#stop it i like it kfc advert

[ballorawan740]

SCP Scenarios: SCP x Reader - McDonald's Sprite (REQUESTED)

Main Masterlist | SCP Scenarios Masterlist | My Works Masterlist | Rules | Request | Socials | My Original Post

Requested by: @katnotmore123

Bro y'all be simping for Sprite and I'm here simping for 7Up...

I mean I like them both but I just prefer 7up over Sprite... It's like comparing Pepsi and Coke ngl but with a more subtle difference

SCP 073 (Cain)

You came back to the foundation one day with a cup of iced drink and Cain had asked what you were drinking and you showed him

He was mildly confused but soon understood the beverage since he had seen them somewhere on the web (no, not the hub, an advert from McDonald's)

You asked if he wanted to try some and he did, so you gave him a sip

You were slightly annoyed and surprised since you drove over an hour and hadn't had anything to drink and the last thing you wanted was someone taking your drink

But since it was 073, you made it an exception since you hadn't expected him to have any food or beverages outside of site 17

You figured that he had enjoyed it as he reminisced his past about being able to eat plant-based food but no longer could

You felt bad and agreed to get more when you next go back

The researchers had wondered if the drink had ever rotted in his mouth but realise moments later that it's mainly made out of artificial ingredients aside from the natural flavourings

SCP 076-2 (Abel)

I have high doubts that you would be able to persuade Abel to drink such a plain beverage, so you had devised a plan to get him to try

You made a bet with Abel in which the loser has to finish off the drink, not that you'd complain (you unhealthy mf), but you really wanted him to give it a try

Abel accepted and had very much lost the bet

He had taken a sip and you noticed that he's enjoying the drink and teased him

He spat it out and flat out denied it (like the tsundere he is) but continued drinking it anyways

Some of the researchers monitoring Abel's cell found it rather amusing that he enjoyed such a "plain beverage" and did try to tease him about it

Let's just say it didn't end very well as it resulted in somebody's head being chopped off

You both had agreed that if Abel stops trying to breach his containment and be more cooperative, you or somebody else in your team would buy him more Sprite from McDonald's (and by 'buy', I mean kidnapping the whole chain's Sprite dispenser)

SCP 999 (Tickle Monster)

999 would most definitely take the drink out of your hand since his little tingles tell him that whatever you were drinking was sweet

And he was very much right

You were slightly shocked but wasn't surprised since he does have quite a sweet tooth

Every now and again, SCP 999 would ask if you had any more of those drinks and would even ask what they were

You had explained to him that it's a lemon and line flavoured soft drink created by the Coca-Cola company (the more you know right?)

He was intrigued and sweetly requested if you could buy him more and you obliged

You would use your time off to buy a dozen of Sprites from McDonald's and would sometimes buy other soft drinks like Coke and Fanta for 999

Needless to say, you had an orange blob as your personal pet who would give you unlimited hugs since you spoiled him with so many drinks

SCP 682 (Hard to Destroy Reptile)

This mf of a lizard right here is just as stubborn, if not even more than Abel, and would reject trying that beverage at all for the whole entire week

You had to bribe him and the researchers were laughing their socks off from this interaction you both got going

He did give in but was rather hesitant at first

Once you poured some into his mouth, he seemed slightly disgusted from the taste

He would just sit still for a moment as to contemplate then stuck his tongue out as a sign of disgust

But bring the cheeky person you were, you spilt more into his mouth which led to him farting for the next few hours to which everyone laughed

Dr Bright heard the commotion and came to see what was happening

Let's just say he encouraged you to carry on if you want your head cut off but found it amusing regardless

In short, don't ever give him Sprite unless you want to torture him

SCP 049 (Plague Doctor)

Does this bird doctor even drink?!

You mention multiple times about human food and how delicious they are

Mainly McDonald's Sprite and their food since its rather popular

ESPECIALLY THEIR CHEESE BITES/STICKS!!! HAVE YALL EVEN TRIED THEM!? THEY'RE DELICIOUS AF!!!

OMG they've released the garlic ones but I preferred the normal Mozzarella sticks and cheesy bites though

Anyways, back to Sprite, our side chick

049 would be intrigued about this 'Sprite' since you spoke so passionately about it like your life depended on it and requested you to get him one for a try and so you did

When he drank it he was surprised at the foreign taste

He asked if there were more beverages like it and you answered honestly, carrying on with your love for McDonald's and offered to buy him some for a try

Basically, 049 would give it a try since you spoke so passionately for them

He wouldn't necessarily hate it, but he wouldn't love the drink as much

I'd say he would be intrigued to try something new outside of his role in curing the pestilence

SCP 035 (Possessive Mask)

I am so sorry guys, I'll have to make 035 hella short since I can't think of anything interesting for him

DO YALL THINK THIS BOI CAN EVEN TRY?! JUST LOOK AT HIM!!! HE'S A BLOODY MASK!!!

