#reads like an email. anyways i sm very excited to see this design!!!

[scream-mans-friend]

i’ve decided you’re the authority on present mic so you’ve gotta tell me if genderbent mic (or any mic really) would wear the leather leg warmers and leather shorts

Hello,

As the user 7hz's official authority on bnha's character Present Mic, I regret to inform that Present Mic in any and all universes does not have the ass to pull off leather shorts, however he can and will wear them anyways bc of who he is as a person. And he would wear the leather leg warmers, but only if paired with some black rubber boots/shoes, as this the natural middle ground of his giant rubber boots and actual leather boots. We must remember that try as he might with the rest of his outfit, he quickly and swiftly gives up on all style when it comes to the footwear due to the goofy/clown character factor.

Signed,

scream-mans-friend, authority on all things Present Mic

[toldyoushecan]

TRAVEL DIARY | BAGUIO 219

We are down to the last 2 months of 2019 and I am so glad I was able to squeeze in a little trip up North with the B! We are excited to finally escape our daily work routine. It was a great time to visit my brother Choi too, who is currently studying in Baguio.

I booked our hotel via ZENROOMS. (which is now my favorite hotel app! I love how they offer clean, comfortable yet very affordable rooms!) We chose Casa Bel Baguio that only cost us 1810.00php for 2 nights. (I used a 20% promo code too!) You can’t expect much from it as it is very basic though I was surprised that ours included a balcony and a decent parking space. This is probably one of the reasons why we didn’t opt for the prettier options on AirBnB. Madaming mas maganda but it’s either mahirap puntahan or there are no guaranteed parking space. Casa Bel located along Marcos Highway which is 15-20 minutes away from the city proper.

We didn’t visit the other common tourist spots because we’ve been here a few times already. We only went to Camp John Hay just for some photo ops. They do offer a lot of cool adventures but were too lazy (or scared lol) to try any. You can check the list here: https://campjohnhay.com/explore.html

Inside Camp John Hay is a garden called Bell House. We paid an entrance fee of 48php/head.

WHERE TO EAT IN BAGUIO:

ARCA’S YARD

Location: Tiptop, Ambuclao Road, Baguio City

We had our first breakfast in Baguio at this very dreamy cafe called Arca’s Yard. It is located approx. 15-20 minutes from the city proper. It is an old 3-story house converted into a very cozy and homey restaurant. We sat on a table beside a white wooden window where I enjoyed sipping my hot chocolate drink while I appreciate the beautiful view of tall Pine trees swaying outside.

WE ORDERED THE FOLLOWING:

LONGGANISA - (165)

HUNGARIAN SAUSAGE WITH BACON AND GG - (210)

CACAO HOT CHOCOLATE - (75) ugh! this one set the bar up high. I love how authentic it tastes.. it’s perfect for the cold breeze outside.

CREAM OF MUSHROOM - I forgot to take note of the price. The B ordered this one and he really liked it. He said the smooth texture of the soup is very creamy and tasty. It’s like the ingredients melt and dance in his mouth which he really liked.

HODORI KOREAN AND JAPANESE RESTAURANT

Location: Mabini Street | Session Road

I craved for Samgyupsal on our first night in Baguio. This one is located near Session Road so we gave it a try.

390PHP/per person for unlimited meat and serving dishes

You’ll get 4 types of meat: Samgyupsal (Pork Belly) Woosamgyup (Beef Belly) Pork Bulgogi and Beef Bulgogi

They also offer additional serving dishes: (which are also part of the unlimited)

- Shrimp Tempura (which to my surprise doesn’t really taste like one. PLEASE SKIP THIS)

- Fried Chicken

- Seasoned Chicken

- Kimbab

- California Maki _(This together with the Japchae were okay)

- Japchae

*Note that they do offer Korean ice cream but it is no longer part of the unlimited :)

GLENN’S 50′S DINER

Location: 92 Upper General Luna Road**, Corner Brent Road

I honestly have high expectations with this diner as a lot of bloggers have been raving about this. (There is another branch which is only called “50′s Diner” located inside Porta Vaga mall) The B and I arrived there just in time for lunch so we had to wait for about 10 minutes before we got our table. I was expecting it to look close like the Filling Station in Makati but the retro vibes was not really there. Maybe because it was too small and the place was packed with customers when we went there.

