#so they lost 4 million whole views in comparison to the

[woomycritiques543]

(TW: Toilets, flashing lights.)

OH SHIT!

Fortunate was right! Spindle IS heading towards bankruptcy, especially since they only rely on one project to sustain the whole studio!

It’s been three days, and last time three days passed an HB episode was WAAAAAY over 5 mil at that point, like about 13 million or so.

So if im correct, they just lost…

About…

EIGHT MILLION VIEWS!!!!!!

Holy shi-

[solosvejs]

Our Flag Means Data

As we all know, Our Flag Means Death has exploded onto fandom in a very short amount of time, and we still don’t have any news about a season 2 so one day at like 3 am I decided that it would be a great idea to see if I can do some data about it. More specifically, I wanted to see if there was any relationship between the stuff that was happening in the show and people writing (or not writing) fic about it. We all remember SPN Finale-pocalypse, when you had to go 50 pages back in the ao3 results to find anything written before that episode - was something similar happening here?

Quick numbers:

We have produced 2131 fanworks in 34 days!!!

The total wordcount was 6,497,681 (yes that’s almost 6.5 million words about gay pirates) - y’all are SO PRODUCTIVE.

Average wordcount: 3042

Est. words per day: 191108   

The first fic on Ao3 was posted on March 9 - six days after the initial batch of episodes dropped (e01-e03). OFMD has a very weird release schedule where they didn’t do the standard one-episode-per-week model OR the Netflix release-everything-at-once model.

By April 3rd, there were over 1000 works - meaning that less than a month after the first fanfic appeared, the fandom was already ineligible for Yuletide.

So far, the day with the highest activity was April 4 - 211 works were posted that day.

The graph above shows very quick growth, but a running total will always look kind of inflated, so lets look at it in more detail:

(full-view for all the data-y goodness)

Here we have the number of works posted per day, and some more interesting patterns. I’ve also plotted the wordcount as the dashed line, and added annotations for when each batch of episodes came out.

We start to see fandom activity start out fairly slow - It wasn’t until after episodes 7-8 (”This is Happening” and “We Gull Way Back”) were released that you get more than 1-2 posts each day. Is this the point at which we all clued into the premise of the show and realized it wasn’t just queer-baiting?

March 26 and 27 saw another spike when the last two episodes came out - you had more fics than the previous day (and it helped that this was a weekend, so people had time to write as many fix-its as they wanted). This is also when the ship was DEFINITELY confirmed, we had an actual kiss, everyone lost their collective shit. The increase after this was a bit slower, but still steady - even if there are falling-off periods like on March 28th, it never does back to the previous level.

I’m really curious about the two REALLY big spikes that we see on April 2nd and 10th.

This graph uses the same daily fic count as the one above, but now we are plotting only the difference from the previous day:

So we are seeing some ebbs and flows in the activity. It’s difficult to make a real comparison to SPN Finale because, well... Supernatural had 15 years’ worth of fic before that, as well as its own fandom migrations, wank, and controversies.

In conclusion...

This whole thing started because I saw someone in the OFMD tag say that people only started watching the show once they knew that Blackbonnet was canon -- I thought, huh I wonder if that’s true, maybe I can do a chart or something. And, well, a couple of weeks later, I don’t know if I have a definitive answer to that question? It’s likely that a canon ship got people talking more and drew some folks in who may not have otherwise been interested -- the “oh it’s queer? Yeah I’m in” argument works on me very often.

Do we see an increase in fanfic production after The Kiss happened? Yes. But because episodes 9 and 10 were released at the same time, it’s hard to untangle which works were written in response to what without looking at the tags. As I was writing this I realized something as well, which I didn’t consider at first: When do we we consider Ed/Stede to have been made “canon” ?

The episode when they kiss is an easy choice, but probably an equally large number of people would say it’s episode 7, “This Is Happening”. I’m sure for some people it was their adorable moonlight exchange in episode 5. Maybe for others it was another moment when they knew it was canon. If you’re David Jenkins, it was probably canon from the very first episode, we the audience just didn’t know about it yet.

Ultimately, I’m not sure it matters. People find different fandoms in all sorts of different ways -- through larger fandom spaces, recs from friends and popular blogs, or even just out in the wild. And people some people did only decide to watch the show once they knew they wouldn’t be queer-baited, which is absolutely their right! Consume your blorbos as you will :)

Caveats and assumptions

I only looked at what was posted on Ao3 because that’s what I have the most access to and am most familiar with in terms of stats and how the data is structured. It’s possible there are other folks who’ve already tracked the growth on Twitter/Tumblr or other social medias.

Data was taken from the main fandom tag: https://archiveofourown.org/tags/Our%20Flag%20Means%20Death%20(TV)/works; Out of the 2131 works, only 55 were marked as crossovers.

“Date posted” and “date updated” a bit tricky to distinguish if you’re just looking at the work results and not going into each individual work/chapter/series. I don’t think it’ll skew the data very much personally, since we’re looking at such a short timescale, but I might look at this in more detail later.

The fandom is VERY NEW. We only have data for a little over a month, so it’s hard to draw any sort of conclusions about whether the trend will keep going or not. 

Currently, OFMD is only available through legitimate means on HBO Max - this will limit the reach of the fandom somewhat; yes, there are people who will consume the show through gifs and memes and fanart, or those who don’t mind reading fic if they’re not familiar with the source material, but it still seems like the relative exclusivity of the show is a factor.

As an addendum to that, I have no idea what/when/how aggressively this show was marketed. I personally only became aware of it through Tumblr, but I’m probably a poor barometer since I don’t have TV outside of streaming and don’t really pay attention to HBO. If someone wants to look at promotional efforts as they relate to fanwork production, I’d be really interested to see that! (Happy to share my dataset but it might be out of date by the time I post this with how fast y’all are writing)

Boring tech info & How to get in touch!

Data was scraped from Archive of Our Own using Python and the BeautifulSoup library. To structure and analyze the data, I used pandas, csv, and collections. Charts (and one pivot table because I am still baby at programming) were made in Google Sheets. If you want a copy of any of my code, or the dataset, please DM me and I’d be happy to walk you through it :) If you’re curious about fandom stats in General, check out DestinationToast, who has been doing this for a lot longer than I have and has a ton of resources!

[quicksilverownsmysoul]

Sparks Pt. 5

It has taken me forever but I finally updated Sparks! I’m sorry for making y’all wait so long but I’ve been busy with other stuff and I keep starting series before I finish the first one (I need to stop doing that). I know it’s been a while, if you need to reread the old ones they are all linked in my masterlist, it’s pinned on my page! Anyway I hope y’all like it!

You can read Part 4 Here 

Summary: 

Warnings: None, this is pure fluff

Word Count: 2298

The ride there was an experience to say the least. Scott drove which meant Jean got shotgun, the rest of you were piled into the backseat. Kurt kept hitting Jubilee in the face with his tail, her hair blew into your face every time the breeze hit, and you were so cramped that you were practically sitting on Peter’s lap. Peter was thankful you couldn't move to turn around, or else you would see how red his face was. He was sitting extremely still too scared to even move. Because if you moved even an inch over, he knew his leather pants wouldn't hide what would form. Scott looked at you guys through the rear view mirror, flashing you a cocky smile. “You guys comfortable?” Jubilee flipped him off while the rest of you grumbled out a no. He laughed and turned back to face the road. 

Scott pulled up to a diner and parked, hoping out to open the door for Jean. Kurt wiggled his arm free and opened the door causing you guys to fall out of the backseat. Jubilee fell onto Kurt’s back and Peter ended up falling on you, he caught himself with his hands, you guys inches from one another. You watched his eyes dart down to look at your lips before glancing back up to meet your eyes. You smirked up at him. “If you’re going to pull something like that, at least buy me dinner first.” 

Peter felt his face heat up and he started to sputter. You laughed at his flustered state and after a moment he did as well. He liked how casual you were about this and how you were able to joke to ease the tension. He smirked back down at you. “Well maybe after I do buy you dinner we can continue this.” It was your turn to get embarrassed. 

“Really guys?” You both looked up to see Jubilee standing with her arms crossed. “Right in front of Kurt.” Kurt was covering his face out of respect for you two and shielding himself behind her. You both turned red and scrambled to get out of the car. Peter let you get up and then hopped out of the backseat behind you. Jubilee pulled you to the back of the group with her and gave your arm a squeeze. “He likes you.”

Peter glanced back at the two of you in between bugging Scott and Jean. He saw you and Jubilee talking in hushed voices and giggling with one another. He felt himself gulp, something told him you guys were talking about him. He caught your eye and whipped his head back around, hoping you didn't catch him staring. 

Scott made his way to the front of the group to announce where you were but Peter hip bumped him out of the way. Scott cussed and Peter just sent him a wink and a smile. He turned back to face the group, his eyes locked on you. “Welcome to our favorite diner, Gus’ Games and Grub.” Peter stood at the front of the group his arms held wide open, showing off the diner. You felt yourself smile as you looked around the place, there was an arcade attached to the restaurant, with a prize cabinet and about a million blinking lights and sounds. 

“This place is awesome.” Peter watched as you took it all in, his heart swelling at the fact he was able to impress you with his favorite diner.

“So do you guy wanna do for dinner, do you wanna split a pizza or get-”

“Let’s play.” Peter said, cutting off Scott. 

“The whole reason we came here was for dinner.” 

“No, it was to have fun.” Peter smirked. “Something you wouldn't know anything about.” 

“Ooooo.” Jubilee responded as her eyes darted back and forth between the boys. 

Scott surged forward but Jean used her powers to stop him, pulling him back towards her by the collar of his sports jacket.

“You guys are acting like children. There is an easy way to decide this.”

“You’re right Jean, battle to the death it is.” Jean rolled her eyes at Peter’s comment. 

“Let’s just take a vote. Who wants to eat first?” Jubilee, Kurt, Scott and Jean all raised their hands. “Who wants to play the arcade first?” Peter's hand shot in the air, he sent you a wide smile when he saw you agreeing with him. “Sorry Peter, looks like we’re eating first.” Jean turned toward the counter and Scott sent him a condensing smirk behind her back. Peter stuck his tongue out in response. He didn't care that he lost the vote, he had you on his side. 

Dinner was filled with easy conversation and stolen glances. You and Peter kept trying to catch each other’s eye from opposite sides of the booth. He had wanted to sit next to you but Jubilee had beat him to it and she refused to move. As soon as you finished eating Peter slid into the booth next to you as Jubilee got up to throw the trash away. He slung his arm behind the booth and you scooted closer to him, making him blush. He leaned down and gently moved his hand to cup the back of your neck. “Wanna go have some fun.”

“What kind of fun is Maximoff?” You teased, loving the way it made him flush red. 

“The best kind there is.” Peter sped off you with you, ditching the other guys as you made your way to the arcade. Peter stood near a dancing machine game and held his hand out towards you with a slight bow. “May I have this dance?”

You curtsied back at him. “Of course.”

You hopped up on the dance floor as Peter put coins in the machine. He used the buttons to scroll through the songs, he stuck his tongue out in concentration trying to find just the right one. He made his selection and joined you on the mini stage. The music started playing and you felt your smile widen. “Oh my god I love this song!”

“Me too!” 

You guys turned back to the screen and started to dance, doing your best to coordinate with the colorful arrows on screen. But it was hard to pay attention when you both were too busy looking at one another and singing the lyrics back and forth. You saw Jubilee approaching the machine out of the corner of your eye. She leaned on the bar behind you, Kurt and the others not too far behind. “I was wondering where you guys went.” 

“We went to totally dominate this game.” Peter bragged as he scored three bads in a row on the game. 

“I can see that.” Jubilee watched as the song ended and the screen showed off your guys' score. It was ranked a D- with a 22% accuracy. 

“Man you’re bad at this.” Scott said.

“What like you could do better?”  Peter scoffed as he hopped off the stage offering you his hand. You took it and hopped off as well. 

“Watch me.” Scott and Jean took your guys places on the game and inserted the coins to play. You and Peter watched with your mouths hanging open as they scored perfect on every step. The song came to an end and they stared at you guys with matching smirks. 

“Okay you so totally did better than us.” You admitted. Peter just grumbled out an agreement. 

“Because we are better.” Scott remarked. 

“Wanna bet?” Peter asked as he crossed his arms across his chest. 

“What kind of bet?”

“Not again.” Jean muttered. 

“Whoever wins the biggest prize by the time the place closes gets the keys to your car for the rest of the week.” Peter smirked.

“What do I get?” Scott asked, hesitation in his voice. 

“I don’t know what do you want?”

Scott scrunched his face up in concertation for a moment before he answered. Knowing exactly what he wanted if he won. “If I win I get your pac-man machine.” 

Peter’s eyes widened, you could see him weighing the risks in his mind. He glanced over at you. He wanted the car so he could ask you out on a date, he wanted to do it right, with a car instead of speeding you somewhere. You gave him a smile and that made up his mind. He turned back to face Scott, a challenging look in his eyes. “I’ll take that bet.” 

“Okay so how are we going to do this? Teams?”

“Sounds good to me.”

“So it’ll be me and Jean, you and (y/n) and Kurt and Jubilee.” 

“What? Why are we playing? And why do I get Kurt?” Jubilee asked with her arms crossed. 

“Hey!” Kurt whined. 

“Sorry.”

“It’s more interesting if we all play.” Scott said. 

“Plus it’s not like you guys are going to win, it’s either going to me or Scott.” Peter joked and Scott nodded in agreement.

“Really?” Jubilee narrowed her eyes. “We’ll see about that. Come on Kurt.” With that they were gone. Now it was time for the games to begin. 

Peter and you sprinted over to the skeeball machines. He put a coin in each one and sped back and forth throwing the ball down the lane, getting the highest scoring points each time. You collected all the tickets, your heart pumping full of adrenaline. You played all the games you could while Peter ran around the arcade beating all the games and winning all the tickets. They made an announcement over the loudspeaker that they would be closing in five minutes, so you and Peter finished off your games and made your way to the counter. Jean and Scott were already there, their ticket pile paled in comparison to yours. Peter opened his mouth to mock them but Jean held up her hand and pointed to the right. You turned and saw Jubilee and Kurt sitting on top of the prize counter. She had three different pairs of sunglasses on and Kurt had about a million scrunchies wrapped around his tail. They were both drinking slurpees, a giant stuffed pink gorilla by their feet. Jubilee lowered her glasses as she took a long sip of her drink. ‘’’Sup losers.” 

Peters was gaping at them, glancing back and forth between the giant gorilla and them. “I- huh.. How? WHAT?”

Jubilee held her arms out and slung one around Kurt. “We won.”

“How?!?” Scott asked. “You guys only played like two games!”

“Yeah we won 67 tickets!” Kurt said excitedly. “That’s how we got the sunglasses and scrunchies!” He held his tail up showing them off. 

“That still doesn't explain how you won.” You asked with an amused smile on your face. 

“My cousin is the manager, I bribed her into giving us the biggest prize.” She pointed down at the stuffed gorilla. “Meet Barbara.” Scott and Peter stared at her with huffy faces getting ready to protest her winning. ‘Hey you never said we couldn't cheat.” Jubilee took another sip of her slurpee. 

“Yeah but you still cheated.” Scott argued.

“What like you guys didn't?.” She pointed at Scott and Jean. “I saw Jean using her powers on the basketball machine.” She motioned towards Peter. “And don’t even get me started on this one.”

“Damn you go Jubilee.” You cheered her as she gave a little bow. 

“So we win!” Kurt cheered. 

“Indeed we do.” Jubilee stuck her hands out in a grabby motion “Keys. Give me.” Scott reached into his pocket and begrudgingly tossed the keys to Jubilee. She caught them with a smirk. “I’ll see you guys in the car, I’m driving.” 

You cheered her on as she left. “Never underestimate Jubilee.” 

“Agreed.” 

“So what are we going to do with all these tickets?” You asked. 

Peter took them from you and came back a second later, arms full of prizes. “We can take them home to the kids at the house.” 

“That’s so sweet Peter.” He smiled at your praise.

“I uh.. I also got something for you.” Peter set down the prizes in his hands and riffled through them. He pulled out a stuffed turtle from the pile and nervously brought it over to you. You took it in your hands, heart swelling at the action. “His name is Mister Dibbles.” 

You looked down at the gentle face of the toy, smiling at it and then back up at peter. “I love him.” Peter gave you a wide smile. 

As you guys made your way out of the diner Peter fought with himself back and forth on whether he should still ask you out. By the time he got to the car he had made up his mind. He opened his mouth to ask you but Jubilee grabbed him by the arm and pulled him off to the side. 

“You can have the car after tonight.”

“What?” He asked, shock evident on his face. 

“You can have the car.” She shrugged. “I know you wanted it so you could take (y/n) on a date.”

“How did you know that?”

“You’re pretty easy to read.” Peter smiled and rushed forward crushing Jubilee in a hug. “Stop that, put me down!” She giggled out. 

“Thank you so much.” 

“Mhmm and don’t worry I’m not going to take your pac-man machine. But you owe me.” 

“Anything.”

“I wanna style your hair.”

“Anything but that.”

“Ugh fine.” 

Jubilee and Peter made their way back over to the car. You smiled as you saw Peter getting closer to you. He returned it. “Hey can I ask you something?”

“Sure.”

“Would you maybe… like to.. I don’t know...go out with me?” You felt your face split into a wide smile. 