The closest thing for him to try the drink is if you gave his now possessed body some beforehand so 035 could telepathically understand the taste

Like if you just straight up gave him the drink I don't think he would be able to drink it even if he wanted to

If the now dead body never had Sprite, then you ould just describe the tase to him in form of arts (I like to imagine 035 would be into arts, especially performing arts since he's basically a theatre mask)

SCP 105 (Iris)

Our girl here has a high chance that she might have tried McDonald's Sprite

But she just prefers healthier foods (this healthy mf knows that y'all can't keep healthy, that's why she's here to start your New Year's Resolution which is to stay healthy)

You both would recommend food which is healthy or unhealthy and would try them

Iris is more than capable of controlling her diet, but you, on the other hand, have a hard time doing so (don't lie, we all know y'all like junk food)

So, you both compromised in which you can have junk food as a reward, namely your favourite beverage, Sprite

You just love the citrus flavoured, colourless beverage so much that Iris would have to hide the drink from you (ah yes great promotion from me XD)

What would you do without our girl, Iris, eh? (Die from overeating unhealthy food which causes heart attacks and strokes, of course, fun!)

Anyways, sometimes when you're the one going out, you would be the one to buy a few dozen bottles of Sprite from McDonald's (bro do they even sell bottled drinks? Ik they do in KFC from where I live OwO)

Iris would drop dead from the sight of you bringing in so many Sprites into the foundation

She would most likely drink some with you, not because she likes them, god no

It's because there's no more room to store them and she's just a little bit thirsty

SCP 106 (Old Man)

This old man would be so confused by all this food and drinks from the outside world

His first impression of McDonald's was that of a circus since you've shown him the older advertisement for McDonald's since it fits his age (love you 106!!! Not)

And then you gave him a menu, and god did he not have any glasses (boi he do be needing to go to Specsavers fr)

He read Mozzarella Sticks as mosasaurs pricks, the Spicy Veggie One as spicy vag- and what's worse is that he read Double Quater Pounder as double quantum pounding (he even read Coke wrong!)

You and the foundation staff burst out of laughter at his 20/20 eyesight

So one day, you returned to the foundation with some Sprite in your hands in hopes that 106 would give it a go and so he did

He found the flavour somewhat new and strange but still enjoyed it nevertheless (this boi here do be a man of culture, am I right?)

Anyways, 106 loved it so much to the point that during one of the breaches, he disappeared from the foundation and reappeared with 10 boxes of Sprite

The researchers then realised afterwards that 106 had used his pocket dimension to teleport to the nearest McDonald's and stole the boxes of Sprite without even paying

They were even more surprised to find that the workers there were ordinary humans and weren't even fazed about 106 teleporting to their business (Sames here bro! If anyone stole my food/drinks I'd be pissed too regardless of who it is!!! Food is food!!!)

You basically made him addicted to Sprite

SCP 096 (Shy Guy)

(Imma be honest here, idk if this guy eats since he's facing the wall and covering his face like 99% of the time unless some guy saw his face)

You were sat in 096's cell and was debating on what food to get from McDonald's

096 was curious about what you're talking about since he heard you mumbling bout food from this so-called "McDonald's"

So you explained to him the concept of food and that generally speaking, unhealthy foods are tastier and typically served quicker in at places like McDonald's

Imma be real here, I like Burger King's chilli cheese bites a tiny bit more since the McDonald's at my place is stuck with garlic cheese bites atm

It's not like I hate them, but I just prefer the old ones, but it's nice that McDonald's changes up their food every now and then

Anyways, back onto our side chick

You bought your favourite Sprite along with the double quantum pou- quarter pounder

096 was upon curious and so you let him have a bite of your quarter pounder and your Sprite

Let's just say that 096 found it weird and didn't ask about human food again

Dr Jack bright

Jack Bright is very much aware of McDonald's and other fast-food chains since he does have a fair share of memories of eating them with his family and because the bodies he possesses do be unhealthy af (just like you)

You were talking about food with one of your co-workers and Bright just so happened to be nearby and butted his head into the conversation

Your co-worker also just happened to leave for a meeting so you're both stuck together talking about McDonald's

Sometime later, you bought to the foundation some food, including Jack's favourites as he had mentioned not long ago

You both tried each other's food and he was mesmerised by the Sprite since it's been a while since he had it

So whenever you went back, you would buy a larger bottle of Sprite for Jack since he wouldn't have much free time and needed to drink more anyways

