’t notice Magnus until he felt his arms around his waist. Magnus’s head in his shoulder and Alec nuzzled his nose with Magnus’s cheek.

The warlock let his arms fell and Alec stopped his work not before he memorized the candy he was about to put in the stocking.

“Aren’t you a dedicated Christmas dwarf?”

Alec wrinkled his nose. “The little things that help Santa?”

“Yep. A hotter version.”

Alec’s cheeks became red but he smiled. “What about you, sparkly dwarf, how you’re your cooking?”

“Very well. We need to have a good cook in this couple, you know.” Magnus said, teasing.

“Ha-ha. Very funny. You can’t insult my abilities.”

“Okay, you’re right. Just your family’s cooking skills.”

“I can live with that. And just to prove my point..again, have a taste.” Alec grabbed a fork with pie, the slice he had been eating because he needed food while he was doing the Christmas stockings. Magnus ate from the fork and hummed.

“A man of many talents, like I said.”

“Well, we can’t all be a powerful warlock, some of us need to have many skills.”

“Hey! I could’ve summoned all the food but instead I’m making it.” Magnus made a false angry look.

Alec just smiled. “Don’t you have work to do?”

“Oh, and here I am making your day shine. Excuse me if I disturbed your labor.”

“You make my day shining even if you are in the kitchen.”

Alec thought he wasn’t good with words but Magnus didn’t complain, Alec walking with his heart in his sleeve was everything he could’ve ever asked for.

“But I did say that so you don’t feel scared of burning the food.”

“I know. And I love you have the teasing mood on.”

“You love me anyways.”

“I do.” Magnus searched for Alec’s hands and pulled him closer. The shorter man kissed Alec slowly. Alec let go Magnus’s hands so he could grab him by the waist. Magnus let his hands wander to Alec’s neck.

The kiss was almost lazy, because they didn’t have a worry in the world. Sure, they could be called for a demon emergency but in this moment they were fine, his friends and family were alright and they could get lost in happiness.

And that little piece of happiness ended with the sound of the cooking timer. Magnus huffed.

“We should call the timer ‘Jace’.”

“It’s a duck shaped timer, I think it suits him.”

Magnus gave him a last peck and went to the kitchen. Magnus set the recipients in the table. All the food was ready as well as the Christmas stockings. Alec put the lemon pie, the cheesecake, and the cake in the table too. That’s when Magnus’s magic appeared again. He multiplied the dishes, preserving the taste that just a homemade dish has.

The couple agreed to do the delivery in the mundane way. The mundanes in the orphanage needed to see them arriving in the cab. A cab full of food.

A woman with long hair opened the door, immediately she smiled and let the couple enter. There was a blonde woman singing while she swept. And a tall man was setting the tables.

They all stopped their activities and went to say hello to the couple. By that time they were well known for all the workers.

“The kids are in the yard.” Lou, the blonde woman said.

“Wonderful, because we have this Christmas stockings. We thought you could hide them and make them appear trough de night.” Magnus said, pointing at the two big black bags that Alec was carrying.

The man, named John helped Alec with a bag and both disappeared trough the last door. Another two women and a man appeared later, they went to the cab for the food.

When Alec and John came back, Lou said it was time to eat. Miranda, the lady who opened the door went to the yard and then all the kids were taking turns to hug Magnus and Alec.

When all the food was served, Miranda said the couple should give a speech. Magnus was the first and then Alec. They all said cheers with juice and ate.

After the meal, the kids began to play with the couple. Magnus pretended to be a thief while a group of kids chase him, and Alec was the guest of honor of a tea party. When Magnus had the time, he watched his boyfriend, he knew Alexander was going to be a great father, he just wished he could be as great as him. He was certain one day he and Alec will be parents, he didn’t know when but he knew it was going to happen and that thought made him more than happy. What Magnus didn’t know is that Alec had the same feeling, and though he and Magnus haven’t talked about having kids, the thought didn’t feel strange or scary. He knew some day it was going to happen and that day would bring even more joy to the couple.

The goodbyes were sad but there was also the knowledge that they were going to come back, so the kids gave them a kiss and said thanks. The workers said thanks too and then the couple leave the orphanage.

“It breaks my heart to see all of them alone.”

“I know, but they are not alone Magnus, they have Lou, Carol, John and the others, and they also have the other kids, and as Miranda said they have many adoption applications, they are just verifying that the couples are what the kids need. And as for the others, they are all incredible, sadly we can’t do anything but expect them to meet a great family but while that happens we are doing what we can, and that is bring joy to them.”

“My Alexander, you always know what to say. You are right, we can continue to do this. It really makes me happy. I just wish I could do more, you know.”

“Of course you do. You are always trying to fix the world. And that’s one of the reasons I love you.” Alec kissed Magnus’s nose. “You have a precious heart and with that you can keep bringing happiness to this place and others. And I always be by your side.”

“Of course you will, you have a big heart, Alexander. I knew it from the second I met you.” Magnus didn’t hide the tear that fell from his eye.

“My warlock, are we in a battle of size of hearts? Because if that’s so, your heart is bigger than our Christmas tree and that thing is huge.”

Magnus chuckled. “Not huge enough.”

“It’s almost 10 ft.” Alec said.

“We could have had a bigger tree.”

“But if you’d had a bigger heart you’d be an angel.”

“Shadowhunter, are you embracing your mundane part?” Magnus asked because in the Clave’s eyes an angel is a powerful being not the mundane version.

Even if Magnus was teasing him Alec knew Magnus understood what he had meant. And the warlock found himself falling in love with his warrior even more.

Alec intertwined his hand with Magnus’s.

“Come on, we will see the kids the next week but now we have a dinner to attend and your mother will be angry if we are late.” Magnus said.

“We won’t be late and she won’t be mad because you and your charming self are going to steal the night.”

“If you say so.”

“Yep. And I’m always right.”

Magnus rolled his eyes but smiled anyways, and began to walk. 

The evening was beautiful, he opened a portal and the couple walked through it.

[adventuresofarainbowcrip]

Some tips on how to handle SSI interactions and communication effectively, courteously and confidently!

Here are some tips for dealing with SSI. Some (haha most) of these are things my mom told me when I became responsible for dealing with all of my own money about 4 years ago. This is based off of my own experiences and opinions so I understand it might be different for you.

-Memorize your SSI number. That way you can have it whenever you need it. Don’t share it with anyone or write it down anywhere public. 

-No one in the SSI system talks to each other, so it’s good to keep records of when you did things. For example dates of when you spoke on the phone or met with someone. I’m not always the best at this myself. They certainly aren’t keeping track of that stuff, so unfortunately it’s up to you. You will likely be taken more seriously if you can present them with evidence that you did talk to someone or received mail about this or that. 

-KEEP ALL OF THE MAIL THEY SEND YOU. Do not get rid of it. File it somewhere, have it somewhere you can easily access and have as reference and evidence of their communication with you. Again, it’s unfortunate that this is all up to you, I agree. But it’s better than not having what you need to support what you are trying to accomplish.

-Report any income changes ASAP. If you work, contact SSI as soon as you get paid from your new job to give them the information about it. Then, submit your income as timely as you can each month. They want you to submit income before the 10th of each month, so try to keep as close to that as you can, but obviously sometimes life happens and it’s a bit late. When I submit my income, I have to wait for one paystub to show up in the mail, print off the other, scan the mailed one AND THEN send it to them. There was an app that worked for a while where you could submit income but that’s not working anymore so it’s a whole process. They hold people to a double standard, because they are allowed to be late and make mistakes, but they penalize SSI recipients for every little thing it seems. 

- Also if you work : Keep all of your paystubs! It is important to keep these even months after they have been given to you, because you might need to refer to them if they ever ask you about past income. 

-Before you call SSI to speak to someone about an issue, know what it is you want to say (write down what you want to say if that helps). If you are dealing with an issue like I am where you are unsure of what to say and how to advocate for yourself, ask someone you trust to help you. My mentor gave me advice on what to say before I called, since I’ve never dealt with this before. 

-Wait while on hold : If you call SSI to speak to someone on the phone, you will be put on hold, sometimes for 20, 30, 40 minutes. If it’s a really important matter to you, I suggest waiting on hold even though it sucks that you have to wait that long. Do something else quiet while you wait, like organizing a drawer in your desk, going over your calendar, or making a to-do list.

-The person on the phone is a human just like you : Once you get an actual person on the phone, remember first that they are just a person. Whatever is happening to you is not specifically their fault. They are just the person who happened to answer your call. It is important to treat them with respect, because if you just get upset, that will likely not go well. 

- Do your best to speak with confidence, even if you are nervous inside : When you are explaining your situation, try your best to do it with confidence. I know from experience that this can be hard. In the past, I have not seen myself as being good at advocating for myself, or pushing back respectfully. When I called someone to speak about the overpayment issue in my last post, the person on the phone at first just kept saying that I needed to pay back the money. This is the point when past me would have given in and been too scared to press on. But I imagined what my strong mom would do, she would not back down. When I explained that I could not pay it back, and said that it would create a financial hardship for me, I did so with conviction in my voice even though I was nervous. I was respectful but also I was not giving up or giving in.  I was shaking and was definitely nervous but I stood my ground. 

My mentor Nikki and her coworker were with me when I made the call, listening quietly on speakerphone. When I was finished, they told me that I did a great job which made me feel good. 

- If you have to fill out paperwork for SSI, get help if you need it. The form I had to fill out to request a waiver was 14 pages long. They do not make this stuff easy, and I believe it is a deterrent to people actually getting what they deserve. They don’t want people to actually stand up for themselves, or they don’t expect that perhaps. Many people who are being asked to pay back money unfairly may see that form and not understand it, or not have the time or energy to pursue the matter, so they give up and end up in a mess.  The SSI form I filled out was long, did not have easy to understand language (really ableist to those who have trouble understanding language or bureaucratic forms and processes) and took a lot of work to fill out. I had help from my mentor and her coworker, and it took us about an hour and a half to do the whole thing. If you have a family member, friend, mentor or personal support worker who can help you, ask them for help. Just because you can’t understand or do this on your own doesn’t mean you should not do it.

I am getting better at handling this stuff every day. It takes energy and work, but it is important. Your voice deserves to be heard, and you have the right to advocate for yourself. 

See you in the next post, and as a 31 -year- old! (my birthday is tomorrow, January 23rd). I hope you all are well, and staying safe from COVID.

Nirvana

[dailydaveeddiggs]

Today, thanks to “Hamilton,” Diggs, 35, may be the more established half of the “Blindspotting” duo, but that wasn’t the case when he moved back to Oakland after earning his theater degree from Brown. Though four years younger, Casal had already made a name for himself on the Bay Area spoken-word scene, from which he was plucked to appear on HBO’s “Def Poetry.”

Casal had set up a recording studio with the aim of finding other musicians to collaborate with, reaching out to Diggs on the strength of a demo CD the rapper had recorded in his college dorm room. The friendship took hold almost immediately: That first night, they created a few songs, which led to albums, live performances (with a group they dubbed the Getback) and countless sketches and online videos.

“Rafael was the most famous person I knew,” Diggs recalls. “He had really tapped into the YouTube audience pretty early.”

Casal’s videos caught the attention of Jess Calder (then Jess Wu). The young producer, partnered in Snoot with her husband, Keith Calder, had seen a couple of his spoken-word performances and was struck by both Casal’s charisma and the fact that he appeared to be a natural-born storyteller.

“In my mind, anyone who can tell a great story can definitely translate that to film,” explains the producer, who contacted Casal and proposed they meet for coffee. She asked if he’d ever thought about writing a screenplay.

“I’d thought about theater a lot, [but at that age] you’re trying to get $5 for something at McDonald’s. A movie is millions of dollars away,” says Casal. But he was definitely intrigued, and began fleshing out a character that was loosely autobiographical. Things started to click about a year and a half later, when the Snoot duo asked Casal to perform at a screening of their documentary “Thunder Soul” at a January 2009 presidential inauguration event in Washington, D.C. Casal couldn’t make it but suggested they book Diggs in his place.

