#since link is the projected winner of the poll

[starsetven]

No longer civil

[wolfjackle-creates]

Bring Me Home Arc 3 Part 3

Again the winner of last week's poll! There won't be a poll this week because I'm planning something a bit different. I hit 1000 followers this past week and have been wracking my brain about how to celebrate! Wasn't up for doing prompts or adding more projects to my list, though, so I didn't want to go that route.

But I did come up with something that I think everyone will really enjoy. Especially those of you who have been voting for Carry Your Heart (I see you in the tags!). So look out for that post.

In addition, I've just posted the first chapter of Arc 2 on AO3! Link below.

Story Summary: Jack and Maddie install a new ghost shield on the house which activates the moment Danny tries to step into his home. His secret is out and his parents are determined to excise the ghost from their son.

Luckily Danny isn't alone. The Young Justice, Sam, Tucker, and Jazz aren't going to leave him to suffer.

Arc 1: AO3

Arc 2: AO3 (incomplete); Tumblr - First, Final

Arc 3: First, Previous

Word Count: 1.4k

-----

Fire rushing through him jolted Danny awake. His back arched as he cried out. He screwed his eyes tight, not wanting to see what torture his parents were going to come at him with next when he realized what the sound of his cry meant: the muzzle was gone.

As were the restraints. And he was lying on something soft. Trying hard not to hope, he opened his eyes.

Sam and Jazz were leaning over him, concern clear on their faces. They were in some sort of ambulance or van.

“How are you feeling,” demanded Sam.

Danny took a moment to answer, his chest was pure agony. He didn’t even want to think what it would feel like to sit up. And even past that, everything was sore. Though the fire that had woken him up had dissipated, the tell-tale feel of ecto-dejecto. “Pretty much the worst I’ve ever felt,” he answered honestly.

Sam and Jazz both winced and his sister grabbed his hand. He squeezed her fingers weakly.

At the foot of his bed stood Tim in full Red Robin getup and Kon as Superboy.

He couldn’t hold back the smile as he met Tim’s gaze. “You came,” he said.

Tim didn’t smile back, but some tension eased out of his shoulders. “I always will,” he said. “Been telling you that since we were ten years old.”

“I know. I’ve always known. Thank you.”

Jazz squeezed his hand again and he looked at her. “Red Robin and Superboy are going to take you away from here. Robin will help you recover.”

Sam nodded. “Yep. And the rest of us are gonna focus on making sure Amity is safe for ghosts once and for all.”

Danny shook his head. “I should be there with you guys, fighting.”

“Nope!” interrupted Jazz. “Not even a little. You’re going to focus on getting better, got it, Danny? That’s all we want from you.”

“But the ghosts—”

Sam covered his mouth with her hand. “Stop it right there. Tucker is working with Impulse and Wonder Girl to get the portal locked up. No one will be coming through. No one—ghost or human—will be in any danger while you’re gone. I promise.”

Danny slumped into the bed. Even the slight change in position caused waves of pain to radiate from his chest even through the healing ice he could feel implanted in his body. He whimpered and closed his eyes until the throbbing receded just a bit. “I trust you. I do, it’s just…”

“You’re used to taking care of everyone,” finished Jazz for him. “We know. So let us take care of you for a change. We love you, Danny.”

“Love you, too, Jazz. Sam.”

“Be good for bird-brain there, got it?” ordered Sam.

Danny gave her a half-smile. “Are Tim and I ever good together?”

She laughed. “Well, don’t burn down Gotham, capiche?”

“Capiche.”

“We have to go now,” said Jazz.

Danny gripped her hand tighter. “Don’t leave me.”

Jazz winced, but leaned down to kiss his forehead. “We need to make sure the Guys in White aren’t going to get involved further. And you need to get someplace safe.”

Danny huffed a half laugh. “Gotham is safe?”

Jazz rolled her eyes at his poor attempt at a joke. “For you it is. Now, I’m leaving Red and Superboy with a case full of ectoplasm for you and our entire supply of ecto-dejecto. I just gave you your first injection. Please try and eat something and drink your ectoplasm regularly.”

“Yeah, yeah. Whatever you say, Jazz.”

Jazz sniffed and it was only then that Danny realized it was wetter than usual and her eyes were watery. He tried not to feel bad for his jokes when she replied, “Yes, it is whatever I say. Glad you agree.”

Sam cackled, and now that he was paying attention, Danny could hear the hysterical edge to it. “You’d better text us multiple times a day, ghost boy. Don’t try and lie to us, either. Kon’ll tell me the truth about your condition. And as soon as we can arrange it, we’re coming out your way for a visit.”

“Course I will, Sam. Give Tuck my best?”

“Duh. He wishes he could’ve come with us, you know.”

Danny nodded. “But he’s better with the tech stuff and that is just as time sensitive.”

“Yeah. Now, get some sleep,” Sam ordered. “You’ve got a long drive ahead of you.”

Danny gave the rote answer after too many all-nighters taking care of ghost attacks before school, “I’m dead, I don’t need sleep.”

His sister squeezed his hand. “Ghosts who just went through what you did need their sleep. Love you, Danny. Get well and I’ll see you soon.”

“Love you, Jazz.”

She kissed his forehead one more time, followed by Sam. And with another two rounds of farewells and love yous, he was alone with Tim and Kon.

“Thanks for coming,” he said again.

“Obviously we weren’t going to leave you there,” said Kon. “Being a lab subject isn’t fun. Especially not that kinda lab experiment.”

Danny couldn’t quite hold back the flinch at that description. It was accurate, but blunt.

Tim walked over until he was sitting by Danny’s bed. “Just listen to Jazz and get some rest. We’re going to be taking the long route to Gotham by going south to start. If we stop for food in a few hours, think you could handle a smoothie?”

Danny shrugged and bit back a yawn. “Could try.”

“That’s all I ask.”

Kon moved towards the front of the vehicle as well. “Looks like it’s time for us to skedaddle. I’ll keep the road from jostling you, ghost-boy.”

Danny gave a small smile and let his eyes close. As he did, he tried to mumble his thanks and he hoped it came across.

---

The next time he woke was more gentle. Someone was tapping on his shoulder and calling his name. But even so, as he was pulled closer to awareness, the pain made itself more and more known. He tried to cling to the darkness, but the tapping wasn’t stopping, nor was the person calling him.

He blinked open his eyes to see Tim’s concerned face. He wasn’t wearing the domino anymore, or his costume. Just a sweatshirt and jeans.

“Hey, Danny,” said Tim. “I’m going to need you to try and eat a bit right now. Kon got us those smoothies I mentioned. I’ve also got yogurt if that’ll be easier for you. But the smoothie will have more nutrients.”

Danny closed his eyes. He wasn’t hungry and didn’t want to eat. Why did Tim have to bring him back to consciousness for this? He hurt and just wanted to sink back into oblivion.

The tapping on his shoulder began again. “I know, Danny. But you have to eat something. And you should take some ectoplasm, too. So just stay awake for a few minutes.”

“Mm ‘wake,” said Danny without opening his eyes. He shifted his weight, hoping to push himself up to eat, only to scream in pain as his chest protested any movement.

“Shit! Don’t move,” said Tim too late. “I’ve got a spoon here. I’ll feed it to you, okay? So just stay exactly where you are.”

Danny gripped his sheets, unable to do anything else as wave after wave of pain over took him. Tim kept up a litany of reassurances and stroked his hair. Eventually, Danny was able to think past it again.

“Don’t think I can sit up,” said Danny.

“Of course not,” agreed Tim. He held a styrofoam cup between his knees and carefully took off the lid and straw. “Just let me. Take at least a few bites. Swallow as is, don’t try and chew. Just do what you can, okay?”

“Okay,” agreed Danny and Tim fed him the first bite.

Danny hated this. Hated it so much. Here he was being spoon fed like a baby all because his parents… He shut his eyes and took the next bite. He wasn’t going to finish that thought. Tim was here and that’s what mattered.

Danny wasn’t sure how much he ate, but it couldn’t have been much. His eyelids were getting heavier and heavier and the pull of oblivion stronger.

“Wait, Danny. Stay awake just a little longer, okay?”

Danny groaned but forced his eyes open again.

Tim showed him a bottle of ectoplasm. “Just a few swallows of this, too. Okay?”

He didn’t want to. He’d rather just go to sleep again, but he opened his mouth obediently. By the time he finished his third spoonful, he couldn’t fight it anymore and slumped into the bed. The pain receded back into blackness for a time.

-----

Next

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Danny is going to be getting all the comfort throughout this. All of them will, tbh. Because no one is happy and they all need a hug or five.

Let me know what you think!

[biocrafthero]

The style of the games is very similar to the specific game in the first Hunger Games book. There are weapons and supplies the tributes can use to eliminate each other. Units and friendships don’t matter all too much, since there can only be one winner and they are all pitted against each other.

All characters were randomized between the first two polls as to avoid bias, and these are the ones we ended up with, the top six from each poll resulting in twelve survivors. Yes I am open to any ideas regarding how exactly these characters are going to fair now that half of the main cast are dead I love seeing y’all’s thoughts

Links to previous polls: Match 1 part 1, Match 1 part 2, Tiebreaker poll for M1, Who died first

[archivehub]

Title: Oddities

Summary: Connie experiences the magical oddities which accompany marriage to a half-gem.

Here's the winner of that Connverse prompt poll I ran the other week! I hope y'all enjoy. Don't be afraid to leave a comment or suggestion!

If you hate external links, the short can also be found below the cut:

There wasn’t exactly a guidebook for these things.

Oddities

By ArchiveHub

After all, Steven’s mere existence was so unprecedented, so extraordinary, it was incredibly likely nobody similar could, or would, ever be produced. Although, that simple fact did little to deter many from trying.

Upon their arrival on Earth, countless gems of all facets, cuts, and crusts had been more than eager to mingle with humans. It was only a matter of time until numerous such gems would follow Rose Quartz’s lead and take a crack at child-rearing. However, as they promptly realized, shapeshifting a womb for nine months was much easier said than done. Evidently, such a feat could only be performed by the most powerful and radiant of all gems: a diamond.

And so, Connie was all by her lonesome. Nobody else could, or would, ever understand the magical oddities of marriage to a half-gem.

Sleep was always a luxury for her. If not by virtue of a crying baby or screaming child, then due to her husband's strangely specific power-set. Frequently, their bedroom TV would stir to life in the dead of the night and exhibit his dreams or, more often, nightmares. Steven had made it abundantly clear that he didn't mind whether she indulged in them; regardless, she couldn't help but ponder the ethics of eavesdropping on her spouse's innermost thoughts. She would be lying, however, if she said her curiosity hadn't eventually gotten the better of her.

Although they were frequent, nightmares weren’t all his unconscious mind had to offer. He dreamt of bonding with their children, adventuring with the Gems, vacationing with his dad, writing songs with Sadie, and soaring through space with Lars. Naturally, he also dreamt of her. More often than not, they were teens in a typical, suburban high school. He would flirt with her; she would flirt back. They would meet outside for lunch, where they took turns sipping from a durian juice box before sharing an awkward, inexperienced kiss. Pure, unadulterated schmaltz—some things never changed, she supposed.

Steven wasn’t the only one whose dreams weren’t particularly private either. His powers caused his slumbering consciousness to merge with hers intermittently, an inadvertent side effect of sharing a bed. Although she wished she could utilize the occasions for wacky, fantastical hijinks which not even Rose’s Room could properly emulate, her dreams weren’t nearly as… varied as her husband’s.

She often dreamt of falling, of violently cascading to her death. She dreamt of desperately gasping for air before inevitably drowning. She dreamt of being restrained as her loved ones, her children, were irreversibly harmed. And no matter how much she struggled, no matter how valiant her husband’s efforts, the nightmares always ended the same.

Oftentimes, she wondered whether they ever bothered Steven, if firsthand witnessing her deepest trepidations had traumatized him all over again. She regularly asked if he wanted to sleep in seperate bedrooms; without hesitation, he always firmly vetoed the idea. Still, she couldn’t help but feel a twinge of guilt every time she inadvertently exposed him to her inner demons. Demons which had been gradually accumulating since her early teens…

Was it strange that her husband sometimes woke up possessing her body? And was that a question which anybody else, at any other point in history, had ever had to ask? She would research the subject, but it wasn't like the local library had a neatly organized “history of spousal possession” section—though, perhaps that would change once her future mayoral plans came to fruition.