Sometimes, when you're both talking about food, you'd make up puns for them or just laugh at your misinterpretations since you're just as blind as a bat (btw I've read somewhere that bats have good vision, they just use echolocation a lot)

Some of the things you both would say would be "Did you hear that McDonald's gave all their employees large laptops for Christmas? They were Big Macs" and "Hey, Ronald McDonald - been watching any good clown movies? Ronald: I'm loving it"

One time, he smacked your bum and casually said to you "Girl, this quarter-pounder will take you to a whole different level of experience" and then left

Dr Simon Glass

Another doctor who has knowledge of fast foods

He's similar to Bright in a way as he doesn't leave the facility as often as he likes since he's constantly busy

Also, he would make terrible jokes and puns using wordplay

When you told him about your favourite drink, Sprite, Glass immediately said "I went to the store to get eight cans of Sprite. When I got home, I realized I’d only picked seven up"

You just looked dumbfounded at his puns and laughed as he continued

He did manage to take a sip and drank the whole can of Sprite instead

You even bought some wrap with extra mayo and told Simon about your friendly chat with the waitress/cashier and mentioned her former co-workers

And you died on the inside because his only reply was "She should go back sometime to ketchup with her old co-workers or she mayo not want to"

To shut him up, you have decided that buying him Sprite would work and it kinda did

Only for a short while though

Dr Alto Clef

Clef is well aware of the fast-food chain called McDonald's

It was hard to ignore it as a lot of people younger than him had kept talking about it, even you

Even worse if it was you talking about McDonald's since you have an obsession with their Sprite

Poor Clef was confused as he assumed that all lemon/lime flavoured drinks were the same

Oh boy was he wrong

You came back with your lunch from you know where and 2 bottles of Sprite

One was from McDonald's and the other from Lidl along with some of your favourite pastries, like croissants and toffee yum yums

You had him try all the foods and both Sprites and he finally gave in to the fact that McDonald's Sprite tastes more superior than the other

Not only that, he made dirty jokes and puns about the food in McDonald's

Like "Baby, you got more legs than a bucket of McDonald's", "Come over to my house and I’ll give ya a happy meal", "Do you work here? Because I’d like to order some fries with that shake" and "Girl when I am done with you, you won't be looking for no toys in this happy meal"

Dr Benjamin Kondraki

Benjamin Kondraki would be the type of person who would be reluctant to try but would anyways since you asked so kindly and gave them those eyes

And by that, I mean a death glare

NGL he doesn't seem like the type of fella to be eating a ton of unhealthy food

I mean he doesn't necessarily eat salad or anything overly healthy, but he does have a balanced diet for the most part and does treat himself sometimes, but not too often

You magically crept up behind Kondraki and scared him unintentionally but you still laughed anyway because you're evil

He looked down and realised that the packaging was from McDonald's and you were holding a familiar clear bottle in your other hand

You were kind enough to share your food with him and he thoroughly enjoyed it

Then after that, you forced him to drink some Sprite since he has PTSD from your unhealthy obsession with it

And yes, he did end up drinking it

And no, he didn't like it nor did he hate it

You were upset that you thought he shot you down about Sprite but quickly regained your happiness since he did tell you about the drink being just above average

[the-fiction-witch]

19TH Driving Home For Christmas

TV SHOW LEWIS COUPLE ADAM X READER RATING: FUNNY

I hummed my little tune as I put my last few bags into the back of our sweet little mini "I love Christmas trips!" I giggled

".... let's do this bullshit" Adam sighed standing by the door with his last bag and a coffee in his travel mug "Let's drive across the UK. in the snow. on Christmas eve. to my girlfriend's parent's house." he sighed sipping his coffee

"Can we get Mcdonalds?"

"Y/n. don't make this any harder than it has to be"

"Please, there still doing breakfast"

"..... fine" he sighed "Only for hashbrowns," he says "But no Mcdonalds, no KFC, no burgers, no take out we bought snacks and we made sandwiches," he says

"But what if I need to pee?"

"we will stop if you need to pee honey"

"what if you need to pee?"