“Daveed came and did like 15 minutes of freestyle at the event and kind of blew our minds,” recalls Keith Calder. “We were immediately like, ‘Rafael, the movie’s gotta be about the two of you!’”

And from that moment forward, “Blindspotting” became the story of two friends of different races forced to consider the world from one another’s viewpoints, all set against the rapidly changing Bay Area backdrop.

Casal hails from Berkeley, the city directly north of Diggs’ Oakland. But they both attended Berkeley High School and later split a four-bedroom house with two other friends for $1,200. “I can’t even imagine what that place would cost now,” Casal says.

Gentrification, fueled by the tech boom, has transformed the neighborhoods they once knew. “Seventh Street is just a BART station and a post office now, but in the ’30s and ’40s, that was one of the jazz and blues centers of the world,” Diggs says. The last of the local music venues, Esther’s Orbit Room (where Diggs’ brother had been a bartender), finally shut down in 2010. His mother and father (also born in Oakland) both had to move, priced out by the newcomers.

Though not a musical in the conventional sense, “Blindspotting” was born out of a desire to translate spoken-word poetry into cinema. “There are versions where it was damn near a poem the whole time,” Diggs says.

From 2009 onward, he and Casal worked on the script together, huddling over the same laptop since they had only a single licensed copy of Final Draft between them.

“We were trying to find a recipe for a world where verse could exist without it feeling like there’s a deliberate shift every time it goes into a number,” Casal explains. “The Bay Area is known for slang and for turn of phrase. It’s the evolution of pimp culture, so heightened language is already very prevalent in the way people relate to each other.”

For the next several years, Diggs and Casal spent their time driving up and down Interstate 5 between the Bay Area and Los Angeles, parking out front of wherever Snoot headquarters happened to be at the time and sleeping in their car if needed. They wrote draft after draft of “Blindspotting,” pitching the changes to the Calders while using Snoot’s facilities to work on music videos and other projects.

“I’ve always felt like our offices were a place where they should feel safe to create art,” says Jess Calder.

Before Diggs and Casal could complete a shooting version of the script, they were pulled away by other professional opportunities. Casal went off to teach verse-driven theater at the University of Wisconsin-Madison for three years. And, for Diggs, “Hamilton” happened.

“The thing about this business is you never know if something’s a break,” says Diggs. “I met Lin-Manuel Miranda because of a clerical error.” Diggs showed up for the same substitute teaching job as one of Miranda’s friends, Anthony Veneziale, who was also a rapper. They hit it off, and Veneziale invited Diggs to freestyle with his group, of which Miranda was a member. Later, when it came time to do an early reading of “Hamilton,” Miranda remembered Diggs and his rapid-fire delivery. “I was invited because I have this particular skill set that allows me to learn a lot of things very quickly,” recalls Diggs, who had just five days to memorize the show’s most demanding part. “I assumed they would replace me because they had plenty of Broadway performers to choose from.”

Except that Miranda didn’t replace Diggs, who spent nearly a year and a half with the production. “Before leaving ‘Hamilton,’ I made this comment to one of my agents,” Diggs recalls. “I was ready to go, but scared that I wouldn’t make any money again, and he said, ‘Don’t worry about that,’ and promptly booked my life with all these things.”

The day after his last “Hamilton” performance in mid-2016, Diggs found himself shooting the movie “Wonder,” starring Julia Roberts. The following week, he began working on ABC’s “Black-ish.” That was swiftly followed by a recurring role on “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” which had to be juggled amid a long-planned national tour with his experimental rap group, Clipping.

Into the midst of this whirlwind came the moment for which Diggs and Casal had long been waiting. Last March, the Snoot producers told them they had the greenlight to make “Blindspotting,” provided the duo could get their script in shape to shoot in June.

“What if I move to L.A. in two days and I write it for a month?” Casal recalls asking — and that’s exactly what he did, undertaking a page-one overhaul while Diggs’ fledgling screen career kept him busy.

“I was on airplanes every other day,” says Diggs, “so really the only through line were these midnight phone calls from Rafael to talk about this thing we’d been talking about for a decade.”

Excited about the prospect of finally making the movie, Diggs kept a rare 25-day window open in June for the shoot. Casal managed to get the rewrite done in four weeks. Reaching out to another old friend, they brought in director López Estrada, who immediately began pre-production.

The project’s Oakland focus attracted some production talent whom the producers normally couldn’t afford, including DP Robby Baumgartner, who had worked in the lighting department for Spike Lee, Paul Thomas Anderson and Alejandro González Iñárritu, and who brought the lighting crew from “Moonlight” aboard.

“We suddenly had this amazing team of people from the Bay Area,” says Diggs. “Doing something with your friends at a high level, that’s a dream.”

After production wrapped, Snoot submitted a rough cut to Sundance, which recommended the music-driven film for a Dolby Family Sound Fellowship. “Blindspotting” is one of two 2018 Sundance selections to have earned the generous post-production grant, making it possible for the filmmakers to upgrade their mix in time for its festival debut. (Past recipients of the grant include “Mudbound” and “Beasts of the Southern Wild.”)

Thanks to the grant, Diggs, Casal and other members of the production team — including López Estrada and the Calders — spent late December camped out on the Paramount Pictures lot on the same Technicolor stage where Michael Bay mixes his “Transformers” films.

On the same day of Variety’s visit, Diggs and Casal wrote a short piece of original music to replace a few seconds of temp score. Since they came up with the cue themselves, that means they can later expand it into a full-blown song for the soundtrack.

It’s the kind of on-the-fly challenge that has fueled the duo’s creative partnership for more than a decade — though “Blindspotting” is the first time they’ve been able to combine their writing, performance and musical talents to such a degree.

“As an artist, the only thing you ever want to do is something that requires every part of yourself,” Diggs says. “And it is so rare when that happens.” (x)

LOVE the insight as to how this all came together.

[kathleenseiber]

Frank Fenner – Australian original

Best known for his role in eradicating smallpox, Fenner was also passionate about the environment.

Each year the Australian Government recognises the nation’s scientists and science educators by awarding the Prime Minister’s Prizes for Science. Along with providing recognition for achievements, recipients share up to $A750,000 in prize money. One of the most important accolades on offer is the Frank Fenner Prize for Life Scientist of the Year.

Yet few people know of Fenner’s achievements.

Frank Fenner was born in Ballarat, Victoria, on 21 December 1914, but the family moved to Adelaide, South Australia, in 1916.

Fenner attended the University of Adelaide and received bachelor degrees in medicine and surgery in 1938, and a Doctor of Medicine in 1942. He also received a Diploma of Tropical Medicine from the University of Sydney in 1940.

A biography published by the John Curtin School of Medical Research, part of the Australian National University, says that from 1940 to 1946, Fenner “served in Egypt and Papua New Guinea as an officer in the Australian Army Medical Corps, where he worked on the malarial parasite”.

At the conclusion of the Second World War, he went to the Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne, where he studied the virus that causes smallpox in mice.

In 1949 he received a fellowship to study in the United States at the Rockefeller Institute in New York, where he carried out research on tubercle bacilli, the bacterium that causes tuberculosis.

Returning to Australia in 1949, he was appointed professor of microbiology at the then-new John Curtin School of Medical Research, where he continued his research into viruses, “in particular the myxoma virus. He was interested in the balance between virus virulence and host resistance.”

A 2011 article published by the CSIRO, titled “Myxomatosis to control rabbits”, describes how Fenner, “who had already established an international reputation for his work on Ectromelia or mousepox (smallpox of mice), went on to make major contributions to myxoma virus research ranging from epidemiology to molecular genetics. He published detailed findings on the pathogenesis, morphology, classification, relationship with other poxviruses, and immunity.”

Rabbits had been introduced to Australia in 1859 “by a wealthy Victorian grazier keen on the sport of hunting”, but “soon millions of rabbits were competing with Australia’s livestock for feed and were damaging the environment”.

The initial release of the myxoma virus led to “a dramatic reduction of Australia’s rabbit population. Within two years of the virus’ release in 1950, Australia’s wool and meat production recovered from the rabbit onslaught to the tune of $68 million.”

The CSIRO also recounts a memorable public scare over the simultaneous outbreak of human encephalitis in northern Victoria.

To calm public anxiety that myxomatosis might have been the cause of this deadly human brain disease, Fenner, along with CSIRO chairman Ian Clunies Ross and renowned Australian scientist Macfarlane Burnet, “injected themselves with myxoma virus. They were unaffected, proving conclusively that the suggestion was without foundation.”

In 1969, Fenner joined an international group working under the World Health Organisation with the aim of eradicating smallpox from the world.

Credit: Wikimedia Commons

In a series of interviews given to the Australian Academy of Science in 1992 and 1993, Fenner described how the smallpox eradication program was set up in 1967.

“It was known from 1958 that another virus caused a smallpox-like disease in monkeys – it was called monkeypox virus, naturally enough,” Fenner said.

“I was a member of the small committee of virologists that met for the first time in Moscow in 1969 to discuss whether this virus might constitute an animal reservoir of smallpox. I later became chairman of that committee, and from that I just got increasingly involved, not in the actual eradication program but in trying to certify that a country or a continent was free of smallpox. Ultimately, I was chairman of the Global Commission for the Certification of Smallpox Eradication – a long-sounding title for the commission and a very challenging role for me.

“Finally, we got signatures from every country in the world that there had been no cases of smallpox in the last two years, and certified that smallpox had been globally eradicated,” Fenner said.

In 1980 Fenner presented a report to the World Health Assembly announcing the eradication of the disease.

He said that he “felt a big responsibility to get those 20 people, from 18 different countries … to agree to a series of 19 recommendations. They finally did that, an historic moment, and so we had champagne at 3.30 in the afternoon on Sunday, 9 December. The WHO don’t often have champagne there, and certainly not on Sunday afternoon. But we thought it was a worthy occasion.”

As an active environmentalist, Fenner worked with the Centre for Resource and Environmental Studies at Australian National University, served as vice-president of the Australian Conservation Foundation, and was a member of the scientific advisory board of the UN Environment Program.

He made headlines around the world in 2010 when he described the potential end of humanity on Earth within 100 years.

“We’re going to become extinct,” he said. “Whatever we do now is too late.

“Climate change is just at the very beginning. But we’re seeing remarkable changes in the weather already.

“Homo sapiens will become extinct, perhaps within 100 years. A lot of other animals will, too. It’s an irreversible situation. I think it’s too late.”

Frank Fenner died in Canberra on 22 November 2010. In its obituary, the The Guardian called him “indisputably one of Australia’s greatest scientists”.

Frank Fenner – Australian original published first on https://triviaqaweb.weebly.com/

[gotravel2fly]

From India, with love

repost from 21st November 2019 on gotravel2fly

Bir Billing take-off site

Going to India for 3 weeks this year was a rushed decision and everything had to be planned in only one month. We wanted to catch the best possible time for flying in Bir, so we decided that mid-October - mid-November is the best time for traveling and for flying there.The result was amazing, we had the best adventure ever in discovering this country, the people and their culture. Of course, just a tiny little part of India, but it is a start. We've met a few people we already knew from Colombia and lots of other people from all over the world.Places like Bir in India or Roldanillo in Colombia are spots for paraglider pilots eager to fly many hours per day, many days in a row, but suitable from beginner to very experienced level. Bir offers a large range of types of flying: for beginner level there can be local flying and small xc flights, for intermediate level there can be XC flying on the front ridges and for experienced level there can be flying in the back, on higher peaks and can be transformed in vol-biv very easily so this type of flying needs to be very well planned in advance, with full equipment on.