During the third trimester of her first pregnancy, Steven had been all but forced to make a sudden, overnight stay at Homeworld—something about negotiating with a stubborn gem colony. He dozed off feeling so anxious about leaving her unaccompanied, he hadn't even noticed as his consciousness gradually drifted back home. Fortunately for him, her cellphone had been just an awkward waddle from their bed, left charging beside her sheathed sword. One surreal call later and Amethyst had dive-bombed his rightful body back awake on Homeworld. Though, not before scribbling a series of crude doodles on his face.

Connie's publisher had strongly advised against including that one in her autobiography, alongside an incomprehensibly long list of other, similarly uncanny tales, factoids, and musings.

For example: was she capable of physically aging? Her husband’s saliva wasn’t exactly discriminatory in what it healed. After all, ingesting an insignificant amount of it as a twelve-year-old had granted her twenty-twenty vision and perfectly aligned teeth, much to the befuddlement of a slew of health professionals. So, with a presumed lifetime supply of magical spit, who's to say the same wouldn’t apply to a variety of other “unhealthy” or “deteriorating” aspects of her body? Then again, her stretch marks had remained untreated following her three pregnancies, so perhaps her theory could still use a bit of fine-tuning… (or maybe Steven just liked the scars).

Was she… effectively immortal? If not by virtue of her husband’s saliva, then perhaps his tears? Lars seemed to think so, and considering the pirate’s appearance hadn’t changed an iota since his resurrection, she couldn’t help but take his word as gospel. And what about Lion? How old exactly was he? If Buddy’s journal was anything to go by, the big cat could be anywhere from two hundred to three hundred years old! Ruminating on that fact, it boggled her mind that such an elderly beast slept at the foot of her and Steven’s bed every night.

For the longest time, immortality was a concept which had been relegated to mere fiction within Connie’s mind. She recalled flipping through a plethora of novels on the subject in her youth. Even back then, she found it difficult not to notice how pessimistic most, if not all, authors were regarding the idea. In retrospect, she wondered whether they truly viewed immortality as a curse, or if disparaging the concept merely brought them a sense of comfort about their own, personal mortality.

Philosophy aside, the prospect of having infinite time to achieve infinite things had always been tantalizing to her. Twelve-year-old Connie had probably just wanted enough time to read every book in existence. Present, thirty-year-old Connie, on the other hand, possessed grander ambitions—not that reading every book was completely out of the question.

Was it strange to want to live forever, to want to spend an eternity learning, loving, and changing the world around her? Furthermore, was it strange to want nothing more than to spend hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years with her half-gem husband, no matter how bizarre things could possibly get?

Who knew? Surely not Connie.

[newmusickarl]

5-9’s Album of the Month Podcast – latest episode out now!

The latest episode of the 5-9 Album of the Month Podcast is here and it’s our penultimate monthly episode of the year! Pleased to say Mama Mañana Records’ founder Kiley Larsen makes his return, as he and I take our usual seats alongside 5-9 Editor Andrew Belt, to review five high profile album releases from the past month in music, ultimately naming one as our Album of the Month at the end of the discussion.

For our September 2024 episode, it was Hayden Thorpe’s unique and dazzling adaptation of Robert MacFarlane’s book, Ness, that took home our coveted Album of the Month title. Now for our latest episode, we look back at five big releases from October and the albums vying for recognition this time around are:

Cartoon Darkness by Amyl And The Sniffers (Poll winner, thanks for voting!)

Fate & Alcohol by Japandroids

Patterns In Repeat by Laura Marling

Endless Rain by One True Pairing

Cutouts by The Smile

If you want to listen to this or any previous episodes simply follow the links below, but also be sure to follow 5-9 Blog on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube for more news and polls relating to the podcast.

Listen on Spotify here

Watch, like and subscribe to our YouTube channel here

Album & EP Recommendations

GNX by Kendrick Lamar

“There we were, all starting to plan our annual Album of the Year countdowns… then BAM! A new project from one of the true modern greats and one of the most acclaimed artists of the last decade plus - none other than King Kendrick Lamar. Dropping ahead of his planned SuperBowl halftime show in February, GNX immediately feels like a record for the fans. Where Mr Morale & The Big Steppers was a more divisive project, a complex double album that saw Kendrick wrestling with guilt, grief and generational trauma, GNX by comparison instantly feels much more accessible. This is Kendrick the artist getting back to being Kendrick the rapper, coming out all guns blazing with his razor-sharp flow and some incredible production work by the likes of Sounwave, Jack Antonoff, Kamasi Washington and, of course, MUSTARRRRRRRD! While fans can continue to speculate on a potential second album before the year’s done, I think it’s safe to say that GNX alone feels like another significant addition to Kendrick’s flawless discography. Not only shocking the world with the nature of its release, but also delivering a project to the same exceptional standard that we’ve come to expect from him. A truly remarkable feat and already one of the best rap records all year, proving once again that Kendrick continues to operate at a level all to himself.”

Read my full review for Clash Magazine here

Listen to GNX here

From Zero by LINKIN PARK

Without a doubt one of the biggest releases of 2024, nu-metal pioneers LINKIN PARK have finally returned with their first new album in seven years, their first since the tragic passing of beloved vocalist Chester Bennington, and the record that introduces new female vocalist Emily Armstrong to their fans worldwide.

While the announcement of Emily joining the band has certainly been marred by controversy, with heavy backlash from both fans and Chester’s family regarding her links to Scientology, anyone who watched the initial livestream will know that, from a pure vocal range perspective, she is probably the best possible replacement the band could’ve got. And the mission for From Zero seems to be just that – convincing the fans to buy into this new era of LINKIN PARK with Emily being part of it. Does it work? I would say yes.

As someone who has accepted that LINKIN PARK are never going to make an album as groundbreaking as Hybrid Theory again, instead enjoying their music these days on a mostly nostalgic level, I’ve had a lot of fun with this one. While there are certainly some duff moments (‘Cut The Bridge’ and ‘Stained’ I’m looking at you), they also deliver plenty of highlights too. ‘The Emptiness Machine’ remains a belter of a hook-laden comeback single, while ‘Over Each Other’ carries a big emotional punch thanks to Emily’s stirring vocal work. There are also some excellent heavier moments that callback to their earlier days too, such as the scream-tastic ‘Casualty’ and hard-hitting rock anthem ‘Two Faced’.

Everything else is solid and catchy too, making this an enjoyable 30-minute listen. As a comeback record it admittedly feels very safe, but I guess the main point of it isn’t really to break the wheel. This is LINKIN PARK doing what they do best and aiming to get their dedicated fanbase back on board for the ride – analysing it from that perspective, I think it works a treat.

Listen here

Night Palace by Mount Eerie

I know what you’re thinking – 26 songs, an 80-minute runtime… why you even recommending this one Karl, you know we ain’t got time for that?! Well, just in case you find yourself at a loss on what to listen to over a long journey somewhere, or even later on next month during the festive period, I have to recommend this new one from American songwriter and producer Phil Elverum – AKA, Mount Eerie.

Firstly, this is an album you need to experience from front-to-back – this isn’t one to dip in and out of individual tracks. Inspired by Zen meditation, it is a single journey of reflection that comes seven years after the devastation of Elverum’s critically acclaimed masterpiece, A Crow Looked At Me. While I personally found that album heartbreakingly beautiful but also very hard work, I’ve found this one has oddly been more accessible by comparison, which is surprising given its demanding length.

But that said, the album has a great flow to it, with many of the tracks between 1 and 3 minutes long, with Elverum constantly jumping between different musings and ideas. There’s acoustic folk tracks and lo-fi rock tracks, with splashes of ambient electronics and harsh static thrown into the mix, playing out almost like someone flicking through different radio stations. It’s an enthralling listen, one that culminates in a gorgeous 12-minute spoken word poem, ‘Demolition’.

So, if you want a record that’s indulgent in the best way, is made for this dark, melancholic time of year and is just utterly fascinating from each brief moment to the next - then give this one a try.

Listen here

Petrichor by 070 Shake

Having come into the spotlight a few years back through her memorable collaborations with Kanye West, rapper/singer/songwriter 070 Shake has since gone on to establish herself through her solid first two albums, Modus Vivendi and You Can’t Kill Me. Now back with her latest album Petrichor, it’s another release that further demonstrates Danielle Balbuena’s fascinating and unique sonic output.

Awash with dark, moody synths, it’s an endlessly interesting collection of glistening neon-soaked pop songs. It begins with theatrical, piano led opener ‘Sin’ before morphing into the pulsating stomp of ‘Elephant’ which sounds like the sci-fi/western collision of Westworld but in audio form. ‘Vagabond’ is similarly dramatic, as is stunning album highlight ‘Into The Garden’ which is a genre-defying whirlwind of a track. Shake then feels festive with ‘Winter Baby / New York Blues’ before an intriguing cover of Tim Buckley’s classic ‘Song To The Siren’ with Courtney Love. The emotional roar of the album then comes on ‘Blood On Your Hands’ which climaxes in a spoken word poem from Shake’s girlfriend, Lily Rose Depp.

While not everything Shake does on this album is perfect, it is always a curious and innovative listen that sees her pushing her sonic boundaries and sounding like no-one else. In a music world where most artists seem to have clear touchpoints, we need more singular voices like 070 Shake.

Listen here

A Weekend In The City B-Sides (Another Weekend In The City) by Bloc Party

To today’s teenagers, the thought of having to illegally download and file share music must seem unfathomable. After all, when music is so freely available with streaming, who needs to track it down through illegal means right? Well, back in 2007 at the height of the indie boom, file sharing was all the rage, with bands blowing up through word of mouth alone, as albums and unreleased tracks were passed through MSN messenger, MySpace and other internet forums.

One such album was Bloc Party’s Another Weekend In The City. A completely unofficial release, it was made up of the band’s brilliant B-Sides from the Weekend In The City singles, as well as some unreleased tracks from the recording sessions that had leaked. For me it remains to this day the ultimate bootleg album, one that I adore as much as Bloc Party’s actual sophomore album.

For years this album was lost, condemned to my broken iPod classic along with some unreleased Radiohead deep cuts (thank God we got ‘Lift’ on the OKNOTOK release eventually). So imagine my delight when Bloc Party a few weeks back announced they would be officially releasing their A Weekend In The City B-sides on streaming services for the first time, bringing life back to Another Weekend In The City.

If you are a Bloc Party fan and are unfamiliar with these tracks, I cannot recommend this enough. The guitar work on tracks like ‘Secrets’ and ‘Version 2.0’ are sensational as always, while the likes of ‘Selfish Son’, ‘We Were Lovers’, ‘Atonement’ and ‘Emma Kate’s Accident’ are as stunning as anything Bloc Party made around that time. It also features two of their finest ever moments in the form of ‘Vision of Heaven’ and, my personal favourite, ‘England’.

At the time of writing, it seems the band have since taken the album down due to poor audio quality – something I foolishly put down to 00s aesthetics when listening late on release day. So, while these songs have temporarily disappeared once again, be sure to jump on them when they return.

In the meantime, you can still listen unofficially here

Also well worth checking out:

Seed of a Seed by Haley Heynderickx

Come Ahead by Primal Scream

BAMBI by Aziya

Don’t Go Making Plans EP by Hard-Fi

Marietta EP by Medium Build

Song Recommendations

People Watching by Sam Fender

He’s back!

A couple of years on from his incredible sophomore album Seventeen Going Under, the Geordie Springsteen has finally returned this month, and with a bang. From a UK/EU tour that sold out instantly, to three big stadium shows and numerous 2025 festival headline spots (including a rumoured Glasto headline set), Sam Fender has also announced that his new album will be released this coming February. ‘People Watching’ is the title track from the project and includes everything that fans have come to love about Sam’s music: his wonderfully descriptive storytelling, a big singalong chorus and some soaring instrumentation. With Adam Granduciel from The War On Drugs also working on the track and noticeably sharing his influence, it’s an absolute belter of a track that sets up Sam Fender to fully own these next 12 months.

Listen here

Pitch Black by The Amazons

Another band set to take 2025 by storm is Reading rockers, The Amazons. After releasing one of their finest songs to date in the form of ‘Living A Lie’ last month, the trio have since revealed that their fourth album will drop next May and will be titled 21st Century Fiction. ‘Pitch Black’ is the latest cut from the project and it’s another absolute stormer, boasting some scintillating bluesy riffs and a hugely anthemic chorus. For my money, still the best pure rock band in the country!