"We will not stop if I need to pee. I am a man! I can piss in a bottle"

"Please don't piss in a bottle while on our Christmas road trip"

"you can't stop me"

"Please adam"

"fine, I'll stop when I need to pee. then you need to sync with me" He says giving me a sip of his coffee

"Ewww adam!" I complained as his coffee was gross

"what you need to drink the same as me so we sync up," He says "I'm not stopping twice. you must need to pee when I need to pee"

"Come on adam let's get going before we hit the traffic and the snowstorms"

"Fine. Come on let's do this" he sighed putting his stuff in and climbing into the cat "you ready?" "Yep" "You haven't forgotten anything?" "Nope" "You don't need to pee?" "Nope" "Alright let's go" he started the car up and we headed out our little road I reached into the back and got my little blanket putting it over my legs as well as my little pillow "if your cold I'll turn the heating on honey" "No I got a blanket I'm cosy" I smiled "cosy watching you drive though the snow" I giggled we drove a good long while him ignoring me most times I asked for drive Thur he did get us some hash browns thought just before breakfast ended, and we went on the infinate streching roads overlooking feild of snow, the occasional flurry of which we drove though, the other cars all slowly trickling away as they all got where they where going, our gentle Christmas music on low on the radio often interupted by comparison website, food and shop adverts as well as traffic updates and weather news Telling us more snows coming. I smiled gently singing along with the music "Adam?" "Yeah honey?" "Can next year we just stay home and cosy up together?" "Aww course we can y/n" he smiled stroking my thigh "you know you can tell your parents no about visiting, if you wanna have Christmas together in our own little house?" "I'd like too, but next year okay?" "Okay, sounds perfect my darling" he smiled

[readyplayerhobi]

Things I found fascinating/unusual/interesting as a Brit while in the USA, a list:

Yellow school buses (I never knew they had a little stop sign that comes out!)

The amount of flags

Wal-Mart

How big cars are

How big roads are!

Jaywalking being a thing

Finding out you gotta pay for an ambulance

Lemonade (it’s not...fizzy?)

Mountain Dew

All the different flavours of Mountain Dew

All the different flavours of Powerade (we only have blue)

Gatorade

American biscuits (or what you guys call cookies, I didn’t find any I really liked :( )

Sugar cookies (??? what even are these lol)

When they spray water at the vegetables in the veg aisle

How small the veg aisle is

How big the chicken at KFC is

American biscuits (the actual biscuits now)

Red cups

Tipping (i think I accidentally undertipped every time)

How cheap petrol was

Wendy’s (it was a disappointment)

The size of fast food portions (good lawd, the cup at McDonald’s lmao)

Overall food portion size (I never managed to finish x-x)

The fact you could take the food home every time??

How friendly everyone is (the whole ‘hey how are you?’ thing was very anxiety inducing for me as I didn’t know how to respond that quickly lol)

Those goldfish biscuits...they were delicious..mmm mmm

Also, those really big Cheeto’s.

And the Funyon’s? Are they called that? Delish

Beef jerky, hoo baby

The ridiculous range of Fanta flavours (strawberry? grape?)

On that note...grape flavoured things full stop lol not a thing here

Pop-tarts of every kind. I had an American flag flavoured pop-tart and if you know what that’s meant to be, you’re doing better than me haha

Cup Noodles - delicious

American’s who had been in college for what sounded like 10 years and never graduated lmao

Those medication adverts with a bajillion side effects said haha

A whole chicken...in a can?

Cars that were literally duct taped together???

[tenspontaneite]

The Time Will Come (Chapter 1/?)

There was a time he’d have given up everything to be here today, before Sai vanished, and try to change something. He’d have sacrificed his life for the weight of that desperation. Now, though…

 (Posted for Hikago Day. Enjoy!)

Content warnings: blood, grievous injuries, depictions of grievous injuries, automobile accident.

Hikaru awoke on a quiet, anonymous Tokyo roadside in the middle of the night, the side of his chest in awful pain and his blood rattling in his lungs. He gasped, and dragged himself wordlessly along the rough pavement, unseen, just how he remembered – remembered –

What? He wondered, uncomprehendingly, pulling himself into the glow cast by a streetlight and collapsing against the side of a storefront as every part of him ached. His side felt cold and wet. He brought his hand to his jacket and his fingers came away bloody. He remembered that. He remembered this, remembered struggling from the impact of an unwary vehicle and the world going dark as his lung drowned in gore, remembered the pain and the foam of blood over his lips, remembered the metal taste on his tongue-

I’m still dying? He wondered, hazily, mind numb with pain and breathlessness, and hunched over. Someone walked past. He tried to call out for help, but he didn’t have the breath for it. He couldn’t breathe. His jacket was black, his trousers were black – in the dim lighting, it probably wasn’t obvious he was bleeding at all.

I’m still dying, he thought, desperate, and reached out a weak, trembling hand after the late-night traveller who hadn’t given him so much as a second glance. He was just another drunkard, to them. Just another vagrant. They hadn’t even looked…

He didn’t want to die. He wasn’t even forty, he had so much left to do. He didn’t want to die, but he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t speak, and the pain was pulling him under again. He was going to die – and no one was even watching.

With something like despair clutching at his sluggish, labouring heart, Hikaru’s eyes fell shut. The sound of his breathing rattled in his ears as the world, yet again, went utterly dark.