Getting to Bir, Himachal Pradesh region, is an adventure itself, because the place is quite remote. We got our cheapest plane tickets with a 9h stopover in Istanbul, so we had a very short flight from Bucharest and almost a full day of maybe visiting Istanbul. So we found out that Turkish Airlines has some city tours for people who have big stopovers and we made it in the last minute to a 6h guided tour, with lunch included in the old city center and visits the Blue Mosque and Aya Sophia. It worth every minute of it and we really enjoyed this tour.Unfortunately getting back at the airport we found out that our flight to New Delhi was delayed with 2h40min so we missed our connection bus to Dharamshala.We bought our sim cards for getting an Indian telephone number and Internet but the guy said that it wouldn't work in the next 12h..so I couldn't reach my friend in New Delhi who would have helped me get another good option for arriving in Bir.So our spontaneous plan B was negotiating for 2h30 for a cab in the airport to get us directly to Bir on the same day.Our first stop by cab was in a vegetarian restaurant Shiva, where all the food was very spicy, even the bread. I think the food would be tastier without all the spices, but that s just me.After 12h of waiting for the sim cards to activate, we discovered that the guy only gave us the physical sim cards but not registered them with the extra option we paid for... So we had to pay again in some shop on our way to Bir.We had a few stops because it was a long journey, even there was only about 500 km. It took us 14h to get to Bir and I start to think that the roads in Romania are not that bad after all. Here in India our taxi driver was a very good one but the roads are impossible to drive faster than he did. Near some cities, there was so much chaos that I 've never seen before and I honestly don't know anyone to manage to drive better than this guy. But the last 100 km was so long.. They wouldn't finish. We managed to get to Bir at 1.30 am, after almost 40hours of traveling and not sleeping. I was so tired that even after 7h sleep in the bed, I didn't want to go flying. But I did  and it was great.The place here in Bir is great, amazing views, friendly people (friendlier than in Delhi I might add) but being tired I didn't want to deal with potential dubious retrieval so I flew in the area for 2h in my first day.Funny fact is that obviously with huge luggage I did not bring my hairdryer. The local solution was to go to the hairdresser, pay him 20 rupees and dry my hair with his hairdryer.

Bir bus station area

The habit here in Bir is to wake up very early if you want to fly far. Sure, that was not the case for me ( because in the first few days I had to get used to the new area of flying, have the mindset that I can do longer flights, you know, confidence troubles) but the others were kind of desperate to fly more and more and so at 8.30 we were already in the cab on our way up. The trip from Bir to the take-off takes about 45 minutes by taxi and it costs 600 rupees. The whole time we had a personal taxi driver, a guy who waited for us every morning at 8.30 to drive us up.The take-off is always crowded even at 9 a.m., with people launching even if there is no thermal, just enjoying the views. In the first days we showed up the inversion didn't let me go too high, but I had nice flights trying to be patient in the air ( the only thing I could think of was Ivo telling Andrei Turnu at the SIV course: be patient, you have to have patience )

Bir -landing area 

  The food in Bir is mixed: you can have Indian dishes, Tibetan dishes or international cuisine (pizza, pasta, falafel, etc). I have tried many of the restaurants there and everywhere the food was good and did not have any problem ( as I thought I would have).The weather here in Bir is usually OK for flying after the monsoon period, so the start of October - mid-November and also in the springtime April-May. But this year it seems that the monsoon had extended and the weather was still very humid the first 2 weeks of October. Problem is that after monsoon come stable days... There was an inversion layer around 2300m and it is mostly ok if you fly on the higher mountains in the back, but from the take-off, you have to reach out to the inversion and fly only above it. If you fall under it, you struggle a lot. So all these being said, my 3rd day of flying in Bir was a complete frustration because I could not get above the inversion for 1h45min. I started to think that I'm a mess and I don't have any idea how to fly. So I landed, pack my glider, return to the homestay and enjoy a nice afternoon visiting the village and one of the Buddhist monasteries in Bir. 

Photos from various Buddhist temples in Bir

the best Masala tea@ Garden Cafe in Bir

After a memorable day of flying, Vlăduț decided that he can sacrifice one day for flying with me, just to give me confidence in flying some distance. Although the day seemed to be the same as the day before, it actually was better as most of the people who took off in the morning managed to climb above the inversion. So did I and first personal record I broke today was the altitude one, I reached 3300m, the highest I've ever flown before with a paraglider. We decided to go to Dharamshala and back and Vladut flew with me all the time, practicing his patience and waiting for me to climb and then waiting for me to glide and so on. The view was just amazing, it's absolutely breathtaking flying near so high mountains. And we flew only in the front, not going on the main ridge actually. On our way back from Dharamshala, on a green terrace where I was trying to get a climb, I saw some animals moving around. They were probably impressed with our colorful wings so they gathered from the bushes and trees. As I could not climb very well there, so losing some hight over the terrace, I was wondering what animals were they so I looked more carefully and I realized they were grey monkeys, like the ones from the Jungle Book. I was so amazed that I circled again around the terrace and I managed to scare some of them away, still, I saw some small baby monkeys.The flight was the longest I 've ever had, duration and distance, flying 6h4min and 85km flat triangle. So 3 personal records in one day. Plus I managed to sum up over 100 flying hours this year, till now. Yep, pretty cool feeling!

https://www.xcontest.org/world/en/flights/detail:raluca_dd/23.10.2019/04:46

The strange feeling here is that every day is different and you can not tell until you fly. You cannot say in the morning if there is a good day or not, the weather can change very quickly and you just have to adapt.When there is overdevelopment or raining or strong wind, you can go visiting some more Buddhist temples.One good thing about the food here is that they have a lot of vegetarian dishes, so I actually haven't eaten any meat in India. I think that this is a good thing for me and I will try to keep this habit longer.The drinking water here is not a problem as I heard about the rest of India. They have here some fountains and everyone drinks from there. I tried not to use so much plastic, so I brought my own metallic recipient for filling it with drinking water.The problem here is the trash. I did not figure out how they collect the trash but most of it gets in the rivers, so the water from the river is only clean on the mountain where are no people. Otherwise everywhere here people throw the trash in the water or they burn it.Another thing you can do when not flying in Bir is renting a bike and visit the Buddhist monastery called Palpung Sherabling, 40 minutes ride from Bir, Dharamshala direction, but on a secondary road(I cannot explain the chaos is here on the roads even when it is not a big city). The whole visit worth it, not only because we saw a big group of monkeys at the monastery, but because I had the best ginger-lemon-honey tea ever and we were also witnesses at the monks' prayers during their ritual. That was an intense and very rhythmic experience in the temple where children and adults monks were singing and reading their mantras and playing on two big drums and horns. I don't know much about the Buddhist religion but the atmosphere was impressive and somehow not that different from our Orthodox church inside monasteries.After many local or very short xc flights, I manage to focus and stay in the air longer time so I get to fly more distance. The classic route is to take off in the morning, go west to Dharamshala, come back and go east to Camp 360.

Baijnath bazaar

The few first days in November weren't that great, it was very unstable weather and it rained for one night that I thought it wouldn't be flyable the next day, but it was. The weather is not very predictable, but it is flyable almost every day.One day we decided that it is no worth going up to the take-off because it was cloudy so we went to a small hike in the wilder parts of the village to see a small Hindu temple. Then we decided to visit a village near Bir, Bashnat, a few km away. So we took the bus because now we were 5 so we don't fit in one taxi. The ride by bus was very cheap and we really enjoyed it. In Bashnat we visited a 1000 years old Hindu temple, just amazing. All sculpted in stone with a lot of decoration.If you like Indian clothes, you will find tons of them in bazaars, all kinds and colors. The trouble is that especially in the countryside there are not ready-made, so you can buy a kit containing one scarf and two textile materials fo trousers -salvar and for the dress named kurta. After that, you have to go to a tailor to sew your new clothes to fit you. It is quite cheap to do that, so I managed to buy a full kit with 750 rupees and paid the tailor 300 rupees. The tailor was very professional and the kurti was amazingly beautiful. We were out dressed in them, celebrating my new distance record 122 km flat triangle, Vlăduț's 150 km fai triangle and the last night in Bir of Kevin and Lisa, our new friends from Australia.

https://www.xcontest.org/world/en/flights/detail:raluca_dd/5.11.2019/04:41

For the last week, we have visited some other places, Palampur and the tea plantations and Dharamshala with Dalai Lama's temple. The bazaars are full of stuff to buy as souvenirs. Himachal Pradesh is an amazing area. All the people we've met were friendly and kind and we decided to come back again next year.Delhi is one of the most polluted cities in the world. We had to wear masks to be able to breathe filtered air, especially because in this period, many people use to burn down their fields and also there is a holiday called Diwali when everybody burns firecrackers all over the place for 3 to 5 days. So the quality of the air is very much reduced because of this. The initial plan was to stay for 2 nights in Delhi and one day to visit Agra and the Taj Mahal. We abandoned this plan when we found out that the quality of the air was very poor with a hazardous risk. So only one day in the big city was more than enough to understand why people in India we talked with prefer to stay on the mountainside, away from the big crowded 28-million-people capital.We enjoyed taking photos with lots of people in Delhi, where we happened to get to a Sanskrit Meeting in an exhibition complex.

1000 years old Hindu Temple in Baijnath

Tea plantation @ Palampur

in Delhi with Alexandra and some nice dressed girls

India, we will come back for sure!

the chaos in Delhi

the veggie momos

[kickassfu]

Mini Drabble - Trainride musings

Caroline always felt nostalgic about trains. No matter how much had changed to conform to modern standards, sitting beside the window as the world passed by brought back warm memories. Years, hell, a century and a half passed by, and one look across the cart to her deviled-eyed companion brought back the vivid flashback of their introduction as if she were the grimy-little-stowaway again.

She was just a small thing but oh so clever. She knew she could disguise herself amongst the bags under the rags she wore.

She hadn’t planned for anyone to find her, let alone a vampire, or to witness him nearly tear the woman’s head from her neck in a monstrous act. Despite the blood smeared across his neck, she could identify him as an attractive man, but when he smiled down at her, she saw behind the façade and wondered if it would be her last day on earth.

He brought her up to his room at the dead of night.

She was terrified. She knew many things could transpire. She heard too many tales of men terrorizing women, especially vulnerable girls such as herself. He was too strong for her to escape his grip and she wondered why she couldn’t resign herself to her fate, to be violated and disposed of, just like the corpse who hid in her previous place in the luggage compartments.

Yet, she didn’t cry.

She wondered why but couldn’t figure it out.

Compulsion, she remembered. He swiftly lifted her up and down the carpeted hall, dragging her numb body without a single complaint.

“What’s your name?”

“Caroline.”

They were on friendlier terms after day break. He offered her breakfast, a game of cards, and lulled her into a sense of safety she couldn’t imagine possible after the ordeal only hours before.

“I’m Kol. Where are you from?”

She was vague. He knew why.

“Running away?”

She nodded.

“I see. As am I. It looks like we have something in common, Sweets.”

She thought little of the name. Not at first. It became a thing: Darling was given to the ones who amused him but were ultimately doomed. Sweets was a term of endearment, there was a chance the recipient might come out unscathed if he felt merciful. But over time, the name became less and less common, replaced by her given name. And she still stood.

“You’re quite good at this,” he mused. She had won the last two rounds. “Are you cheating?” She shook her head. “Show your deck.” She shook her head. “Not fair, sweets.”

“Life’s not fair,” she murmured. She was bold. Had it been anyone else, certainly Kol wouldn’t have been as lenient.

“I can’t disagree,” Kol nodded. “Let me show you a trick or two. Have you ever gambled before?” She shook her head. He grinned. “Oh, come on, you must have played a game or two of high stakes.”

“I’m only eight.” Caroline deadpanned.

His brows raised.

“There is so much to learn. Watch carefully, sweets.”

She was a quick learner. Three days they spent in that cabin, bonding over card games and stories. Kol brought her to a table game on the last day. She was understandably nervous. One man had the idea she was the reward if he won. Kol had other ideas. Hours into the game, with Caroline preening over Kol’s shoulder subtly to see his deck, watch his moves, and memorize the rules of the game, the men grew anxious and demanded an end.

It was a foolish mistake on their part.

They were the only ones to walk out of that game alive. That was her second bit of carnage, many more would come.

“What are you doing?”

Caroline was nervous. She swallowed painfully and rose from the floor, ignoring the wet spot on her knees where the blood soaked her tattered skirt. She gripped the towel with all her might and wearily brought her eyes to meet his, straining her neck.

“Cleaning up,” she spoke softly.

He shook his head and held out his hand.

“No need, sweets.”

“But… if someone finds them…” she muttered.