“Of course I would.” 

Taglist: @chiswritingandreadingcorner @enemy-of-wonkru @xxspqcebunsxx @coffeeandteaintheevening @kitwalkerangel @xmaximoffic @livingmybestfictionallife @evanmybeloved @kaismessiahbb @bugboy-and-icegirl

[tcsauaskblog]

OH MAN I GUESS IT’S TIME NOW HUH???? THEN HERE WE GO KIDS

So Abner is one of the older cousins (about 7 years older than Fethry). He’s not much bigger or taller then other kids his age, but he’s built like a brick wall and stronger than he looks FOR SURE. He’s a rowdy kid, often getting into lighthearted trouble and roughhousing with other boys in the school yard, but all in all, he really is a good kid. 

He helps his dad out with the chores on his gran’s ranch without complaint, does the nitty gritty jobs so that his gran doesn’t have to, and isn't afraid to give his mom a hug and a kiss in front of the other school boys (even if they’ll make fun of him later for it, which he’ll then get into a tussle about, but more for the sake of principle than actually denying that he’s a momma’s boy and is embarrassed by her affection.) He really is, truly, a good kid. Just a bit rough around the edges is all.

He’s not good around kids though. He never really payed much attention to his younger cousins till they were old enough to actually hang around with. Donald was always a little too feisty and eager to prove himself, which Abner could respect, and he was fun to wrestle with once he was actually able to hold his own. Della talked a lot, but momma said that was just a girl thing, despite her being just as eager to wrestle and get down and dirty with the boys. Gladstone showed off too much, but sometimes his luck would get them free ice cream down at the shops on Sunday afternoons, so he wasn’t too annoying to hang out with. And it helped that Gus was around his age, and able to help him round up the little gang of hooligans when it got a little too much for Abner to deal with sometimes.

And then Fethry came around. 

And he was small. Smaller than the others had been, almost tiny in comparison, and Abner felt his heart flinch every time someone asked him to hold his baby brother. (Either for a family pic for granny or to help momma out sometimes when she was busy) 

It wasn’t like Abner didn’t like Fethry. He was a relatively easy baby. Hardly ever cried, compared to what Abner remembered of his cousins as babies, and usually was content just to be held and giggle. Abner just didn’t know what to DO with the kid. 

He was just. So. Little. little enough that one wrong move from Abner and his baby brother would break into a million pieces. Not to mention the kid was so adored by everyone around him and was the complete opposite of Abner in every way. Abner didn’t think he could stomach the idea of being the reason this little kid, who was all smiles and stars in his wide brown eyes, cried or got hurt.

So Abner did was any kid his age could do in his situation and just sort of,,, avoided Fethry. Not to be mean or difficult, but just to be safe. Just until Fethry was a little older, a little less breakable.

As the years went by though, it became harder and harder to break this avoiding game they were playing, despite Fethry’s BEST efforts. Because the kid LOVED his cool and distant older brother. He’d follow Abner everywhere he went, would try to copy some of Abner’s poorer choice habits (which horrified Abner to no end, thus furthering his efforts to keep away from Fethry so as not to taint the kid) And even though Fethry got older and wasn’t the baby he used to be, he somehow got even more fragile, even more precious before Abner’s eyes. The kid was as pure hearted as could be, while Abner, entering his early teen years, became more and more rambunctious with his shenanigans and got into a lot more trouble than he was probably worth. He became to hard to be near the kid, a shining beacon of everything good in the world, where Abner was bordering on the darker side of that shadow the beacon cast.

Abner didn’t really mean to get into as many arguments about his estrangement with his kid brother with his folks, mostly his dad. But it was hard to explain himself. Abner was a little too much like his father, where words were hard to come by and actions always did the job of conveying his thoughts anyway. His mother, a kind hearted and gentle spirit, was always able to see through his rough exterior and understand him perfectly, but even she was having difficultly understanding his hesitance to be around Fethry. Abner wished he could be a little bit more like Fethry, the spitting image of his mother’s kind soul, But alas, he was too much like Eider, and that made the two butt heads more often than not. 

It was Gladstone’s 7th birthday when the incident occurred. 

The party was being held at granny’s ranch, and it was a big family todo, (family events always were) and Abner was getting a little too smothered with all the constant chatter and loud music. He had only stepped away just to catch his breath, to be able to breathe a little easier without all the commotion. He had taken a walk down to the little pond at the bottom of the hill. 

He didn’t really like water all that much. He wasn’t a very good swimmer, and after the summer he broke into the movie theatre with some friends to see an R-rated horror film about a sea monster when he was 9, he’d never really been able to look at a body of water the same again. But he had half an egg sandwich he swiped from the buffet table in his hoodie jacket, and feeding the bluegills was always something that calmed him down, so standing on the little dock didn’t seem too scary.

Abner didn’t realize Fethry had followed him down to the pond. He should have. Of course he should have known the kid would. Fethry followed him everywhere, like a little duckling would. Abner should have realized Fethry would have trailed along right behind him.

But he didn’t. He was too stuck in his own head, trying to calm himself down from getting too overstimulated from the party. He didn’t realize Fethry was right behind him. 

He didn’t mean to jerk as hard as he did, when Fethry has reached out towards him, he really, honestly, didn’t. The kid had startled him, and Abner was acting on school yard protective reflexes faster than he could stop himself.

To this day he doesn’t really know if he actually pushed Fethry in or not. It hurts to think about. All he knows for sure is two things. 

That Fethry fell into the water.

And that Abner didn’t jump in to save him.

Someone did though, Donald a few seconds later. Where he had come from, Abner couldn’t bother to ponder about. Donald had always been a little too protective over Fethry, acting on those big brother instincts far better than Abner ever did. He must have followed after Fethry when he noticed the little 4 year old duckling toddle away from any adult eyes. He had jumped in the water immediately to save Fethry. 

Abner wasn’t even sure if the Donald could swim. It didn’t matter if he could though. That wasn’t the point. The point was that Abner didn’t jump in, regardless of whatever excuse he could come up with.

And he tried, for years. Abner spent countless hours trying to wrap his head around why he never jumped in. Why he couldn’t move. Why is heart felt like it broke the second Fethry’s signature, stupidly big hat, disappeared under the water. Why it didn’t feel better when both he and Donald broke the surface again, whole seconds later.

The coming days would be a blur after that. A hazy blur that Abner didn’t like thinking too hard about. 

The adults had come to the rescue a few minutes later, Gladstone and Della must have ran to get them after Donald had jumped into the water after Fethry. Fethry ended up ok, if not a little water logged and shaken, understandably. They had demanded to know what had happened.

And Abner couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even make eye contact. Just stared at his own feet, his hands clenching in his hoodie pockets hard enough to leave bruising as he willed the pain in his chest to go away. Donald had no such reservations, and told the story as he saw it. 

That Abner has pushed Fethry into the lake.

Abner couldn’t very well refute it, no matter how much he wanted to. He didn’t mean to push Fethry if he did, he didn’t mean to not jump in after him. He didn’t mean to hurt Fethry. He never did. Fethry was the last person on the earth that Abner wanted to hurt. But that didn’t change the fact that he did hurt Fethry, and that he didn’t do anything to change that.

He was sent away to a boarding school the following week. A school for lost and wayward boys. Boys who had caused so much havoc in their lives, that their parents didn’t know what to do with them or how to help them anymore. It was, for a lot of cases, a last ditch effort to save some reckless boys from causing any more damage to themselves and the people around them. Abner was one of those cases.

He didn’t want to go. Had begged and pleaded and fought tooth and nail not to go. Momma, the sweet soul that she was, didn’t seem like she wanted to send him away either. But Fethry had almost drowned, and neither of them could deny that Abner was the cause of it, and had said nothing to his defense against it. But Pa’s word was final, and Abner couldn’t do anything about it.

The school was strict, but it had never met a challenger quite like Abner Duck. Stubbornness was something tangible, flowing in his veins like the rest of the spitfire Duck traits he inherited, and Abner proved himself to be quite the problem child that everyone had always painted him out to be. 

It was about a year later, that Abner got the letter from his gran that his mother had fallen ill. She died the following spring. 

Abner felt out of sorts in his suit that didn’t fit him quite right as he stood in the spring rain at his mother’s grave spot. It was under the little oak tree on the hill overlooking gran’s ranch. The pond Fethry had almost drowned in was just a little bit away, in viewing distance at the bottom of the hill. Fethry was on the other side of his father. Abner felt bile creep up in his throat whenever Fethry would peek over at Abner with wide brown eyes that reminded Abner too much of their mother, and try to give him a smile. Abner tried not to hate him in that moment. It wasn’t Fethry’s fault. He was only 5. He didn’t understand what was going on. Didn’t realize the weight of momma’s death. Still didn’t really understand why Abner hadn’t been around the past few months, but still. There was a pit of anger burning itself into Abner’s stomach that he didn’t know what to do with.

He hadn’t seen his mother in almost a year, and now he’ll never get to see her. Never get to hold her hands or give her hugs or eat her brown sugar cookies that was the only thing she could bake without burning. The last memory he has of her alive is when she hugged him goodbye before the boarding school bus took him away. Abner was too upset and angry that he didn’t hug her back. If he had known that was going to be his last moments of her, he would have turned around in his bus seat, to at least see her wave him off, with little Fethry, not understanding the situation at all, waving good bye too.

Abner was incredibly heartbroken, but more than that, he was furious. Furious that his father had sent him away in the first place. Away from his mother, the only person who really saw him for his worth. They had gotten into another fight that night, screaming at each other so loudly that they neighbors dogs, a whole acre away, could hear them and started barking in turn. Abner doesn’t remember a whole lot of the fight. Just that they were both raw from grief and heartbreak, and that Abner knew, that without his mom, he couldn’t stay in that house. Not with a dad who was a little too much like him, and a baby brother who couldn’t have been more different. Abner left for the school again the next morning. He hated being in the school, but it was the only place that was familiar enough to return to, without feeling like it was a home. 

Abner got the news that his father died half a year later. Abner didn’t bother going to the funeral, no matter how devastated he was about the news. The only person left from their broken little family, the only person who would, undoubtedly, be waiting for him, was Fethry. And Abner couldn’t see him. Not now. He didn’t know when, but certainly not now. Not after everything that had happened between them.

Abner decided it was best to keep the distance between himself and Fethry. Nothing good came from them being near each other, and this way, Abner knew that at the very least, Fethry would be safer without him around. Fethry had granny to take care of him, and Donald and Della and Gladstone to keep him company. He didn’t need Abner.

Fethry would be better off without him.

[thanksjro]

More Than Meets the Eye #32 - Nobody’s Ever Actually Dead in Comic Books

Our band of merry guys-who-weren’t-on-the-Lost-Light-in-issue-#1 approach the shattered husk of the Lost Light, in a gruesome scene that is only slightly marred by the graphic design.

Font doesn’t really suggest danger, does it? Here, for comparison, is something I slapped together in fifteen minutes (including recreation of background) using a font I got off a free font site.

Now, one could say that my version is rather derivative, flat, and arguably cliche, but you know what else it is? Appropriate for the fucking mood of having found a destroyed, hemorrhaging ship after everyone you knew disappeared.

I’m available, IDW! Hit me up.

Theorizing that this is the ship that the Coffin Rodimus came from- remember that? It was a few issues ago- the gang flies in for a closer look. The ship blood is actually something called quantum foam, which allows for quantum space travel to happen. It’s not supposed to be outside of the quantum quills, but the ship’s pretty junked up, so it is.

Because the ship is so very full of holes, the gang can set down for repairs pretty easy. They land in Swerve’s, finding it in less-than-pristine condition. They also find evidence of Crosscut having gotten creative, as a poster for the play he was working on is hung up in the room. Considering he was still writing it when he disappeared, this might seem a bit odd. But then you remember that this is a ship from the future, and it stops being so odd.

Because this is a future ship, with evidence that Crosscut did some stuff, it stands to reason that, at some point, everyone is going to come back from being disappeared.

Just to die.

Which is a bummer, but one crisis at a time.

Megatron disembarks the Rod Pod, with Ravage following, and everyone is just a touch put off by the duo. Everyone but Nautica, who proceeds to commit a microaggression.

Nautica, that’s Soundwave’s father you’re petting like a common animal.

Ravage, angered by this over-familiarity, swats at her. Skids questions letting an active Decepticon roam around, but Megatron brushes off these concerns, saying that finding any still-living crew members is more important. With that, the search begins.

The gang splits up to look for clues, despite Riptide thinking this is a horrible idea. They’re on the clock for this one- the quantum foam is liable to explode if it touches anything, and there’s an awful lot of the stuff floating around right now.

Nightbeat and Nautica leave the rest of the group to their own work, seeing as Nautica has the most appropriate alt-mode for traversing the gaps in the ship.

Man, that’s pretty cool. Wish Nautica hadn’t been regulated to being “girl best friend” for her character arcs, I would have loved to see her do some neat stuff for her own development. Guess that’s what happens when you get introduced as main cast late, and have to compete with all the faves who had dozens of issues to be established and who also don’t have to deal with the whole “token girl character” thing.

The rest of the gang- Megatron, Ravage, Riptide, Skids, and Getaway- start looking in the area they’re already in. Seems a little lopsided, but whatever.

Ravage finds someone almost immediately, identifying Ultra Magnus through smell alone. Only, it isn’t just Ultra Magnus.

The Magnus armor lays not terribly far away, having had its hands cut off to prevent the recall signal from being activated before being gut-murdered.

Gut-murdered wiTH A FUSION CANNON, MEGATRON

Of course, Megatron was forced to destroy his fusion canon after it was decided he would be joining the Lost Light, but you can buy these things off the black market like it’s nothing. Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if Brainstorm had a few stashed in his lab.

As it currently stands, nobody can trust the guy who has a storied past of killing Autobots, on a future ship where the only folks who could stop him are dead. Megatron, at least, has the good sense to not argue this fact, and suggests that the boys lock both Ravage and himself up until they suss out exactly what happened.

Meanwhile, over with Nautica and Nightbeat, we run through all the weird shit that’s happened in the last day or so.

Nautica, you’ve been on this ship for months now. How did you miss the fact that the only couple within 800 miles got annihilated by way of Phase Sixer? I feel like that attack might have come up at some point.

Since they’re on the subject of spouses, Nightbeat asks Nautica if she’s married, or if she has friends. Though noting that such a direct line of questioning might get him slapped with someone else, Nautica reveals that she is single, though she does have a best friend. Nightbeat is also single, probably because he pulls shit like this.

While this conversation is going on, Nautica uses her Sonic Screwdriver wrench to open a door with the literal push of a button. Brainstorm tricked out her wrench so hard it turned into a magic wand, which is good, because they’re going to need all the help they can get now that space is literally warping around them thanks to the quantum foam.

Nautica kicks something on the elevator, and that something turns out to be Brainstorm’s mysterious briefcase. Too bad Swerve is gone, he was so invested in what it contained. Luckily, Nightbeat is just as interested.

Back over on the other side of the ship, it seems as though Megatron kept his word about not resisting, as both he and Ravage have been locked in a cabinet. Wonder how that’s going for them.

Oh, better than I expected.

Ravage is fucking pissed that Megatron joined the Autobots, thereby turning his back on everyone who supported his cause during the last four million years. Despite this grievous betrayal though, the Decepticons haven’t stopped moving. Turns out, Galvatron’s in charge now.

But only if Autobot Megatron isn’t some sort of ploy.

It’s at this point that we learn just why Ravage is here to begin with- to see if Megatron’s truly given up the Decepticons, and if he has, to murder him. But first he’d like to know why this is happening.

Megatron views himself as a monster, having perpetuated a war that ended the lives of billions, destroyed the Cybertronian way of life, ostracized his race from the rest of the universe, and killing just to have something to do. He doesn’t like feeling this way about himself, so he decided to walk away from that life by joining the other team.

Don’t think it’s quite that easy to do, but okay.

Ravage isn’t so sure that this change of heart is going to stick, still convinced that Megatron will snap back to his old self with just a bit more time. Problem is, Megatron may not have a ton of that resource left.

Didn’t they build that body in like an hour so you wouldn’t die? Yeah, no wonder it feels as ill-fitting as a twenty-dollar suit. Thing’s probably made out of pig iron and duct tape.

The lights come on before further self-reflection can be done, and the duo realize that they’ve had guests this whole time.

Someone put the kettle on.

Obviously some fucked up shit happened on this ship. Megatron isn’t so sure that it’s him who did these dirty deeds, however, as he reaches into Ratchet’s mouth and pulls out his brain. Which feels like something that doesn’t really absolve one of guilt, but okay.

Also, ew.

Back with Nautica and Nightbeat, things are getting weird.

Now, this sequence might seem confusing at first blush, but this is because the laws of reality are collapsing around them. Going by clues in the background, we can find the proper, linear progression of time, and thus is conversation. This is what is actually happening:

With the mystery of Brainstorm’s briefcase eluding us once again, we move on to see more graphic aftermaths of violence. Poor Tailgate has been nailed to the wall with a chunk of a metal beam that’s almost as big as he is. The mood lighting for this scene is gorgeous, but I’ve hit my limit for exposing y’all to gore for this issue, so you’ll just have to trust me on this one. Then they find something even more interesting.

Who’s ready for Under Cold Blue Stars… 2!

Back over on the opposite side of the ship, Riptide’s found something nasty. It’s a bunch of dead bodies!