  When he next woke, it wasn’t as hard to breathe, and that was pretty confusing. Hikaru remembered passing out. He remembered passing out for the second time, after the impact from a car had undoubtedly done something fatally horrible to his ribcage and its contents. He hadn’t expected to wake up again at all, much less under the same street lamp he’d expected to die under.

He stared up at it, befuddled, the harsh light it cast vaguely painful to his eyes. Tentatively, he moved a trembling hand to his side, and hissed – that still hurt. He coughed, and something wet and metallic came up into his mouth. He gagged, and then turned to the side to vomit. What he brought up was unsettlingly dark-coloured in the shadows of the city-lights.

Finally, he summoned the mental acuity to put his hand into his pocket, to get his phone – the screen lit up immediately, not even cracked, and the lock screen obediently lit up, the numbers of the time swimming so madly in his vision he couldn’t read them. He swiped up the emergency symbol in the corner, not something he’d had to use before, and waited, shakily, for salvation.

Instead, the phone beeped regretfully at him, returning back to the lock screen. He stared helplessly, and brought it close to his face in hopes of reading it.

No signal. Somehow, there wasn’t even enough signal to call an ambulance. He hadn’t thought that would be possible in the modern day, in the middle of Tokyo.

Hikaru closed his eyes for a moment, body aching and exhausted and breath still wheezing unhealthily with every sucking movement of his chest. He cursed his luck, and then tried to stand. Surprisingly, he didn’t immediately fall over. However, his vision swam horribly, and he wasn’t certain how long his hold on consciousness would last. He looked around, but to his dismay, the street was all but deserted. That’s what he got for walking through the side roads to get home, but it was not helpful. There was no one to talk to, no one to call for help-

He just…had to get to a bigger road. He just had to keep walking home, and he’d find someone. He would. It would be fine.

Clinging onto the wall for support, Hikaru managed to pull himself into the tiny side alley that would bring him to where he needed. It was such a short, insignificant shortcut most days. It wasn’t even twenty metres long. Maybe not even ten. But it felt like a mile now, and every step was pulling horribly at something in his chest.

Exhaling shakily, Hikaru had the sense to lower himself to the floor before he passed out for the third time.

 The third time he woke, he felt suspiciously not-bad.

Hikaru blinked once, twice, and three times to clear the blurriness from his eyes, but his vision wasn’t swimming any more. His chest felt a bit tender, but there was none of the shooting pain, and his thoughts were oddly clear. He had a bitch of a headache, but it wasn’t that hard to focus. He sat up, bizarrely alert, and felt quickly at his side. It was cold. Still very wet with blood. But…

He wondered if a lack of pain was a bad sign. Maybe it meant he was too far gone to feel it. Maybe he was in shock. Maybe…

Hikaru looked up, and noticed with a jolt of shock that the sky was getting light. He’d been there for hours. Hours, when he was sure he’d been bleeding out, with his lungs logged with blood and no one around to give a damn that he was dying on a random back road. How was he even alive, let alone so bizarrely clear-headed?

He checked his phone, which informed him it was nearly five in the morning, and that there was still no signal. He unlocked it and tried turning the mobile data on and off, tried searching for nearby wi-fi networks, but…nothing. Bewildered, he put it back in his pocket, and then, after taking a deep breath, slipped a hand under his jacket and shirt to feel carefully at his side.

His fingers trailed over half-formed scabs that dislodged from his skin and smeared in the still-wet blood around them. There had been so much blood. But…

The skin felt tender, maybe. Bruised. But it was whole. There wasn’t a single wound.

Hikaru withdrew his hand, thoughts reeling wildly, and looked at his bloody fingertips as if they could reveal the answers to whatever was afoot. “What the fuck,” He whispered, to himself, and his voice was hoarse but not weak. Not choked. Not dying. He coughed and cleared his throat and brought up some red-black phlegm, looking for all the world like a blood clot as he spat it out next to a dumpster, and the evidence was in the blood. He had been injured. Badly. He hadn’t imagined that. But – somehow he was magically healed? It didn’t make any sense.

He shook the helpless confusion away and stood up, facing back along the alley. His apartment wasn’t far from here. He should just – get home. Get home, and clean up, and put on clothes that weren’t caked with blood, and hope the world made more sense then. He could figure it out later, when he hadn’t just been unconscious in an alley for hours and couldn’t taste copper every time he swallowed.

He wiped the blood from around his mouth and wiped it on his trousers, since it wasn’t like a bit more would make a difference, and walked.