Listen here

When I Wake Up I’m Sad by Fiona-Lee

Someone who has been working with The Amazons and is due to support them on their upcoming UK tour is the wonderful Fiona-Lee, one of my favourite new music discoveries of 2024. Her latest single ‘When I Wake Up I’m Sad’ showcases her incredible talent, with gorgeously soft vocals, honest and vulnerable songwriting, and a spine-tingling arrangement which climaxes emphatically in a fist-in-the-air, saxophone-led instrumental passage.

Listen here

Drown by Bleach Lab

Around this time last year, dreamy indie outfit Bleach Lab were being named as one of my Top 10 Albums of the Year for their phenomenal debut, Lost In A Rush of Emptiness. Now back with their first single since that release, ‘Drown’ signifies a noticeable sonic evolution from the band, particularly the production and singer Jenna Kyle’s more confident vocals. Another great song from the band, it’s already got me excited for their forthcoming next chapter.

Listen here

Singles to get you in the Festive Spirit!

What is Christmas without some classic Christmas tunes hey?! While there has been a drought of any good ones in recent years, this festive season has seen a few new Christmas songs pop-up that are well worth a spin. Some are vying for the UK Christmas No.1 spot, some are for good causes… but all of them are spreading a little festive cheer! Here’s my five picks of Christmas 2024 singles to go check out:

This Christmas Time by Tom A. Smith Listen here

Late Night Phone Call by Reverend & The Makers Listen here

Merry Christmas, Please Don’t Call by Bleachers Listen here

Christmas (Baby Please Come Home) by Nation of Language Listen here

Happy Trails by Orville Peck Listen here

Also well worth checking out:

Renegade by Doves

U by Jadu Heart

Antartica by Divorce

Time of My Life by Somebody’s Child

Blood Is Thicker Than Honey by Lace Thief

My Drummer’s Girlfriend by ALT BLK ERA featuring Wheatus

REMINDER: If you use Apple Music, you can also keep up-to-date with all my favourite 2024 tracks through my Best of 2024 playlist. Constantly updated throughout the year with songs I enjoy, it is then finalised into a Top 100 Songs of the Year in December.

Add the Best of 2024 playlist to your library here

[hit-song-showdown]

Year-End Poll #18: 1967

[Image description: a collage of photos of the 10 musicians and musical groups featured in this poll. In order from left to right, top to bottom: Lulu, The Box Tops, Bobbie Gentry, The Association, The Monkees, The Doors, Frank and Nancy Sinatra, The Turtles, The Young Rascals, Frankie Valli. End description]

More information about this blog here

Moving on to 1967. As mentioned in one of the previous 60's polls, we're seeing how rock and roll is continuing to shift throughout this decade. With the debut of The Doors, psychedelic rock is starting to take hold within the genre. Even beyond rock music, with acts like The Association and The Turtles, that psychedelic descriptor will start applying to pop music as well as the psychedelia subculture truly takes hold in the decade. In the classic rock canon, 1967 is considered one of the greatest years the genre has to offer. And just looking at the projects and artists that debuted this year, that reputation doesn't feel like an exaggeration. Since these polls are strictly focused on the very top of the Billboard year-end Hot 100, I won't go too much into that. But just to give you an idea, this was the debut year of Creedence Clearwater Revival, Fleetwood Mac, Blood Sweat & Tears, The Jimi Hendrix Experience, Sgt. Pepper, and many more. Trust me, I'm making a bunch of painful cuts from this list alone.

We're also seeing the mainstream rise of Blue-eyed soul, a term used to describe white R&B singers at the time. While originally used by radio DJ, Georgie Woods, to introduce the Righteous Brothers, the term soon expanded until now some would classify it as a genre of its own. However, to paraphrase musician, writer, and political activist, Darrell McNeill, BES is primarily a marketing term. Since he explains the phenomenon and context far better than I can, here's a link to an article where he's quoted.

Much like how yesterday's poll was marked by an important cultural moment, we have another one today. This is the first poll that has a nipple on the banner. Yay! Congratulations Jim Morrison. Spoilers: he won't be the last. But this isn't a nipple poll, so they're all winners.

[news365timesindia]

[ad_1] Republican Donald Trump declared victory in the 2024 presidential race after Fox News projected him as the winner over Democrat Kamala Harris, marking a remarkable political comeback four years after his departure from the White House. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump told a jubilant crowd at the Palm Beach County Convention Center early Wednesday morning. Harris, meanwhile, refrained from speaking to her supporters gathered at Howard University, her alma mater. Campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond addressed the crowd just after midnight, offering a hopeful message that Harris would speak publicly on Wednesday. “We still have votes to count,” he said. Trump’s performance was strong across a broad swath of the country, improving on his 2020 showing in both rural areas and urban centers. Republicans also secured a majority in the U.S. Senate by flipping Democratic seats in West Virginia and Ohio. However, the battle for control of the House of Representatives remained too close to call, with Republicans holding a slim majority. Trump’s political resurgence was remarkable, given that just three years earlier, on January 6, 2021, many had predicted the end of his political career after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Exit polls indicated Trump had gained significant ground with traditionally Democratic voter groups, including Hispanic Americans and lower-income households, who have been hit hard by rising costs since the last election. He captured 45% of the Hispanic vote nationwide—still trailing Harris, who garnered 53%, but a notable 13-point increase from 2020. [ad_2] Source link

[news365times]

[ad_1] Republican Donald Trump declared victory in the 2024 presidential race after Fox News projected him as the winner over Democrat Kamala Harris, marking a remarkable political comeback four years after his departure from the White House. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Trump told a jubilant crowd at the Palm Beach County Convention Center early Wednesday morning. Harris, meanwhile, refrained from speaking to her supporters gathered at Howard University, her alma mater. Campaign co-chair Cedric Richmond addressed the crowd just after midnight, offering a hopeful message that Harris would speak publicly on Wednesday. “We still have votes to count,” he said. Trump’s performance was strong across a broad swath of the country, improving on his 2020 showing in both rural areas and urban centers. Republicans also secured a majority in the U.S. Senate by flipping Democratic seats in West Virginia and Ohio. However, the battle for control of the House of Representatives remained too close to call, with Republicans holding a slim majority. Trump’s political resurgence was remarkable, given that just three years earlier, on January 6, 2021, many had predicted the end of his political career after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol in an attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election. Exit polls indicated Trump had gained significant ground with traditionally Democratic voter groups, including Hispanic Americans and lower-income households, who have been hit hard by rising costs since the last election. He captured 45% of the Hispanic vote nationwide—still trailing Harris, who garnered 53%, but a notable 13-point increase from 2020. [ad_2] Source link

[icinch]

How to Build an Email List from Nothing and Get 1,000 Subscribers in Just 7 Days

New Post has been published on https://www.cinchhomebiz.com/how-to-build-an-email-list-from-nothing-and-get-1000-subscribers-in-just-7-days/

How to Build an Email List from Nothing and Get 1,000 Subscribers in Just 7 Days

Can you pick a topic, build a list of 1,000 and even promote your first product in just 7 days? Yes! Here’s how…

First of course is to choose your topic or niche. If you want a head start, pick something that will interest your friends – preferably both your friends in real life and your social media friends. Let’s say you’re interested in marketing, and you’ve got some business friends in your hometown as well as more business friends online. This is a good topic choice to hit the ground running.

Next, reach out to those friends you already have a relationship with. Let them know about your new endeavor. In our example case, you might write the following:

Hey George,

Quick question for you: I’m starting a new project where I give out the latest marketing tips for small businesses like yours on how to cheaply get more customers.

Traditional advertising just isn’t cutting it anymore, and we need alternatives that don’t cost a lot and flat out work.

Anyway, thought you might be interested.

I’ll be emailing the latest ‘how-to’ info as I find it.

Want me to include you?

Jill

When they reply back, manually add them to your list. Yes, this takes a little effort, but it’s an excellent way to get started. Go through your phone, email and social media contacts and get as many people as you can this way. Don’t stop until you have a bare minimum of 50. 100 is better.

Next step – create a contest for your new subscribers.

Brainstorm a list of 3 to 5 things you could give to the winner of your contest.

Do a quick poll of your list to see which of those 3 to 5 items they would most like.

Put up a giveaway page and announce it to your list. Use one of the contest sites to make this easy. Your goal is to get them to share it with everyone.

In our example, you might write something like:

Thanks for joining me in my new project!

To kick things off, I’m giving away the book, “How to Get More Customers Than You Need.”

In fact, I’m giving away 5 of them!

And since this email is only going out to 100 people, your odds of winning are pretty darn good.

Here’s what you need to do:

Enter the giveaway by clicking here to leave your email address.

Take the special link you get when you register, and share it with your friends to improve your own odds of winning.

For every friend of yours that joins, you get another entry. Good?

Great! Here’s the link.

Jill

You might be concerned about the cost of the prize(s). You can either give away something you own or have rights to, or you can get a sponsor who gives their products away in exchange for you promoting them to your growing list. Or you can simply buy them yourself.

The point is, don’t let obstacles get in your way. There’s always going to be something – web hosting, web design, copywriting, etc., that tries to throw up a roadblock to slow you down or even stop you in your tracks. Don’t let it. Just keep moving forward and tackle each bump in the road as you get to it.

The main thing is to always stay focused on your objective. In this case, it’s 1,000 subscribers in 7 days, followed by the immediate promotion of your first product. (And don’t sweat this part, either. If you don’t have a product, I have two work-arounds for you coming up.)

Continue to promote your contest. Let other list owners know, let blogs know, let the world know about your contest. If you get one good list owner to tell their list about your contest, that alone can snowball into a thousand subscribers. Remember, those who enter the contest can then promote their own link for more entries, thus further increasing your list size.

The next step is key: Immediately start building rapport and delivering great content to your list. Give them exactly what you promised and a whole lot more. What you send them is of course going to depend on your niche. Just make sure it is info they can use to solve problems and you will do well.

Also inject humor when you can, write like you’re having a conversation with your best friend and enjoy yourself. If you’re having fun creating content, your list is having fun reading or watching it. That’s right – recording videos for your list is a great idea and can work to build rapport far faster than simply sending emails.

Finally it’s time to promote your first product. If you don’t already have a product of your own that fits this list, don’t worry about it. Choose something that your list wants and be an affiliate for that product. If you don’t know what your list wants, take a poll.

And here’s an even better technique than promoting an affiliate product – sell a product you haven’t even created yet. That’s right. Take a poll to find out exactly what they want. Then sell it to them. Let them know if it’s a book or video series or what. Let them know exactly what’s in it for them. Let them know that if you don’t get “x” amount of orders, you won’t make it. And lastly, let them know that because they are preordering before it’s even made, they get special bonuses and / or a special discount. Make it an offer they cannot refuse.

Just think: If you get 50 sales from your new list for $30 each, that’s $1,500 for a product you haven’t even created yet. Your results will vary.

Things to remember:

Your friends want to help you. Sometimes it’s easier to ask strangers for help than it is your friends and family. But the people who know you are the ones who will join your list first and promote your contest first. They get the ball rolling for you because they want to see you succeed.

Don’t hide. Yes, you can email until you’re blue in the face, and you will get results. You can also pick up the phone and call people to let them know about your new endeavor. Guaranteed, those you call will be far more likely to promote your contest and buy your product.

You might even randomly call people from your list just to thank them for joining. They will be blown away. In fact, send out an email to your list telling them you will call them on Skype for a 2 minute chat if they like – just reply with their Skype ID and you’ll call. Even those who don’t answer will be intrigued that you would do something like that. It shows you are a real person who wants to make real connections. And that counts for a lot.

You can also send private messages to people on your list through Facebook and Gmail if they have a Gmail address. Ask what kind of help they might need and what they want to accomplish.

If you want to make more sales of your first product, wait another week or two before promoting to build more trust with your list. Build rapport. Build a relationship. THEN promote your new product or future new product. Sales will likely double the amount you would make by promoting after just the first week.

Continue to build your list. 1,000 subscribers is a good start. Now go for 3,000. You can do it. In fact, it gets easier and easier as you go. Do lots of guest blogging – it’s a great way to list build.

Create a list-building incentive that drives people wild. This will take some brainstorming, but the perfect incentive is one that people would gladly and eagerly pay for with real money. When you figure out what this is for your niche, your list building will skyrocket.

Don’t get lazy. Building a good list quickly takes effort. Building rapport with that list takes even more effort. But in the end it can pay off big. VERY big.