Including, uh, Pipes.

Who already died a while ago.

Hm.

All the bodies in this room are in their alts, and it looks like they’ve all been shot and drilled into, for some reason. Skids brings up that he had a friend who could identify the placement of any robot’s brain module just by knowing what they turned into. Then he reaches into a corpse to see what the drill-hole’s all about. It makes him sick, though maybe not for the reason you might think. He gets on the phone with Nightbeat, who’s called to tell them that they’ve found Overlord.

Still locked in his weird body harness.

And decapitated.

Megatron is on the other line, calling because he’s figured out the same thing Skids has. Someone paid a visit to this ship. Someone nasty.

The gang regroups, and Nautica gets the basics on the DJD, because I guess nobody’s mentioned them even in passing in the last six months, either.

God, what do they even talk about on this ship? Certainly not their feelings.

The reason that one room was filled with alt-modes was because of Tarn’s addiction to transforming; t-cogs are easier to remove when they’ve been used recently.

We get a quick 4/5ths-page gore-fest, then it’s back to making it all about Megatron.

Maybe you should have thought about that before you FUCKING DEFECTED, YOU POOL NOODLE.

Nightbeat’s beginning to put two and two together. There’s an Overlord in the basement. That shouldn’t be, because Overlord got exploded by Chromedome when he mercy-killed Rewind. Something is off about the past of this ship.

Before he can establish his MTMTE everybody-lives-but-then-dies AU though, the quantum foam fucks with the ship. These sons of guns need to get the hell out of here, pronto.

Oh god, what now?

Ravage smells someone inside the Magnus armor, someone who isn’t a part of the usual nesting doll lineup. Megatron reaches into the Crackerjack box and pulls out one hell of a prize.

HE LIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIVES

Chromedome would be so thrilled, if he still existed.

[ohnobjyx]

so, i am from the west and before cql it never crossed my mind to check out c-ent (i guess that's almost universal for white people over here) but i started watching cql because there's a lack of lgbt media in the world and now i got interested as a consequence in the rest of c-ent and learning chinese, so i wonder if it could happen in ten years or so that the government realizes they can export lgbt content, suck people into c-ent, get money & so they might relax on censorship, could that be?

Hi, anon! Just for your info, your ask made me think a lot in the past few days. I’m happy to see that there are more people hooked on c-ent! If I’ve to be honest, I consume much more c-ent than western. There’s a certain beauty and poetry that it’s really different from western dramas.

Okay, there are several parts in my answer, so I’d like to tackle them one by one:

Background and language

LGBT content and public stance

Money (I strongly recommend you to read this one and the next, this is your answer, anon)

Success

If any of you are interested, click to see below the cut!

Disclaimer: except actual numbers (some are from official reports, others from articles), the post does have a heavy coating of “my opinion”. Beware.

1. Background and language

If I’m not mistaken, anon (if I am, I’d like to be corrected), you may have watched only CQL and maybe The Guardian, which is another fairly popular among int-fans (I haven’t watched it yet, no spoilers, please!).

These two had a combination of factors that made it easier for int-fans to accept them: fantasy world + well-received lgbt subtext (wangxian!) + less amount of poetic and lyrical language + the plot is surprisingly good (at least CQL from my knowledge). But it’s not the case of the rest of the dramas, and it may not be of the future BL dramas.

When I say “fantasy world” (c-fans often debate in which historical period CQL is based upon, but mxtx never bothered too much with that kind of details), I mean specifically that there isn’t a preexisting set of rules that the viewer may not know about. It’s often commented how CQL never explained how their world works (so a lot of it is fanon) and that viewers had to learn the niceties and the conventions of the world by watching the show.

It’d be a slight problem if the show was set on a historical period and even in a modern setting. C-dramas in general, since their target audience is Chinese, never bother introducing any kind of background or cultural convention. This would be just a little problem, after all, if watching tv shows contribute to our knowledge, we get an unexpected gain. But for many people, if the background or the references are difficult to understand, they may feel discouraged to keep watching it.

(And the rythm of the c-dramas is often extremely slow for western standards, since you have 40-50 episodes to develop a single story, instead of one season of 12 episodes). 

The main problem I see is the language barrier. Something I (and mostly c-fans that speak English or int-fans that speak fluent Chinese) marvel everytime I think about it is how people could stand the subtitles. I’ve yet to find good subtitles (though the ones from the official Youtube channel do a passable job and I’ve heard that on viki the subtitles are good too).

The meaning is often twisted (if not outright reversed sometimes), the poetry is lost, the difference between levels of formality is also blurred, the way Chinese people address each other is also not respected (I’m looking at you, Netflix subtitles). So you can’t ignore the damage the language barrier does to the reception of a tv series.

You’ve said it yourself, anon, that CQL made you interested in Chinese as a language. Chinese, from my point of view, is a fascinating language, but it’s so difficult to translate.

Among other things, the main language barrier is the use of 成语 (cheng yu). They are traditional idiomatic expressions, usually consisting in 4 characters, and originated from ancient literature. Commonly they are created by succintly paraphrasing or summarizing the original text, so they convey information a lot more compactly than normal speech or writing.

From what I know, there’s a logistical problem: a cheng yu of 4 characters is often read in around 1 second, but if the translator wants to include the most complete translation, that get all the nuances of the phrase, it can often end up in a long phrase that take quite longer to read (I saw once a cheng yu literally translated and well... 无语).

This use of chengyu spreads from historical to modern to fantasy tv dramas. CQL’s dialogues use less of them (the novel was plagued with them), making it easier to sub. They also make less use of poetry and literature references that so often appear in historical dramas (just the reference, no context whatsoever, I despair sometimes too), thus making it easier to convey to int-fans.

2. LGBT content and public stance

You wrote at the end: “the government realizes they can export lgbt content, suck people into c-ent...”

This would be assuming that the government acknowledges it is lgbt content. Which they don’t. 

When they were making the adaptation from the novel to the tv script, they were very carefully thinking of how they would introduce the series to the regulation department that controls everything that gets aired in China. In fact, the target audience they specified was “teenagers and youngsters” because of its xianxia themes, its fantasy world and the whole adventure after WWX’s resurrection (but we know that the real target audience was female and mainly in their 20s).

So officially, even though it’s based on a BL novel (and the general public knows it), the government only acknowledged it as an xianxia drama. Even if someone points the BL elements out, they are ambiguous enough that they can avoid the questioning. And since it brings money, as you say, they may turn a blind eye to the people who points it to them now.

There’s another point of your ask I want to highlight: “if it could happen in ten years or so...”. Ten years is a lot of time. I trust their society to take steps in a much more lgbt-friendly direction in our globalized world, and maybe things will be different in a decade’s time, when the younger, more open-minded generation starts to take over the control. Censorship will one day be relaxed or even disappear (from my pov, this is possible with more time and a great change).

(We can’t forget about the propaganda here... so I’m unsure of how this issue will develop in the future).

However, I don’t think the change will come from the government realizing that it is very profitable, and this is the last point I wanted to talk about.

3. Money

Disclaimer: it’s difficult to find out how much a tv series makes as a profit, since they keep making money to this day, this minute, this second. It’s also difficult to find the information, since I don’t work in the industry so I’d to make due with what I have.

I won’t lie, anon, when I saw your ask the first time, I thought: they have no need. You talk about the government realizing that they can earn money with lgbt series, but the reality is, CQL, while one of the highest earning dramas from 2019, it’s not the only one capable of that.

Recently it was issued the list of the Top 10 Most Influential TV Dramas of 2019, in which CQL was top 7. “Not bad!”, one would say.

I’ve taken the data from a few others so you can make a comparison in their profit.

A c-drama usually earns money by selling the license rights to different platforms, commercials and merchandising. In the case of CQL, you can add the concerts, fan meetings and the different events and articles.

Top 1 in the chart was 都挺好 (All is well, I really recommend this one, it’s one of the best dramas I’ve watched). This drama was aired from March 1 to March 25 in 2019. The data from April 3, 2019 is a copyright profit of 667,000,000 ¥ (a total of 14,500,000¥ per episode, the total of what 2 tv stations, Tencent, Youku and Aiqiyi paid for license rights).

Around the time CQL was finishing airing (on Tencent), the copyright profit was around 156,000,000¥. For transparency: this data is from August 20, and CQL finished airing on August 25, while All is well data is from a week after the finale. However, I doubt that in a week CQL could reach a profit of 500,000,000 ¥ to match the profit of All is well (I don’t know how much Netflix paid them for licensing rights, but it may be a similar sum).

Top 5 in the chart is 庆余年 (Joy of Life, in this one XZ had a secondary role). This was has a fanbase too in int-fans, though smaller than CQL’s. The company that’s the main stockholder for this series made a profit of 4,420,000,000¥  in 2019, approximately 48% is copyright profit. The series that brought more profit was Joy of Life, though, of course, they produce more series.

By the time they finished airing, CQL had made a profit of around 400,000,000¥ (estimated), with predictions of it getting to 800,000,000¥ (taking into account license, commercial profit, merchandising and the concerts). I haven’t been able to find how much they made in the end, but it must be around 900 millions to a billion yuans.

I know 800 millions it’s a lot of money (more than what I’ll ever see), but if you take it and compare it with the 667 millions All is well made with just licensing the series, one can understand that a series like All is well is much more profitable than CQL.

However, there’s no need to rank in the top 1 to get this kind of profit. 如懿传 (The legend of Ruyi), a series from 2018 that was the continuation of a drama that had been wildly succesful in 2011. It ranked 5th on douban, but didn’t make it to the top 10 chart of the most influential TV dramas (in spite of a superb leading actress and supporting actors, the plot and the poor production didn’t get it as high as it could have been).

BUT. Just license rights to 3 platforms made them earn 15,000,000¥ per episode. For a show that wasn’t as successful as people had predicted it to be, their profit is quite decent (the production cost was also quite higher than CQL’s, so maybe the net profit wasn’t so high for a 90-episode drama, but they didn’t fail in this investment).

Nonetheless, not everything revolves around money. In my opinion, more than direct economic profit, for CQL their main gain was the fanbase they amassed, that has skyrocketed the actors’ careers, let them make a lot of profit with merchadising and the concerts, and the series still profitable to this day. They have also contributed greatly to the increased presence and popularity of Asian content in the West, which isn’t a small acomplishment.

(As I’m writing this, I’m also watching last week’s episode of TTXS. Guys, the garlic commerce in just 1 county made a profit of more than 9 billion yuans in 3 months. Just so you all have a reference.)

4. Success

Nothing guarantees that a BL drama will be successful. Though there isn’t a lot of BL dramas, The Guardian and CQL aren’t the only (nor the first) BL novels to be adapted into tv series.

In fact, just in 2019, there were 59 BL media (novels, games, manhuas) to be adapted into TV series. Of them, 3 have finished filming and have been aired. Of the 59, I had only heard of Winter Begonia, which has a historical setting and the two male leads are famed actors (one of them is YZ, dd’s motorcycle friend). So just the BL theme doesn’t ensure the success of the drama.

And yet, we haven’t caught news of it here. I didn’t know there were so many (for a country that has a strict censorship, 3 BL dramas in a year is a lot) until I was getting information for this post.

That’s why, in my opinion, if someone said “hey, let’s relax a bit the regulation, since CQL was so liked by the fans”, others may say “but out of 6 BL dramas, only CQL was successful... so it must not be the BL theme after all”.

CQL has many many factors that makes it as good as it is, wangxian being one of the main reasons I fell in love with CQL, but it’s true that it isn’t the only key to its success.

In summary

(I appreciate it if you have been able to read until here).

CQL (and The Guardian, in a lesser degree) had a very distinct set of factors and conditions that made it possible for it to have great success with int-fans. However, there is a trend: only dramas that have been highly rated in China to start with were able to stand out in western countries as well. In my opinion, that’s because people aren’t so different: what the general public likes is very similar, no matter if it’s eastern or western countries.

In fact, CQL has been more successful among the same kind of public everywhere: mainly female, from around 15 to 30 years old.

Moreover, this target audience is very restricted. It’s just a matter of numbers that a drama like All is well, which target audience goes from mainly females from 20 to x years old, is more likely to be successful (yes, at my home, all of my aunts, my parents and I have seen the drama, while only I have watched CQL).

I think I sometimes ramble a lot, so I’ll write down my point here: the entertainment industry is profitable just with the Chinese audience. If a good drama ends up getting famous Western countries, is just 锦上添花 (“adding flowers to the brocade”) or “the icing on the cake”.

CQL is the exception, not the rule. As a drama last year, it broke a record, going on hot search for 49 days on a row in China. It’s a incredibly rewarding show, and, because of that, incredibly lucrative as well. However, since all its accomplishments are very rare, I don’t think this boom will be easily reproduced with just any other drama.

So, to answer your question about whether the profit they can gain with BL dramas would make them reconsider the censorship issue... why would they?

(I’d put everyone to farm garlic).

[violent-optimism]

Rey as a Palpatine and Why it’s Grown on Me

Hello my lovelies!

I think it’s been quite a while since I posted any kind of essay on here. Between work and other things I honestly haven’t had much time for it. However in recent days I’ve felt very motivated to work on a very particular kind of essay; a subject that I’ve been stewing over since December of last year.

Obviously from the title you already know what I’m going to be talking about. I’m not going to deny that this is a rather heated subject for some Star Wars fans, particularly those who disliked this plot choice and The Rise of Skywalker in general. As per usual in my essays, my goal is not to change anyone’s mind or argue over who’s opinion is “more right”. Plain and simple, this is just going to be me talking about MY thoughts and MY observations about Rey’s journey and lineage in The Rise of Skywalker. I hope this doesn’t need to be said but if you read something in this essay that you disagree with, I politely ask that you keep it to yourself and move on. At the end of the day, we are just talking about a movie, and this is all just for fun.

Now, with that being said, let’s get started! This essay is definitely going to be a bit more structured than my usual efforts and I hope this will result in a much more straightforward and clear-cut essay. Enjoy!

 1.      My Initial Reaction

 While I don’t want this to be a major part of the essay, I do think it makes sense to start this off with a little story about the time I first saw TROS in the theatre. I can remember it pretty well. My whole body was tense, my eyes glued to the screen for what I knew was about to be some kind of major reveal in the story (even if it felt very late in the film for such a scene). Then came those shocking and irreversible words from Kylo Ren: “You’re his Granddaughter. You are a Palpatine.”

Wait…what?

My mind recoiled at this statement. My heart sank into my stomach with complete rejection. This can’t be right. He must be lying. I don’t like it. I don’t like it one bit. A man behind me just snorted with laughter and I can totally see why. Rey being related to Palpatine sounds more like a crazy Youtube fan theory than something that could actually be canon in the Star Wars universe. We had always thought she might be related to Luke or even Obi-Wan, but…Emperor Palpatine? Darth Sidious? No, just no.

So yeah, suffice to say that my first reaction towards this plot twist was not very positive. I admit that even once the movie was over, I still didn’t like this reveal. I don’t even think I began to warm up to it until my 3rd or 4th viewing of TROS. I had become so used to the idea that Rey had no special lineage and she was just a very force-sensitive girl from nowhere that it was extremely hard to let go of that. And honestly, if JJ and everyone else involved had chosen to keep it that way, I would have been perfectly content. So why…you might ask, has Rey’s true lineage grown on me in the last several months?

Now, don’t get me wrong…there’s still a part of me that thinks it was a very odd choice to introduce a reveal like this considering what happened in the previous installment. However…this fact has already been discussed to death and this essay is intended to be more of a story exploration rather than a critical film review. So let’s talk more about Rey being Palpatine’s Granddaughter and how I have actually grown to love the idea.

 2.      Rey’s Journey

 Throughout the trilogy, Rey has had to overcome quite a few challenges in her path to becoming a Jedi. Her journey has been one of mostly self-discovery and personal growth. In The Force Awakens, Rey discovers that she is strong in the force and can do things she never imagined. In The Last Jedi, Rey’s strength in the force grows stronger and she learns to accept that her parents were nobodies and that some things do not turn out the way we expect.

And so, thematically, it would almost seem like Rey has reached the end of her character arc. This is Rey at her most powerful. There’s nothing left to learn, and there are no more secrets to be revealed…right? Well, we know that this is not the case. Even from the first scene with Rey we know that something is wrong. She knows that something is wrong. There is a darkness inside of her; she fears for her destiny and who she is meant to become. It’s not until later that we understand why these feelings have come to the surface.

Up until TROS, we didn’t truly know who Rey was or where she came from. However, by this point in the story anyone should be able to describe her as a character. Kind. Brave. Resourceful. Curious. Compassionate. Strong. Rey has proven time and time again that she is an incredibly kind and capable individual who wants to do the right thing. Although both TLJ and TROS strongly hint towards Rey possibly turning to the dark side, we know that our protagonist never actually would because we know who Rey is.

And this a huge reason as to why the Rey Palpatine reveal works so well for me. There is an incredible juxtaposition with Rey being the most heroic, kind-hearted person imaginable, and yet she is related to the most evil man in the galaxy. There is something deeply profound about the last living Jedi having Sith blood in her veins. Part of the reason why this reveal is so shocking is because the two characters are complete polar opposites in terms of good and evil. Rey is absolutely nothing like Palpatine and so the familial connection seems impossible. It doesn’t just seem like an unlikely truth, it feels entirely incorrect. And yet, that is also what makes it (again, in my opinion) so interesting and bold.