  “What the fuck,” Hikaru said again, this time less of a whisper and more of an incredulous demand, finding before him not his familiar apartment building but a fucking construction site. There was the shell of the familiar building’s shape there, an orderly mess of scaffolding, a billboard cheerfully advertising the apartments being built and advising potential buyers to get in contact with the agency ahead of the completion-

It was his apartment complex being advertised. His own fucking place, the same company, right there. Definitely in the right place. He double checked the road signs and it was all right – except-

Since when was that storefront abandoned? It was definitely a KFC last time he looked, he’d gone there a couple times when too drunk or too tired to go around the corner to the cheap ramen shop, but it…just plain wasn’t there, now. And the convenience store next to it looked weirdly fresh and new, the adverts looked weird and old, and the magazines advertised in the next shop over looked weird, and everything was all just so strangely off that he had no idea what to do with it.

Hikaru slumped against the nearest building, head aching and thoughts confused. Am I hallucinating? He wondered, and turned to peer more closely into the dark store, at the advertisements, at the rows of magazines sheathed in the shadows. He looked at advert after advert, reading offer ends on the first of June! on one, ends on 20th May! on another, each one sending another jolt of confusion through his system.

It’s July, he thought, incredulously, looking at the apparently very out-of-date adverts with suspicion. This store wasn’t, in his experience, negligent enough to leave expired offers up for longer than a day or two, but months? It was incomprehensible. He looked back across the street to the befuddlingly incomplete apartment building, then back across the changed storefronts, and felt a seed of extremely ridiculous suspicion take root in him.

He turned away and walked slowly down the road, stopping at every shop window to look in. Not all of them advertised much in the windows, but they all mainly seemed to have offers expiring in May. No year listed, that he could see, but…

Hesitantly, he withdrew his phone and turned the flashlight function on, shining it at the fine print at the bottom of the page, and saw something he did not like. Something that absolutely could not mean what his stupid brain thought it did. Something that was, assuredly, just a random fluke. Surely. Heart in his throat, he turned to the next leaflet, and looked at its fine print too, and then the next, and the next, and then he saw a newspaper sticking out of a nearby bin and – that was kind of…harder to ignore.

The date on the discarded newspaper was May 4th, 2001. The dates on all the adverts were 2001. There was absolutely no reason for false leaflets and newspapers to be all over the place when they were over two decades out of date, but that – that was impossible, surely, people didn’t just get hit by cars and then wake up twenty-four years in the past-

He turned off the phone torch and groaned, bringing his breathing carefully into a forced regularity that ought to help calm him, in theory. He breathed for a couple of minutes until his heart was being less of a frantic bastard and his thoughts weren’t going off in every direction, and that was good enough.

“God, what even is my life.” He said to himself, and then a moment later lamented “I’m too old for random unexpected time travel.” And then he looked at the date on the newspaper, and it started kicking in, started occurring to him, made him think wait-

If this was yesterday’s paper, and yesterday was May 4th 2001, then today…

Hikaru looked up at the lightening sky with trepidation, and – something shifted.

Hikaru woke feeling oddly disorientated, more than the tiredness of too-little sleep after an eventful day should warrant. There was a bizarrely distant headache, like an echo of pain, in his head, something oddly sore about his chest that didn’t respond when he rubbed at it. He scowled, resolving to ignore it, and moved to extract himself from the roomful of futons of event-going Go professionals.

It was way too early to be awake, but that wasn’t really a bad thing. He needed to get going early, just in case Ogata remembered anything from when he was all drunk and made a fuss, which was the last thing he needed. He was exhausted, but he could sleep on the train. Carefully, he stepped around the lines of sleeping people, footsteps soft, and left the room, Sai trailing silently after him-

Hikaru jolted on the street, holding a steadying hand against the nearby wall, and wondered what that had-

Sai offered a quiet good-morning, once they were out in the hallway, but Hikaru still couldn’t respond. It was too quiet around, and someone might easily wake if he spoke-

Sai?

Sai looked over the rows of gobans in the event hall with that familiar longing expression, but for whatever reason, he didn’t try to suggest that Hikaru stay and play, didn’t speak, and that was a bit weird but welcome, considering he had to get to the train station soon if he was going to get the early train-

Hikaru staggered with the weight of it, a scattered trace of a morning from decades ago, a morning that was now and happening now. He pulled himself along the street until he found a random bollard to sit on, planting his backside on it as he tried to acclimate to the bizarre experiential effects of witnessing his younger self going about his morning.

That’s what it was, right? That’s what it had to be. Leaving the event facility early to avoid potential repercussions from Sai’s last game – though he’d had no idea at the time that it really was Sai’s last game-

The morning was light in a way that suggested clear weather later on, the skies clear as the sun rose. It would probably be hot today-

Hikaru tried to concentrate past it, slapping himself lightly on the face as though to instil greater alertness.