[onewingedsparrow]

All right, the results are in! The winner is Deku Tree Link AU! Close second is Over the Edge! I love that there's so much hype for those, yesssss. I'm also very happy that everything got a vote because, yes, I will work on all of them! Here's what I owe (rounded up from the percentages): Deku Tree Link AU - 10 sentences Once More, With Spirit - 1 sentence secret sparkling project - 2 sentences All I Am - 6 sentences Under My Wings ~ 3 sentences When the Dust Settles - 2 sentences Over the Edge - 9 sentences GIANT FIRE EMBLEM STORY ~ 3 sentences If you would like to read the first chapter of Over the Edge, feel free to comment; I would love to hear what stood out to you. Most of these aren't posted quite yet as I am a plantser who writes megafics, but so far you can read one chapter of "All I Am" and two chapters of "When the Dust Settles" if you're curious! (I have had more chapters for all these fics marinating for a while, so this game was a good excuse to jump back into the fray.) Thanks @mailrebel for starting the reblog chain! :D And since Deku Tree Link AU was the grand winner, I'm going to make sure that besides the minimum ten sentences, I set aside a full hour sometime this week to devote to writing that, because I see the audience is growing (hehe, no pun intended 🌱) and I'd love to share that story with you all someday. It is SO FUN. Cannot wait :D

Please dig through the chain and vote on some more polls!!! Let's all work on our projects!!! We got this 👊

Make me work on my fics!

Rules: Make a 24hr poll listing the titles of every WIP you want to work on. (It’s fine if you only have one, still make a poll for the vote count). Whichever WIP title gets the most votes, write 1 sentence for every vote received.

Thanks for the tag @pelicanpig With the end of the year upon us, it’s a good chance to take a step back and reevaluate what I want to focus on.

I'll tag @spices28 @lily-alphonse @to-be-frank-i-dont-care Join in if you want! :)

[popculturebuffet]

Danny Phantom Reviews Poll Winner: Kindred Spirits!: Danny Really, Really Hates Clones

Hello all you happy people! I”m Jake , I review animation comics and film and today marks the return of one of the most popular segments on this blog: My Monthly Danny Phantom reviews! To make up for the lost review I had you fine folks pick from one of four episodes, two of which are selected by my patrons, over on Patreon. 15 of you fine folks voted, as well as myself though I do not look at any results till I have just to make it fair, voted and while every episode got some love...

The winner by a LANDSLIDE was Kindred Spirits, picked by good friend of the blog and patron @weirdkev27. If you’d like to throw your own dog in the fight next time, join by the end of the month! 

Any level backer gets a REVIEW OF THEIR CHOICE on joining, two months after and 5 dollar backers get a half hour or single issue review of their choice EVERY MONTH so if there’s some danny you want to see sooner rather than later, sign on up. Not only that every person who does gets me closer to my stretch goals. Next one is monthly reviews of owl house season 1 and a few after that nets an EXTRA DANNY PHANTOM REVIEW A MONTH. Guarnateed till I finish it. So if enough of you join, i’ll be happy to double down on your monthly percription of SPOOKAY GHOST BOYS! 

So come on RIGHT OVER HERE AND BECOME A PROUD PATRON!

And if you’d like to help with my next poll click this link to pick one of 5 insane superhero weddings!

This one’s overwhelming win dosen’t suprise me though: While there were other fan favorites in the mix with Identity Crisis and Fanning the Flames and one of my own favorites with What You Want, they simply can’t compete with the million dollar debut of one of the series most popular characters: Danny’s younger clone/”Cousin” Dani. Despite only having two episodes, Dani left a huge impression on fans for reasons we’ll get into. 

It’s also the first episode i’ve reviewed that I saw all of ONCE as a kid. 

Yeah shocking isn’t it? I still saw it, but due to being later in season 2, i.e. right before the network stopped caring about the show, I didn’t catch this one until AFTER D-Stabalized, which was one of the ONLY danny phantom episodes from season 3 I caught in the initial run along with Urban Jungle, Forever Phantom, Living Large and Phantom Planet. That also makes it the ONLY chapter in the brilliant seasons long saga of Vlad and danny I missed prior to season 3. 

And it’s also the first time in that saga we’re skipping ahead slightly since I haven’t gotten to my next story arc, covering Jazz’s knowledge of Danny’s secret identity and the episodes around that, yet. Thankfully this one dosen’t follow up on the previous Vlad episodes Secret Weapons and Masters of All Time, even though it was produced after both so you got me there, so we’re fine to jump around jump around jump up and jump up and get down. It still builds off previous events in intresting ways and still slaps though like always so join me under the cut as I recap as we send in the clones, those laughy daffy clones.

So we open.. with a really dope opening. Had I seen this one more as a kid it probably would’ve stuck to my brain the way Vlad’s speech to danny in his first apperance and chess speech and reign storm did. Vlad watches over some recordings of fights between Val and Danny.. and we find out besides having a pawn stored for later there was yet ANOTHER purpose to giving Val equipment:  Her helmet has been recording field data on Danny and his biological structure this entire time. It’s brilliant and unsettling all at once, letting us know both how Vlad’s had such detailed info on Danny and that there’s something far worse at stake he’s been working on since season 1 and to finish his ghastly project he sends three other ghosts, one under a bed sheet, one looking like a frankenstien and one that’s pym sized to go get Danny. It’s an ominous as hell opening and knowing exactly what he’s up to.. dosen’t make it any less creepy. Knowing h’es CLONING danny and has been working toward it this whole time honestly makes it even MORE creepy but we’ll get into that more later. 

So one title sequence later, Danny is late meeting his friends for mini golf and tries making up a story about fighting Pariah Dark again.. but since that’s like saying Darkseid omega beamed your homework he’s forced to admit he simply slept too long. But Tucker and Sam are annoyed for more than just half assed excuses: Lately Danny’s been ditching them and leaving them with the aftermaths of his ghost missoins, treating them mroe like sidekicks. And this.. COULD be an intresting plotline, having Danny deal with the fact he exploits his friends good will a bit too much secret ID or no, especailly with how vital they are to his superheroing. Instead this plot falls a bit short but we’ll circle to why soon enough. 

For now he admits he’s been a bit much and vows to change it.. just as the sheet ghost attacks, leading to an awesome fight. We also get an awesome reveal as Danny is unimpressed with the ghost.. till it removes the sheet revealing a HORRIFYING LOOKING SKELETON 

The design here is just top notch and deeply terrifying.. especailly once you know this is a version of DANNY. And that’s another key part of the design: while the failed clones look diffrent enough to not give the game away there are subtle hints like the face structure and eyes that tell you this is danny.. or at least a warped horrifying near mindless versoin of him. 

Danny wins the fight by DOING A GODDAMN KAMEHAMEHA. Like no really, his beams have gotten so strong he can do that now. Like I know he had the charge ball from desire but holy shit. 

This leads to .. Danny booking and leaving his friends to get blamed for it. Also they don’t you know, blame a ghost since their public and that happens for no reason. And this is one fo the big reasons why this plot dosen’t work: they CONTRIVE reasons for the others to be left holding the bag to make Danny look worse. They have to actively work to make him be a shitty friend. 

Another problem.. is that they’ve ALREADY DONE THIS PLOT AND BETTER BEFORE. It ended up being fitting I put “What You Want” in the poll for this episode because this subplot rehashes part of that. In that underrated Gem, Tucker also is left with consequence after consequence due to Danny having powers. But in What You Want instead of contrivances, they think of less over the top but still understandbly frustrating ways Danny accidently, key word being ACCIDENTALLY screws over his best pal (Sam is out of comission with a cold for most of this one). He has to bail at a football game and leave tucker as mascot to suffer the teams wrath, has to bail on the movies to stop an attack there leaving tucker with a less good film, and in general has something Tucker DOSEN’T after they’ve shared their whole life in his secret powers. It’s used to resonably build up some resintment in tuck so when Desirree gives him powers of his own, her wish has something to warp, some reasonable things Tucker was annoyed by but shrugged off that get twisted into rage and egotisim. 

Here? Danny’s just kind of an insenstivie dick and in this case especially left his friends. He says it was to protect his identity.. but his ID isn’t in any danger here. While he keeps it secret for good reason the fact is NO ONE suspects he isn’t a full ghost while gone ghost. Even Vlad didn’t know till he’d nearly beaten Danny to death first. It’s like with Superman: most people don’t go sniffing for Superman’s other life.. because they don’t think he has one. He dosen’t wear a mask, he dosen’t talk about another life, and he even has a well known if remote HQ that people assume is his home (and he likely has slept in on ocasion).  Most people who found out who he was were either really perceptive like batman or new 52 lois, or he outright told. The fact he he HAD another ID was a huge shock to most people when he went public. 

It’s the same here: while Danny Phantom is a heroic ghost, no one has ANY reason to suspect he’s only human. There were only two halfas before this episode and BOTH keep it secret. And they only know each other’s id’s because Vlad nearly pummled danny to death and saw him transform back to human and then decided, of his own accord to reveal his secret identity. So while yeah Danny’s id’s in danger if he goes missing or something like that, it’s not in danger from him happening to show up after a bit dust up at the golf course and nothing stopped him from simply flying a distance away, changing back and taking full responsibility. It makes him a dick for no good reason. And the baffling thing is both this episode and what you want HAVE THE SAME WRITERS.  Series architecht and real dad Steve Marmel and Sib Ventress. So how they fucked up THIS BAD boggles the mind. 

Thankfully we get to the good part of the episode as Danny returns home.. and finds an 11-12 year old sitting on his bed. 

He’s understandably put off by his supposed “cousin” danny, especially since she seems to like everything he does from Nasa to Dumpty Humpty, a nice call back to Val’s origin story ep. She books it though when he tries to bring his parents into this because you know, lost homeless child, kinda need their help to take care of her. 

Being a good guy and having questions, Danny rushes after her.. only to run into a frankenstien because that’s how his life goes. Try to do something personal, get beat up by a ghost, rinse repeat. I do really like frankendanny, from his finger claws to just how DIFFRNET he is from the original and how intimdating he looks. Frankendanny fucks regular dannys’ shit up.. till Dani shows up... and reveals she’s ALSO half ghost. Danny’s reaction is understandable. 

So Danny decides to table his questions about.. all of this and the two easily hold back Frankendanny working together. It’s a damn cool scnee that shows Danny is just as capable as her brother from another mother. Her mother is a purple pod with Danny’s dna jammed inside. She loves PodMom. 

So the next day Danny tells tucker about her annnndd... instead of focusing you know on the fact there’s a second ghost kid and she seems to be on their side, they focus on.. Danny ditching them the other day. 

Their right to be mad.. but a SECOND hybrid showed up, is seemingly on their side, but also knows everything danny does and has all his powers, meaning if she’s not as friendly as she seems she COULD be really dangerous. And their thought is “we’re still pissed off about your golf assholery?!” This is.. badly out of character. I buy they’d still be mad.. but I also buy they’d at least pivot to this new mystery person. Their STILL more pissed abotu the stuff when Dani does show up, and Dash frames them for the distruction she caused... than the fact THER’ES ANOTHER GHOST KID. 

So this time it’s the tiny ghost, but Danny soon has bigger issues.. as Vlad has arrived and we get a truly awesome scene, for all parties involved. Danny tries using Vlad’s own mental blindspots against him, asking why he’s not talking about wanting maddie or making danny his son or hating jack.. but for once.. Vlad is all business. And the reason for this is very simple: if he beats Danny this time.. he’ll be able to clone him perfectly and thus be done with his arch enemy once and for all. For once he has no buttons to press, no tricks to play, and no desire to SPARE danny and save him for later: just to beat him up and take his dna so he can make a better danny and throw out the old model. His fighting style dosen’t really change to reflect that.. but it dosen’t need to. Until now he’s always had the advantage over danny, only loosing because his own ego and deranged obessions blinded him. 

But this time.. Danny fights back equally. And i’m glad this scene is here as it’s Marmel’s last Vlad episode, sad I know, and thus the last time someone would CARE about how far the characters have come. Something I love about the show, something I feel a GOOD superhero work about anew hero like this should do.. is progress. Learning new skills and powers, making them better, getting better bit by bit and the joy of seeing this young hero you respect only get better and better and fight better and better, going toe to toe with those who would once curbstomp them. Not by cheap power ups, but by hard work, traning and dedication. THe best shows of this time did this and Danny is the gold standard of that. 

While we don’t see him train every episode, tha’td be boring, we see him running improvised Danger room style training with Tucker and Sam every so often, and we see subtle progress. While he struggles with powers the first time he gets them, having the ghost ball thing backfire, having his pants fall down due to intagablity that osrt of thing, that stuff slowly peters out as he gets better at each skill. It even shows here: he’s gone from doing maybe a few beams an episode to being able to do a giant one that can level a building. And it all cumilates here as this time, when fighting vlad they have a dbz style beam struggle.. and both hold it. Danny struggles with it sure.. but the fact is earlier on.. vlad would’ve won without a thought and easily curbstomped danny by now. Every victory he’s had over vlad has beeen due to cleverly exploiting vlad’s flaws. Here while he’s close to defeat.. he still stands a chance... until Dani back blasts him and we get a great reveal line  “did I do good daddy?”