“It is not our problem,” he assured. “Look at you. You’re a mess.” Nonetheless, he smiled. The blood on her knees, straining her skirt, and the red around her hands reminded him of what she could be if she were a vampire. She was too young, and while she had extraordinary control and curiosity for her age, it’d be too cruel to condemn her this short in her life. She would have more advantageous if given the gift of immortality much later into her adolescence. “Let’s find a suitable replacement,” he gestured to her tarnished garments.

“Okay,” she nodded. He tugged off her bonnet and ruffled her hair.

In that moment, he thought of his sister. She reminded him so much of Rebekah. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t kill her that week. Or he was lonely and found her company, regardless of the resemblance, comforting – not that he’d ever admit it.

He was always messy while she was neurotically clean. It proved to be a running joke and at times, their saving grace when she thwarted any pursuers from their trail with her tendencies to cover their tracks – and the carnage that usually overlapped.

“Have you been out here?” Kol inquired.

She shook her head. She began to talk more. She grew out of her shell when she found his presence less threatening – and more protective, whenever that happened, she wasn’t quite sure.

“I’ve heard stories.”  She smiled. “People come out here for new beginnings. They seek adventure. I want that. I want to start anew, to ride a horse across the desert, to rob a bank,” she laughed. “I wouldn’t have been able to do that at home. I’d be like my mother – married, stuck in a loveless marriage, and miserable. I don’t want that.”

“I could help you,” Kol offered. “Have you robbed a bank before?”

“I’m only eight,” she laughed.

“We’ll work our way up there. Have you ridden a horse?”

“No,” she frowned. “We only had one and Dad took her with him. Mom was too scared I’d fall off, so I wasn’t allowed.”

“We’ll rectify that,” Kol promised.

“I’d like that,” she smiled. She saw hordes of buffalo pass by. She never saw anything like it. Her eyes widened, excited by the new sights.

She has seen so many things through the glass panes of a rolling train. Great cities, untamed wilderness, quiet countryside, you name it. They all had a story. She could appreciate all of them.

“Well Caroline, it appears our stop is nearby. What do you say, want to join me?”

“Where are we going?”

“Colorado City. It’s rough but you’ll survive it. I bet you this stack you will.”

That stack was her first betting money. She lost the first round but recovered quickly. Kol taught her well. She relished in the faces of the losers – men who plundered their fortunes to the hands of a girl no older than nine. She wasn’t old enough to drink but that didn’t stop her from taking a celebratory shot of whiskey. It burned. She stuck to cider for a while after that experience. Nonetheless, she split her winnings with her new mentor who splurged on women, booze, and horses.  

She saved one half of her part for future endeavors and used the other to buy three new dresses.

“Comfortable, Sweets?”

They were in a luxury cabin, isolated from the rest. He claimed the loveseat, enjoying a cigar, while she practiced her tricks. She had made quite a name for herself, usually winning honestly, but in the handful of incidents she found it necessary, she proved to be a talented deceiver.

Luck would only get you so far.

She turned and smiled.

“Very,” she confirmed.

She was older now. Three years had passed.

“It seems you are, too,” she teased, noting the shadow of a woman who had entertained him moments ago. “Satisfied?”

“Very,” he returned jovially.

“I’m surprised she could walk. You usually like to take an extra bite,” she observed.

“The night is still young. Ah, you know I’d never subject you to endure such festivities. I’d dismiss you before I’d engorge.”

Caroline took is as a sign of respect. She usually retired to the main hall, conversing with the gentlemen or woman that remained, while Kol entertained his flavor of the night. She only walked in on him a handful of times and avoided the topic each time.

“But,” he countered, “should you ever have questions, I’d happily oblige in the dirty details of adult pleasure. It’d be a shame should you be disappointed by someone who’s inadequate in the area.”

“Kol,” she whined, red in the face. “Not now.”

He laughed, enjoying her embarrassment.  He missed having those simple interactions with his siblings. Caroline was a wonderful substitute.

“I’m just saying, Sweets,” he shrugged. “Take charge. Make him work for it. Or her, should you ever steer that way. And don’t sell yourself short. It’s an activity that should satisfy both.”

“Unless one ends up dead,” she remarks dully.

“All in good fun,” he toasted.

He killed the majority of her lovers, she mused. He was rather protective of the blonde and when she was old enough to muster thoughts beyond the lock of lips. She killed the rest when they pushed her boundaries. At first, she was stunned, then angry, then grateful. It was an odd realization, but she knew his reaction stemmed from something sincere.

---

MORE OF THIS AU???? I’m seriously so fucking excited, and I feel so happy and lucky to have this *cries* honestly thank you for writing more!!! You’re a fucking angel, and i hope you’ll keep going haha

Koroline is the best~~ and i loved this look at their past, how they all started, how they worked together...it’s really nice and I’m in love :D also how fucking cute are they? even in the midst of murder and blood loool I’m super in love with this AU, and your writing!!

@arrenemris she wrote more about your wonderful AU!!!! Everyone should read this!

[hello-em75]

Hey everyone! 

It’s time to announce the results of the next award category: the Astrid Hofferson Award! 

For this category, I chose people among those who reblogged the Em’s 2K Tumblr Awards post who I felt have made my experience in the HTTYD fandom truly memorable and special. They may not have made the most breathtaking art or the most tear-jerking fanfiction pieces, but without these individuals I certainly wouldn’t feel as comfortable and as at home as I do with all of you. I consider so many of them dear friends of mine and I’m so blessed to know them for the truly outstanding and beautiful people they are. 

The final results are as follows: 

@chiefhiccstrid - With everything from our infamous jokes involving bread to talking Cheetos, joint weddings, and potential intruders that need to be tasered; you and I have had no shortage of memories and laughs. It’s so crazy to think that just one year ago you were almost a complete stranger to me and how in the few months that we’ve really gotten to know each other I’m able to call you one of my dearest friends. You inspire me each and everyday to be a better person and I’m so grateful that in this crazy journey that we call life I’ve been able to stumble across someone as amazing as you are. We may be on opposite sides of the country, but we’re connected at the heart and I know the friendship that we’ve developed will continue to grow even after the Dragons franchise has come and gone. Thanks for being my partner in all things Bitmoji, GIFs, and HTTYD! Love you, babe!

​@astridthevalkyrie - I can’t believe that something as weird (and often insane) as the HTTYD fandom has led me to someone who not only has as insatiable of an appetite as I do, but is also such a model of inner strength and devotion. As a fan of your blog, I’ve always admired your understanding of the HTTYD fandom and the amazing content that you’ve been able to create. But as a friend, I admire the person that you are. You’re incredibly funny, kind, smart, and have enough talent to make a volcano explode. Whenever we talk, I feel like I’ve found a friend who I can always be completely honest with and not have to feel scared or worried that you’d ever up and run. I’m beyond grateful for everything that you and I have shared and I’m so excited to see how our friendship continues to develop! 

@drchee5e - If there was someone who I believed to have the heart of a chief and the soul of a dragon, it would most certainly be you. Your commitment and loyalty to those around you is something that would make Stoick grin in Valhalla, and that’s not even the best thing about you. You instantly make anyone you talk to feel comfortable and listened to -- no matter who they are or what they have to say. Your positive attitude is extremely contagious and I can’t help but be happy when I talk to you! I feel like I’ve known you for a long time because of your blog, but I’m so grateful that I’ve gotten the chance to get to know you better after all of these years! You have a light inside of you that would make the Sun jealous of you and I’m so thankful for the bond we have and the friendship we’ve formed! 

@dragonlovertr - When I think of possibly the sweetest person on the face of this Earth, my mind automatically jumps to you! I was SO nervous when we first started talking because you seemed to be very sociable and cool and talented and I was still trying to get over being an awkward little bean, but I’m very glad that since our first conversation we’ve been able to really get to know each other and become good friends. You’ve been such a motivation of me to put myself out there more in the HTTYD fandom and I can never thank you enough for doing that for me. Without you, I’d probably never had the thought to do the IHFAP and I wouldn’t have met the amazing people that I have! Being ten hours apart really sucks most of the time, but our friendship and connection is definitely something that can’t be denied and I’m so blessed to have someone as wonderful as you to call a friend. 

@saracorinnelikesthis - Throughout my time in the HTTYD fandom and following your blog, I’ve loved your blog and your quick wit that weasles its way into all of your posts! You’ve been the source of so many laughs and great fandom memories and to me have always embodied what it means to be unabashedly yourself. You like what you like without a second thought and share what you share when you want to, and I could only hope to be as comfortable with myself as you are. Despite all that I admire in you, you still somehow continue to be approachable and a friend to worms like myself  to so many other people in our ragtag group of wannabe dragon riders and I’m extremely thankful to have the opportunity to get to you know better through this fandom! 

Congratulations to @chiefhiccstrid for being the recipient of the Astrid Hofferson Award as well as all of the runners-up! You’re all great people and I’m incredibly thankful for each and everyone of you!

[one-of-us-blog]

Flatline (Doctor Who S08E09)

Today Drew is forced to watch and recap “Flatline”, the ninth episode of Doctor Who’s eighth series. The TARDIS is shrinking, people are going missing and Clara is the Doctor. Up is down, left is right, everything’s crazy! How did all of this come to be?

Keep reading to find out…

Eli, as always you did a fantastic job with you latest recap! I agree that this isn’t one that stands out as particularly memorable, but I always get a kick out of the cheery Create Your Own Miracles cult and Dorothy’s attempt at leading a more optimistic life. I agree that Blanche should have tried to at least explain the situation the heart transplant recipient’s wife, but, I mean, you know she’s not gonna let another woman hold onto her man when she can stake a claim of her own. You’re special, Chief, and I can’t wait to read your next recap! For now, though, let’s head to space!

Buttocks tight!

Episode directed by Douglas Mackinnon and written by Jamie Mathieson

We start off with a frantic and bearded man calling the cops and telling them he’s cracked some sort of case. He begins to sound like a bit of a nut as he tells the woman on the phone that ‘they’re’ everywhere, but then he gets snatched up and turned into a decorative wall art.

After the credits Clara is carrying her stuff out of the TARDIS and explains to the Doctor that Danny has gotten ‘territorial’ and doesn’t want her leaving any of her things in the TARDIS, and naturally when her man tells her she’s not allowed to do something Clara obeys without question. The Doctor and I are on the same page when it comes to this relationship plotline, which is to say we don’t give a shit, and he prepares to drop Clara off. There’s a problem, though, as the TARDIS is giving him weird readings and the door to the outside has shrunk to about half its size. As he and Clara head outside they see the entire outer shell of the TARDIS has shrunken down to the size of a child’s play TARDIS. They’re also about 120 miles away from where they were supposed to land, and the Doctor has no idea what’s going on.

The Doctor sends Clara to take a look around while he tries to shimmy back inside the tiny TARDIS. Unfortunately, the TARDIS shrinks again while he’s inside, so he’s not getting out anytime soon. Clara finds a shrine dedicated to all the locals who have gone missing. She meets Rigsy, a would-be Banksy who’s doing community service for all his graffiti work. Clara heads back to tell the Doctor about the missing locals and finds the TARDIS, now small enough to hold in her hand. The Doctor says something nearby is leeching the dimensional sciencey magic that makes the TARDIS big and small at the same time, and he gives Clara his psychic paper and sonic screwdriver so she can go get her investigation on. He also hacks her optic nerve so he can see everything she sees.

Clara runs into Rigsy again and takes on the mantel of the Doctor (Doctor Oswald, specifically). Rigsy takes her to the home of that bearded guy who went missing earlier and she finds out that the man went missing even though the room was locked from the inside. Rigsy gets scared off by Clara’s crazy ideas about the bearded man being shrunken down or something, so she shows him the actual Doctor in the TARDIS to keep his interest. Another dose of energy gets leeched from the TARDIS so they need to leave Beard-o’s apartment, and Doctor Oswald and her companion head to the apartment of the first man who went missing. Doctor Oswald uses her psychic paper to convince a local lawwoman that she’s with MI-5 and she looks into the Doctor’s hunch that the missing people are in the walls of their apartments. The lawwoman gets gobbled up by something that came out of the walls of the apartment bedroom, and by the time Rigsy and Doctor Oswald arrive she’s vanished.