 3.      Meaning and Impact

 Apart from giving Rey one last emotional challenge in the final installment, I think this choice was made for other reasons as well (3 to be precise).

1.      It made Rey even more similar to Kylo as he too is grappling with the dark influence from his Grandfather

2.      This decision subverts a long-existing trope in fantasy stories

3.      Used to further tie the 9 films together as a story about the Skywalker and Palpatine bloodlines

Since The Force Awakens, it was made very clear early on that Rey and Kylo were connected in some way; their destinies were intertwined. Although this was further explored in TLJ, we would not truly understand just how similar their journeys would become until the final installment. The dynamic between Rey and Kylo is infinitely interesting because at first glance they seem like completely opposite people, when in reality they share a very similar struggle, especially in The Rise of Skywalker.

Both Rey and Kylo experience the overwhelming darkness of their respective families. Kylo even says it quite bluntly before the lightsaber duel on the ruined Death Star: “The dark side is in our nature, surrender to it.” He is quite obviously trying to use Rey’s lineage against her in an attempt to turn her over to his side. What makes this so interesting is that we know Kylo himself is not yet completely taken over by the dark side. Despite his evil deeds, he has always been conflicted during this story.

When Rey finds out that she is related to Emperor Palpatine, she becomes withdrawn, angry, afraid and unstable. This is the closest to the dark side that we have ever seen Rey at. Indeed there are some moments where she almost seems to be channeling behaviour that would be more suited for Kylo (snapping at her friends, using anger as power). Although Rey eventually comes to her senses and realizes what is happening to her, she was clearly affected by her Grandfather’s dark influence, just as Kylo was.

 Despite the fact that both Rey and Kylo come from families with a history of the dark side, the film makes it very clear that one character’s lineage is far “worse” than the other. This is where the subversion of a common fantasy trope takes place. Now, to be clear, this is only my interpretation and I don’t claim this to be exactly what the filmmakers were going for; however this subversion is yet another reason why I enjoy the Rey Palpatine reveal.

How many times have you watched a movie or a TV show where a character’s lineage was a significant part of the story? It’s probably more times than you can count on one hand, right? My point is that the idea of a character’s lineage/family history becoming a main plot element in a story is nothing new, we’ve seen this before a million times. For example, in Disney’s “Tangled” (2010) Rapunzel learns that she is the long lost princess who was taken away from her family when she was an infant. Disney influence aside, does this sound somewhat similar to Rey’s story? Yes, it absolutely does…but not in the traditional or conventional sense.

This is where Rey Palpatine (for me at least), becomes extremely appealing. This reveal is like the evil, twisted version of a heroine discovering that she is the secret heir to a royal family. And instead of the protagonist being overjoyed and enlightened by this information, the reveal comes with great personal shock and emotional turmoil. In this case, Rey is the Granddaughter of Emperor Palpatine, which essentially makes her Sith royalty if we’re being really comparable. Am I the only one who (for lack of better words) thinks this is insanely cool? Not only is it a direct subversion of a very common story trope, it directly ties into Kylo’s arc and it also parallels Luke’s family revelation in “The Empire Strikes Back.” Coincidentally, this also makes Rey’s journey similar to Luke’s in that regard, but I’ll get back to that later.

Now as you’ve probably heard before, as we look back on all 9 films in the Star Wars saga we can see that this is clearly a story about the Skywalker and Palpatine families. Granted, the Palpatine bloodline is largely unexplored in comparison to the former. We know that Rey’s Father was the son of the Emperor, but we still don’t know his name or who he really was. Ultimately this information is not relevant to the story as a whole, but it’s clear that Emperor Palpatine has been pulling the strings throughout basically the entire saga.

More specifically, Palpatine himself has always been tied to the Skywalkers. He seduced Anakin Skywalker to the dark side and later tried to do the same to Luke. Via Snoke he was also able to turn Ben Solo, who shares a dyad with Rey, Palpatine’s Granddaughter. It kind of comes full circle and it’s really quite clever in my opinion. The Villain of the ST is related to the Heroes of the OT, and the Hero of the ST is related to the Villain of the OT (Did I just blow your mind?).

Put simply, Rey being a Palpatine makes a lot more sense thematically when you examine the story that came before her. Families are complicated and messy, especially in Star Wars. Rey’s experience echoes this, but in a much darker and harsher way. Her journey is meant to resemble Luke Skywalker’s in many ways, but their stories do have differences. In Luke’s case, he actually got to see and interact with Anakin, the real face of who his Father was. Anakin Skywalker was certainly not a perfect person, but in his last moments he turned to the light and saved his son’s life.

Rey, of course, did not get to experience a moment even close to this. Palpatine is about as evil as evil gets. There is no hope or chance of redemption. She was forced to look upon her own flesh and blood and see nothing but a monster. It would be unfair to turn this into a competition of “who had the most devastating family reveal”, but the point I’m trying to make is that Rey and Luke’s journeys are undeniably similar, which serves to further strengthen the connection of Skywalker and Palpatine in these 9 films.

 4.      Conclusion: The Power of Choice

 I feel I must end on the note of choice, because this is how The Rise of Skywalker chooses to end. Despite everything I have mentioned and how much I have grown to love the idea of Rey Palpatine, there is something that I love much more than this: Rey Skywalker. Even just reading it or saying it out loud fills with me an indescribable amount of joy.

To put it bluntly, Rey did not have an easy life. In fact, she probably had one of the most challenging upbringings of any Star Wars protagonist. Yes, Anakin was a slave at a very young age, but he also had friends and a mother who supported him. Luke was even better off with a relatively normal childhood, friends and parental figures who loved him as if he was their own son.

Rey had nothing and no one.

She was forced into a life of struggle and hardship, not by choice, and certainly not by her parents’ choice. Although they loved and cared for her, she would never feel this or know it to be true until much later in life. Rey did not choose where she came from, nor could she choose who she was related to. This is perhaps the most powerful and meaningful message that one could take away from the Sequel Trilogy: You cannot choose the circumstances of your childhood, nor can you choose who you are related to by blood. However, you can choose your destiny, you can choose who you want to be, and you can choose who you consider to be your family.

Rey had all the makings of a villain, but she chose to be a hero. A Sith that chose to be a Jedi. A Palpatine that chose to be a Skywalker. It doesn’t matter where you come from, only where you’re going. At the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide who you want to be. That is a beautiful thing.

Well folks, it took me a long time to get here but we’re finally at the end. I hope this essay was able to make some kind of a comprehensible point. Even if you didn’t agree with anything I said, I hope it was still something that made you think. It was quite a lot of fun to really delve into this topic and explore every microscopic detail. I sure hope it made sense, and if not, I’ll try to do better next time.

Thank you so much for reading! Bye for now.

[triptychexe]

TRIVIUM - PART 3 - DEBUT MINI ALBUM [2016]

TRIVIUM is the third and final unit to debut from Triptych’s first generation with their debut mini album PART 3. With a significantly more hip-hop and rap-focused sound in comparison to the two previous Triptych units, TRIVIUM brings a new layer of talent and meaning to the super group. Covering hard-to-swallow topics like gender roles and societal double standards, TRIVIUM hits hard and makes waves.

△ TRACK BY TRACK. 

1] BERLIN 

The decision to make BERLIN their debut song was a power move. Not only does the song have a very distinct and recognizable sound that drags listeners in, but it sets the vibe for TRIVIUM’s energy.

All three members had a hand in writing this song.

The line distribution can be found here

2] SAVAGES

In this hiphop-influenced track, TRIVIUM has a back and forth debate between rappers Van and Cal over if human nature is inherently good or evil, giving examples of highs and lows in society.

Doubled with a strong chorus, thought-provoking versus, and irony twisted into more than a half the lines, this song can be seen as an ironic commentary on what people see as ‘right’ and ‘wrong’.

Written by all three members.

3] WHO I AM

Trivium talks about their past and how it had shaped them into who they are today. This song is like the last goodbye to their old selves, ready to let go of the past and move on.

This track also acknowledges that admitting ignorance isn’t something that you should be ashamed of, as you can only change as long as you’re willing. 

Written by all three members

 4] BACK OFF

 Ura, the only woman in this subunit, took it upon herself to write a feminist anthem for their album. It’s basically a response to all the times Ura has had a man be patronizing towards her. Van and Cal act on the track as supporters, but the song is mostly Ura focused. 

The first song on the album where you actually hear Ura rap and get to see her lyricism play out. One of Ura’s lines mentioned snapping kneecaps. Everyone’s afraid of her now. 

Written by Ura

5] BITE

This song is all about wanting someone that’s not good for you, but you keep coming back. 

The non-gender specific pronouns in the song show that this song can be about any type of relationship, regardless of gender or if it is a romantic or platonic relationship. 

Written by Van and Cal

6] MEN/WOMEN

All about gender roles and how they’ve hurt them as they’ve grown up. Since they are the first co-ed unit from Triptych, they took it upon themselves to address double standards/gender roles.

This one caused a bit of a discussion, especially since it directly calls out the double standards in the kpop industry.

Written by all members. 

△ THIS ERA.

So... Trivium easily got the most attention out of Gen 1.

Mostly because they’re a co-ed duo that covers topics that aren’t discussed super openly.

But also because they’re really good rappers. Like, all of them. And their stage presence is really intense. 

Ura doesn’t rap as much as she would have liked to this era, as they needed her on vocals to break up the tracks a little since neither Van or Cal can sing very well.

Trivium were given the title ‘un-idols’ - which is both a term of endearment as well as a critique, depending on who uses it - because of their unwillingness to play up the role of a significant other at fan signs as well as their general aura.

Idols are supposed to be like... ‘perfect’ at all times, and Trivium just doesn’t do that? Like they wear the worst outfits to the airport, fansites have pictures of them waiting in line for street food (and then chowing down on said street food), and the way they talk to fans is so casual? 

This attitude turned off some fans, but it brought in a whole new wave of support, especially from international fans who felt like Trivium were relatable. 

The most popular member this comeback was easily Ura. Not only was she the only girl, so she visually stood out, but she was the one that often went viral for fan-zoning fans who asked her to be romantic with them.

She also received the most criticisms, but she really didn’t care. She wasn’t going to make herself uncomfortable for the sake of others. 

Cal got a good amount of attention too because of his accent and his looks. Cal has a very slight British accent when he says certain Korean words and people just... lost it over that.

Van kinda sunk to the background this era, but he doesn’t really mind. He just wanted the kids to have fun and have their time to shine. :) 

As far as numbers go, Trivium breaks records for Triptych by gaining 10 million music video views in the first 24 hours as well as having BERLIN chart on Melon upon release. 

△ ERA FASHION. 

I promise this is the last era that Triptych wears color-coded outfits. I promise. The company was trying to see how the color-coded concept would work and gen 1 was the guinea pigs. 

When Artychs saw how lacking Trivium’s debut outfits were.... they almost rioted at HBH. They already were accusing HBH of picking favorites and not giving Trivium equal treatment. 

But the truth is... Trivium picked their debut stage outfits. Yes, they’re bland, but Trivium wanted their debut to feel like friends were finally meeting up for the first time, hence the casual clothes.

The button up shirt fits tho.... that made a few bitches go feral. That was an exquisite serve. 

The award show fits were nice too! Ura stunned bitches pulling up with her short blazer dress and fishnets. Van had really cool dress pants with designs on them and Cal wore a color that wasn’t black! It was monumental!

As far as hair goes, Ura had short black hair with wispy bangs. 

Van had black hair and almost always wore a wide headband on his hairline.

Cal’s hair was usually just styled into tousled brown curls and called a day. 

△ FANDOM BEHAVIORS.

I’ve explained triptych stan culture before (basically the fandom is kinda divided? like some fans only support certain subunits, others support all of them, etc.) but I think Trivium was what really made that divide clear. 

Trivum just sounds different than S.O.T and Tromme, there was gonna be people who didn’t vibe with their style. But that’s kinda the point of Triptych, to like.. get different sounds involved in their discography.

And some gross fans didn’t like that Trivium made it clear that they don’t want to be sexualized by fans, so they just decided to ignore them and focus on S.O.T and Tromme, who hasn’t spoken out about being sexualized by strangers online. 

People also started calling Van a ‘smol bean uwu’ (hello 2016) and started like... infantalizing him?? even though he’s a grown ass man??? does he LOOK like dan OR phil to any of you???????? 

Fans also started calling Cal a fuckboy and played him up as this big meme just because he’s goofy. I will never forgive y’all for that.

Pick Mes hated Ura because if anyone’s ‘one of the boys’, it’s Ura and they were jealous. But she literally has to be one of the boys. It’s apart of her job. 

But the artychs that do stan Trivium are probably some of the chillest people ever. They are literally just vibing. Trivium stans are dubbed as the ‘stoners’ of the fandom as a joke.

And OT9 stans overpower solo stans by a LONG SHOT, so don’t worry! Trivium received more love than hate from artychs. There were just a few bad eggs that ruined shit. 

[wazafam]

"That wasn't flying. That was falling with style!" Sheriff Woody will continue to be a popular voice among audiences of Pixar's Toy Story films. From Buzz and Woody's budding friendship to the sweet romances the toys find, Pixar introduced everyone to the world of a toy. Each character has their own unique mannerisms, but their perspectives and personal experiences differentiate the toys from one another.

RELATED: Toy Story: 10 Easter Eggs You'll Only Notice On Your Second Viewing

Some of Andy's toys have a little more knowledge than others, based on what they've lived through with different owners or even not having any other owner aside from Andy. Since everyone's favorite toy bunch gets themselves into trouble throughout all four of the films, it's easy to see where each toy's weaknesses and strengths lie. Some are clearly a little wiser than others and their intelligence can be fairly judged when considering their actions throughout all the films.

10 Mrs. Potato Head

This character is the ultimate sweetheart and the traditional caretaker of the group. Mrs. Potato Head isn't as intelligent as most other toys though, but it could be because she simply doesn't have as much screentime as other characters.

However, her impulsive and boisterous reactions do lessen her intelligence factor. In Toy Story 3, she freaks out and complains that Andy threw them away, and doesn't try to fully listen to Woody when he tells her what really happened.

9 Rex

The sweet and adorably innocent dinosaur is just not the smartest of Andy's toys. Perhaps if he was given more screentime in the four films, he could have had a chance to show some more intellect, but he is at the bottom of the intelligence list, for now at least.

Rex is overall oblivious, which results in his clumsiness. His vocabulary is actually pretty strong, but his aloofness is his prime obstacle. This trait causes him to catch up to plans a little too late.

8 Sarge & The Green Army Men

Andy's "Bucket 'O Soldiers" are the "professionals," as Woody dubs them, as they're the spies for the toys to see what's going on outside of Andy's room. They're of huge importance to the toys. Without them, the others would have a hard time preparing for when the humans run into Andy's room.

RELATED: Toy Story Meets Monsters, Inc.: 5 Friendships That Would Work (& 5 That Wouldn't) 

But since Sarge and the soldiers are mainly focused on muscle work and missions, they don't have ample time to explore their knowledge. With all the experience they have as toy soldiers, they've truly been through a lot, and so they must have some brains when it comes to certain things aside from battle tactics.

7 Buzz

The favorite funny, charming, and calculative spaceman, Buzz Lightyear does have some intelligence to him, apart from certain moments in the movies. He's pretty knowledgeable about space travel, as his vocabulary sounds educated and well-trained.

Since education doesn't guarantee emotional intelligence, though, Buzz stumbles upon a few dumb incidents, like when he initially thinks he's really an astronaut and not just one of the millions of toys in the "Buzz Lightyear" brand. There's also the period of time when he thinks he can fly, which Woody consistently attempts to debunk. He definitely improves over time with regards to his awareness, but he still sometimes doesn't catch onto an idea or observation as quickly as the others do.

6 Mr. Potato Head

The Brooklyn-accent, tough-guy character comes across as extremely cynical and irritable, but his loud-mouthed behavior can sometimes be helpful. Rather than dwell on how limited he can be as just a potato with some body parts, Mr. Potato Head goes above and beyond in the third movie when he uses a tortilla to reattach his body parts to escape the sandbox.

What's even smarter is when he improvises after a bird eats the tortilla and he grabs a cucumber instead. His improvisation skills prove that he is a somewhat smarter character in the bunch.

5 Hamm

Hamm is way more than a piggy bank filled with coins. This character has a different element of intelligence in comparison to the others in Andy's room. Even Andy feels that he should call him "Evil Doctor Porkchop" in the game that he invents when he's a kid.

RELATED: Toy Story: Bonnie's Toys Ranked, By Likability

Hamm can change television channels rather quickly, emphasizing how observant and fast-thinking he can be. He also is the main toy to hypothesize aspects about the evil bully, Sid. Hamm is also the first to tell everyone his gruesome observations about Sid and is able to speculate reasons as to why Sid is home, for example, and what they're going up against since Buzz and Woody do indeed have a face-off with Sid. Without Hamm, the toys possibly wouldn't be informed of a lot of vital information they need throughout the films.

4 Jessie

Jessie is always up for an adventure since she became accustomed to life as an owner-less toy before Toy Story 2. The cowgirl proves to be fearless and defensive when she participates in the various schemes throughout the movies. However, it's her anxious and traumatized nature from her past life that sometimes gets in the way of her intelligence.