Why was he here? Why had he woken up over two decades in the past, instead of dying? Why today, of all days, the still-reigning worst day of his life? Was it some kind of divine intervention, like Sai had been granted to linger as a ghost for a thousand years past his death? If so, what was the point? What was going to happen? Was he meant to be doing something?

…was he even alive, or just another ghost?

Hikaru recalled interacting with the newspaper, and decided that, no, he probably wasn’t a ghost. Probably.

So why…?

He rubbed at his eyes, and then stood to go looking for…something. Some sign, something that might shed light on whatever he was doing here. He had no idea what he was searching for. But what else could he do?

  His younger self boarded a train and sat down, kicking his legs out and sprawling out to nap on the journey. Sai was surely there, too, but younger-him wasn’t paying attention to that. The thought of it caused a familiar pang of old regret in him, softened and smoothed by years and years of life and memory.

Meanwhile, Hikaru was picking through his wallet on a street corner, where he’d found a t-shirt vending machine and became suddenly desperate to have at least one un-bloodied article of clothing. A lot of the coins, and especially the notes, had changed over time, but some of them would maybe be accepted by a vending machine. Vending machines probably couldn’t read the minting dates of coins, right?

Thanking small mercies for having broken a larger note for dinner yesterday, he fed coins into the machine, and was delighted to have them accepted. The machine presented him with an exceptionally cheap black t-shirt which, for whatever reason, was decorated with a smiley-face in white. Thankful that it was in a plastic wrapping, he went in search of somewhere with a bathroom he could get changed in.

Quietly, in the strange other-part of his awareness, his younger self fell asleep on the train, and gave him back his concentration.

Tokyo, in the end, was a city, and had plenty of 24-hour businesses when you got to the right roads. He wavered over a few coffee shops and one manga café, and in the end selected the coffee shop that looked least likely to have CCTV cameras. Although – it was 2001, were cameras even as omnipresent now as they were in the future? He had no idea. Either way, he really needed to wash up.

Once inside, the one person who seemed to be on staff apologetically informed him that the restroom facilities were only available to paying customers. Since Hikaru didn’t want to try his future-money against a real person, he accepted that and left, eyeing the other establishments with consternation.

In the end, he went looking for a public toilet.

It stank unpleasantly when he found it, and seemed mostly bereft of things like toilet paper, but he was mainly there to wash up a bit and change shirts, so that was okay. Hikaru peeled off his suit jacket, grimacing at the noise of its fabric tearing the blood-bonds it had to the undershirt. He sent a modest spray of dried blood dust onto the already-unpleasant flooring, and set the jacket carefully aside to inspect his shirt.

It had been blue, once. It definitely wasn’t now. The side where he’d been injured seemed a bit damaged, the fabric lightly scored, and there was an enormous bloodstain reaching from half-way around his chest to half-way around his back. Only the edges were approaching dry. Carefully, Hikaru undid the buttons and took that off too. He’d never been shirtless in a public toilet before, but he supposed there was a first time for everything.

The mirror over the sinks was cracked but not shattered, and was perfectly sufficient to inspect the state of his side. It looked…gory. Absolutely caked with blood, which had thickened all-over into a sludgy mess halfway between liquid and scab, interrupted only by the clumsy lines his fingers had shoved through it earlier. He had no idea what the state of his skin underneath was.

After some searching, Hikaru retrieved a small cache of clean toilet paper from the last cubicle, wetted it in the sink, and started clearing the mess on his side away.

Underneath, the skin was whole and unbroken. There was a horrible bruise there, black and purple over his side, but no sign of an open wound at all. It was patently impossible, but…so was time travel. Hikaru sighed, and used a combination of the tissues and the clean section of his shirt to wash and dry his skin. The sink was absolutely crimson with blood.

In the end, his torso was as clean as it could reasonably get in a public toilet with no replacement available for the bloody trousers, so Hikaru removed the 500-yen t-shirt from its plastic wrapping, put it on, and felt immediately far less disgusting. He stared at his reflection in the mirror as he tried to wash the worst of the sink-blood away, noting the bags under his eyes and the faint unhealthy pallor to his skin, and wondered if he should worry about the consequences of surviving certain death.

Eventually, Hikaru bundled up his bloody clothes and took them outside to find a bin, and then he was done with them, and had no more idea of what he should be doing than before.

Directionless, he wandered until he found a bench, and then sat there, staring at the sky. He was starting to feel vaguely hungry, his stomach apparently making itself known now that there didn’t seem to be any danger of death. He felt tired, of course, since he’d never had an opportunity to actually sleep last night, rather than just passing out for several hours failing to die. He felt hungry and tired, and he wasn’t dead, and he wasn’t sure what to do about any of that.