Genius. So after the commerical break, which I didn’t have because paramount+... though if I may rant for a second. While I don’t get most commericals with Paramount+, when I watch stuff aimed at kids... they ALWAYS air an ad before it. Always. It’s really annoying. It’s bothersome enough right now when it’s for Rumble.. aka a film I was already going to watch and now have for  a review, and likely woudl’ve at some point anyway out of curosity. But it was even more annoying when it was for the Jojo Siwa movie or The Loud House christmas movie. On the formrer I have nothing against the person I just don’t want to watch a J-Team unless it’s lead by Jackie Chan and the latter just looked awful and I already watched one terrible loud house movie last year. I didn’t need to go for two. I probably will eventually because they apparently half assedly break up Luna and Sam OFFSCREEN

And yes I know i’m not who their aiming at but  1) Dosen’t mean adults don’t watch this and ads free MEANS ads free you dicks. I dont’ see Hulu, Prime, or Netflix pulling this kind of thing. HBO Max does.. but it’s skippable and only in front of HBO Content. So it’s mildly annoying sure but it’s standard policy and again SKIPPABLE.  2) More importantly THEIR ONLY PUTTING ADS IN FRONT OF CONTENT FOR CHILDREN. I.. I shoudln’t have to explain WHY that’s scummy right? Trying to shove kids over to your original stuff by implanting it in their heads right? I get this was standard practice on a cable network, having adds for a show inbetween shows.. but this isn’t it. If they want to watch it they’ll watch it. Don’t try and hedge your bets. 

Okay... got that out of my system

So Tucker and Sam come out to find.... Vlad and Dani carrying an unconcious Danny in the alley behind the school now. When they were in the street earlier.  Something @jess-the-vampire  pointed out and still confuses me. Guess the street was behind the school?

So yeah the two feel RIGHTFULLY like dicks for not having you know, actually thought two seconds about any of this. Then Lancer comes in.. and yells at them for not being in the cafeteria.. even though the two came out to put trash in the cans. 

So not having time to deal with an aging balding idiot or a situation they got themselve into by agreeing to get the mop instead of at least TRYING to defend themselves, they instead call Lancer old and run off. Well Tucker does.  I’m going to get this part of the plot out of the way now. After some more Dani stuff we’ll circle back to, they run into the fenton’s house, and then the basement to steal the specter speeder and the boo-merang (because it can still track Danny from having his DnA during the events of The Ultimate Enemy) and bounce, getting into trouble.. because Danny needs them. And we needed a subplot about Danny taking them for granted to get here .. why?

No really, while I apricate TRYING to add some character depth in stuff, it’s so half assed in execution that really makes me wonder.. why not just have Tucker and Sam save him and get in trouble? If your not going to put in the effort you have in other episodes to make it work, why have it at all other than to pad out the episode.. oh okay there we go. And if your wondering why so harsh.. it’s Steve Marmel. He’s had off days sure, no writer is perfect and splitting images is proof of that, but this is the MAIN WRITER OF THE SHOW. It’s head. The reason it was so good for two seasons and his absence is why it went off the rails without his direction.. or rather because Butch wanted to change the direction clearly. I love the guy dearly and while he’s botched subplots before, their usually covered by better writing. Here the better writing in the other story.. just exposes how half assed this plot is and how unecessary it feels. He can do better.. so I EXPECT better. While I don’t let a writer escape because I don’t expect much from them, hi butch, I’m more pissed when a writer I know can do better half asses it. 

Now REALLY back to the good part. Danny wakes up in the cube from Bitter Reunions and finds uh oh, he’s back to the lab again. And Vlad has plans. As i’ve made no attempt at hiding because anyone reading this likely knows and if you don’t.. sorry about that... Vlad is trying to make a perfect clone of danny. He used Val to get biometric readouts and data on Danny and apparently got his Dna.. at some point. I won’t mock this though: having covered most vlad episodes up to this point he had PLENTY of opportunity to get Danny’s Dna samples

Danny stayed at his house overnight, god that does not make it sound better, he stayed at Danny’s house overnight, even worse, and they’ve fought 5 or 6 times at this point. While Danny dosen’t shed like the majestic moongoose, he still likely left something Vlad could use...and just.. i’mg oing to stop. Point is he has the dna to make his perfect boy AND I TOPPED MYSELF OKAY MOVING ON. 

Problem is he ONLY has 2/3 samples he needs: he has morphed and unmorphed.. but cleverly he needs Danny MID-MORPH. It’s why the kidnapping: it’s the one bit of his dna he CAN’T get casually without Danny knowing. 

The other clones were failures in Vlad’s eyes... both for being mindless.. and for having a short life expectancy as using their powers causes them to burn out quick. So to stabilize it he needs that sample.. and Danny resisting isn’t a problem as he has micro danny OVERSHADOW HIM. For the first time in the series Danny is on the receving end of overshadowing and it is CHILLING. 

So after more Sam and Tucker stuff, we cut back to Danny who has been fighting it every step of the way. While Danny is badass for holding off something only his dad has been able to, and only for a minute, before, it also makes sense: Jack was fighting off Vlad, who as we learn in this ep has decades of experince with overshadowing people and has likely done so for far longer. Danny is fighting off someone who not only has the same brain if not thoughts, but dosen’t have a will of his own that we’re aware of. It’s a lot easier to fight someone else trying to take control of your mind when they don’t have much of one. 

And yes we do get some nice backstory with vlad as we found out HOW he got so rich as Danny taunts him for being a fruitcake “Could a fruitcake rob countless banks without being caught? Could a fruitcake overshadow countless billionares to build his empire?” 

It’s called being a supervillian dude. Just because your a master manipulator, scientest and combatant.. does not make you any MORE sane. Lex Luthor’s solution to dying of cancer was to make a younger clone and pose as his own australian illegitmate son, Norman Osborn let his arch enemy think he was a clone just to fuck with him while chilling in Europe, Doctor Doom BUILT A FREAKING TIME MACHINE and runs a small nation yet once faked a diary to try to turn the FF against reed, recently stuck Johnny Storm in nova mode for sleeping with his future wife BEFORE he asked her to marry him or be in a relationship (Though that’s also a whole other can of stupid stupid worms to get to another day. “SIGH”), and stiffed Luke Cage on 20 dollars just to be a dick.  Being a rich super genius and cool as hell as a villian.. dosen’t mean you don’t do stupid shit. 

So Danny escapes by shorting it out and Dani arrives. Vlad spins him a story and while Jess questioned why she bought it I have a simple answer: she has no reason to doubt it. She likely hasn’t been around THAT long, and as we see Vlad’s been putting on a front of geninely carring about her. And if he can manipulate someone like Val whose naturally skeptical and has every reason to be wary of a creepy old man taking an intrest in her, if THANKFULLY platonic, can easily be fooled.. why woudln’t a 12 year old who only knows him as her loving father? Vlad is a master manipulator: he knows exactly what buttons to press on a person to get what he wants. So manipulating someone whose life story he’s written from birth.. that’s child’s play. 

So he naturally just tells Dani the reason for the dna is to fix her, not to make another clone, and she buys it. A fight ensues between the two with Danny TRYING his best to convince her of the truth... and while Dani is clearly worried she’s wrong she decides the best way to fix this is to give Danny back.

So Vlad’s just about won.. and as usual that means it’s time for him to shoot himself in the foot. The ghost from earlier burnt out, horrifically and in front of Danny. So logically, as Jess once again pointed out, Vlad could just overshadow danny himself. But he dosen’t WANT to. And that’s one of his biggest flaws I didn’t think about till now, even if I always knew it was there: Vlad is entitled. He feels he’s owed everything by the world because of the accident. It’s why he can never see Maddie never was attracted to him: To him him he DESERVES her more and jack by being smarter and better looking. That by being who he is he gets what he wants.. not getting that’s not how people work. They make their own choices.. and Maddie choose jack because she loves him and while he’s a moron.. he’s a good man. Vlad isn’t. It also explains something i’d wondered about in the past: his minons. Why are his only minons three hapless vultures and skulker. ANd the answer is simple: the rest of the ghosts likely wouldn’t put up with his controlling bullshit. The Vultures are old and clearly loyal and DO carry out their tasks with absolute obdience, something an enttield control freak needs, while Skulker.. gets paid well in upgrades. It’s mutually benifical: Skulker robs some places or designs a device for vlad once in a while, Vlad gives him shiny new toys. Vlad is basically alone because he’s an ineherntly selfish manchild. 

And that’s why he looses her, telling Dani to overshadow her brothercousin and not carring about the risk to her “I made you, you obey me!”. Vlad can’t fathom that Dani geninely LOVES him, and that had he asked nicely or just done so himself, he might not be alone. Instead he sacrifices her.. because she’s not what he wants and he wants a perfect obdient danny clone. And because he can’t EVER accept what he has.. because he’s a selfish entitled bastard.. Dani frees Danny and we get a badass transformatoin sequence as the two team up against vlad. The fight, as you’d expect is impressive and damn fun to watch, and this time Danny dosen’t have to trick vlad to win.. he simply uses his own talent: the Ghostly Wail, destroying the lab and making sure this won’t happen again any time soon. Also Vlad’s maddie program tells the dick she never loved him. He had a maddie hologram. Are you suprised?He also made a jack program for some reason. (Shrug)

Sadly this isn’t enough to totally beat vlad, so Dani valiantly gets ready to fight even if it kills her... only for Vlad to get run over with the specter speeeder. 

They save Danny who geninely apologizes and thanks them. But now they have bigger issues as Tucker and Sam broke a lot of laws to pull this off. Thankfully for once.. our heroes aren’t severley punished. I know right.. that NEVER happens. This is thanks to Dani who, while not wanting to stick around, is greatful and thus overshadows Maddie and Lancer into saying “kids will be kids etc”, confusing both enough to get the kids off. As for Jack.. she dosen’t bother instead just pointing out as Lancer he can just make a cooler ship thingy because she knows her dad. 

So our heroes head to Danny’s room and Dani pops by both to reveal she did that and to say goodbye.. and see ya real soon. And thus Dani Phantom flies off into the sunset. I REALLY wish we’d seen what Steve Mamel would’ve done with this character.. as for what Butch did.. that’s a long ways off

Final Thoughts:

This is a decent episode. It’s not AS good as it could’ve been for reasons i’ve already hashed out plenty, but taking another page from spidey and having a clone saga was a great move and Danny Phantom’s own take on it was brilliant.  Dani is also a great additon to the cast: a younger, more naive verison of danny who also has her own touches, being more sarcastic and playful than her big bro. It’s a REAL shame we never got around to her being adopted by the fentons or joining the main cast as planned and a bigger shame the one who got to write her again was not the man who created her. Hopefully a reboot or revivial fixes that. 

Next Time: We take a break from polls and storylines for Valentine’s Day as Danny and Val hook up, and Technus decides to use the distraction of a new relationship to their advantage.. and also gives Val a terrible new costume. Also we go to space. Zoom! If you want to hear more nonsense from me here’s my twitter and my discord server. Thanks for reading and see ya real soon. 

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[luxurypackagingdesignagency10]

Luxury Packaging Design Agency In New York

We understand the market, and know what meals luxury packaging design agency will attract shoppers. We problem ourselves to create packaging that is contemporary, inspiring, clever and charming, that sells the USP of the product. These include Tesco’s own-brand salads, The Royal Household’s sausages, alongside varied product traces for Ocado and Waitrose.

They also follow developments, embody robust branding, and comprise entertaining storylines that have interaction audiences. We made certain to incorporate packaging design companies with in-depth expertise and outstanding inventive energy in all forms of promoting, from TV and print to digital. We additional be positive that the companies can synchronize their promoting efforts with the client’s model id, values, and aesthetics.

With persuasive beauty branding copy and design, you presumably can effectively propel customers via the whole gross sales cycle, even if this is their first interplay along with your brand. Once your model identity is well-established, you’ll have the instruments you want to inform your product package deal design. For example, the fonts, colours, and graphics you use on your product package ought to mirror your branding and truly characterize your story and point of differentiation. Di20 Design developed packaging design and branding companies for a vegan product company.