Jessie brings up her traumatic loss of her first owner, Emily, in the third movie when everyone starts to believe that Andy trashed them (literally). Jessie can get freaked out easily, but her intelligence isn't completely hindered by this and she's always ready to jump into something new, like when she tells Andy's toys that they can just live at Sunnyside Daycare instead of struggling to live on their own. While she clearly doesn't know what terrible things would happen at Sunnyside, her quick-thinking skills can actually help the whole gang.

3 Woody

As the original leader of the toy pack, Woody's wisdom derives from his years of experience as Andy's favorite toy. His ability to lead appears in several ways, such as his skills in calming everyone down when they're anxious about a new toy at Andy's birthday party.

RELATED: Every Easter Egg In Toy Story 4

The only way that Woody is weakened, in terms of his intelligence, is how he isn't as experienced as some other toys in the outside world. The first two films present him as a strong voice for the toys, but his initial fear of losing Andy sometimes clouds his brain. All in all, though, the sheriff's leadership skills validate his overall intelligence.

2 Slinky

Slinky is an underrated character and might be misconstrued to be one of the least intelligent in the group, but he's actually, on the contrary, one of the smartest. His placid demeanor allows his ideas to flow more easily than other toys, as a lot of them become quickly anxious.

Slinky is the one to get the Scotch Tape to help Woody fend off the monkey and the one who allows the toys to use him as the bungee cord when springing themselves off of high surfaces. He's "got a spring in his step" after all because he thinks of smart, helpful, and viable ways to help the whole group move forward with a plan.

1 Bo

Bo (short for Bo Peep) is the most intelligent of all the toys. Although fans know she is no longer a part of Andy's room, she once was and she experiences a lot of intimidating events in the fourth film. Bo shows Woody the ropes of the reality out of a child's bedroom and teaches him that a toy should experience the world outside a single child's ownership. Her courage and instinctual actions when she accepts that Molly (Andy's sister) lets her go prove that this character is full of knowledge and wisdom, aside from mental and physical strength.

Bo is clearly adaptable to her environment, such as how she can easily move and climb throughout the carnival park in the fourth film and adaptability takes a specific mind. Bo is evidence that a "lost" toy isn't really lost if they find their own way, without relying on a child to own them.

NEXT: How Toy Story Established Pixar's Storytelling Style

Toy Story: Andy's Toys, Ranked By Intelligence | ScreenRant from https://ift.tt/2O893Cd

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WORK ETHIC AND LEAD

It's not just startups, and in their own blog posts. Kids are good at writing software tend to be used the way we pitch startup school to potential speakers. And as any politician could tell you that taste is just personal preference is a good tool if you want to, which means working on the product after a funding round finally closes, it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide.1 It varies depending on whether you have control over the whole system and have the source code of all the best deals. On the web, Google at year 1 is the limit that such tricks will approach. In more recent times indecent, improper, and unamerican have been. What struck me at the time they expended on this doomed company. The only external test is time.

Buildings to be constructed from stone were tested on a smaller scale.2 We didn't know anything about marketing, or hiring, or organization. His skills are simply much more valuable. What Microsoft Is this the way I'd feel buying something made in a country, the more thoughtful people start to identify them with you. They could evolve into ads.3 I was delighted. Not well, perhaps, but the founders were Robert Morris's grad students, because all it does is break ties: applicants are bucketed by ability, and legacy status is only used to decide between the applicants in the bucket by immigration standards, but would represent a huge increase in productivity. But in her novels I can't see the gears at work. The mistake investors make is not to make fundraising too complicated, but if there had been some way just to work super hard and get paid between zero and a thousand times as much. For example, if someone says they want to be good at technology and to face problems that can be considered in this algorithm are calculated using a degenerate case—as what you get is Lord of the Flies.4

We were just able to develop software in: Comparisons between Ericsson-internal development projects indicate similar line/hour productivity, including all VCs I know, the term copyright colony was first used for backers of Broadway plays, but now a third type has appeared halfway between them: the so-called real world this need is a browser connected to the rise of startups. Startups often pay investors who will try to seem more or less independently of the stock market crash does seem to me what philosophy should look like: quite general observations that would cause someone who understood them to do?5 How did Apple get into this fix? The disadvantage is that it has to convince instead of commanding. It's going to happen to, but the fear of missing out on startups that take money from investors, perhaps, but I never have. 5 million. Better check. But they've been trained to do for the next generation of kids.6 Ten years ago that was true. And yet all the adults claim to like what you learn via users anyway. Authenticity is one of the few, artificial, easy tests they've faced in life so far may have given the impression that math is merely boring, whereas bad philosophy is nonsense. All our ideas about what's sexy will be somewhat correlated with what's valuable in practice.

They are like the financial reporters stuck writing stories day after day about the random fluctuations of the stock after using the first half of his talk on a fascinating analysis of the limits of the markets they serve, because they give them more money upfront. When one person is in charge he can take risks that a committee would never agree on. People in past times were much like us. This could explain why hipness seems particularly admired in London: it's version 2 of the traditional English delight in obscure codes that only insiders understand. From either direction we get to the point here, vice versa. Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be exceptional. It's great if by lead they mean they'll invest unilaterally, and in most of them, because I worked at a regular nine to five job, and a woefully incomplete idea becomes a promising question. Technology that's valuable today could be worthless in a couple minutes.

The IBM 704 CPU was about the death of our first cat. 01 graham 0. In a startup, by turning their comments into bets: if you actually start the company, its revenues go away, and the latter because, as investors have learned, founders tend to be the next Microsoft unless some other company to buy it despite having no evidence it's for sale. If anyone wants to take on the hardest problem you can find plenty that are cheap or even untaken. Delight You should take more than you think.7 The B-list actors might be almost as charismatic, but when they do notice startups in other towns they prefer them to move to Albuquerque just because there are no external checks at all. Starting a company changes people. So one way to do it.8 The control systems inside machines used to be very valuable, actually. 76% of the company's stock. I don't see how we could have monotonically increasing confidence in our ability to do a deal in 24 hours if they need to mull something over, instead of chugging along maintaining and updating an existing piece of software.

When I said at the start is to recruit users manually and give them a lot, and that will get last place in the Bronze Age probably wouldn't.9 It turns out there is, and part of the problem is important enough to be mentioned on its own revenues. By singling out and persecuting a nerd, just try to hit it every week. If we improve your outcome by more than 6. I suspect the statements that make people mad are the ones that win.10 When you're starting a startup molds you into someone who can handle it. Chesterfield described dirt as matter out of place. Why wait for further funding rounds to jack up a startup's price?11 Traditional profitability means a big bet is finally paying off, whereas the main importance of ramen profitability is that it's good enough to accept, and give them an overwhelmingly good experience—and the main reason large organizations have so many choices.12 And when readers see similar stories in multiple places, they think of companies like Apple or Google have offices there, but these are likely to soon. And in the process of innovation.

If doctors did the same work, except with bosses. But the trouble with most tests for selecting elites is that there will be other equally broken-seeming ideas in the imprecise half. Number 6 is starting to be VC territory. Likewise its reincarnation as political correctness. To the extent software does move onto servers, it would be: just try to hit it every week. Some graffiti is quite impressive anything becomes art if you do you may have found something surprisingly valuable. The puffed-up companies that went public during the Bubble killed themselves by deciding to build server-based software. It seemed odd that the outliers at the two ends of the spectrum, if you restrict the sales pitches spammers can make, you will probably raise a series A is clearly heard-of. 7602. You could probably do it. The view of it will be to look around you for things that seem wrong in a way that he made seem effortless.

Notes

Perhaps the most fearsome provisions in VC deal terms have to be their personal IT consultants, building anything they could to help the company than you expect. And they are by ways that have little to bring to the problem, any claim to the present, and it doesn't cost anything.

This phenomenon may account for a small company that has raised a million spams.

Interestingly, the owner has already told you an asking price. Foster, Richard. But this is certainly not impossible for a solution.

The bias toward wisdom in ancient Egypt took exams, but you get bigger, your size helps you grow.

That sort of pious crap you were doing Bayesian filtering in a band, or can make better chairs or knives, crucibles or church organs, than to read this essay wrote: One year at Startup School David Heinemeier Hansson encouraged programmers who wanted to start a startup or going to get kids into better colleges, I had a demonstration of the movie, but in practice signalling hasn't been much of the market. Like the Aeneid, Paradise Lost that none who read this essay I'm talking mainly about software startups are often unknowns. Some of the Times vary so much on luck. I've observed; but it doesn't cost anything.

Seneca Ep.

Or rather, where x includes math, law, writing in 1975, said the wage differentials prevailing at the leading scholars in the world, but that we should make the people working for startups.

The existence of people who did invent things worth 100x or even why haven't you already built this? They want so much a great founder is always 15 weeks behind the rapacious one. Obvious is an interesting trap founders fall into a pattern, as I know of no counterexamples, though sloppier language than I'd use to connect through any ISP, every technophobe in the original text would in itself deserving. If we had to bounce back.

The obvious choice for your side project. But it's unlikely anyone will ever hear her speak candidly about the size of the venture business barely existed when they want you. Even the desire to get going, and logic. 54 million, and logic.

The real problem is not a problem can be fooled. Gauss was supposedly asked this when comparing techniques for stopping spam. But it wouldn't be irrational. Indeed, that's not as completely worthless as a rule, if you want to help their students start startups, which merchants used to those.

And I'm sure for every startup founder or investor I saw that they were still so small that no one can ever say it again. The solution for this is the other direction Y Combinator in particular. Why Are We Getting a Divorce? Some are merely ugly ducklings in the U.

But in most high schools. Founders rightly dislike the sort of community. Is this unfair? Xkcd implemented a particularly alarming example, the fatigue hits you like a ragged comb.

Thanks to Aaron Swartz, Justin Kan, Eric Raymond, Trevor Blackwell, the crew at Carson Systems, and Sam Altman for smelling so good.

[sweetsunrayssr]

A Shrine - Gordon’s Garage

In Cameron’s Pilgrim I mentioned the Japanese shrine that Cameron talks about over the phone. Every twenty years the shrine is rebuilt with new material, looking the same as the original, but not actually being the original. Joe thinks it’s beautiful, while Cameron explains she believes people do it for how the process makes them feel, the doing of it. Following Cameron’s explanation of the Japanese shrine rebuilding, these shrines are physical manifestations and reminders of a process that the characters wish to repeat.

In this series, the process is not so much about building a computer, creating or playing a game, or achieving a business model. Those are all just a medium to these characters to connect with the people they want and need to connect with, even if they are not always aware of it. Ultimately inspiration comes down to the people you relate with and how curious you are about what is happening in the world.

Each pivotal character has a shrine, representing their connectivity to somebody who inspires and motivates them, and by the 4th season we can see a returning pattern of what they try to recreate and from the very beginning season 4 identifies to which location or “shrine” this is tied to. The bond they try to hold on to, reestablish or set-up with a particular person is automatically linked in their mind to a certain room or building in their memory.

Because a building or a place is durable and physical a “shrine” is easily mistaken as lasting and always perfect. In reality it is but a momentarily event when everything feels perfect and ideal. Other events and bonds are like the elements eroding at its perfection, and in the worst case scenario natural disasters or demolition teams with a wrecking ball. Each character is aware that their shrine is under possible threat at any given time, and tries to deal with this in their own particular way.  

This meta-analysis will limit itself to discussing Gordon’s Shrine.

THE GARAGE

We see the Japanese shrine in 4x05 in Pilgrim as Donna is transported to it with the avatar. Gordon’s lit up tent in the camping scene in 4x01 has the same warmth, and thus is a visual “shrine identifier” moment from Gordon’s POV. Gordon has a memory vision of Joe leafing the IBM BIOS binder in his garage morphed into the camping environment, right before we are treated to that beautiful image of Gordon’s warmly lit tent.

When in 4x05 Gordon asks Joe what he saw for the future in the garage back then, Joe  explains was how it would feel to work with him, “the doing of it”, and how that was more important to him than the actual end result. So, we could have no clearer comparison of what Gordon tries to recreate whenever he works together with Joe: that doing-of-it feeling with Joe in Gordon’s garage ten years ago, an idealized moment full of potential when their bond was just perfect.

SEASON 2: SURROGATES

Throughout the seasons we learn that the garage was always important to Gordon, even before he met Joe. He grew up in an autoshop, and he made his first computer project for Comdex 81 with Donna in his garage. So, the garage was always a shrine location to Gordon, but not until he reverse engineers the IBM chip for the BIOS with Joe does it become an ideal moment that he continues to seek, rebuild and re-enact in some way, and can only be perfect if Joe is his partner in it.

At the start of S2, after Cardiff is sold, Gordon intends to return to his garage, proclaiming it on TV even in an interview with the host no so incidentally called “Chip”. He intends to do it alone, but can’t help tell Joe in the elevator, who apathetically agrees that is what Gordon should do. Excited like a child, he orders several computers, sets them up, admiring the blank slate, but soon finds himself stuck. He can’t do it alone.

Since consciously Joe is still out of the question as a partner in that moment, Gordon reaches out to Donna and Mutiny instead, seeking a problem he can help solve for Mutiny (Tank Battle) and eventually writing Sonarys, which ends in disaster.

Simultaneously he reconciles with Joe on a personal level, enough for Joe to contact Gordon to help set up the Westgroup mainframe. Gordon sends Joe packing when this conversation occurs in Gordon’s living room, but he agrees to do it when meeting Joe in the garage parking lot.

Since it’s only a one-time deal, Gordon surrogates Joe with his Cardiff engineering team to build computers on demand. But again that fails, and on top of it he learns that Joe is moving to California with Sarah (again in the Westgroup garage). Gordon is so rattled that he can’t find his car anymore at a garage parking lot, gets lost, falls and is taken to the hospital. On the surface, Gordon’s breakdown seems amped by having business competition, but the whole breakdown occurs after he already discovered his rival is already total loss. And the doctor specifically stipulates to Donna that his breakdown in the garage parking lot was not related to his neurological disease, but purely psychological. Hence, Gordon’s arc in S2 emphasizes that Gordon’s well being and happiness relies on having a work & friendship relationship with Joe. He literally falls apart and is lost without Joe in his garage shrine.  

It is actually Joe’s visit to Gordon’s garage in the S2 finale to return the chip back to Gordon’s shrine that gives Gordon the fire to successfully transform himself from a hardware engineer in a world that is fast gearing to a virtual network world into a successful software coder: Gordon changes a few lines in the malignant Sonarys to turn it into an anti-virus cure. Except Gordon picked his family and Mutiny over working with Joe and learns that Joe built Macmillan Utility with Gordon’s program.

SEASON 3: ABSENT SHRINE

The entire shrine is destroyed, as there are no garage scenes for Gordon in S3. Throughout that season Gordon maintains that he does not want to work with Joe, not even if Joe offers him 70% of Macmillan Utility. He truly believes this and that is why we don’t see him in an actual garage.

When Joe gives Gordon credit and hands him a 20 million company, the two patch up their friendship and want to work together, but it proves impossible. There are various plot causes for it, but the visual absence of the garage-shrine is the tell. The browser project depends on Cameron and Joe isolates himself in the basement. Gordon may have built the network successfully by himself upstairs, but it is an empty success for Gordon with Joe in the basement. Callnect looks more like a Cardiff office floor than a garage, and Gordon was unfulfilled by that, as much as he was by the Giant-professional.

RE-ERECTED BY CAMERON

It is not until the opening scene of 4x04 that the garage shrine has been rebuilt for Gordon. Cameron uses it as a temporary autoshop when she brings her bike in and repairs it. In the same scene Haley inquires whether Scientology is a religion or a cult. A Comet is a returning object in space. And Joe and Gordon bond in the office agreeing with each other, absolutely content with what they have done. So, we have all the elements to identify a returned shrine moment: garage, a spiritual element, the name of a recurring event of the past, and Joe and Gordon being a bro-romance team all wrapped up in one scene.

Once the shrine is erected again, Gordon wants to preserve the shrine via maintaining control. Remember how he offered Joe 49% of Macmillan Utility in S3? Sure, giving Joe even 1% was a miracle, but that specific number shows how great a need Gordon has to control Joe. Another way he tries to have control over Joe is by wanting to keep the shrine exclusive for them alone. He does not want a third party influencing Joe, especially if they might pitch an idea to Joe that Gordon is not yet on board with, and then Gordon gets outvoted. Gordon has his gifts and talents, and a conservative reasonable voice to ground a development team is important, but he is also the person with the most limited view. He only truly innovates when being outvoted and all his excuses are thrown by the wayside.

An ever constant person he does not want around Joe is Cameron, but in S1 we also saw how obnoxious and insulting he was to Simon, and in S4 he’s just as wary of Haley being brought in initially. Sure, in S4, his need to keep Cameron out of the equation is not entirely selfish. He cares for Joe as a friend and he has witnessed him pine away in the basement for three years, for one reason only – Joe’s in love with her. And it is not even wrong that Gordon tries to look out for himself as well, when a miserable Joe usually means that Gordon is left out in the cold to muck around by himself.

What Gordon fails to account for is that he put the fuse in the dynamite in S1 when he made the unilateral decision to take out Cam’s OS. Nor does he recognize and is not fully aware how Cameron has been instrumental in re-erecting his garage shrine:Cameron advised Joe to give Gordon credit

Joe wouldn’t have been meticulously keeping all those post-its with urls if he had not been waiting for Cam.