WE ORDERED THE FOLLOWING:

GRILLED PORK BELLY - 135PHP (Soft and tender meat. It was good!)

BLT - 1150PHP (The bun was really big! I enjoyed my burger though nothing was really special about it)

CREAM OF MUSHROOM - 60 (This one doesn’t taste home-made. I feel like they used those easy-cook sachets to make this)

STRAWBERRY MILKSHAKE - 70 (I am a sucker for Strawberry milkshakes and this one was what I really loved. The combination of milk and strawberry was perfectly blended. It was not too sweet and I find it very affordable for the big glass.

BAGUIO CRAFT BREWERY

Location: Marcos Highway

This is another must-try place in Baguio as it gives a whole new social drinking experience. Too bad we went there during a black out in the area so we were only able to check out the roof top without experiencing the view of the city lights below the building. It was a great experience as it was my first time to try craft beer. How it works is you have to go to the cashier where all the craft beers are located. You may ask for free taste until you find what beer really suits your liking.

We ordered the following:

Lagud - Strawberry Fruit Beer - (180PHP) I played safe and ordered this one. hehe This was actually my brother’s first choice. It was good. It tastes like wine to me!

Kraken - mixed with coffee - (190PHP)

English Man in New York - mixed with caramel - (190PHP)

SIZZLING PLATE

Location: 116 Session Road

The B has been eyeing this the moment we passed Session Road. We could see a lot of people dining in so we finally gave it a try on our 2nd night in Baguio. We were surprised that this restaurant is the same one we see inside SM’s food court. However they do offer bigger serving that still didn’t hurt our pockets.

WE ORDERED THE FOLLOWING:

GRILLED PORKCHOP 

T-BONE STEAK - 240PHP

SALISBURY STEAK - 161PHP

CREAM OF MUSHROOM 

ILI LIKHA ARTISTS VILLAGE

Location: Assumption Rd

You should definitely consider going to this place when you go to Baguio. It’s not your typical food hub as the entire place was built with big trunk of trees. All the pieces made to assemble the food hub are recycled which is really evident if you would walk around the place.While appreciating the crazy aesthetics of the entire place, you could fill in your stomachs from the different food stalls inside. You can order from any of the stalls and they would bring you your food wherever you want to be seated.

We ordered the following: (We ordered these from 3 different merchants but I wasn’t able to take note of each names)

BALBACUA - 75 (I’ve been curious about this too as I’ve read this dish in a lot of other blog post. They said it taste like “pares” which I don’t really eat but I gave it a try anyway... locals, please don’t get mad at me but I feel like matabang siya. :(

RICE - 35 (I ordered one rice because the dish doesn’t include it yet)

BULLET PROOF COFFEE - 110 (Coffee is always a good idea anyway. I loved this!)

PINIKPIKAN - 110 (Here’s another dish we got curious with. It turned out it taste exactly like Tinola hehe masarap!)

ALIGUE RICE WITH BAGNET + 1 STEAMED RICE - 170 (I enjoyed the Aligue rice as it was very tasty and flavorful pero naumay kami with the rich taste so mixed it with steamed rice hehe)

SAGADA COFFEE with 1 free refill - 50

This is a little bridge going to the other side of the food hub. 

you can dine wherever you want!

This one is pretty awesome! They have a small theater designed with wood and trunks. I believe this is where they would invite people and play indie films.

OTHER INFO I WOULD LIKE TO SHARE :)

- Total gas was 2000.00 for an AT Sedan Hyundai Accent (departed from Tandang Sora, Quezon City. 3 days stay. Including city driving)

- Total toll gate was around 1300.00

- Total budget for pasalubong was 600-1200.00 (Dun kayo sa Public Market nila bumili kasi mas mura yung mga pasalubong dun. Mas makakatawad din. Sample pricing: 120php for the big Choco Flakes, 80php for 1 pack of cheese bars, 100php for 7 Fuji Apples, 80php for the Lengua)

- If it’s your first time going to the night market. Only bring a small bag or purse. Expect na sobrang daming tao talaga. They open at 9PM :)

- Looking for the best cake? YOU MUST TRY VIZCO’S STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE! Located along session road :)

**

I enjoyed writing this travel post! I hope to write another one anytime soon.