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We partner with shoppers at every step to make sure we design collateral and packaging to match the characteristics of your products. Our group can be primarily based in your workplace, working hand-in-hand with you to additional enhance the partnership. In the luxurious packaging, there could be much less of a necessity to speak the unique selling factors of the product. Typically, the competitive advantage here is within the brand equity and the connotations surrounding that brand. 1HQ was in at fifteenth place within the Design Week Top one hundred back in 2010 with 2 top five finishes in each the packaging and product design sections. In HQ have been as excessive as quantity ten in the Drum's prime 100 design agencies.

Scroll down to find the revolutionary packaging design winners along with actionable tips for choosing the right agency in your model. BRIGADE is a brand and luxury packaging design company — creating award successful work for established and rising companies worldwide. Founded in 2004, Lazy Snail Design is a marketing and promoting agency that provides branding, packaging design, and net design companies to their enterprise, small business, and mid-market clients. Their `50 staff are based mostly out of offices in Copenhagen, Denmark and Heraklion, Greece. We use our distinctive three-step process in relation to branding and packaging design; this is essential to make sure your product picture is really reflective of the model identity and aligned along with your company imaginative and prescient. Massive portfolio with lovely portfolio items embody Vimto, Diageo, Buxton Water, Unilever and Nestlé.

We choose agencies that can create outstanding digital experiences utilizing a wealthy assortment of visible elements that portray the brand identity in the very best method. That’s why we searched for packaging design companies that double as social media marketing consultants. We stalked their shoppers on social media to examine whether or not their digital aesthetic and communication are in sync with the brands’ character and values. Companies that can build a notable and aesthetically-pleasing social media presence that drives engagement and gross sales get a higher rating on our record. We performed in depth research to ensure we suggest only packaging design corporations with a spotless popularity. We explore reviews on Clutch, Trustpilot, companies’ social media accounts, and all over the place on Google to explore consumer satisfaction and agencies’ quality of service.

It’s finest to get a pricing quote from at least a few companies that tick all the bins earlier than hiring one. A one-stop-shop for all of your advertising and design needs could be very useful for your corporation. You get to work with teams that understand your model, providing services that assist you to achieve targets in one cohesive effort. In this step, we rise up shut and personal with the packaging design companies.

Our group thrive on creating lovely bespoke meals packaging design for startups and area of interest brands. We like to get underneath the pores and skin of the model and create every little thing from the logo mark upwards. Some niche manufacturers we’ve worked with embrace; BVI Gin, contemporary out of the Virgin Islands, Love Thai, genuine sauces, Heritage Kitchen, recent from the sector celery and Vegging with Sindy, Vegan prepared meals. Almost every packaging design company on our record provides emblem design.

We have particular experience in luxurious, style and jewelry packaging. Projects have included Devotion Diamonds, Petit Tribe (luxury children’s fashion), Kalayci and Spence Diamonds. One of our newest initiatives is Savage and Rose, a new luxurious jewelry brand. These are our ideas, and we apply them every single day to craft lovely branding & packaging that works even higher than it looks.

While the shelf-life will depend on the nature of the goods you produce, the best product package design will make all of the difference. What you select to include in your packaging is essential in phrases of the sales cycle. In addition to attracting potential customers, your product bundle design can play a crucial role in informing them too.

The client was very pleased with the branding and says that their merchandise are very competitive. Helping main heritage manufacturers evolve with the occasions by understanding their history and distinctive DNA. Graphic evolution, product design, and new packaging ideas for restricted version launches.See references.

[theliberaltony]

via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

For months now, President Trump has carefully planted the seed that he might not leave the office of the presidency willingly if he loses.

Whether it’s tweeting that the election should be delayed as it “will be the most inaccurate and fraudulent election in history” or that there will be widespread voter fraud because of the expected uptick in mail ballots due to the coronavirus, Trump seems intent on undermining the electoral process.

This, in turn, raises a rather thorny and unprecedented question: What happens if Trump won’t go? The answer is bleak. Experts tell me that the president actually has a lot of power at his discretion to contest the election, and some of the scenarios that could bring us to the edge of a crisis are actually very plausible.

Consider this one: It’s late on Election Day, and hundreds of thousands of votes in key battleground states still have to be counted due to the increased use of mail and absentee voting because of the pandemic. As a result, media outlets have largely avoided calling the race, but based on the votes that have been counted, Trump leads in enough states to reach at least 270 electoral votes, which would be enough to win the election if his election-night lead holds. Trump claims victory, but because Democrats were much more likely to vote by mail than Republicans, Joe Biden eventually pulls ahead because of the Democratic lean of the remaining votes — a phenomenon known as the “blue shift.”

That’s just one of the many scenarios the Transition Integrity Project, a bipartisan collection of over 100 experts, explored this summer while researching how a possible election crisis could unfold.

Rosa Brooks, a professor at Georgetown University Law School who co-founded the Transition Integrity Project, told me she and her colleagues weren’t interested in predicting the likelihood of any one scenario they looked at, but more so in understanding the range of possibilities. Ultimately, they don’t know to what extent this year’s election result will be contested — would Trump deploy federal agents from the Department of Justice to secure vote counting sites or would he just take to Twitter to bemoan the results? — but Brooks told me they do think the election will be contested at least on some level. So the question they’re asking is: How much?

One big takeaway from the Transition Integrity Project’s simulations was just how much power Trump has at his disposal should he choose to contest the election. “You have just a tremendous differential between the president of the United States of America, who has just awesome coercive powers at his disposal, and a challenger who really has no power whatsoever in our system,” said Brooks. “Joe Biden can call a press conference; Donald Trump could call on the 82nd Airborne.”

This, of course, would be a doomsday scenario, and one reason why so much of this is hard to fathom. A cornerstone of American elections has been the peaceful transition of power, but as research from the Transition Integrity Project and others underscores, there are multiple ways to contest an election. And it’s not limited to just Trump either. It’s very possible were Trump to win in the Electoral College, where he has an advantage, but lose the popular vote to Biden, that Democrats would dismiss the election as unfair.

We, of course, do not have to look too far back in our electoral history to know that Americans have survived a disputed election before — see the 2000 presidential race. But experts I talked to were worried, given Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric around the election and his own track record of openly flouting democratic norms, that the country wouldn’t be able to handle another full-throttle election dispute. Take how low the public’s trust in the election already is. Last week, an NBC News/SurveyMonkey poll found that 59 percent of Americans were not too confident or not confident at all that the election would be conducted in a free and equal way, in line with its polling since early August on this question.

It might be hard to remember now, but in the 2000 presidential election, Florida’s GOP-controlled state legislature was on the verge of appointing a new slate of electors to vote for George W. Bush had a court-ordered manual recount imposed by the Florida Supreme Court dragged on. Of course, it ultimately didn’t come to that because the U.S. Supreme Court stepped in and halted Florida’s recount, famously deciding in a 5-4 decision that the state Supreme Court had overstepped its bounds and that a recount could not be held in time to meet the federal deadline for the selection of presidential electors.

Edward Foley of Ohio State University’s Moritz College of Law thinks something similar could happen this year if the president and his backers contest the results in the Electoral College.

In Foley’s scenario, Trump leads in the tipping-point state of Pennsylvania on election night, but because of Democratic gains in ballots counted in the following days, Biden pulls ahead by a few thousand votes. What happens next quickly devolves into a partisan dispute. Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf signs Pennsylvania’s certificate of ascertainment, confirming Biden’s victory by listing the Democratic electors as the state’s official slate for the Electoral College, while the Republican-controlled Pennsylvania legislature appoints a different set of electors at Trump’s behest as he has claimed there was widespread election fraud.

This, were it to happen, would likely be met immediately with legal challenges in state and federal court, perhaps followed by another intervention by the U.S. Supreme Court. But the significance is that even if a court ruled against the validity of one set of electors, Congress still has the power to consider both sets of electors as long as they have in hand the certificate naming them.

The Electoral Count Act of 1887, which governs the electoral vote counting process, was designed to help Congress decide how to handle such a situation. But it is especially ambiguous on what would happen if the Senate and House disagree on which set of electors should count, which could happen if the GOP retains control of the Senate and Democrats keep the House.

In Foley’s scenario, Vice President Mike Pence — as president of the Senate, he would oversee the count in Congress — follows one interpretation of the law, arguing that neither set of electors should count because they conflict. That removes Pennsylvania’s votes from the total number of electors and gives Trump a majority based on the remaining 518 electoral votes.1 Democrats, however, counter, claiming the certificate bearing the governor’s seal, which supports Biden, is given preference by the law.

Ultimately, though, neither side finds a compromise and we find ourselves in the midst of a full-blown constitutional crisis. In this scenario, the Supreme Court could become involved if, for instance, Democrats seek an injunction to stop Pence from not counting Pennsylvania’s votes. But it’s also possible the court would try to avoid making a ruling on the counting dispute, in keeping with a dissent from Bush v. Gore that argued neither the Constitution nor the Electoral Count Act provided a role for the judiciary in this process.

Under the 20th Amendment, we know someone must take office on Jan. 20 as president, yet the amendment is curiously silent on how to deal with a dispute over whether someone has actually qualified to take office. “The thing that we know for sure is the current term ends,” said Foley, but he added that doesn’t mean it would be straightforward to figure out who should take office next if there’s a disagreement.

In fact, it’s possible that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi could claim that under the Presidential Succession Act, she is next in line to become president and that she would be willing to resign her House seat to serve as president until Biden is ruled the election winner. But if Republicans claimed Trump had won reelection, they very well might object to Pelosi being sworn in. Given a crisis on this scale, it’s hard to unpack what exactly might happen, but it’s very likely things would spiral out of control, and the resulting uncertainty could spark unrest and protests that could very well lead to violence.

Gaming out these different scenarios demonstrates that, should Trump dispute the result, a key factor will be the extent to which leading Republican officials at the federal and state level cooperate with him. Brooks pointed out that while Trump has significant power to contest the results as president, he can ultimately only go so far if supporters don’t follow his lead.

For instance, in one of its simulations, the Transition Integrity Project found that GOP leaders might support some of Trump’s claims of fraud or maneuvers to manipulate the vote count, but that didn’t mean they’d go along with every move he tried. For instance, it found many Republicans might oppose an attempt to federalize and deploy the National Guard. And in Foley’s scenario, much hinged on what Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and other Republicans — including Pence — chose to do when it came to deciding which Pennsylvania electors should count.

The relative closeness of the election is a factor here, too. In a different simulation the Transition Integrity Project looked at that put Biden in a stronger position on election night, Trump attracted less support from Republican leaders and Biden’s campaign was able to get some degree of bipartisan cooperation so that the country didn’t slide into a full-blown electoral crisis. Still, throughout its different scenarios, the project found it likely that the Trump campaign would try to raise enough doubts about the vote so as to undermine what might even seem like a clear result. Considering Trump claimed millions of people illegally voted when he won in 2016, it doesn’t take much to imagine he’d do the same this year if he thought it would improve his chances of winning a contested election. That’s one reason researchers at the Transition Integrity Project rank Trump’s allegations of voter fraud among the most dangerous threats currently facing the election.

Of course, considering how high the existential stakes seem to be in this election, it’s not out of the question that Biden might be the one who disputes the result. Tellingly, in another simulation the Transition Integrity Project played out, a crisis unfolded after Trump won in the Electoral College but lost the national popular vote by 5 points. Trump claimed it was fraud that explained Biden’s popular vote edge, but Biden retracted an election night concession and pushed Democratic governors in Michigan and Wisconsin to send appointed slates of electors to Congress, in conflict with the elected ones backing Trump. In his work, Foley also explored an alternate scenario in which Arizona was the tipping-point state and Republican Gov. Doug Ducey refused to certify the results to give Biden the state’s electors. During Congress’s counting, congressional Democrats argued that Arizona’s electors should be disqualified to give Biden the victory — the same argument Pence made in the Pennsylvania scenario to claim Trump had won.

The scenarios laid out by the Transition Integrity Project and Foley shouldn’t be taken as definite outcomes, but they do make clear that the rickety apparatus governing our electoral process could collapse if key actors decide to push against it.

Worryingly, the public may be especially vulnerable to attempts to delegitimize the election, too. Faith in the Electoral College is already shaky because of the possibility of a popular vote-electoral vote split like in 2000 and 2016, and worse yet, support for the Electoral College is increasingly polarized by party. A conflict over which electors should count would only exacerbate those concerns. And because many Americans still expect to know who won on election night, this could create a situation where much of the public isn’t ready for — or is ready to reject — sizable shifts in the vote after Election Day, which could make it easier to cast doubt on the outcome.