Cam’s remark on how Joe would soon run out of post-its gave Joe the idea to index the web. Despite initially chastising Cam about this and remarking on it negatively to Donna over dinner, he’s now running a new company that he actually has nothing but fun in.

Cam helps Gordon see that Haley just want to spend time working with her father

Cam puts the dash on the T by bringing in her bike and actually making Comet a garage setting.

Joe’s complacent, cooperative and happy in a way he has never been before

When in 4x01 he tells Cameron it probably is for the best for Joe that their meeting at Gordon’s birthday party didn’t go so well, that’s ok. He’s just looking out for Joe. When later he tells her she was cruel to give Joe fire for the mountaintop unwittingly, Gordon may tell himself he’s just looking out for Joe, but that would be a lie. He’s upset with her, because she inspired Joe to a new idea and Gordon sees the signs that threaten the status quo. He is at least as out of line as Joe is in 4x05 about Katie to both Cam and Joe when he discovers their romance has been rekindled. Since Gordon cannot control who Joe chooses as a romantic partner (hell, Joe is 5 years his senior), his next step is to use passive aggressiveness against Cam’s presence at Comet, while Joe lights up like a Christmas tree with Cam in his lap checking out Rover’s HTML.

Initially, Cameron is not eager to get on board of the team and makes the adult and respectful decision to stay out of the business side. But the start of 4x04 was the moment where Cameron’s professional interest is piqued and she is right in her prediction that Comet will run into trouble once the web expands further (Rover would not be the sole company looking to solve “search”). If Gordon had not acted like a jerk to her in that scene, she probably would have ended up helping them. Instead, she bows out and respects Gordon’s wishes of business exclusivity. She has no hunger to develop a new computer game and physically stays away from Comet ever since, eventually leading to the circumstances at the start of 4x05. Joe and Cam have their actual first fight over Cam’s refusal to help them out for even two days. Even if Joe has no full scope on all of Cam’s reasons yet, he does instinctively identify Gordon as part of the issue. Worse, his best friend is not just keeping Cam away from Comet, but Gordon is having fun with his own lover at work. Joe lashes out to Gordon about Katie, because he’s envious.

MUTATED SHRINE

The volatile argument between Gordon and Joe reveals that Comet was turned into a playground by Joe’s initiative. Joe bought and wanted the air hockey. Joe’s probably also the person behind the pool table, the foosball, and the surfing competition. So, Joe turned the autoshop setting into S2 Mutiny. Just as we hardly need any outspoken explanation why Joe refused to leave the basement, screwing around with post-its (instead of Cam) for three years, we hardly need Joe to vocalize his subconscious motivation to make Comet’s work environment into a playground: he wants and needs Cameron there. 

Gordon’s objections to Cam being part of the professional equation and Cam respecting it and stay away from the place, leads to Joe mutating it into something else, as well as Cam using Bos’s plea for help to prove to herself she can write a brilliant algorithm, putting Rover one over Comet in the “competition” (which is actually a false competition: a guide of great websites is fun, but ultimately not the answer that a search engine is), and puts his relationship with both Joe and Haley in jeopardy.

SOLUTION?

Unless Gordon allows Joe the freedom to seek inspiration with a muse, his shrine is doomed for destruction once again. One of the possible solutions to allow Joe into bringing other partners into the shrine and still preserve a balance of opinions is for Gordon to bring in someone as well. In S1, Gordon brought in Donna for Comdex 83, and the Giant with Cam’s OS would have been a success if Donna and Gordon hadn’t been so careless with inside information that led to the Slingshot. In S4, Gordon’s bonding with Katie likely aims to do the same thing. Unfortunately it may already be too late. The seeds have been sown already.

Note: I will post other shrines for other characters as well, and point out how they may be self-sabotaging as well. So this meta-analysis does not have the intent to put it all on Gordon.

[newstfionline]

The true story of the fake US embassy in Ghana

By Yepoka Yeebo, The Guardian, 28 November 2017

On Friday 2 December 2016, a curious story appeared on the website GhanaBusinessNews.com. “Ghana security authorities shut down fake US Embassy in Accra,” the headline declared. For a decade, the story went, there had been a fake US embassy in the Ghanaian capital. The fraudsters behind it had flown the American flag from their building and even hung a portrait of Barack Obama on the wall. The criminal network behind the scam had advertised on billboards and prowled the most remote villages of west Africa, searching for gullible customers. They brought them to Accra, and sold them visas for as much as $6,000 (£4,495).

The story was an immediate hit. “In less than an hour we were getting 20,000 views on the website for that story alone,” Emmanuel Dogbevi, the website’s managing editor, told me. Two days later, the news agency Reuters picked up the story and it swiftly became an international sensation.

“No Passport Control: Mobsters busted after running FAKE US Embassy in Ghana for 10 years” (The Sun). “‘Sham’ US embassy in Ghana issued fake visas for a decade” (Fox News). “Ghana uncovers fake US embassy that issued authentic visas” (Deutsche Welle). “The actual US embassy in Accra shut down the fake embassy over the summer,” stated the Chinese news agency Xinhua. “This takes counterfeiting operations to a whole new level,” read a comment about the story on the Times of India website, which triggered an argument between readers over which country did corruption better.

According to a US state department statement, which had been published in early November, the fake embassy was operated by “figures from both Ghanaian and Turkish organized crime rings and a Ghanaian attorney practicing immigration and criminal law”. The American authorities supplied a picture of an old, two-storey pink building with a tin roof, originally captioned: “The exterior of the fake embassy in Accra, Ghana.” The caption was later changed to: “One of several buildings used by the disrupted fraud ring.”

Reuters reported that the Americans, with the help of the Ghana Detectives Bureau, had raided the fake embassy. Several people were arrested, and officials seized 150 passports from 10 different countries. The Ghanaian police did not distinguish themselves. The conmen eluded them long enough to move the operation out of Ghana, and get their associates out on bail. But, the US state department said, the number of fraudulent documents coming from west Africa had gone down by 70% as a result of this and other raids, and “criminal leaders no longer have the political cover they once had”.

The fake embassy became a sensation largely because the story was so predictably familiar. The Africans were scammers. The victims were desperate and credulous. The local police officers were bumbling idiots. Countless officials were paid off. And at the end, the Americans swooped in and saved the day. There was only one problem with the story: it wasn’t true.

On the morning the news broke, Seth Sewornu, who was then head of Ghana’s visa and document fraud unit, got a text message from the director of the police criminal investigation department (CID). Like everyone else, the director wanted to know about Sewornu’s bust. “I was receiving a lot of calls,” Sewornu said when we met earlier this year in an open-air restaurant near the police headquarters in Accra. “A reporter from BBC called me, a CNN reporter called me. The Ghanaian media houses were all calling to find out. I got calls from other police officers.” The US state department story had said that the scammers had also been running a fake Dutch embassy, so the Dutch called, too.

Sewornu was stumped. He knew nothing about any investigations into a fake embassy. He tried to find out which officers had been involved, but the police unit credited by the Americans, the Ghana Detectives Bureau, didn’t exist. Ghana’s national Swat unit, the CID and the Bureau of National Investigation all told Sewornu that they weren’t involved either.

It didn’t make any sense. The entire story seemed to be based on one source: the US state department website. And their source was the US embassy in Accra. “So I called the American embassy to find out, and my contact said: ‘I don’t know anything about it,’” said Sewornu.

In Ghana, it can be extremely difficult to obtain visas for travel to other countries. The application processes tend to be expensive, time-consuming and usually end in disappointment. As a result, over the past two decades, a thriving underground economy has sprung up in Accra. It ranges from low-level conmen who can produce counterfeit paperwork to sophisticated criminal organisations that operate in multiple countries. In 2016, of all the American embassies in the world, the one in Ghana had the highest number of pending fraud cases, according to a US state department report.

The operators and middlemen who help circumvent the visa application processes are so ubiquitous that few people realise that what they do is illegal, Sewornu told me. “Some are very bold, they advertise visas on TV,” he said. “Plenty have fallen victim. They think it’s authentic once it’s on TV.”

Sewornu has been a policeman for 23 years, and as we spoke, he was serious and reserved--but when he talked about particularly audacious crimes, he started grinning. “I’ve lost count of the musicians,” he said. “A lot of them are into visa fraud. They go on tour and take people who can’t even perform. They just play CDs and lipsync.” Then, those people vanish.

In the past, he said, passports were easier to tamper with. Fraudsters would steal a real passport belonging to a well-travelled person with valid visas and replace the picture with one of a paying client. The classic method was to put the passport in a freezer for about an hour, which caused the film on the photo page to peel away. Then, said Sewornu, the scammers could “clean off the original picture with chemical eraser, and put in a new one, printed on a thin, almost transparent film.”

Now that passports contain biometric data, such as fingerprints, it is becoming harder and harder to get away with this kind of crime. “You can’t fake everything 100%,” said Sewornu. Instead, the underground economy has started to focus on faking the documents required for legitimate visa applications, both for short visits and for people who want to emigrate. For the right fee, you can get hold of school certificates that turn you from an unskilled worker to a PhD, or bank records that turn you from a shoeshine boy into a successful entrepreneur. Of course, scammers do still offer fake visas, but most of these are not actually intended to get the bearer past border control in other countries. Instead, they’re meant to make it look--to embassies--like you’ve travelled extensively, and returned to Ghana each time. As if you are the kind of person who has no intention of becoming an illegal immigrant.

In 2010, as the number of fake travel documents continued to rise, Ghana’s government founded the Document Fraud Expertise Centre, which verifies documents for embassies, banks and the police. It’s the only one in west Africa, which reflects the sheer scale of Ghana’s shadow visa industry. In 2016, about half the documents submitted to them for testing turned out to have been forged.

For centuries, Ghana was a magnet for immigrants, not a country people were trying to leave. The country’s population of about 28 million is made up of about a dozen ethnic groups, most of which trace their origins to other parts of west Africa. In 1957, after Ghana won independence from Britain, the country’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah, embarked on a massive infrastructure programme. All that infrastructure needed people to build it, and partly as a result, by 1960, immigrants made up 12% of Ghana’s population. By comparison, less than 4% of the population of England and Wales had been born abroad.

In 1966, Nkrumah was deposed in a military coup. The country was destabilised and people started to leave almost immediately. Over the next three decades, much of the economy collapsed, unemployment soared and millions of Ghanaians left in search of work.

Today, Ghana is one of the most stable and prosperous countries in west Africa. But while the population is expanding, the economy is not. Each year, 250,000 young people compete for just 5,000 new jobs. Lack of prospects drives many young people abroad. Of the Ghanaian-born citizens currently living abroad, 70% are in other west African countries. Of the remaining 30%, most live and work in the UK, Germany, Italy, Canada and the US.

A small, but significant number of Ghanaians simply travel to these countries on tourist visas, then stay on when their visas run out and work illegally. So wealthier countries now assume that most Ghanaians who apply for temporary visas will become illegal immigrants. Visa policies have been designed to filter out the young and unskilled and the poor, says Paolo Gaibazzi, a research fellow at the Zentrum Moderner Orient in Germany. Such policies sometimes also exclude people who are perfectly qualified and would be granted visas if they were coming from wealthier countries. In one case not long ago, a Ghanaian consultant orthopaedic surgeon with two decades of experience was shocked to have his application rejected for a short-term visa to attend a medical conference in Spain.

Even with legitimate, professional help, filling out the application form for a US tourist visa is a maddeningly difficult and unforgiving process. Applicants have to provide their parents’ dates of birth, but Ghana had no complete register of births until 1965, so a lot of people just don’t know. Then there’s the fee: around $160, which amounts to about 75% of Ghana’s average monthly wage. That fee is non-refundable. If you are rejected, and you want to apply again, you will have to pay another $160.

Once you have done the paperwork and paid, you still don’t get your visa. You just get to book a visa interview at the US embassy. Well before dawn on most weekdays, there is a sizable crowd of people outside the embassy in Accra waiting to go in. “Applicants often waited outside the embassy compound for extended periods, presenting a poor image of the US government and causing a security issue,” according to a 2017 US state department report.

Once you get to your appointment, you must produce proof that you are who you say you are. Then it gets harder: fewer than 10% of people in Ghana have a salaried job, but many applicants have to present a letter of introduction and a payslip from their employer. You will also need a letter of invitation from someone in the US who can vouch for you. Got all that? Congratulations. You can still be rejected on the spot, with no explanation.

People in countries such as Ghana are faced with a simple choice: apply over and over again and spend huge sums of money each time, or pay someone who promises to get you that visa. Each time a new con is discovered, the embassies panic and add another layer of scrutiny to their visa application processes. Each layer of scrutiny gives the fraudsters an extra hurdle--but also creates extra business. “People try to level the playing field. This is where the migration industry kicks in,” said Gaibazzi. “The exclusion from legal ways of migrating creates so-called illegality.”

One day in early June, I decided to go in search of this fake embassy, which the US state department claimed had operated from a house in an old neighbourhood north-west of central Accra.

The pink house sits on a tumbledown street, part industrial, part residential, overlooked by a hulking shoe factory. There are mechanics’ shops, stalls selling spare parts and a huge, dusty football field. The house itself is stately but decrepit, the walls covered with a layered patchwork of faded paint and cement. In the house’s front yard, there is a small tailor’s shop. (According to the US state department story, a dress shop near the fake embassy was one of the fronts for the operation: “It was purported to house an industrial sewing machine they would use to re-create the binding on the fake passports.”)

When I visited, I found a man named Pierre Kwetey, who was cutting a pattern out of turquoise and yellow wax print fabric. He was adding an ever-widening series of chalk lines to a shirt for a man who was so big that “you’d think he’s pregnant”. Kwetey’s shop is less than two metres across at its widest point. The walls are yellow, with shallow seams of dust in the uneven cement. Above the cutting table, there’s a crucifix draped with two rosaries.

Kwetey first saw the fake embassy story when someone sent him a link via WhatsApp. He was totally baffled. “If I’m doing such illegal business, you’ll see my Range Rover parked in front,” he joked.

A few days later, when I returned to the pink house, I came across one of the building’s owners, Susana Lamptey. Sitting in the small courtyard in front, Lamptey was wearing a yellow dress and a headscarf, and looked even less like a crime kingpin than Kwetey. Her grandfather had built the house long before she was born, she said, probably in the 1920s or 1930s. When he died, he left it to his eight children. Most of them moved away and cut their portions of the house into flats, which they rent out.

In the entrance hall, there were no portraits of US presidents. Instead, it smelled comfortingly of flour and margarine--Lamptey runs an open-air bakery in the back yard. The rest of the yard is a tangle of washing lines and uneven cement.

When the Americans announced that her house was a fake US embassy, Lamptey was one of the last to hear about it. A friend called to say it was all over the internet, she said. “I was really annoyed. Because how? And from where?”

Lamptey said there had never been a police raid. Instead, after the story broke, she and the family marched down to the local police station to find out whether they were really under investigation. The cops told them there was nothing to worry about.

In the days after the story was published--and in the following months--Lamptey was plagued by journalists, all asking the same questions about her alleged life of crime. She has denied everything, every single time. In response to her denials, the US embassy doubled down on its story. “We cannot speculate at this time what has occurred at that building after the initial raid,” the US press attache told Ghanaian reporters in December 2016. “The photo used in the online article is of the building the criminal enterprise used to conduct their fraud operations.”

When we met, Lamptey still couldn’t understand why anyone had believed the story. Look at this place, she said. “If there was an American embassy for 10 years in this house, by now everybody would be in America!” As it happened, Lamptey had applied for an American visa--a real one, at the real US embassy, in the spring of 2016. She was rejected.

Lloyd Baidoo, a detective in Accra’s regional police force, said he was the one who took the photo of Lamptey’s house. He’s been on the force for 18 years.

Baidoo first heard about the fake embassy in June 2016, months before the Americans put out their story, when his team got a tip about a visa-fraud ring. Someone was allegedly issuing US visas out of an old pink house in Adabraka on Tuesdays and Thursdays. When it was open, they flew an American flag and hung up a portrait of Obama.

Baidoo and another officer went to check it out. They drove past the pink house a few times, and Baidoo took some pictures. He couldn’t see anything suspicious, so he walked around the back of house, in plain clothes, to have a closer look. Wandering around the rundown property, Baidoo quickly realised nobody would buy a $6,000 visa there. “I did not take five minutes to conclude that,” he said.

Later that week, Baidoo got a second tip. Another operation in Adabraka was issuing US visas. This time, there were more details: it was allegedly run from the apartment of a man named Kyere Boakye, who charged 2,000 Ghana cedi (about £350) for his services. This time, the information seemed to check out. Baidoo decided to raid the property.

Just before dusk, in late June 2016, a Ghanaian Swat team, five detectives, and a diplomatic security officer from the US embassy swooped in on the apartment. Inside, officers found 135 Ghanaian passports. The majority would turn out to be counterfeit. There were other passports too, mostly from other African countries. Some appeared to be real, but might have been stolen or bought on the black market. The passports contained visas for, among other countries, the US, the UK, South Africa, China, Kenya and Iran.

Detectives also found two dozen counterfeit rubber stamps, used to endorse the official letters for visa applications. There were stamps purporting to be from the Ghana Immigration Service, Barclays bank, the National Investment Bank, several non-existent doctors and even a firm of lawyers with offices below the apartment. Three men were arrested in the raid: Kyere Boakye, Benjamin Ofosu Barimah and Jeffery Kofi Opare. All three were charged with forgery and possession of forged documents. It was a month before they made bail.