**

Thank you for visiting my blog! :)

Let’s stay connected!

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For business purposes please email me at dhindeleon@gmail.com

Love,

Claudine

[creativesage]

By Tom Steinberg, Guest Contributor

The "I’ve got a new job!" social media post is one of modern life’s new normals, the sort of thing that washes over all of us every day, now, without much comment. But last month, one such post appeared on Facebook that’s very interesting, indeed. It’s from an experienced software engineer named Brian Acton, and it went like this:

What Acton doesn’t mention in his modest post is that he was a co-founder of WhatsApp, not just a regular staffer. And as such, he’s worth an estimated $6.6 billion, thanks to Mark Zuckerberg’s historic purchase of WhatsApp in 2014. He’s already donated shares valued at hundreds of millions of dollars to community issues, and this Facebook post marks a more direct step out of the business world and into the nonprofit universe.

If Acton was nothing more than a highly successful businessperson moving on with his life, I probably wouldn’t have paid any attention. But I am myself someone who spent a big chunk of his career founding, growing and then eventually leaving a user-focused, tech-for-good nonprofit. Significant new players in this field are rare and interesting, and there are all sorts of reasons why Acton might be the most interesting new arrival ever. To explain why, I need to step back a couple of paces, and explain the fundamental challenge with the entire tech-for-good sector.

Explosive Complexity

Every successful nonprofit organization or campaign group has to assemble a range of moving parts to have a chance of succeeding. Even the simplest of soup kitchens needs to bring together property, volunteers, food, equipment, energy and more before they can hand out a single plate of food. If even one of those is missing, or badly delivered, the whole thing can fall to bits.

This is where digital technologies bring extra excitement and risk. Modern tech is a bit like a volatile rocket fuel when it comes to new organizations and projects: It can massively increase your impact (think Wikipedia), but not infrequently, it can blow up in your face and leave you with a load of smoking wreckage for your considerable investment. Funding and running nonprofits that are highly digital is like taking a double-or-quits bet about impact—but times a hundred.

To avoid this fate, successful digitally enabled nonprofits (such as Crisis Textline or Frontline) need to get a whole bunch of really difficult things just right, including: product design and product conceptualization skills; user-centered design skills; market analysis skills; engineering and design skills; a realistic theory of change; and money and other scarce resources, like passionate volunteers.

Getting all these lined up is really hard. So hard, in fact, that total project failure is not at all uncommon in the tech-for-good world, and why the whole sector is littered with projects that almost got going but didn’t ever really launch. You might think this is true of all startup fields, but the cycle in tech-for-good is especially vicious, and the money and the tech-savvy talent don’t naturally come from the same places.

A Unique Starting Point

Brian Acton starts in a remarkable and almost unprecedented position for someone starting a tech-driven nonprofit because he can almost certainly tick off all the items on the list above before he even starts. This is what made me sit up and pay attention to his Facebook post.

So obviously, he can tick the "money" item off that list pretty easily. But it’s the other items that are actually more rare amongst traditional donors. For example, you only have to open WhatsApp to understand how much Acton and his circle clearly know about product design, engineering, and responding diligently to user feedback and complaints. But if he only understood the iPhone-buying demographic, that wouldn’t make for a very promising nonprofit—the skills would likely be irrelevant.

However, WhatsApp is a famous exception to the "isn’t everyone middle class?" assumption baked into so many Silicon Valley products. Its co-founders were famously interested in the lives and constraints of people whose most valuable possession was a $10 Nokia phone, and for whom 1 cent per SMS was an unaffordable and frustrating expense. They actually beat competitors partly because they understood what it was like to live like this. This perspective will be an amazing asset if Acton plans to run a project that will be of value to people who don’t drive everywhere in the latest Tesla.

Now, that said, whilst I think Acton’s in a fantastic position, there are still some things I’d like to convey to him and the team that I imagine he’s building. Here’s what I’d write to him, if I still actually wrote letters:

Hi Brian, Hi Team!