But even if the worst scenarios don’t come to pass, the fact that we lack a neutral electoral arbiter is surely a ticking time bomb for our democracy. Such an institution may sound difficult to create, but many individual states have used judicial panels to successfully sort through close elections, and other democratic nations have far better laws to adjudicate contested elections. For now, though, in the absence of such measures, the peaceful transfer of power hinges on the expectation that that is how American elections work, but that may be increasingly hanging in the balance, as anyone living in this incredibly polarized era of U.S. politics will tell you.

[newmusickarl]

5-9’s Album of the Month Podcast – latest episode out now!

The latest episode of the 5-9 Album of the Month Podcast is here and it’s a big clash of rock giants both old and new! As ever, I take a seat alongside 5-9 Editor Andrew Belt and Mama Mañana Records’ Kiley Larsen to review five high profile album releases from the past month in music, ultimately naming one as our Album of the Month at the end of the discussion.

For our July 2024 episode, it was Hot Chip’s Joe Goddard who took home the coveted Album of the Month title, wowing us with his feature-heavy second solo album, Harmonics. For our latest episode, we look back at five big releases from August and the albums vying for recognition this time around are:

Romance by Fontaines D.C.

Champion by Pom Poko

Aghori Mhori Mei by The Smashing Pumpkins

Infinite Health by Tycho (Poll winner, thanks for voting!)

Midas by Wunderhorse

If you want to listen to this or any previous episodes simply follow the links below, but also be sure to follow 5-9 Blog on Instagram, Twitter and YouTube for more news and polls relating to the podcast.

Listen on Spotify here

Watch, like and subscribe to our YouTube channel here

Album & EP Recommendations

Ness by Hayden Thorpe

“When going on a sonic journey into the wild, who better to chaperone than former Wild Beasts frontman, Hayden Thorpe. Six years after the disbandment of the acclaimed art-rock quartet, the singer-songwriter and multi-instrumentalist has since firmly established himself as a solo artist, thanks to the stark balladry of ‘Diviner’ and the synth-soaked majesty of ‘Moondust For My Diamond’. Now back with his third solo album Ness, an adaptation of author Robert Macfarlane’s book of the same name, Hayden has successfully crafted his most magical and ambitious project yet. Hayden Thorpe’s Ness ends up being more than just another album. Where Macfarlane’s book was part-novella, part-prose and part-poem, Hayden too has crafted a piece of art that blurs the lines between music, audiobook, spoken-word and classical composition. It’s simply a one-of-a-kind auditory experience, one that whisks you away to a place full of historical dread and natural wonder, which feels all too relevant for today’s world. Through Hayden, Ness Speaks – and it’s quite unlike anything else you’ll hear all year.”

Listen to the album here

Read the full 9/10 album review for Clash here

Watch or listen to our exclusive interview with Hayden on the making of the record here

Someday, Now by Katy J Pearson

The evolution of British singer-songwriter Katy J Pearson has been quite something to witness. From her solid debut Return back in 2020 to her ultra-impressive follow-up Sound of the Morning in 2022, Katy has taken sizeable steps forward and matured her songwriting with each new release. So, it is no surprise then that not only is ‘Someday, Now’ her best record to date, but it’s also one of the year’s best too.

Filled wall-to-wall with soaring, string-tinged indie-pop anthems, this is without a doubt her boldest collection yet, where the production throughout is exquisite and the vocal performances remain as sublime as ever. The orchestrated delights of Save Me and It’s Mine Now dazzle early doors, before the jittering riffs of Grand Final and the stripped-back majesty of Someday light-up the back half. However, Pearson arguably saves the two best songs for last, from the melancholic sway of Siren Song to the triumphant, bluegrass finale, Sky.

Overall, this is another all killer, no filler release from Pearson, one that perfectly fits the Autumnal weather, to the point that I can’t seem to stop playing it. A magnificent record that sees Pearson continue to go from strength-to-strength.

Listen here

Cascade by Floating Points

We have been spoilt for incredible electronic records in 2024, but this new one from Samuel Shepherd, AKA Floating Points, is right up there with the year’s best.

After his much-acclaimed collab album with Pharoah Sanders (a record I personally found quite underwhelming) I’m pleased to say Shepherd has returned to the club for his latest album. ‘Cascade’ is a fitting title too as listeners are treated to an avalanche of sonic splendour, beginning with the dizzying Vocoder club mix and pulsating Key103, before the vibrant euphoria of Fast Forward and throbbing, distorted beats of tracks like Afflecks Palace and Tilt Shift. That said, the pick of the bunch is the enchanting, near 9-minute sonic journey Ocotillo, which begins as an understated dash of ambient electronica before morphing into a racing barrage of static synths.

All in all, one of the year’s best from the genre and an incredible listening experience that will pull you back in for repeat spins.

Listen here

Dance, No-One’s Watching by Ezra Collective

When your last album not only wins the Mercury Music Prize but also makes history by being the first jazz record to do so, you better believe there’s going to be some pressure on the follow-up. However seemingly not phased at all, the quintet that make up Ezra Collective have returned a year to the month with their joyous third album ‘Dance, No-One’s Watching’, which I’m pleased to say is every bit as dazzling as its award-winning predecessor.

A celebration of music that makes you dance inspired by their triumphant 2023 world tour, the mosaic of global influences is condensed into this incredibly satisfying, groove-tastic concept album, set around a liberating night out. From the West African rhythms of Palm Wine, the gospel guided duo of Hear Me Cry and Everybody, to the cherry on top features from the likes of Olivia Dean, Yazmin Lacey and Moonchild Sanelly, it’s another captivating work from Ezra Collective that will just put the biggest smile on your face.

Listen here

HOPECORE by Rahim C Redcar

You may not recognise the name Rahim C Redcar, but you may be familiar with his former musical pseudonym, Christine & The Queens. Now officially releasing music under his chosen name, ‘HOPECORE’ is a debut album of sorts for this new identity, after it was first introduced on Christine & The Queens’ projects, Redcar les adorables étoiles (prologue) and Paranoïa, Angels, True Love.

Sonically this new release isn’t a million miles away from those projects, boasting a hypnotic collection of synth-soaked sonnets enriched by theatrical, live-sounding production. This rawness of the production is the big fascination point, helping to supercharge these songs so that the impassioned vocal performances and aching lyrics pour out of each bar.

Like it was on Paranoïa, Angels, True Love, at times it also sounds like Rahim Redcar just riffing in the studio, giving these tracks a magical, improvised nature. None more so than on the album’s phenomenal 20-minute centrepiece, OPERA – I UNDERSTAND, which will certainly test the patience of some, but also blow the minds of others. Add in other sensual sensations like ELEVATE, DEEP HOLES and RED BIRDMAN EMERGENCY, and what you have is another towering work of art from one of alt-pop’s true visionaries.

Listen here

Stream of Life by Maxïmo Park

For more than 20 years, Geordie heroes Maxïmo Park have been one of the UK’s best manufacturers of certified indie bops and, as a result, one of my sentimental favourites. While not all their records have completely hit the mark, their output has generally been solid over that period and their last outing, Nature Always Wins, was one of their best yet.

Now back with their eighth studio album ‘Stream of Life’, the band are looking to build on their creative purple patch with a new record that digs into the complexities of the modern world and human existence. Now, what was special about listening to this record for the first time is that I got to experience it first in a live setting, as the band played the new album in full at their recent show at Metronome, here in Nottingham.

It was a revelation, making me wish more bands would do a pre-release album launch show, rather than a post-release album launch show (although I appreciate this helps more with the chart battles). So rather than reviewing the album here (which in short, is fantastic!), I thought I would share my review of that night at Metronome and experiencing the album for the first time.

Read my review of the Stream of Life album launch show here

Listen to the album here

A Modern Day Distraction by Jake Bugg

“After his revelatory self-titled debut made Bugg a star, earning him a Mercury Prize nomination, critical acclaim and legions of fans the world over in the process, his subsequent efforts have admittedly been more of a mixed bag. While each of his four albums since have had their fair share of moments, none have had the consistency of his brilliant first outing. Seemingly recognising this, Bugg has gone back to basics on his new album ‘A Modern Day Distraction’, abandoning the more pop-influenced sounds of his previous outing ‘Saturday Night, Sunday Morning’, to instead return to the blues-inspired indie rock & roll that brought him to the dance. While it may ultimately be a solid rather than sensational listen, this is an enjoyable sixth outing from Jake Bugg that marks a reasonable return to form, while also providing more than a few strong highlights. By getting back to what he does best, this is a sizeable step in the right direction, with ‘A Modern Day Distraction’ easily his most well-rounded project since his beloved debut.”

Listen here

Read the full review for Clash here

Idiot EP by Bored Marsh

“Bored Marsh, made up of Joe Need (Vocals), Brad Westby (Guitar & backing vocals), Jade Bowman (Bass guitar) and Paul Mason-Smith (Drums), formed during the height of lockdown. At a time when the music industry was facing an uncertain future, these four friends were sharing demos and bonding over a shared love of Oasis’ ‘Be Here Now’. While it may have started out as just a hobby, once Bored Marsh were able to get out and start playing their music live in front of crowds in late-2022, their popularity in their home city of Nottingham quickly blossomed. Fast-forward to today and their reach is now expanding well beyond the NG postcode, playing industry showcases in different cities, festivals further afield and getting their name on national lists of the country’s best unsigned bands. Now with this their debut EP, they are ready to officially make their introduction to rock fans across the UK and beyond. Everything that has gotten Bored Marsh attention so far is laid out tightly on this EP. From Joe Need’s passionate vocals to the dynamic and stylistically varied guitars, the appeal of Bored Marsh’s sound is evidently clear from this first collection. Reflected in Broadmarsh’s recent rejuvenation, Bored Marsh have ascended from the bleakness of lockdown to present the confident and assured band found playing on this EP. While the music itself often remains dwelling in the darkness, the hopefulness is carried in their massive, soon to be realised, potential.”

Listen here

Read the full review for Clash here

Also well worth checking out:

Manning Fireworks by MJ Lenderman

Same Mistake Twice by The Howl & The Hum

The Greatest Love by London Grammar

Ten days by Fred Again…

WOOF. by Fat Dog

Hysterical Strength by DEADLETTER

Gary by Blossoms

INTRO by Kaeto

Emita Ox by Hello Mary

It's Nothing by Dolores Forever

Song Recommendations

Alone by The Cure

Autumn has arrived and after 16 long years, the gothic kings are back with new music. Their much-anticipated new record ‘Songs Of A Lost World’ drops on the 1st of November and our first taste is the album’s near 7-minute opener. Typically dreamy yet aching with melancholia, it’s an outstanding return from one of music’s true greats.

Listen here

The Lighthouse by Stevie Nicks

Speaking of musical greats with new music, rock icon Steve Nicks has also recently returned with her important new single, The Lighthouse. Written in the wake of Roe v. Wade being overturned, it’s a hopeful and inspirational track centred on women’s rights. Powerful and hard-hitting in every sense, it shows Stevie still has the gift of shaking the earth when needed.

Listen here

SPEYSIDE by Bon Iver

Announcing a new EP for mid-October, Justin Vernon and Co. have also returned with this utterly stunning new single. As beautifully moving as even their best work, SPEYSIDE marks a return to the understated and stripped-back sound that made their early work so special, with Vernon’s vocal performance as goosebump-inducing as ever.

Listen here

Living A Lie by The Amazons

Watching Reading-based trio The Amazons grow from promising indie upstarts to one of the best rock bands in the country has been one of my biggest musical pleasures over the last decade. Now back with a seismic new single that marks the start of their new era, Living A Lie may be their most accomplished track to date. With outstanding guest vocals from Ella McRobb, a rumble of stomping drums and typically scintillating / jaw-dropping guitar work from Chris Alderton, it’s just an absolute triumph.

Listen here

The Silence That Remains by The Horrors

After ending their last album with Something To Remember Me By and then giving us nothing but radio silence for the past eight years, I had come to terms with the fact that psych-rock outfit The Horrors may be no more. So you can imagine my joy this week when the band finally returned with news of a new album, ‘Night Life’, due for release in March next year. This first taste is vintage The Horrors too, showing that despite the time away and changes in the line-up, they can still deliver the goods that fans expect.

Listen here

Otherside by Maribou State & Holly Walker

A group that has been away almost as long as The Horrors, electronic duo Maribou State also finally made their return this week. With Chris Davids thankfully recovering from the brain surgery that forced shows to be cancelled and their new album to be postponed, the vibrant and joyous rhythms of Otherside are an early sign that new record ‘Hallucinating Love’ will be well worth the wait, as regular collaborator Holly Walker also once again lends her sweet vocals to the track.