It wasn’t a fake embassy, but it was a major case. Baidoo wrote to the passport office, banks, businesses, government departments, and even the country’s biggest teaching hospital--45 institutions in all--in order to confirm whether or not each of the suspicious-looking documents was fake. By the time Baidoo was done, two months after the raid, the police docket was the size of three phone books, and the case was ready to go to trial.

Then, in December 2016, the US state department put out its story about the discovery of a fake embassy. Dep Supt Sewornu took over the case, and Baidoo was moved on to a different police department. (Sewornu, too, was soon transferred.) Since then, the case has gone nowhere, having been delayed largely for banal administrative reasons. When I went to a hearing for the case in June, the three defendants were there, but their lawyer wasn’t. Neither was the prosecutor. The courtroom was almost empty. It didn’t look like a case that had made news around the world. After some muttering between the judge and another prosecutor, the hearing was adjourned.

Outside the courtroom, Kyere Boakye told me he had no idea why he kept being hauled into court. He didn’t think there was going to be a trial. Boakye insisted that he was just an ordinary travel agent. “It’s my clients who brought every paper they found [in the raid],” he said. “I have never forged anything.”

When Detective Baidoo finally got to the bottom of the fake embassy story, he was perplexed. Sitting together in his flat, we looked over the US state department’s story. Almost every detail in it came from the faulty intelligence Baidoo’s unit had received in June 2016. The photo of the pink house--the one that had brought the world’s media to Susana Lamptey’s doorstep--was, he insisted, one he had taken himself when surveilling the building.

Another photo that appeared in the original US state department story had showed a heap of passports strewn on the ground. That one, Baidoo said, had come from his raid on Kyere Boakye’s apartment, not from a raid on any fake embassy. In the top-left corner of the photo, you could see part of a maroon trainer, which, Baidoo said, belonged to him. “I was the one standing there,” Baidoo said, going out into his hallway to show me the shoe in question. “In my independent opinion, I’d say the story was fake.”

Sewornu was equally sure that there was no story. He said that his contacts at the US embassy told him someone at the state department had taken the faulty intelligence and “kind of married the story” with details of Baidoo’s raid. The two cases had been merged into one. It might have started with a diplomatic cable--a classified memo--sent from the US embassy in Accra to the state department in Washington DC on 25 July 2016, titled “Ghana: Fake US Embassy Closed for Business.”

When I asked the US state department for comment, an official simply told me that US Diplomatic Security Service officials work with Ghanaian authorities to uphold the integrity of the visa system. The state department declined to provide additional information in response to specific questions. They referred all queries to the government of Ghana. Ghana’s Bureau of National Security and Ministry of the Interior did not respond to dozens of letters, emails and calls requesting comment.

As it can take weeks or months for an embassy to check whether a document submitted by a visa applicant is real, most embassies do not attempt to verify everything. Instead, everyone puts on a show. Embassies overzealously scrutinise a handful of applications. Ghana’s police shut down what scams they can. Reporters file sensational pieces. Foreign governments, facing increasing pressure to limit immigration, add ever higher hurdles for legitimate applicants to clear. Everyone gets to say they’re doing something.

But the harder it is for ordinary people to apply for visas successfully, the greater the demand for fraud. While the Americans have been making a show of shutting down a non-existent fake embassy, it’s boom-time for Accra’s visa-fraud industry.

One day this summer, I stopped by the leafy, upscale Cantonments neighbourhood of Accra. There, hidden in plain sight, is a one-stop shop for visa fraud--one of dozens of such places that are scattered across the city. The fraudsters at the office I visited use a Microsoft Word template to churn out fake letters from dozens of different employers. A student visa application, complete with all the documents you’ll need, will cost you 1,000 cedi (£175).

One of the men running the place told me that people needed help jumping through all the hoops. As he spoke, customers picked up their paperwork and headed off to keep their appointments at the huge grey complex in the distance, spread over 12.5 acres of prime Accra real estate.

On the horizon, above the embassy, the American flag was flying.

[morganbelarus]

The Great British Bake Off crowns its winner

Image copyright Channel 4

Image caption Left-right: Steph, Alice and David survived to the final

After 10 gruelling weeks of being tested in the Great British Bake Off tent, David Atherton has been crowned 2019’s champion.

David beat fellow finalists Alice Fevronia and Steph Blackwell in Tuesday’s finale, which included chocolate cake and stilton souffle.

David, an international health adviser from London, said winning was “the best feeling in the world”.

He triumphed despite not having been named star baker during the series.

Steph had been given the accolade in four episodes, and Alice received it twice.

“Week on week other people were stronger,” he said. “I was always the underdog and yet I just managed to get through.

“All of it is a bit surreal and I am still trying to process it, but the whole Bake Off journey is non-stop and part of it is just having the stamina.

“Honestly it was never in my mind that I thought I could win this. I have had daydreams of winning Bake Off for about 10 years. The judges always loved my presentation but not my flavours.”

Image copyright Channel 4

Image caption David Atherton said he had been “the underdog”

The final started with David, Steph and Alice being tasked with baking a decadent chocolate cake. Next came a twice-baked stilton souffle in the technical challenge – the round in which the dish is sprung on contestants, whereas they are able to practise for the other two.

Finally in the showstopper, as their families gathered outside the tent, the final trio had to create a visual illusion picnic basket using cakes, sweet breads and biscuits.

At the end of the episode, Hollywood said: “Well done mate you smashed it… David came in as probably the underdog into the final knowing that twice Alice has won [star baker] and Steph won four times.

Image copyright Channel 4

Image caption Paul and Prue agreed David Atherton was a worthy winner

“He has gone from nothing to win the whole thing – it’s priceless, absolutely priceless, he should be really proud of himself. I think he has done an amazing job.”

Fellow judge Prue Leith added: “David is an extraordinary baker and I am so full of admiration for him.

“Right from the beginning he has never lost his temper he has always been very neat and organised. It was really a question of the tortoise catching the hare. He just steadily went on and won.”

The two other finalists were equally full of praise for the victor.

Alice, a geography teacher from Essex, said: “David just blew us out of the water – the best baker won. I am so happy and really proud of myself and I can really leave with my head held high. It’s just the best feeling.”

Steph, a shop assistant from Chester, added: “I have made some amazing lifelong friends. It’s just really been the most incredible experience ever.”

Image copyright Channel 4

Image caption David kept a cool head throughout the series

Series 10 was the third since the show moved from BBC One to Channel 4, and featured a decidedly younger contingent of hopefuls. David beat 12 other contestants, more than half of whom were in their 20s, while the oldest contestant was 56.

The average viewing figures for this series have been around 8.9 million per episode, on a par with those in 2018, when Rahul Mandal won.

While The Great British Bake Off has not achieved the audience size it enjoyed on BBC One – where it peaked at almost 16 million for the 2016 final – it has been a big success for Channel 4, with some episodes almost reaching the 10 million mark.

Image copyright The Great British Bake Off/Channel 4

Image caption The Great British Bake Off class of 2019

By comparison, Gogglebox, the broadcaster’s next most successful show, averages around four million viewers. And a significant proportion of The Great British Bake Off’s audience is made up of the younger viewers particularly prized by advertisers.

David has had to keep his win secret since the finale was filmed, keeping the trophy under his bed. “I am now planning to put a potted palm on it and keep it in the living room,” he said.

He said he was “looking forward to the exciting opportunities that might come from this”.

He also had a final word of advice for anyone thinking about applying for the series.

“Don’t think you have to be a totally perfect baker to apply for Bake Off. If you think like that you won’t ever be ready.

“You get a lot of help and you learn so much along the way. It’s a great experience and I would encourage any amateur bakers out there to apply.”

Follow us on Facebook, on Twitter @BBCNewsEnts, or at bbcnewsents. If you have a story suggestion email entertainment.news@bbc.co.uk.

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Paul Hollywood

Channel 4

Prue Leith

Television

The Great British Bake Off

Original Article : HERE ;

The Great British Bake Off crowns its winner was originally posted by MetNews

[oadara]

my point about lyanna is that we don't know. maybe she was manipulated. we have no idea. concretely blaming her is unlike blaming dany for her white saviorism in slaver's bay. lyyanna was selfish but to act like she was definitely not caring for her fam based on circumstantial evidence, because that's what the evidence is, is wild when y'all excuse dany for things we see her do because her motives are good lmao I can't. blame Rhaegar all you want. he deserves it.

mentioning that we don’t have lyanna’s pov or that what we have is circumstantial evidence on what/when lyanna knew is excuses? I wonder what the yt people dany defense essays of her actions in slavers bay are. I was softening towards dany and her yt savior nonsense that got brown people killed bc of her mismanagement and had slaves sell themselves back into slavery. but if we’re taking an hardline position, then wonder what a defense of dany/slavers bay (book) is but an excuse of the outcome

Anon,

These are two separate asks but I because clearly you are the same anon and by the way you write I’m pretty sure I know who you are. Why don’t we get a few things straight and then you can leave my mailbox alone for all eternity

I see that you mentioned the books, which is fantastic because I can finally set you straight on your delusion that the Slaver’s Bay was only populated by people of color, which is untrue, it was mixed race. Slaves from the Free Cities, Qarth Lhazareen, Dothraki, etc. populated Slaver’s Bay. 

Here, why don’t you read this, it’s straight from the horse’s (GRRM’s) mouth:

“And meanwhile, you’ve got Daenerys visiting more Eurasian and Middle Eastern cultures.

And that has generated its controversy too. I answer that one to in my blog. I know some of the people who are coming at this from a political or racial angle just seem to completely disregard the logistics of the thing here. I talk about what’s in the books. The books are what I write. What I’m responsible for.

Slavery in the ancient world, and slavery in the medieval world, was not race-based. You could lose a war if you were a Spartan, and if you lost a war you could end up a slave in Athens, or vice versa. You could get in debt, and wind up a slave. And that’s what I tried to depict, in my books, that kind of slavery.

So the people that Dany frees in the slaver cities are of many different ethnicities, and that’s been fairly explicit in the books. But of course when David [Benioff] and Dan [Weiss] and his crew are filming that scene [of Daenerys being carried by freed slaves], they are filming it in Morocco, and they put out a call for 800 extras. That’s a lot of extras. They hired the people who turned up. Extras don’t get paid very much. I did an extra gig once, and got like $40 a day.”

Finally, I can get that off my chest. Now, let’s address your other points, that I give Dany a pass because but won’t give Lyanna a pass because of her you. Let me say this for what it feels like the one thousandth time, Daenerys Targaryen has made many mistakes. This has never been a problem for me, it’s one of the reasons I love her so much. 

Having said that, I have a hard time equating Dany’s mistakes with Lyanna’s mistakes. If you look at their upbringing, the education, the values they were thought, and the impetus behind their actions you see why this comparison falls short. So let’s look at the background for both Lyanna and Dany to see where these two young women are coming from. 

Lyanna as the Lord Paramount’s daughter would have had an excellent education, training as a lady, as well as a very stable upbringing. She was clearly allowed to indulge in the things she liked, such as riding and learning how to fight. Her father might not have approved of the fighting but he wasn’t against it enough to stop her from doing it. I think it’s safe to say that there was very little that Lyanna would have gone without while growing up at Winterfell. 

We should all know Dany’s story by now but I’ll repeat for the benefit of those who constantly seem to forget it. A few days after she was born she had to be rescued because the new king of Westeros had sent his brother to her home in Dragonstone to assassinate her and her brother. They ended up in Braavos and for about four year’s she had a good life but then her care taker died and she and her brother were thrown out into the streets. They lived in the streets and on the kindness of strangers for the next nine years. Dany remembers sailing on ships at least 50 times in this time period, so there was a lot of moving around. She lived in nine of the Free Cities and can remember times when buying a sausage was a luxury. Throughout all this, she lived in fear because her brother believed that king Robert was sending assassins after them.  Her training and education were handled exclusively by her brother and whatever she thought herself through books she would read while staying with some rich benefactor who would take them in for a few months. Whatever sense of right and wrong she learned she did so on her own because clearly, Viserys had a very skewed view on those. 

Before we continue we should note that there is an age difference between the two, at this point in the series (the end of ADWD) Dany has just turned 16 year’s old and Lyanna, who died at 16, died close to her 17th birthday. But if we want to find a point of comparison, Lyanna was running away with Rhaegar around the same time Dany was conquering Slaver’s Bay. So, let’s look at these two events to see the difference in their actions.

Let’s start with Lyanna. We all know the general story and we are going to assume, given some information we have, that Lyanna ran away willingly with Rhaegar.  She could have done it for a variety of reasons but whatever the reason it falls into one of three categories, she was in love with Rhaegar and wanted to be with him, she bought into the prophecy of TPTWP and thought she would save the world by doing whatever she needed to do to make that happen, or she was so against her upcoming wedding with Robert that she would rather run away. I know there is another theory of maybe Aerys finding out her identity and going after her, but that’s when you run home to Winterfell and have your dad and your betrothed sort that out. 

Looking at Lyanna’s background and support system and what we are told about her she was a very strong-willed and clever girl. Even taking into account her being in love, or believing in a prophecy or not wanting to get married to Robert, I can’t imagine that the ramifications of her actions never crossed her mind. She was raised a noblewoman, she was around nobles her whole life, the actions that she decided to embark upon would have been considered disastrous by any standard. And if she was taking a calculated risk for say the good of the world, she must have known that her family was not just going to sit at Winterfell and do nothing. 

I do take into consideration Lyanna’s age and that a person her age is also highly impulsive, but that still doesn’t absolve her of culpability. She is still responsible for her actions whether they were impulsive or not. In addition to all this is the amount of time she was gone, she didn’t get pregnant right away, at least 4 months had gone by before that happened. And of course I put most of the blame of Rhaegar, he was the adult in that situation, he had a wife and children, a father who he knew was mad, and it was his decision to run away with a young, unmarried girl, who happens to be the daughter of a Lord Paramount and she’s also engaged to another noble. Rhaegar being mainly responsible for what happens still doesn’t absolve Lyanna of her part in this mess and the destruction that took place because of her and Rhaegar’s actions. 

If Lyanna’s actions are night, let’s go to the day and briefly review Dany’s actions. So you have this girl who’s recently lost her brother, husband, and child and has no more family and no support system at all. She’s 15 year’s old, on her own, and she actually finds herself responsible for other people. Because she has no family and her father and older brother almost extinct their House, she feels responsible for avenging her family and recovering what was theirs. She goes to Slaver’s Bay to get herself and army, but while she’s there she sees that she has landed in the pit of hell. Little boys being mutilated, babies being murdered in order to train the Unsullied, children slathered in honey and thrown at bears for the amusement of the Master and just general slavery disgustingness. 

So, Dany having been sold herself and not appreciating the experience decides to do something about it, because “you know what? This ain’t right”. So she concocts a plan and voila Dracarys Motherfuckers. Now, a lot of Dany’s mistakes stem from how she left Astapor, which she left with a ruling council but without any defense and then the mistakes she made in Meereen. And while Dany’s actions did cause a great deal of death and destruction ultimately hundreds of thousands of people were freed from slavery and therefore free to chose their own choices. And in addition, her actions started a revolution in Volantis which will ultimately free hundreds of thousands of more people, if successful. Which means that in the long run millions of people would potentially be saved from continuing to be slaves or becoming slaves in the future. 

Can you see the difference in their actions and the outcome of their actions? If Rhaegar and Lyanna did what they did because of a prophecy, their actions were based on a belief which neither of them could prove was real. And in the meantime thousands upon thousand of people died, lives were ruined, families destroyed. And while you can turn around and say thousands died in Dany’s revolution, I can then turn around and say but hundreds of thousands more lived and were saved from a life of slavery. At the end of the day, people had hope when they might not have had hope before. 

Their actions are not comparable, no matter which way you cut it. 

TTFN

[cynthiatherrera]

Wall Street’s believe it or not

Ripley’s Believe It or Not! is an American franchise, founded by Robert Ripley, which deals in bizarre events and items so strange and unusual that readers might question the claims. Originally a newspaper panel, the Believe It or Not feature proved popular and was later adapted into a wide variety of formats, including radio, television, comic books, a chain of museums, and a book series. In our April 2 call with clients, we laid out an argument that contended that in March 2020 global investors experienced their own “believe it or not” moments, as a global pandemic of historic proportions led to cross-asset price action that was so drastic and volatile, it was truly hard to comprehend. We share those arguments below.

Market moves that were hard to comprehend

Indeed, the market moves last month were unlike any we have seen in our careers with many assets experiencing more year-to-date price volatility than what was realized over the entire previous decade. In early March, it became suddenly obvious that the COVID-19 crisis was going to morph into a contagious whole-asset stack shock, and very quickly thereafter virtually all global markets froze. Global risk assets were forced to be marked down to the price at which they could be indiscriminately liquidated. For assets that couldn’t find a clearing price, it was nearly impossible to discern their “actual value.” To wit, AAA rated assets were marked down by 10 or 20 points, in some cases. The fear was even more palpable in the markets for implied volatility where the cost of options approached the ten-year 100th percentile in nearly every asset class where options markets exist, while the CBOE’s VIX index hit an all-time high.