You don’t know me, I’m just some British guy who reads the internet a lot, and who spent a good chunk of his adult life trying to build public-good digital applications before working in the funding world. Because of your skills and resources, I think you’ve got a fantastic chance of starting something really important, and there’s a whole load of stuff I could tell you that you already know. But I’ve wracked my brains, and here are some things that might be of use to you.

There’s a lot of knowledge from past failures lurking in the tech-for-good scene, so seek them out. A lot of people have already tried to build a lot of digital services to make the world a better place, with a predictably high failure rate. But this sector doesn’t have a TechCrunch that documents every last story, so you can’t just read about it all online in one place. Instead of Googling, you should try asking around among some of the sector’s more connected people, to see if you can fix conversations with people who might already have tried projects like the one you’re working on, to save you some pain that might be avoided.

Work hard to articulate and toughen up your new venture’s "theory of change." Even if they don’t use that strange jargon phrase, most nonprofits have one of these anyway. What it means is that deep within the heads of most non-profit founders is an idea of roughly this form: "If only we can do thing X, then good thing Y will happen (or bad thing Z will stop happening)." It’s really easy to get quite a long way down the road to setting up a nonprofit without ever really articulating or testing your theory of change because, well, nobody demands it of you. But if you don’t have a good one, it almost inevitably bites you badly on the backside later on, when the going gets trickier. So get yourself a few good, disinterested people to kick the tires of your idea a few times, and see if you can spell out your theory of change really clearly.

Don’t fudge the nonprofit/for-profit choice. It is very tempting to try to build an organization that’s a hybrid for-profit and nonprofit so that it has some sustainability, whilst still doing socially valuable nonprofit work. Having witnessed many attempts to do this, I am now of the view that organizations are much more focused and successful if they stick clearly in one camp or the other. If your idea is really more like a for-profit, make it as a for-profit—there are great social-impact businesses out there. If your idea is truly incapable of making a return, don’t mess it up by giving it a distracting secondary business mission. I’ve written on this before, elsewhere.

Be aware if you’re about to compete with someone you might not know already exists. Markets are fundamentally about the virtues of competition, and competition can be quite valuable in the nonprofit world, too. However, please be aware that if you launch a new competitor to an existing organization that the reaction won’t be the same as it would be in a traditional business—observers and future partners might be horrified rather than impressed; they might diss you instead of celebrating you. So take a bit of time to determine whether or not you’re actually competing with anyone else (even a tiny micro-project), and then if you do, be kind and respectful about it, even if you do end up replacing it.

Build systems for honest feedback. People in the nonprofit world are terribly nice. They’re not really like your historical tech customers who love to complain about every tiny feature choice and bug. If your nonprofit project sucks, people are still quite likely to tell you it’s lovely and you’re a good person for running it. So you need to establish special systems to truly listen for signals through the thick curtain of politeness. If everything you hear is that your nonprofit is awesome, you need to invest more time and money to hear the voices that are not content.

O.K., it’s late night here in Olde England, so take care and good luck!

***

Tom Steinberg is Digital Transformation Lead at the Big Lottery Fund, the UK’s largest community funder. He was the founder of mySociety, a civic tech organisation. His other writings are available here.

[Entire post — click on the title link to read it at Inside Philanthropy.]

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At Creative Sage™, we love to connect corporate leaders and entrepreneurs with good causes, and help companies start genuine Corporate Social Responsibility and Sustainability, Social Entrepreneurship, Intrapreneurship, Impact Investing and/or philanthropy programs that are a win-win for all partners. We’re also researching new developments in the Sharing Economy that include new business models to increase profits, and also support social good.

Please do not hesitate to email us if you would like to discuss your situation and find out more about how we can help your organization move forward to a more innovative and profitable future, strengthening your branding and resonance with customers while helping to do good in the world through appropriate, authentic CSR partnerships with nonprofits, philanthropists, educational institutions and programs, or government agencies and community organizations.

We can also help you connect with celebrities and other notable people who can help amplify your message of social good, or headline entertainment events and concerts for good causes. You can call us at 1-510-845-5510 in San Francisco / Silicon Valley. We look forward to talking with you!

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