The Doctor recognizes a mural on the wall as actually being the lawwoman’s nervous system, and a mural in the bearded guy’s apartment was actually a bit of magnified skin. The Doctor says that the things that are doing this are experimenting and trying understand the three-dimensional universe. Rigsy tries to make a break for it, but the handle of the door is suddenly in two dimensions. The furniture in the room starts to be broken down by the creatures in the walls of the room, but all of this is too interesting so we need to grind the plot to a halt with a phone call from Danny. Doctor Oswald and Rigsy manage to break out a window before the two-dimensional invaders get them, and Danny knows something’s up because he hears, well, a window being broken. He demands Clara tells him what’s going on, and for once she does the sensible thing and hangs up on his ass.

The Doctor is thrilled at the idea of contact with beings from a two-dimensional universe, which has been theorized to exist but never proven until now, and he also calls out Clara for lying to him about Danny being okay with her traveling in the TARDIS.

…

Oh, sorry, I dozed off for a second there when I tried to think about this Danny plotline for a second. Doctor Oswald and her companion held back to the mural depicting all the missing people, and the Doctor realizes that the mural actually is the missing people, just flattened out to two dimensions. Well, actually they’re the two-dimensional aliens, wearing the guise of the missing people to blend in. Rigsy, the group of people charged with painting over the mural and Doctor Oswald hide in a nearby warehouse and Doctor Oswald uses the skills she learned from the Doctor to take control of the group. The Doctor thinks the two-dimensional aliens might now know they’re hurting these three-dimensional folk and that they’re just experimenting in an attempt to learn, so he says Doctor Oswald needs to talk to them.

The Doctor has Doctor Oswald send out a message the two-dimensional beings can understand, and they send back messages referencing the people they’ve killed. Despite the TARDIS being locked up tight, the aliens manage to leech more energy from it. The aliens grow more sophisticated and begin to manifest three dimensionally, but thanks to the Doctor’s latest invention, the Toodis, they’re able to get through a door whose handle has been flattened. The Doctor says he’s figured out a way to send the aliens back to their own 2D universe, but the TARDIS doesn’t have enough power right now to pull it off. Doctor Oswald, Rigsy and an old jerk who’s managed to survive are chased by the three-dimensional aliens and for literally no reason he old man tries to steal the shrunken down TARDIS and drops it down a shaft. It lands on some train tracks, and a train is headed for it. Because of its low energy the TARDIS’ shields are down, meaning that it will be destroyed if the train hits it.

Doctor Oswald talks the Doctor through moving the TARDIS out of the train’s path Thing-style, but at the last second it seems to be hit. Doctor Oswald, Rigsy and the old jerk are stuck in a tunnel with the 3D aliens on one side and an oncoming train on the other. Doctor Oswald stares down the train and uses the screwdriver to stop it, and then Rigsy highjacks it so he can ram the aliens to hell. Doctor Oswald figures out how to have the train ram them without him sacrificing himself and the two manage to get off as the aliens immediately flatten the train. Doctor Oswald finds the TARDIS, which the Doctor put into siege mode, meaning no one can get in or out, and takes it with them.

For a moment Doctor Oswald tries to think of what the Doctor would do to save them, but then she decides that the right question is what would she do to save them. She finds a poster and has Rigsy use his graffiti skills to make something special for her. The life support in the locked-down TARDIS begins to fail, and the Doctor, cut off from Clara, tells her that she was a good companion and made a fine Doctor. Doctor Oswald, meanwhile, has sprung her trap. She had Rigsy paint a door that the aliens would pump their energy into in order to de-flatten it, but since it’s just a piece of paper the energy goes through it and into the mini TARDIS. The Doctor has enough energy to take the TARDIS out of siege mode and even gets it back to its regular size. He’s able to send the aliens, which he dubs the Boneless, back to their own dimension after a stirring speech in which he declares this dimension is protected and they’re not welcome here.

The TARDIS drops the old jerk and the train conductor off while Doctor Oswald, now just Clara again, says goodbye to her companion. The Doctor tells Clara she made an exceptional Doctor, but that goodness doesn’t really play into that.

Missy observes all of this and watches Clara while saying that she chose well.