In the U.S., equities witnessed their third worst month in modern history, while U.S. high yield bond yields doubled in a two-week interval. Astoundingly, even the “risk-free” U.S. Treasury market was upset. While benchmark Treasury issues were sprinting toward the zero-lower bound, off-the-run Treasury issues couldn’t find clearing levels in the secondary markets, as there was simply no spare systemic balance sheet capacity. Global investors began hoarding cash in record-setting amounts, with money market funds receiving $500 billion of capital inflows over a four-week span. To be sure, the entire financial economy has been inundated with a true 100-year storm.

This financial panic reflected the unfolding left-tail scenario for the global economy that appears to be an unprecedented halt on a great deal of economic activity. We expect the real-time indicators to translate into stunningly poor (albeit lagged) economic data points in the coming weeks (see graph). Only a month removed from the end of a long and persistent string of full-employment readings, we suddenly face the highest jobless claims numbers in history. Moreover, the U.S. unemployment rate might exceed the 2008 high, and GDP will likely contract roughly 5% this year, the worst growth since the Great Depression. Fortunately, there is sufficient reason to view this growth shock as temporary.

Three years of crisis in comparison: 2001, 2008 and 2020

We find it useful to compare the looming growth shock to the two most recent U.S. recessions as we endeavor to visualize the trajectory of the eventual recovery. In the 2001 recession, aggregate personal income never contracted. Meanwhile, government benefits grew more than 25%, providing a $432 billion backstop such that throughout the recession, personal consumption never contracted. The 2008 recession was much deeper than 2001. Personal income fell 4%, or $650 billion, with financial asset income down -18%, or $505 billion. Somewhat offsetting that were government benefits that grew by roughly 33%, providing a $640 billion backstop. But even in the face of this significant income shortfall, personal consumption only contracted by 3% in 2008.

So how much household income will be lost as a result of the current crisis? We looked at 15 crucial sectors that make up roughly 70% of total private sector jobs. Depending on the specific sector we assumed anywhere from 30% to 90% of jobs will be impacted for a duration of between four weeks to six months. Based on our conservative assumptions, we’re forecasting that roughly 50 million workers will miss an average of 11 weeks of work, for a total lost income of nearly $460 billion. Fortunately, the recently signed $2 trillion CARES Act providing $525 billion of direct household income support should be able to keep aggregate U.S. personal income steady, ultimately supporting consumption on the other side of today’s necessary quarantining.

More broadly, there is little doubt that without the massive, holistic global policy response that we’ve already witnessed, some far worse real economy outcomes risked becoming deeply entrenched. Global policy makers have been bold and timely in both their fiscal and monetary policy responses, so much so that we see a right-tail scenario brewing for the financial economy in the quarters ahead. Indeed, in February and March alone, global fiscal and monetary policy responses totaled a staggering 11% of global GDP, and it’s highly likely that there’s more policy assistance on the way.

The historic marriage of fiscal and monetary policy measures

With respect to U.S. fiscal policy, we are convinced that the potency of the CARES Act is being systematically underestimated by conventional wisdom. Nearly all of the targeted categories of the legislation have impressive multipliers associated with them. The healthcare, research and development, infrastructure, and direct transfers to household segments all have multipliers that approach two, by some estimates, while the state and local aid, refundable rebates, and payroll tax holiday initiatives all have projected multipliers of nearly 1.5x. Contrast that to the 2017 tax reform act, which is thought to have had almost no multiplier at all, perhaps somewhere around 0.3x. Making some very conservative assumptions about the pace at which this committed fiscal outlay will be recycled over coming weeks/months, we see at least $1 trillion in spending over the next 90 days – that’s an annual run-rate of more than 20% of U.S. GDP, which is staggering and unprecedented, and will go a long way towards dampening the growth shock.

icon-pointer.svgFollow Rick Rieder on Twitter.

As far as the Fed is concerned, we’re convinced that its policy response was truly historic, wholly debunking the incorrect notion that their policy toolkit is finite. Again, using conservative estimates on how the Fed will proceed with planned asset purchases and funding programs, we see the Fed’s balance sheet growing by nearly $6 trillion before the end of Q3, an eye-popping number considering that the total size of their balance sheet was near $3.8 trillion as recently as last September. In fact, the Fed will likely end up purchasing the equivalent of 20% of the U.S. Aggregate index over just a six-month window. This initiative will undoubtedly offer meaningful support for the entire domestic asset stack, save for entities with true existential concerns.

Moreover, when you add in the committed contributions from other global central banks, the resulting surge in global liquidity is profound (see second graph). We estimate that by year-end 2020, global liquidity will exceed 40% of global GDP, shattering the previous record and providing critical support for a nervous and heretofore fragile financial economy stunned by the crisis. In short, we think that absent some new shock, the holistic global policy response has likely been sufficient to provide support for most asset markets as the virus evolution unfolds in earnest.

Portfolio construction and asset allocation in a time of crisis

So, where does that leave us with respect to portfolio construction? For starters, developed market (DM) yields will stay stubbornly low as central banks will strive to keep both short rates (policy rates) and long rates, via quantitative easing (QE), very low for the foreseeable future. Aggressive central bank purchase programs will create a negative net fixed-income issuance paradigm of unprecedented scale providing a strong technical backdrop. Incredible fundamental dispersion will unfold as the varied fortunes of real economy actors become evident over coming weeks, leaving a fertile opportunity set across spread sectors.

The potential to construct a 4% to 5% yielding portfolio is now significantly more attractive than at the beginning of the year as we can get those yields with an even higher quality mix of assets today. Moreover, with many of those assets trading at nice discounts to par, there is also the potential for near-term capital appreciation.

As far as equities are concerned, it is critical to remember that each investment is simply a purchase of future cash flows. Clearly, 2020 earnings expectations have changed dramatically, but companies shouldn’t be valued based only on a single year’s earnings. Investors should be modeling at least the next several years of cash flows to come up with expected returns and then derive reasonable fair value. While 2020 EPS is likely to be down between 15% to 25%, at current prices near 2,500, the S&P is offering investors a nearly 7% annual risk premium, versus just half that level coming into the year. Even on depressed earnings estimates, discounting these cash flows with a normalized risk premium of 3.5% and today’s 1.0% risk-free rates would imply the S&P near 3,500 over the next year or two. If earnings recover more quickly, or the contraction is less severe, the rebound can be sharp. Compelling long-term value is clearly forming in U.S. equites.

So, we are thinking about the coming weeks in terms of two intervals. Initially, we plan on keeping a significant cash cushion given uncertainty as to the length and depth of the economic downturn. At the same time, we will follow the Fed and other DM central banks by purchasing what they’re purchasing, and assets that rhyme with those. That means buying U.S. nominal duration where there is still scope for rates to rally further (i.e. the back end), which also provides a dependable risk hedge. We will own some U.S. breakevens that are cheap for technical reasons, and we will be selling U.S. rate volatility as rates come down and are pinned lower, especially at the front-end.

We like rotating out of Agency mortgage-backed securities and into investment-grade credit and buying other high-quality assets that are not included in Fed purchase programs. Finally, we want to pick away at some sectors of the equity market that have had valuations destroyed beyond even worst-case scenarios, such as healthcare, biotech, technology, defense, home builders, and others. We’ll target moderate equity exposures but can take on more exposure through selling volatility that would put us into long positions at lower levels and thereby benefit from still crazy-expensive implied volatility.

Longer term, we envision getting more invested, allowing cash to run down. We will rotate down the credit spectrum, swapping investment-grade credit for higher quality high-yield or loans. We’ll cautiously grow EM exposure, though EM fundamentals remain a ‘known unknown’ in terms of the crisis evolution. We anticipate that we’ll want to reduce some of the long-end duration positions in DM rates and high-quality assets, eventually as greater fundamental visibility emerges, and high-quality assets rally through fair value. Finally, we also plan on growing the equity exposure, this time in outright expressions as well as through buying options that will likely have cheapened considerably. While the magnitude of this unfolding crisis is truly historic, eventually things will return to a more normal equilibrium, and as is often the case, the markets will lead the way back to normalcy, believe it or not!

Rick Rieder, Managing Director, is BlackRock’s Chief Investment Officer of Global Fixed Income and is Head of the Global Allocation Investment Team. Russell Brownback, Managing Director, is Head of Global Macro positioning for Fixed Income, and both are regular contributors to The Blog. Trevor Slaven, Director, is a portfolio manager on BlackRock’s Global Fixed Income team and is also the Head of Macro Research for Fundamental Fixed Income, and he co-authored this post.

Investing involves risks, including possible loss of principal. Fixed income risks include interest-rate and credit risk. Typically, when interest rates rise, there is a corresponding decline in bond values. Credit risk refers to the possibility that the bond issuer will not be able to make principal and interest payments.  International investing involves risks, including risks related to foreign currency, limited liquidity, less government regulation and the possibility of substantial volatility due to adverse political, economic or other developments. These risks may be heightened for investments in emerging markets. This material is not intended to be relied upon as a forecast, research or investment advice, and is not a recommendation, offer or solicitation to buy or sell any securities or to adopt any investment strategy. The opinions expressed are as of April 13, 2020 and may change as subsequent conditions vary. The information and opinions contained in this post are derived from proprietary and non-proprietary sources deemed by BlackRock to be reliable, are not necessarily all-inclusive and are not guaranteed as to accuracy. As such, no warranty of accuracy or reliability is given and no responsibility arising in any other way for errors and omissions (including responsibility to any person by reason of negligence) is accepted by BlackRock, its officers, employees or agents. This post may contain “forward-looking” information that is not purely historical in nature. Such information may include, among other things, projections and forecasts. There is no guarantee that any forecasts made will come to pass. Reliance upon information in this post is at the sole discretion of the reader. Prepared by BlackRock Investments, LLC, member Finra ©2020 BlackRock, Inc. All rights reserved. BLACKROCK is a registered trademark of BlackRock, Inc., or its subsidiaries in the United States or elsewhere. All other marks are the property of their respective owners. USRMH0420U-1146706-6/6. from BlackRock Blog https://www.blackrockblog.com/2020/04/13/uncertainty-and-investment-opportunities/

[kadobeclothing]

How to Stand Out on Amazon, According to a Former Amazon Executive

Nowadays, Amazon is the largest retailer in the world.

Additionally, in September 2019, over 150 million mobile users accessed the Amazon app, making it the most popular shopping app in the U.S. By comparison, Walmart was in second place with a mere 76 million users. However, if you work for a smaller ecommerce business, you’ve likely struggled against the Goliath that is Amazon. If your products or services don’t rank at the top on Amazon, it’s easy to get lost in the mix — but avoiding Amazon altogether isn’t a good strategy either, since the majority of consumers turn to Amazon first when shopping online. To help you boost sales and exert brand control on Amazon, I sat down with James Thomson, former Business Head of Amazon Services who now consults brand executives on how to optimize their distribution strategy on Amazon marketplace. Thomson spent over five years at Amazon, and recently published the book Amazon Marketplace Dilemma: A Brand Executive’s Challenge Growing Sales and Maintaining Control. Here, let’s dive into Thomson’s advice for selling “on” versus “to” Amazon, how small brands can succeed in the crowded marketplace, and the biggest lesson he learned as an Amazon executive.

1. In your book, Amazon Marketplace Dilemma, you mention this dilemma most brands face — to sell “on” or “to” Amazon. While I know it’s a complex topic, could you start by providing me with a sense for what determines whether a brand should choose one option over the other? For many brands that have traditionally only wholesaled their products to retailers and/or distributors, the idea of wholesaling product “to” Amazon appears logical as that’s the only way brands know how to go-to-market. However, for other brands that have some experience selling direct-to-consumer (B2C or DTC), selling “on” Amazon as the seller of record isn’t as much of a stretch for them. Additionally, there are brands that have never sold direct-to-consumer, and find that Amazon’s fulfillment services offered to third-party sellers are more than adequate to entice the brands to try selling direct-to-consumer. As a result, the brands can make typically >50% margin by being the seller of record rather than just wholesaling to a retailer or distributor. While there are at least two dozen considerations to evaluate whether to sell “on” vs. “to”, we start by looking at the trade-offs of how much control the brand has around pricing, branding, inventory levels, selection available in the catalog, and advertising activities on Amazon, and how much daily involvement the brand needs to have in order to manage the specific distribution option it selects. If the brand is wholesaling products “to” Amazon, Amazon will control inventory levels, selection, retail pricing, branding, and may direct advertising spend decisions. If the brand is the seller of record, it has much more control over these same issues, including pricing (which we view as the most important short-term issue for the brand), and branding content (which we view as the most important long-term issue for the brand). As for daily involvement, if the brand is wholesaling to Amazon, there is very little daily involvement by the brand beyond reviewing and filling purchase orders as Amazon submits them. If the brand is the seller of record, then the brand is dealing with all customer inquiries, handling inventory management/forecasting issues, listing creation and optimization issues, managing catalog issues related to duplicate listings, and typically filing plenty of service tickets with Amazon to address any outstanding account issues related to product reviews, financial payments, catalog issues, etc. Fortunately, brands can outsource all of the day-to-day work to consulting agencies — there is a whole industry of such companies (including one that my business partner and I run, Buy Box Experts). One important qualifier — if a brand is already wholesaling at least $10 million of product per year (wholesale prices) to Amazon, the brand isn’t going to have much success pivoting to becoming the seller of record itself, as Amazon will block the brand from doing this. 2. Nowadays, both small and large businesses sell products on Amazon — but I want to focus on small businesses and start-up ecommerce shops. What’s your advice for smaller brands, looking to succeed on the platform or stand out in a crowded marketplace? For retailers that carry other companies’ brands, the process of adding Amazon as a sales channel is often very difficult because most brands are already on Amazon, and more likely than not being sold by at least a few sellers that are not bound by any minimum pricing policies implemented by the brands.

With low price usually driving the winning seller on a competitive Amazon listing, traditional retailers are at a disadvantage unless they also drop their retail prices.

If a retailer has exclusive access to a brand, and can get permission from the brand to be the exclusive reseller of the brand on the Amazon channel, that model can be productive. Then, the retailer needs to learn how to manage an Amazon seller account to the level of performance required by Amazon (including answering all customer emails within 24 hours, 24/7/365; understanding how to handle inventory management to ensure no stock-outs on Amazon; developing careful P&L analysis for every single SKU sold on Amazon, and ensuring some basic profitability for each item sold). Should a retailer decide to play on Amazon, one big change will be the need to invest in traffic-driving activities — either spending money on Amazon advertising, or sending traffic from outside Amazon to the Amazon listings (e.g., through email campaigns, or social media advertising). Given that most product searches on Amazon are unbranded (a.k.a. people searching for “men’s running shoes”, not for “”Reebok men’s running shoes”), having your products show up on the first page of product search typically involves a lot more attention to driving traffic than what traditional brick-and-mortar retailers are used to. 3. You worked at Amazon from 2007 to 2013. I’m willing to bet 2007-Amazon looked vastly different than 2013 Amazon, and looks vastly different today, as well. Can you speak about any lessons you learned at Amazon — about innovation, culture, and/or what it takes for a company to “make it big”? The most important lesson I learned at Amazon is the critical importance of understanding and focusing on the most important levers of growth.

If you don’t use data to develop a clear understanding of what key levers most impact one’s ability to grow one’s business, you’ll never have time to try all the levers.

At Amazon, our growth goals were often well over 40% per year, which is a level that requires a clear understanding of where to focus one’s time (that is, no one is going to ‘luck into’ that level of growth by standing around!). So being willing to test out a lot of ideas around the key levers helped me identify how to grow at seemingly impossible rates. 4. Amazon’s marketplace enables third-party sellers to sell another brand’s products. Do you think this poses a threat for bigger brands, or do you think it’s simply enabling more people to enter/compete in the ecommerce industry as a whole? Practically anyone can show up with most any brand and sell it on Amazon (there are a few restrictions, but very few in general … I would estimate well over 90% of all brands that exist can be sold by anyone who has inventory to sell). So, if you have Amazon recruiting literally hundreds of thousands of unauthorized sellers who aren’t held to any pricing policies from the brands, then price competition and erosion happens quickly, leading to lower prices — which is good for Amazon customers, but terrible for brands. The bottom line is brands must control distribution much more tightly in order to avoid price erosion and channel management issues with authorized sellers that complain they are fighting against unauthorized sellers who aren’t held to same pricing policies. So, yes, this is a huge threat to brands … yet brands have usually only themselves to blame: their sales teams are incentivized to “sell, sell, sell”, rather than to sell while also protecting distribution/branding. This results in the brand’s own sales team selling to people who will divert product onto Amazon, messing things up for everyone else (yet the sales person still gets paid his/her commissions…). This issue of channel control is the central topic of our new book Controlling Your Brand in the Age of Amazon: The Brand Executive’s Playbook For Winning Online. 5. Are there any brands you think do particularly well on Amazon, and any you think should avoid Amazon altogether? Apple and Sonos have done a very good job of controlling distribution, and hence tightened up pricing on Amazon. Almost every other national brand has some level of problems with unauthorized products showing up on Amazon. As for brands that shouldn’t be on Amazon … that’s a trick question. In reality, any brand with a decent level of customer demand will find its way onto Amazon, and the question brands should be asking themselves is how does the brand plan to control branding on Amazon, and eventually control distribution on Amazon, so as to minimize prices on Amazon that are inconsistent with prices in every other channel where the brand is being sold.

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