Listen here

Oh Boy by Oscar & The Wolf

With his new album ‘TASTE’ only a few weeks away, Belgian superstar Oscar & The Wolf has been ramping up the single releases in the build-up to the 25th October. The standout has been Oh Boy, the devastating closing track on the album which, based on the singles so far, seems to deal with a tough break-up from a toxic relationship. This song is only made more impactful by the striking music video that accompanies it, featuring home footage of singer Max Colombie in a stirring dedication to his mother.

Watch the video here

Human Frailty by One True Pairing

Another artist continuing the build to his new album is Tom Fleming, former member of Wild Beasts and the genius behind One True Pairing. This latest single continues the sonic shift from the soaring stadium rock that made up his solo debut to a more stripped-back and folk-inspired sound. This latest single is one of the best yet of the pre-released singles, featuring stirring acoustics and a tender, self-aware message of acceptance.

Listen here

All My Freaks by Divorce

For folks of Nottingham like myself, one of the most exciting album announcements of recent times. In March next year, fast-rising local quartet Divorce will finally release their debut album, ‘Drive to Goldenhammer’. The first track to be revealed from the debut is All My Freaks, with the country-inspired indie-pop track representing everything that is so wonderfully captivating about this band. Get ready for a Nottingham takeover of UK Music in 2025!

Listen here

Nightcall by Kavinsky, Angèle & Phoenix

And finally this month, while I don’t have a cover for you all this time around, I do have a fun reimagining of a classic. You may know French producer Kavinsky’s iconic single from either Nicolas Winding Refn’s film Drive, or possibly London Grammar’s atmospheric cover. Well now, as first heard at the Paris Olympics back in the summer, the new version with the addition of French indie rockers Phoenix has officially been released, bringing a fun new spin to this old favourite.

Listen here

Also worth checking out:

Eusexua by FKA Twigs

A Hole In The Ground by Porridge Radio

Love Second Music First by Self Esteem

In My Dreams by Four Tet & Ellie Goulding

Timeless by The Weeknd & Playboi Carti

Still Riding by Barry Can’t Swim

Can’t Pretend To Know by The Murder Capital

Mistake / Better Man by Katie Keddie

REMINDER: If you use Apple Music, you can also keep up-to-date with all my favourite 2024 tracks through my Best of 2024 playlist. Constantly updated throughout the year with songs I enjoy, it is then finalised into a Top 100 Songs of the Year in December.

Add the Best of 2024 playlist to your library here

[antoine-roquentin]

The fissuring of the German left after Agenda 2010 opened the door to the CDU’s recovery of power. Though Die Linke and Merkel are radically different expressions of post-reunification politics, they condition each other. Despite her formidable reputation, Merkel is not a successful electoral campaigner. In 2005, at the height of the turmoil and indignation stirred up by Agenda 2010, she managed only to inch the SPD out, 35.2 to 34.2 per cent. Her brand of neoliberalism stirred anxiety among CDU voters as much as Schröder’s did on the left. Only once, in 2009, did she win a vote share large enough to enable a centre-right coalition with the FDP. For three of her four governments, Merkel has relied on a grand coalition with the SPD. The impact on the SPD has been deeply ambiguous. On the one hand, except for the interlude of 2009-13, the SPD has been in government in Berlin for 21 years continuously. On the other hand the loss of identity, already visible under Schröder, has been ever more pronounced.

Governing with Merkel is dangerous. She is no ordinary conservative. Paying relentless attention to opinion polls, she omnivorously absorbs the agendas of her partners and opponents. This gives hardline conservatives little to cheer about. In electoral terms the CDU, like the SPD, has suffered a serious decline. And as conservative strategists have long worried, Merkel’s move to the centre opens space for a hard right alternative, an opportunity that the AfD seized in 2015. But the truth is that given the alignment of German political forces, Merkel simply did not need the right wing. The SPD has supplied her with the votes she needed to govern from the centre. As both parties have discovered, access to power in Berlin today depends less on your absolute share of the vote than on your place in the coalitional algebra.

The SPD was by no means a passive victim of these developments. For 15 years it has chosen to double down on the Schröder agenda. In 2009 the party fought a losing election with Steinmeier, the orchestrator of Agenda 2010, as its Spitzenkandidat. Then in 2013 the party grandees nominated Peer Steinbrück, who as finance minister in 2008 took responsibility for the bank bailouts. He can also claim credit for the Schuldenbremse, the ‘debt brake’ amendment to the constitution which throttles public spending. The notorious ‘schwarze Null’ (the fiscal surplus), popularly associated with Wolfgang Schäuble, is actually a creation of the SPD. Perversely, this fiscal discipline bears most heavily on the weakest Länder, including North Rhine-Westphalia and Bremen, which were once bastions of the SPD. It was not until 2013, after its third consecutive loss, that the SPD made any effort to change direction.

Under the new rules of the Berlin game, losing to Merkel in 2013 didn’t mean the SPD was out of power. It meant that it governed with her. And the social democrats extracted a heavy price. Not only the foreign ministry, but justice, the economy, labour and social affairs, family and youth and environmental policy were all in the hands of the SPD, at least some of whom were now determined to distance themselves from Agenda 2010. Their key demand, in the face of howls of protest from employers, was a minimum wage.

In the heyday of the German model, when wages were set by collective bargaining arrangements, there was no need for such regulations. But in the new era of flexible, low-paid work, the minimum wage of €8.50 an hour brought relief to some four million workers when it was introduced in 2015. Combined with the continued growth of the German economy and other incremental changes to the benefit system, it has lifted the acute economic insecurity of the early 2000s. Nachtwey’s dark vision of social crisis and downward mobility better describes the situation a decade ago than in Germany today. Even in the east, conditions are improving. If the AfD is a conflagration born of the socioeconomic crisis, it is of the slow-burning variety. It’s also clear, however, that the SPD gets no credit for its earnest efforts to rebalance the Agenda 2010 model. The party’s fate will be decided not by its success or failure in delivering specific social policies, but by its ability to tie its identity to a compelling diagnosis of Germany’s current problems and a credible account of its role in the recent past.

For the 2017 campaign, the party apparatchiks plumped for a fresh face – Martin Schulz, a former president of the European Parliament. As described by Markus Feldenkirchen in Die Schulz Story, despite his endorsement of Agenda 2010 in years gone by, Schulz’s rocky personal biography and folksy manner vouched for the authenticity of his commitment to a more egalitarian politics. But rather than giving him a clear mandate on social inequality and Europe, which would have played to his strengths, the party managers decided to pit his personal appeal against Merkel’s. For a delirious few weeks it seemed that it might work. But by the summer his political stock had collapsed. The election was a disaster. Not only was it the worst result in a national election since 1949, there was not a single Land in which the SPD scored more than 30 per cent. Of the voters the party had retained, a quarter were over the age of 70.

The election results in September 2017 were bad for the SPD, but the aftermath was worse. Merkel tried, first, for an unprecedented ‘Jamaica’ coalition – the CDU/CSU (black) with the FDP (yellow) and the Greens. After six weeks the FDP walked away and the talks broke down. That left the options of new elections – unattractive given surging support for the AfD – or another Große Koalition. The SPD was bitterly divided. Kevin Kühnert, the leader of the party’s 70,000-strong youth wing, mobilised against the GroKo. But he was fought to a standstill by a powerful lobby in favour of it, headed by Olaf Scholz, a party boss from Hamburg, and Andrea Nahles, once on the party’s left wing, who became leader in April 2018.

Once again the SPD extracted a steep price for its co-operation with Merkel. To the horror of conservatives and the business lobby, the chancellor turned a blind eye while SPD ministers launched a raft of new social and environmental policies. But once again, the SPD in government with Merkel lacks credibility. This year’s European elections gave the party its worst result in a national ballot since 1887. And the data are worse when broken down demographically. Among voters under thirty, the SPD scores no more than 10 per cent. While Scholz and other senior SPD ministers remain in office, Nahles has resigned from all her party positions. Until the next party conference, scheduled for December, the SPD is without a leader. There are no candidates. It seems inconceivable that anyone who backs the coalition with the CDU could be a candidate. But an anti-GroKo candidate would hasten a new election, which is a terrifying prospect.

*

What is remarkable – the third big story in German politics in the last four years – is who has benefited from the SPD’s collapse. Not the CDU, whose results are by its own standards barely less disastrous than the SPD’s. Outside the east, the AfD seems to have hit a ceiling at around 10 per cent. Die Linke, worried about competition on the right, has impaled itself on arguments about immigration policy. The FDP’s refusal to take a share of power in 2017 has left it sidelined. The great beneficiaries of the upheaval are the Greens.

Immediately after the collapse of the Jamaica coalition talks in 2017, the Greens’ poll numbers surged. In the recent European elections their record result of 20.5 per cent put them in second place for the first time in a national poll. That breakthrough seems only to have increased their momentum. They now regularly poll over 25 per cent, ahead of the CDU. Their leaders, Robert Habeck and Annalena Baerbock, are inexperienced but charismatic. They clearly stand for the party’s shift to the mainstream. The Greens have established a business council, frequented by senior management from the chemical giant BASF, Accenture consulting and the reinsurance group Munich Re. The party that once represented the ecofundamentalist fringe no longer shrinks from the project of greening German capitalism.

The most widely discussed option for the future is a Black-Green coalition: a modernised CDU and a moderated Green party in a new-style centrist formation. Something of the kind operates in Baden-Württemberg. But it’s unclear whether the Green base in the rest of the country will tolerate such a conservative deal. On the same day as the European elections, Bremen held a vote, which brought another historic defeat for the SPD. Having ruled the city uninterruptedly since 1945, it took only 25 per cent of the vote. The ‘winner’ was the CDU. But it cannot govern alone, which makes the Greens the kingmakers. To the dismay of the party’s Berlin leadership, rather than talk to the conservatives, the Bremen Greens entered talks for a Green-Red-Red coalition, with the defeated SPD and Die Linke.

Bremen, a heavily indebted post-industrial port, is the smallest state of the republic. But if its coalition model were to catch on in Berlin, it would cause an earthquake. The Red-Red-Green option is the one that the SPD leadership, in better times, refused to countenance. Now it is one of the few possibilities left. And it is all the more significant now that the CDU has to deal with its own split on the right wing. The CDU’s reaction to the news from Bremen was telling. Merkel’s designated successor, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, immediately denounced the move, declaring that the Greens had revealed their true left-wing nature, and voters who hoped to bring about a change of government by supporting the Greens were naively opening the door to Die Linke. But this rhetoric cannot disguise the difficulty of the CDU’s position. What options has the retiring Merkel left her party? Given the CDU’s diminished polling, a coalition with the FDP alone is no longer enough. Would the CDU want to pursue an ‘Austrian option’ – a coalition with the AfD? Such a scenario is conceivable at the Länder level in the east. In regional elections in Saxony and Brandenburg later this year, the AfD is likely to consolidate its position as the leading party of the right. But at the federal level there is nothing that would do more to rally a majority for a Red-Red-Green coalition than the prospect of a CDU-AfD connubio.

[splungecoyote]

It's the sound of the sea that makes you believe in mermaids.

― Anthony T. Hincks

(full post on the link above)

Welcome to MerMay! It’s an art challenge I’ve wanted to do ever since I’ve heard of it, so I’m glad I have the time to do so this year. Maybe it’s because Ariel was the first Disney Princess I saw in theaters, but I’ve loved mermaids for a long time. But since I draw fantasy creatures a lot, I’m sure that’s not a surprise.

Not sure it was understood in my last poll that I was asking what you to guess what I would do for May, not what you wanted to see. But there are a lot of anime Mermaids out there, so maybe the AniMay voters won’t be too disappointed.

REQUEST GUIDELINES ARE BACK TO NORMAL! So just let me know what mermaid character you’d like me to draw- and if you’re a watcher, if you’d like a non-mermaid character drawn as a mermaid/man. Watchers have more than one request again, too. :)

Also, send me any Mermay pictures you do and I’ll share them on my next journal! I’d love to see your artwork! :)

Lastly, an art update. Because of my job, I haven’t had a lot of time to work on the ‘April Showers’ poll winner pic. But I will make sure it goes up by this weekend at the latest! I’m hoping I’ll be able to actually get some big Saturday projects done this month, so look forward to those, too!

Well, shorter is better, so I’ll end here. There will be a lot of announcements in the Mid Month journal, so that might be a touch longer. ;)