The End

~~~~~

I don’t know if it’s just how much the recent string of episodes have bugged me or not, but I really dug this one! It was fun to see the TARDIS shrunk down, and it was great to see Clara really step up to the plate and take control of an episode. If Danny hadn’t been in this episode at all it would have been even better, but I can live with the small amount of him we had to suffer through. At least there was no Courtney Woods to deal with, right? The Boneless (that’s a dumb name, just to be clear) were a really neat enemy, and I thought they were well-used. Rigsy made for a neat semi-companion, but golly was that old man unbelievably unlikable.

Overall, I give “Flatline” QQQQ on the Five Q Scale.

Tune back in on Friday when Eli will try to juggle a lot of balls with the next episode of The Golden Girls, “Triple Play”, and then after that chaboi will turn in his recap of the next episode of Doctor Who, “In the Forest of the Night”.

Until then, thanks for reading, thanks for flattening and thanks for being One of Us!

[ask-daniels-kids]

Random Event~Her most loyal knight.

Summary~ Amelia questions Colin about something personal and is surprised to know that all that glittered wasn’t gold in the past.

Amelia sat on the second story of the greenhouse watching Colin and Cyndy playing down below. He would turn his back on her and she’d try to get as close as possible before he’d whirl around and grab her, only for her to jump away and the game to start again. Such a pointless activity, no real goal, no winner, no prize. It was stupid. 

She leaned back in her seat and got comfortable with her magazine again, flipping through the glossy pages as the squeals and laughter came from below. Every now and again, she’d glance down to get another peek at the siblings, goofing off. After a while, she’d set down her magazine and just stared at them, as if they were jesters entertaining her.

Cyndy jumped back near the pond and slipped back. In a flash, Colin had grabbed her by the waist and hoisted his sister to his other side away from the water. It was memorizing, the speed which Colin had moved. His reflexes were amazing, like a lion on the prowl. She’d seen him catch full glasses of water before they fell without letting so much as a drop spill out.

“Be careful.” He told her firmly. 

“Yes sir!” She took a few steps back and waited for him to get ready to play the game again, only, he didn’t. Instead her brother tapped on his wrist. 

“Homework time, I want to see it when you’re done.” He ordered.

“Can’t I do it later, we never get to play like this!” Cyndy whined, slouching. 

“No, education should always come before fun.” He frowned down at her. “And don’t slouch, it’s bad for your posture.” 

Amelia watched as the girl copied his stance and walked out the greenhouse stiffly, like an old wooden soldier. How fast Colin had gone from play mode to serious mode. She knew that he was a real stickler for the rules, but at the same time she’d seen him be a huge softy for his sister. She went to pick up her magazine, but accidentally knocked over her water cup by accident. Colin flinched and his head jerked up at her.

“Oh, Amelia, I didn’t know you were up there. I hope Cyndy and I didn’t disturb you.” Colin’s voice was calmer now, so casual yet somewhat formal. 

“Trust me, you didn’t.” The older woman picked up the cup and stood up, pulling down her red skirt. She made her way down the stairs with the latest issue of ‘People’ under her arm. “You’re always so different around her.”

“What do you mean, are you implying that I am two faced?”

“What, no, just that you’re super nice to her while being a real stick in the mud to the rest of us.” She hated that she had to look up at him, why the Hell did he have to be like a foot over her? “I once saw you throw a guy in one second then call you sister kitten and kiss her head in the next.”

“Yeah, she’s my baby sister.” Colin blinked down at her. “I’m not going to allow her to be the direct recipient of my anger, even if she did somehow cause it. Amelia, she’s been at that end of someones anger for long enough.”

“What do you mean?” She wished she hadn’t spoke, god she must have sounded so nosy. Is this how reporters felt when asking risky questions? 

“Our parents weren’t as nice as they led others to believe.” Colin sat down on one of the many bags of soil occupying the greenhouse. He invited her to sit beside him. Amelia sat down. “It was a facade, a little game they played to seem like the perfect family.”

“It was fine until Cyndy was born, my mother was a good woman and you remember when we would play all the time. We’d look through those stupid old baby catalogs and help my mom design the nursery, but we never even used it.” Colin sighed, looking up at the old glass roof. “Cyndy slept in my drawer, because my mom refused to have a ‘demon’ sleeping in such a lovely room.”

“Your mom considered her a demon?”

“Yeah, because Cyndy had red eyes. She was fine with me having them, it was a fluke of nature, but for her daughter to have them too was too much to bare. She hated Cyndy, only keeping her alive because Hiks made her.” Colin rested his folded arms on his legs. “It was so sudden, but she turned on me as well, I had to raise my little sister and myself while my mom tried to kill us. Did you know that she tried to make Cyndy drink Windex once?”

“W-What?” Amelias blue eyes widened. 

“Had I not been peeking around that corner my little sister would be dead. My dad wasn’t much better. He’d lock us in the basement and starve us for weeks at a time, Cyndy and I learned to depend on the other sibling for food and water while down there. I remember once being locked down there while my mom decided she didn’t like Cyndy going in the living room. I remember listening to my sister scream for hours begging mom to stop hitting her. I remember wanting to break down the door but knowing if I did, it would only get worse for her. Th-That night when she came to bring me food, I saw her face and knew we needed better.”

Amelia slowly offered him her handkerchief. Colin refused it and took out a rag, which he used to wipe his face. 

“Cyndy was so used to getting hit that when Marius went to high five her once, she covered her face. There were nights when we first arrived where she’d panic when she realized she was in a bed, because she wasn’t supposed to be on one. The first night we got here, she cried because she got her own room. I wanted her to stop being scared, to stop being worried. She’s spent a big chunk of her life with angry people, I don’t want to be one more of hose people.” Colin buried his face in his hands. “But I know that everyday she still worries that they’ll come for her, that one day her freedom will be taken away. I want her to enjoy every single day until the day she dies, and....and....” He  broke into tears. 

Amelia went to comfort him only for someone from behind to beat her to it. Cyndy had her arms wrapped around him and her face buried in his shoulder. Three papers fell to the floor as the child held her brother from behind.

Amelia slowly stood up and walked away, it was hard for her to believe that Mr. and Mrs. Shepard with the bright smiles and warm hugs could be cruel. She’d been over to their house many times in the past, she would have died to have a room like the one Cyndy ‘slept’ in. She was jealous of the child who has a brother that loved her so much. She wanted to live like that, with a mother that acted like she was a princess. But Amelia didn’t know what happened behind closed doors. 

She went up to her room and locked her own door. She laid on her bed and stared up at the ceiling, thinking about everything. All the times she’d yelled at and insulted Colin, all the times she’d slammed a door or put something down on the counter too roughly. All the times she’d been mean to Colin, every insult and rumor spoken behind his back. She fell asleep with a full mind.

The next day, Colin helped Cyndy get ready for school. Amelia watched quietly as Cyndy and her brother left. A little girl and her brother, a girl and her guardian angel, a princess and her most loyal knight.  She went up to her room and selected a tiara from her collection. She laid it on Cyndy’s bed and walked out the room.

[6of575-oldblog]

i laughed myself sick over being the recipient of the stupid mango jello AND helping package the rest of the stuff to send off

that was a memorable april fools

the first time i ever had fun

i really and truly used to hate this holiday because people are MEAN on this holiday

see a) i scare really easily due to ptsd and health problems compound on that

and b) im so gullible, like! its ridiculous! i fall for everything i cannot usually recognise sarcasm & jokes so then i get really sad when whatever it is turns out to be fake and not true at all since my excitement is always 100% genuine and all consuming; i am That Person who is all or nothing (seriously theres no halfway with me)

i just usually boycott the day entirely

but last year was a blast & mr am came up with this yrs “prank” to go ahead and gift yall with the final chapters early and ive been dancing around the kitchen with glee every time i thought about it so

yeah

always do nice things and turn this day on its head for weenies like me thanks

One year, I:

sent my pea-hating friend jars of jointed snake toys (and much needed earbuds) that had vintage pea can labels to disguise the contents.

sent another friend a book on rats he really wanted, but put a fake book cover on it (the shark one from here) because his partner is a fiend for sharks.

put a bunch of really pretty bracelets in mango jell-o (the worst flavor and texture) and watched Sunflower poke at it to try and excavate.

Wholesome pranks only, okay.

[goodra-king]

Transcript of Crafting Growth-Focused Content for Your Business

Transcript of Crafting Growth-Focused Content for Your Business written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

Back to Podcast

Transcript

John Jantsch: Want to quickly send amazing looking emails to your prospects and customers in just minutes? AWeber is the market leader in making email marketing powerfully simple for a small business. Visit aweber.com for a 30-day free trial.

John Jantsch: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Lance Cummins. He is the president of Nectafy, a company billed as a growth content company. We’re going to talk about his entrepreneurial journey, how his company runs, and maybe what else he’s up to on the side. So Lance, thanks for joining me.

Lance Cummins: Thanks so much, John. I appreciate it.

John Jantsch: So let’s start off with your story. How did you kind of get to this place where you are the president of the company and doing other entrepreneurial things?

Lance Cummins: You’re going to love this. I’m going to give you the full story but super quick. So back in 1996 I wanted to start my own business and I asked my mom, “Hey, what businesses could I do from home?” And she’s like, “Well, this web design thing is actually pretty interesting. Have you thought about that?” And I was like, “Well, okay.” I bought a book called Teach Yourself HTML in 24 Hours, and I didn’t realize that that meant like 24 days of one-hour sessions maybe. I spent like 24 hours and built a website and said, “I’m open for business. Let’s do this.”

Lance Cummins: That business lasted exactly two years because I had no idea how to run a business, but it got my interest in all things web, so learned a ton. I was actually building like ASP custom shopping carts, all this crazy stuff that I don’t even know how to do now. I’ve forgotten everything. It was a lot of fun.

Lance Cummins: I got a real job. Well, I got somebody else paying me, at least, for a little while. This is where my story gets crazy. So I actually got involved being a music pastor at a church in Georgia. I then moved my family to Kansas to be a music guy out there. We did that for six years, and then we decided we would move to Boston because … This is where my marketer brain kicked in. I was like, “There are not a lot of the type of church that we are at out there in Boston. Let’s go out there and start one.”

Lance Cummins: So I literally moved my family, my three kids and my wife and I, to Boston. We didn’t know anybody. I didn’t do like the … I don’t know if you know anything about how people normally start churches, but they raise all this money and do all this crazy stuff. I didn’t do any of that. I was just like, “Let’s see what happens. This is going to be a great adventure.” So we moved out there and I expected to find a job. I was just going to get hired somewhere. Well, I didn’t really think about it. Your resume looks a little odd when you’ve been in church work for like 12 years, so nobody hired me, and I thought, “Oh, I guess I need to start my own business again.”

Lance Cummins: So I, man, I just quickly brushed up on what I remembered. I did a ton of crash course learning, started building websites, and then I realized, there’s this moment when you build a website after you have the design usually, you say to the client, “Hey, can you just send over the copy for the website?” And then there’s this big panic moment because they don’t know what to write, and so I started doing that, and that’s when I realized there was a big opportunity in content, all that good stuff. So that was 2010.

John Jantsch: Awesome. So I built maybe a dozen websites in FrontPage.

Lance Cummins: Okay. Yeah.

John Jantsch: Microsoft builder that … One of the early ones on there, and it just, it scares me to think about that now.

Lance Cummins: That was pretty sweet. Like that was the first time you could use templates because otherwise you were coding in straight up HTML in text editor.

John Jantsch: So I got to know, what’s in the name? What’s up with Nectafy?

Lance Cummins: All right. So, in full disclosure, you mentioned about your name, Duct Tape Marketing, when you and I were offline a second ago. So I actually named my company … You’re going to laugh at me now … Nearly Freelance, because you know, my name’s Lance. Yeah, there’s too many things going on there. And after two years I’m like, “I need something different. I’m tired of people calling me freelance, almost free, completely free.” So we lived in Boston. I love the Boston accent. It’s still one of my favorite things about Boston, and my neighbor Kyle, he’d come over, and he had the strongest Boston accent. And so I loved that, and then I loved the concept in nature, this whole thing with how nectar works is really crazy to me because basically plants are producing stuff that all the little bugs and the bees love, right? They fly in and grab it, and meanwhile pick up whatever pollen the flower has and spread it. And so this is about necta. Yeah, [inaudible 00:05:27] little Boston accent. Nectafy. I don’t know. It’s lame.

John Jantsch: Well, it’s one of those things that is meant to be memorable, but I’m sure I’m not the first person that’s asked you, “What’s with the name?” All right. You are billed as a growth content company. I know this is going to sound like a stupid question, but how would you define what content is today for marketers?

Lance Cummins: Yeah. So I mean, content, as far as I can tell, for marketers, is literally anything that you put out that’s I think particularly designed to educate, entertain, inspire, not necessarily directly sell. That’s what differentiates us from just advertising. What do you think?

John Jantsch: Yeah. Well, I mean, that’s the thing. I think it’s a fine line. I almost have come to say any way in which you communicate is some form of content. Video, email, audio, even sales copy that is meant to sell. I mean, in a lot of ways, I think that collectively is content. Well, let me ask you this. In the time that you’ve had your company, how do you feel like it’s … How has the role of content changed in your view?

Lance Cummins: I think content has gone through some interesting developments, let’s say. So you know, 10 … What was it, 10, 12 years ago, HubSpot really kind of popularized this inbound marketing thing, which it wasn’t new, it’s just they put a term around it, and that was sort of the wave that we started to ride. But we realized pretty quickly that what happened is there was a lot of emphasis on the tactics of inbound marketing, and a failure to recognize that without genuine human quality to what you write and a connection, it’s just crap. I mean, it doesn’t matter if you get somebody to the site. If what they read isn’t something that makes them really be glad they found that, it’s a waste.

Lance Cummins: And so to me that’s one of the big iterations that’s happened with content is that it went from this game where you play and you try to beat Google and trick them to get somebody to your site, and you forget like this is a human on the other end reading this. This is so strange that you would game somebody to become a client.

Lance Cummins: So, for us, the evolution is content now, a computer can generate most of the content that inbound marketers used to just regurgitate constantly, and so this is about, how do we as humans tell a human story? How do we explain something so that … The litmus test for us is if your ideal customer, we call them personas like other geeky marketers, is if when they see that piece of content, they’re glad they found it. Simple test. For us, that’s how it’s changed.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I think that in the early days it was sort of novel that people had content, and obviously like you said, the search engines didn’t have as much content to chew through so they would surface your content. It was actually a pretty easy game in some ways, and I think that, even on the recipient side, the behavior of consuming content was in its early stages, and so the expectation wasn’t there. People weren’t deluged with it, and so I think what’s happened now is, because it’s become an absolute significant part of the buyer’s journey … I mean, people aren’t buying today without content and without a journey that’s led by that content, that, as you just said, the bar is just so significantly higher than it was. I think you can say that for all the tactics. I mean, email marketing used to be really easy. A lot of people in the early days of social media, it was pretty much an easy game to try to attract people. So, I think the role has changed as much as anything because of the expectation of the buyer, I think.

Lance Cummins: That’s a really good point. Yeah. The thing too that we’ve seen is when people … Because they’re better at it, because customers are better at it, they can identify when it’s poorly done a lot more quickly. Right?

John Jantsch: Yeah. Yeah, and I think that’s the … not that there’s strict divisions for generations, but you look at millennials particularly as a buying group, and because I happen to be a parent of several, I know this behavior quite well. They’ll go to a website and they’ll bounce off of that in a couple of seconds if it doesn’t act like they think it should act, and I think that’s what marketers are up against, whether they know it or not.

Lance Cummins: John, that’s actually how I selected my accounting software back when I started my company, which is pathetic. That’s a terrible reason to choose accounting software. I got to the website and I went, “Yeah, I like this. I’m going to use their software.”

John Jantsch: I’m going to guess it’s FreshBooks.

Lance Cummins: I actually use Xero out of New Zealand.

John Jantsch: Oh, Xero? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

John Jantsch: Hey, with more than 20 years of proven success, helping more than one million small businesses around the world, AWeber’s powerfully simple email marketing solutions make it easy for you to connect with people and build your business. Quickly and easily build lists of contacts, send and automate emails and newsletters, and analyze your email performance with AWeber. And if you need help, AWeber’s customer solutions team is available 24/7 from their Pennsylvania headquarters to help you grow your business through email marketing. Visit aweber.com for a free 30-day trial.

John Jantsch: We just talked about what content is, the role of content, how it’s changed. You defined something called growth content as being kind of different than maybe the inbound marketing approach. So you want to elaborate on that?

Lance Cummins: Yeah, absolutely. So it was sort of a response to what we were seeing. We were using the phrase inbound marketing an awful lot, and because HubSpot’s fantastic at recruiting people and recruiting companies in all walks of life, suddenly there’s all these people talking about inbound marketing this and inbound marketing that, and it’s like, “Oh, boy, this is all messed up.” And so we really thought like, “Let’s just think about what we’re really, really good at, what we think really makes a difference in the marketplace, and then let’s figure out what identifies that.”

Lance Cummins: So for us, we decided to call it growth content because it is content specifically designed to grow organic traffic. So we, for instance, don’t necessarily write … We don’t write like narrative pieces on a website. We don’t write just great stories, even though perhaps for some brands that would be a worthwhile effort. That’s just not what we do. So really, it’s like old-school SEO, although we never use those letters ever. I’ll have to go wash my mouth out with soap after this interview. Old-school SEO with really genuine, high quality content that’s created with subject matter expert interviews, but everything is around growth. So like when we’re creating the calendars, this is designed for growth. If it’s not designed for growth, we’re not going to do it. That’s where we kind of married those two words together.

John Jantsch: Well, where’s the separation between growth and just awareness? Is awareness just a step? I mean, because again, a lot of times the first thing we have to do is let somebody know we’re out there or that we understand what their problem is. Is that growth or is that before growth?

Lance Cummins: Yeah, that’s a great question. So for us, to geek out a little bit about the buyer journey, right? That top of the funnel is an awareness stage. So for us, that content is vital, and it probably just serves an awareness function, but awareness is the leading indicator of growth, so we definitely write stuff around that.

John Jantsch: There are many types of content that people can consume, and maybe in some cases their preferred method to consume content. I know when my books come out, for whatever reason, the audio book is a few weeks later or a few months later, and I always hear from people. It’s like, “I only listen to audio books. When’s it coming out?” Are there forms of content that you would say today people need to be doing more of, like audio or video for example?

Lance Cummins: Yeah. So it really depends on your audience, right? Like you kind of alluded to that a minute ago. For our clients, they’re all what we call brainiac B2B clients, which basically means they have a complex product or service. Their persona may or may not be technical. So each one of those, first of all, we just look at like, how do they consume stuff? Right? For a lot of people, ironically, in 2020, it’s still written, which just feels very arcane, but still effective. For younger demographics, you’re getting into video, explanation of what’s even on the page. Like let’s just watch this video instead of reading the two paragraphs, which blows my mind because I’m not that demographic. Then there’s the thing coming that I think is really cool and it’s kind of the marriage of several of these ideas, and basically it’s like the revival of radio, much like we’re doing here with podcasts, right? Is audio content on your website, basically audio content on demand for every type of article that you can do. So I’m familiar with companies that are spinning up content that then you can add it into custom podcast playlists to listen to on the ride home and to work and so forth. Like that’s really a really cool idea and another way to get your content in front of people that I think really marries pretty well with where things are headed.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’ve been such a proponent of the audio content. In fact, I wrote my obligatory trends for every year post, and I put audio content on there as a trend. That sounds sort of absurd. I’ve been podcasting since 2005, how’s that a trend? But I think what you just mentioned is people, like a lot of things, they saw it as a podcast, as like, that was a thing, but a podcast is nothing more than audio content. I think now people are just finding ways to distribute audio content, and to me, the beauty of it is the portability, like you just mentioned. For me, videos, I can’t sit still in front of a monitor and watch something for 20, 30, 40 minutes, but I could put it in my head and go walk for 20 or 40 minutes, and I think that that’s what … to me, that’s one of the great appeals of audio content.

Lance Cummins: Yeah, I love that. I think it’s also interesting, a friend of mine pointed out that audio content, especially in mass distribution, so like think Kmart Bluelight Special, “Attention, shoppers,” basically that audio content is really coming back into effectiveness because everybody’s face is buried in their own device. The only way to get their attention in mass would be through sound, and I think that’s a pretty interesting assessment.

John Jantsch: So you have a little side hustle that, if people were … This is just an audio-only podcast, as listeners know, but I do record with video too, and Lance has a nice little background behind him because we’re all on these video chats in these interviews and things like Zoom and Skype and different platforms. So you want to talk a little bit about that idea?

Lance Cummins: Sure. So when we started Nectafy, we hired remote team members, and that wasn’t necessarily on purpose that I set out to build a remote company, but that’s what we have, and we love it, and so we also use Zoom for everything, for video calls with all of our clients. I use it for all my sales stuff, marketing stuff. And I realized, “Man, we got to do something about how we present ourselves as a team. Like I just want to present a professional look. It doesn’t have to be formal or scary or anything. It just needs to be consistent.”

Lance Cummins: So I started like, I bought some pipe and drape, I did the video backgrounds you can use for video, photography. I bought all this stuff and sent it to my team, and they would use it for a little bit and then stop using it because they go, “Man, this is just super inconvenient. It doesn’t fit in my room. This is bigger than my room,” all this great stuff.

Lance Cummins: So I’m like, “Okay, there has to be something.” I couldn’t find anything, so I said, “DIY guy, I’m going to figure out a way to build this myself,” and came up with some ideas, and then I realized, “Oh, my, this is something that people could actually use because it’s tailored for remote workers doing video stuff. It’s just the right size, no bigger, fold it down.” So we started a company called Anyvoo. It doesn’t mean anything. My daughter helped me name it. And so the whole idea is that these are portable backdrops that are branded, can break down into a … it ends up being in a 6 x 6 x 26 inch long thing, portable. We’re actually in prototype phase right now. We’re shipping them that … They don’t break down all the way. They’re still kind of a little bit bigger, but we’re getting a lot of great feedback right now. You can go look at anyvoo.com and kind of see what we’re doing. If you’re interested in participating in that, you can just fill out the contact form or send me an email.

Lance Cummins: My kids and I are doing this, so this is part of what makes it fun. In fact, my daughter, we’re actually at Anyvoo right now. I zoomed out so you could see the edge of the drop and all this. My daughter’s back there helping me sew. My son helps assemble these things. We’re learning about business together, so it’s been a lot of fun.

John Jantsch: Yeah, that is awesome. It kind of reminds me of the old projector screen that you’d bring in and kind of pop up, kind of the school size, not the giant thing. All right, so Lance, tell people how they can find out more about Nectafy and then obviously Anyvoo as well. And I hope you have your kids designing that website for Anyvoo too.

Lance Cummins: That’s right. We’ve got something up there going. So nectafy.com is our growth content company. That’s if you’re a brainiac B2B company, you sell a complex product or service, and you’re trying to actually grow your leads and traffic with really high quality content in pretty complex areas. That’s nectafy.com. Anyvoo.com is if you’re a remote worker and you want to really present yourself professionally on video, get one of these drops. We’re in prototype phase, so if you mention this and you send me an email, lance@anyvoo.com, I’ll send you a coupon code so you can get it really cheap since it’s in prototype phase, and give me some feedback. We’d love to build one for you.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Well, Lance, thanks for coming, sharing your journey and about your various ventures, and hopefully we’ll run into you soon out there on the road.

Lance Cummins: Thanks so much, John. I really appreciate it. It’s been fun talking with you.

from http://bit.ly/39arsDC

[democratsunited-blog]

Democrats tangle on records in gubernatorial debate

https://uniteddemocrats.net/?p=3288

Democrats tangle on records in gubernatorial debate

TALLAHASSEE, Fla. — 

(NEWS SERVICE OF FLORIDA)-In the midst of a firestorm about a reported lapse in background screenings for concealed-weapons licenses, four of the five top Democratic candidates vying to replace Republican Gov. Rick Scott squared off in a debate Saturday night.

Former Congresswoman Gwen Graham, former Miami Beach mayor Philip Levine, Tallahassee Mayor Andrew Gillum and Orlando-area entrepreneur Chris King answered questions about a laundry list of policy issues on which the Democrats seemed to agree.

But attacks came more than midway through the hour-long debate, with Gillum lashing out at Levine’s record as mayor, King blasting Graham for a congressional vote that could have affected Syrian refugees, and Graham demanding that Gillum explain his support for a coal-fired power plant.

At the same time, Graham repeatedly scolded her opponents for the “negative narrative,” stressing the Democrats needed to unify if they want to take back the governor’s mansion after being shut out for nearly two decades.

“This election is too important. We have got to elect a Democrat in 2018,” said Graham, the daughter of Bob Graham, who served as Florida governor and U.S. senator. “We’ve got to end the chaos. We’ve got to end the negativity. We’ve got to end the attacks and start talking about what we are doing for the people of Florida.”

The evening began with a question from 11-year-old Taylor Harris, who asked the candidates about guns, already a flashpoint for Democrats following the February massacre at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland that left 14 students and three faculty members dead.

“What are you planning to do to keep me safe … from gun violence and school shootings?” the seventh-grader asked. “I want to be safe and not scared at school.”

Levine, who has made a ban on “assault” rifles and stricter background checks a cornerstone of his campaign, boasted that Miami Beach passed an ordinance outlawing assault-style weapons when he was mayor.

Gillum, who also endorses a ban on assault-style guns, bragged that he “took on the NRA and the gun lobby” twice in court, and won.

“It breaks my heart that this has to be a question that an 11-year-old would have to ask,” Gillum said. “No parent should fear that their kid will come home in a body bag.”

King, a self-professed progressive, has also proposed doing away with assault-style guns as well as imposing a tax on bullets.

Graham used the question to play up her gender, saying Florida law “allows the governor, whoever she may be,” to sign an executive order banning assault weapons, something she intends to do if elected.

Graham entered the ring Saturday boosted by this week’s backing from the Florida Education Association teachers union and former U.S. Rep. Patrick Murphy. Murphy had floated the possibility of a bipartisan run for governor with another former congressional colleague, Republican David Jolly, before announcing Thursday he was throwing his support behind Graham.

But King repeatedly went after Graham, who served in Congress for two years before leaving after her North Florida district was redrawn, for a 2015 vote on the American Security Against Foreign Enemies, or SAFE, Act that would have made it more difficult for Syrian refugees to enter the U.S.

According to PolitiFact, the act — which died after the Senate refused to pass it — would have imposed an additional burden on “the processing of certain refugees that would have slowed the process, likely resulting in at least a pause in admissions.”

Graham said the act “was purely to certify the process that is already in place” and would have been better, had it passed, than the current immigration policies being carried out by President Donald Trump’s administration.

“That’s simply not true,” King said of Graham’s explanation, adding that then-President Barack Obama opposed the proposal.

“You were not there during the discussions,” Graham shot back.

King persisted, however.

“She was there, but it didn’t matter. Look, the most important job for a governor is to stand up for people who can’t stand up for themselves,” he said.

Gillum then joined in, saying no one was more informed on the issue than Obama, who opposed the legislation.

“We need leaders that will not just be thermometers but will set the temperature,” he said.

Gillum continued his attack on Graham for “voting against Obama 52 percent of the time” during her tenure in Congress.

Tampa Bay Times Political Editor Adam Smith, one of three moderators, put Levine on the spot about a contribution to Republican U.S. Sen. Marco Rubio. Smith noted that the audience at the debate, which took place at a Pinellas Park high school, was populated with progressives.

Levine, who was a supporter of Hillary Clinton, said he’s given “upwards of $1 million to Democrats,” and “spent over a year-and-a-half of my life trying to elect the first female president of the United States.”

Levine then rattled off a list of items he said he accomplished during his tenure as mayor, including a hike in the minimum wage, decriminalization of marijuana, addressing climate change and sea-level rise and banning assault rifles.

“I’m not going to separate people. I’m going to bring people together,” he said, drawing a rebuke from Gillum.

“Marco Rubio is anti-immigrant. … He is a bad Republican. He was undeserving of any Democrats’ support whatsoever,” said Gillum, who also accused Levine of overstating his achievements.

King then jumped in, accusing Levine of bullying reporters and blocking critics on Twitter.

“Boy it’s sure fun to be the front-runner,” a laughing Levine said, drawing jeers from the crowd. “I stand on my record.”

Graham — who scored a memorable line in the candidates’ first debate, when she said it was “Gwen and the men” — used the sniping to emulate a Democratic icon.

“What Michelle Obama said: ‘When they go low, I’m always going to choose to go high,’ ” she said.

But that prompted another reprimand from King, who pointed out that Republican gubernatorial candidates — Agriculture Commissioner Adam Putnam and U.S. Rep. Ron DeSantis — are “not going to be playing softball.”

Gillum was also on the defensive after Smith asked him about an ongoing FBI investigation of Tallahassee City Hall. Smith asked Gillum about a recent report by the Tallahassee Democrat newspaper that Gillum went on a “lavish trip” to Costa Rica with lobbyists and paid $1,400 in cash for his luxury hotel room.

Gillum said he has “zero tolerance for corruption” and that the investigation did not involve him.

“I have been elected for 15 years by doing right, not by doing wrong,” Gillum said. “Judge me by my actions, judge me by my deeds.”

Graham also demanded that Gillum explain his repeated votes in favor of a coal-fired plant in North Florida. Gillum said the coal plant never got built, “thanks to my colleagues and me, who ultimately opposed it.”

Saturday’s debate did not include billionaire Jeff Greene, who jumped into the race this week. Greene declined to attend the event or another debate slated for Monday evening in Margate.

The debates come as Democrats demand that Putnam resign from his post and drop out of the governor’s race, something none of the candidates addressed on stage Saturday night.

The focus on Putnam followed a report that a former Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services worker failed for more than a year to conduct national background checks on applications for concealed-weapons licenses.

An Office of Inspector General report from June 2017 — obtained by the Tampa Bay Times in a public records request — said that between February 2016 and March 2017, the Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services didn’t access an FBI crime database called the National Instant Criminal Background Check System because an employee was unable to log into the system.

Democrats jumped on the report, and the outcry over the lapse prompted Putnam to hold a press conference to defend himself against what he called “misleading headlines,” hours before the Democrats’ debate kicked off Saturday night.

“The headlines and the stories that say that there were no background checks for a year is inaccurate and misleading,” Putnam said following a campaign event in Sun City.

The former employee failed to follow through on 365 applications that were tagged by the Florida Department of Law Enforcement as having information that could make them ineligible for concealed-weapons licenses. Putnam said 291 of those licenses were later revoked. None of the recipients of the wrongly issued licenses would have been able to purchase a gun, Putnam maintained.

Around the same time as Putnam went on the defense, DeSantis blasted his opponent while campaigning in the Panhandle.

“Adam has spent years campaigning for governor, basically, in this position and the report was very concerning because it seemed like he wasn’t minding the store when we needed him to be there,” DeSantis told reporters after a Pensacola event.

But Putnam, a veteran politician who made national headlines last year when he referred to himself as a “proud NRA sellout,” said he asked for the inspector general investigation and that his office has subsequently added “new safeguards to prevent this from happening in the future.

“This is a serious issue. Make no mistake about it. But it has been misleadingly reported that 350,000 people did not have background checks. That could not be more wrong,” Putnam said.

Read full story here

[barstoolkate]

Travel Guide: Tokyo

Tokyo: MIND BLOWN...

EATS//

TAKE-CHAN 武ちゃん

Our first night we were indoctrinated to the drill of finding restaurants in Tokyo.  Stand on the sidewalk in the dark.  Stare at Google maps and confirm you’re within 20 feet of the mapped location.  And then walk into every vestibule trying to make heads or tails of the Japanese characters and the confusing address system.  Repeat each night of your Tokyo trip.  We ended up confirming that we had found Take-Chan by matching the waitresses head scarves with a photo from Tripadvisor.

This place is OG yakitori shiz.  We arrived about 30 minutes before they closed so the menu was limited but we got our fill of skewered meats.  Chicken meatballs, chicken tail, liver, thigh, wing and miso duck all charred to perfection and washed down with cold Asahi.  A 90 year old man sits in the back of the room next to an equally old icebox and counts your bare skewers and the tokens they hand out with each beer to tally your check at the end of your meal.  This spot is the perfect way to ease into eating your way through Tokyo.

SUSHI IWA

You’re spending a week in Japan and you have to sift through HOW many sushi restaurants to pick the one you’re going to drop $500 at for (no pressure) the most memorable sushi experience of your life??  No simple task.  I trusted the Sushi Geek to guide me and I’m glad I did.  He calls Sushi Iwa the “perfect introduction to Tokyo high end sushi” and after our experience that feels pretty spot on.  

Had I not read after the fact that our chef that evening wasn’t Iwa-san I would not have known.  I loved the hospitality of his sous chef Shigeyuki Tsunoda.  His english was excellent, he made us feel comfortable in an environment that could easily be intimidating (6 seats = super quiet) and he answered all of my questions as he guided us through each course.

Anticipating my first omakase experience in Japan I wondered what weird shit might be in store for me.  And then about 4 courses in I wished that I had brought a bigger purse.  Tiny whole squids and hot squid rings oozing with something white stared me in the face - a sampler of sorts that I wasn’t sure I could tackle.  I put on my big girl pants and dived in to be surprised that hot squid stuffed with its own roe is actually rich, creamy goodness and not as fishy as I had expected.  And those tiny firefly squids won me over...especially when I learned that they’re luminescent!  

Our 2 hour meal was like the Neverending Story...but one I want to see one night a week.  The fish fest started with hairy crab, bonito sashimi, a cooked fish (I forget what exactly) and moved on to sushi of hen clam, toro, ebi, squid, o-toro, hotate, anago, the sweetest uni from Hokkaido (which will change my mind about uni forever), a giant prawn barely cooked, a maki roll, a seaweed salad, and finally custardy tamago that stood in for dessert.  If you have any doubt about whether a single sushi dinner in Tokyo could be worth $500 (for 2) ...throw caution to the wind and book a seat here.  

SHIMA

There are several restaurants in Tokyo known for waygu beef.  But when Dominique Ansel and David Chang both raved about the same place I felt pretty good about following their lead and booking a table at Shima.  Unfortunately the night we dined there I had horrific jet lag and couldn’t fully appreciate the meal, but I was well enough to comprehend that this was the best beef to ever have touched my lips.  

The starters are huge - order one to split.  We had a giant plate of cured salmon and I spied a sashimi starter that looked insane.  The steak comes in two options: filet or sirloin in 5 ounce portions.  We both had the sirloin.  Upon inspection we discovered that the steaks were both skewered through and after peering into the open kitchen confirmed that they’re cooked via rotisserie.  The starter, 2 steaks and a bottle of wine set us back $480 and was well worth every penny.

2 notes:

Everyone lusts after the steak sandwiches and after reading a lot of reviews it seems that you either have to order an extra steak and request it be made into sandwiches to take away with you or perhaps (?) if you book a table late enough you might be the lucky recipient of a sammich gift.  Don’t quote me on that!  

Next time we go I’ll request a seat at the bar/open kitchen.  We were seated at a table in the back of the restaurant and had to suffer through neighboring tables of obnoxious Americans (ordering well done steaks, asking for bordeaux glasses for their ginger ale, fist bumping the wait staff - no joke).  Spare yourself the pain unless you’re one of them and then please stay at home.

TSUKIJI MARKET

Holy hell - this place is worth the 12 hour flight in and of itself.  I was completely blown away by the scale of the market (reading afterwards that it employees over 40,000 people).  Endless stalls of beautiful species and the characters who sell them make it a chaotic and colorful photographer’s delight.  I’m so glad that we made the trip before the impending relocation of the market (which will be a blow to Tokyo that I can’t believe will actually happen...kind of like Trump winning the election).  

Everyone recommends going to the market shortly after your arrival in Tokyo so that you’re conveniently awake at 3 am to queue up for the tuna auction, and after the first few nights I understood why that makes sense (oy vey).  What people don’t really talk about is that if you don’t go to the auction you won’t see the giant whole tunas.  We went to the market around 10 am and saw tunas broken down in their “coffins” or on tables, but no whole tuna were still around.   

Other details you need to know:

INNER MARKET - I’ve read that some people miss out entirely on the wholesale market experience, which would be a huge loss.  It’s not difficult to find if you’re seeking it out, but make this your top priority/first stop as the selection is going to be better earlier in the day.  Also don’t wear precious shoes - you will get wet.  We visited Tsukiji after our phenomenal dinner at Sushi Iwa so it was fun to identify some of the treats we’d tried there.  Firefly sushi, ark shell clams (aka bloody clams) and uni for miles.

OUTER MARKET - Endless rows of varieties of vendors including dried fishes and seaweed, japanese pottery, tchotchkes, produce, more fish, food stalls, sweets, pickles, kitchen shops, etc.  I’ve traveled to France and Italy and always seek out farmers markets, expecting to be impressed, but I’ve never been more wowed by fresh produce than in Japan.  They offer the most pristine varieties of everything - no bruises, perfectly ripe, instagram-worthy fruits and vegetables.

SUSHI! - We didn’t worry too much about finding the perfect place for lunch given that we had our splurge sushi dinner already.  I knew that the longest lines would be at Sushi Dai and Daiwa and that we were too hungry to sign up for those waits.  We jumped in line at Sushi Zanmai and I immediately got nervous at the cheeseball exterior of the restaurant (giant plastic tuna and life size photos of Chef Zanmai).  Don’t let that scare you off - request a seat at the sushi bar (duh) and saddle up for a delicious meal for $40/person.

As everyone says, the sushi ANYWHERE in Japan is better than almost any sushi you’ve had in the states and it’s certainly true here.  Zanmai is open 24/7 to service the Tsukiji workers and I felt reassured that I was sitting next to what appeared to be a local woman having lunch alone.  Make sure to order the torched toro - the highlight of my tuna “flight”.

TONKATSU SUZUKI

I’m going to curse again because: fried pork.  FUCK is that good!

I was a tonkatsu virgin (how this is possible I really have no idea) and I’m confident that I picked the right spot for my first experience.  I’m also confident that I’ll never find tonkatsu this good in New York.  This recommendation came from Lucky Peach (RIP) and according to them should be “your first stop when you arrive at the train station in Tokyo”.  I’ll add that it should also be your last stop because you’ll want it again.  

If you want your pork fattier order the rosu or lean hire.  The fattier the better, right?  This meal was probably the singular best composed and most satisfying meal we had in Japan.  That juicy pork cutlet topped with tonkatsu sauce ladled on to your liking, shredded cabbage dressed with zingy ponzu (again, you dress it) and THE MOST PERFECT bowl of rice I had the entire trip.   All washed down with a crisp Asahi.  Ahhhhh.

Back to that rice.  I couldn’t stop thinking about it after that meal and upon returning home I conducted Google searches to see if I could uncover some secret technique or rice variety.  My “Tonkatsu Suzuki rice” search failed me...but going to the Japanese food store and buying the most expensive bag of rice did not.  THIS would be that rice and it’s changed my Japanese cooking world at home.  

CAFE ARLES

Visiting an owl cafe was on our list... a cat cafe was not.  You know when you’re traveling and your feet hurt, you’re cranky and you’ve already stopped for one glass of champagne in the middle of the day and it’s too early to just keep on drinking???  Well Ryan stumbled upon this place on Foursquare when I was in a particularly cranky mood and it turned my frown rightside up.

Cafe Arles is totally weird but definitely better than the other themed cafes because it feels like a neighborhood cafe with a few pet cats to add some charm.  Local teenagers lingering over their laptops and drinks tip you off that you’re not in one of the cat cafes catering to tourists.  Order a coffee (their iced coffee was actually really good) and it arrives with a half of a banana, a tiny bowl of giant corn nuts and a delicious vanilla creme filled packaged wafer cookie (that I also sought out when I got home).

Ryan desperately trying to woo one of the cats.

DRINKS//

MORI BAR

Mori was our first cocktail stop in Tokyo, so we didn’t quite know what to expect from a city so famous for high end mixology.  Thus my list of “things to note” about cocktail bars in Tokyo:  

The glassware: is beautiful.  And not just the cocktail glasses.  At more than one establishment we noted the thin-as-a-lightbulb tall glasses used for water and decided right away that we needed this kind of luxury at home.  

The snacks: are an adventure unto themselves.  At Mori we were greeted with a small shot of beef consomeé, some popcorn, seaweed snacks and some deliciously refreshing iced jasmine tea.  Don’t mind if I do.  

They know that the a barstool is the best seat in the house.  Here we were initially seated at a table across from the bar but they moved us without asking as soon as seats at the bar were available.  Cheers from barstoolkate...

Ignore the cheesy plastic table tents promoting their signature drink and go ahead and order the Mori Martini.  It’s unlike any martini you’ve ever had and I don’t even understand how it takes the way it does - smooth, full bodied...it would convince me to drink martinis again if one like this could be found anywhere else.  The drinks at Mori are super boozy so don’t count on having too many unless you need to induce sleep (which was actually effective given our jet lag).  

BAR BENFIDDICH

This was the highlight of my Tokyo cocktail experience.  Bar Benfiddich is certainly hard to find but worth the effort.  Photos online don’t do the space justice.  Enter this bar on one of the upper levels of a nondescript building in Shinjuku and you’re transported into a dark, dungeon-y lair.  Think Henry the Eighth’s private bar updated with hip Brooklyn live edge wood accents.  The atmosphere sets the right tone because you’re in for something dope.

Bartender Hiroyasu Kayama has a commanding presence and mixed every cocktail we saw served himself with the help of 3 assistants.  This being one of those “tell me what you like and I’ll craft you a cocktail” joints - you do need to be prepared to provide direction.  Since I’m yuzu obsessed I ordered a yuzu pisco sour and saddled up to enjoy the 10 minute preparation from my comfy lounge chair.  No bar stools here - primetime seats at the bar are in fact THE most comfortable seats at any bar ever.  

You’ll notice that Kayama stations himself centered in the middle of the bar beneath a dim spotlight, showcasing his hands and drawing your eye toward his mixology wizardry.  You’re entranced as you watch his assistants gather bottles, herbs and the gear he needs to craft your potion.  My yuzu pisco sour involved muddling, blending, shaking and straining and did not let me down - it was exactly what I had hoped for.  The second we tasted our first cocktails we knew we would order another.  Make sure you carve out enough time to wait for a bar seat (if you sit at a table you’ll miss the show) and to have more than one drink here because Bar Benfiddich can easily sway you to linger.

BAR HIGH FIVE

High Five was my least favorite of the cocktail bars we visited.  I read that they relocated to the ground level of the same building and noticed the new interior felt like it was trying to recreate another space.  It seemed like everyone drinking there was a tourist and several of the bar staff were interns visiting from other countries.  The cocktails were delicious but the atmosphere didn’t sit quite right with me so I wouldn’t go out of my way to return here again.

STAY//

PALACE HOTEL

We stayed at the Park Hotel for the first 4 nights of our Tokyo trip (comfortable enough, conveniently located, great city views) and after traveling to Kyoto and back splurged on a night at the Palace.  On my next trip I aspire to stay at there the entire time.  The luxury of this hotel room (get a Deluxe King room with balcony) was perfect for our last night when we were tired of travel and ready for some R&R.  We checked in and immediately after the bellman left our room I decided that I needed a glass of champagne to enjoy in the beautiful bathtub that was open to the room and faced the terrace and view of the Emperor’s Palace.  Avoid the $14 coffee in the lobby and venture down into the subterranean mall to fetch coffee and pastries and bring them back to your balcony for breakfast.  If I lived in Tokyo (which I decided I could) I would want to live in this room.

Photo: The Palace Hotel