Somewhere, he was sleeping on a train, unaware of the sorrow the day would bring. Somewhere, Sai was sitting beside him, unaware that no one would be watching when he disappeared.

“What the hell did I do to deserve being shunted back to today?” He asked the sky, without expecting any particular response.

He stared at the sky, and nothing changed.

  A while later, a thought occurred to him. A flash of memory, of thought, half-grasped between the blood and burbling breath and a world going dark at the edges.

“Aw shit.” He said to himself, out loud, like an absolute madman. “That’ll have done it, if someone was listening.”

He couldn’t be certain. But he thought, maybe, that before the first time he’d passed out in the future, he’d thought of Sai. Something like: maybe I’ll see Sai soon. Or possibly: I guess I always wanted to see Sai again.

Maybe the gods weren’t done screwing around with Sai, or the people his life had touched.

“Maybe that’s it.” He sighed, and drew some stares from passers-by. It was Golden Week, so there wasn’t much of a commute going on, but it’s not like everyone could get time off in that week, or society would collapse. Hence, the streets were far from abandoned now.

Maybe that was it. Maybe he was here to see Sai again. Maybe that was why he was here.

He considered it, and watched a wispy cloud spread across the blue of the sky.

Sai’s disappearance was an old scar, now. With the passage of years, it had come to hurt less, and the weight of his regrets had worn thinner and lighter with every passing month. He’d talked about Sai, to the people who cared about it, who cared about Hikaru. He’d shared the games, still immortalised in his memory, and with the inexorable advance of time, they had become good memories. The games, the conversations, all the time he’d shared with Sai – they were memories to be treasured, and cherished, and they weren’t so painful anymore. It wasn’t as though a person could ever really completely move past a loss like that, but…

It hadn’t really hurt for a long time. There was a time he’d have given up everything to be here today, before Sai vanished, and try to change something. He’d have sacrificed his life for the weight of that desperation. Now…

He watched the cloud, and pondered.

It was a nice thought. He’d like to see Sai again. Of course he’d like to see Sai again. If that was why he was here, if that was why he hadn’t died…it was a nice thought. Maybe he was only here on borrowed time. Maybe he was only here for the sake of a last wish, and then he’d be gone. He wasn’t sure, but at this point, there was little to be gained by waiting.

He stood, and considered where he ought to go from here.

  Hikaru had never slept especially well on trains, no matter how tired he was, so it wasn’t surprising that he kept waking up. He shifted restlessly, shuffled his feet, got up and blinked a few times, glanced to his side to see if Sai was doing anything, and went back to sleep about a dozen different times over the course of the journey. Whenever he managed to doze off, his dreams were…weird.

Once, he woke up convinced there was blood all over his hands, that he’d just been cleaning it off. He looked at his fingers in bleary-eyed confusion before going back to sleep again. He dreamed of cloud-watching, of taking a different train, of knocking his side against something and sending a horrible pain through the bruise there – but he didn’t have any bruise on his side, so that was stupid. In the end Hikaru conceded to the inevitable and allowed himself to wake fully, still exceptionally drowsy from the heat and lack of proper sleep.

He looked over at Sai, who was staring at his hand, oddly pensive-

God, it had been so long since he’d seen Sai. He’d not considered that he’d see him again any time soon-

Hikaru blinked, and shook his head with dizzy confusion.

Sai noticed, and looked back at him. His hand disappeared back into his sleeve. “Hikaru?” He asked, voice still unusually subdued. Hikaru wasn’t sure what was up with him. He’d been acting all depressed for days, even when he’d got to play Ogata last night. “Is something the matter?”

He made a dismissive noise. “Nah. Just weird dreams.” He said, and sighed. “We’ll be back soon anyway, and I can have a proper sleep.”

Sai opened his mouth, then hesitated strangely. In the end, he didn’t say anything. He was acting so weird. Hikaru turned away. If Sai wanted to say something, then he could-

It was strange to see, how determined he’d been to ignore the signs. How convinced he’d been that things would remain as they were, that people couldn’t just suddenly disappear one day, that people you loved would always stay-

Hikaru swayed a little in his seat and held a hand to his forehead in confusion. Was he sick? Was he still asleep?

“Must be more tired than I thought.” He muttered to himself, and for the rest of the short journey, ignored the weird dreamlike fragments of – thinking, standing on a train, getting off a train, stepping outside a platform to wait-

Whatever the connection was seemed to be getting stronger. Maybe because they were getting closer. It wouldn’t be long now-

Hikaru closed his eyes to try to make the weird-waking dreams stop, but they didn’t. For the rest of the train ride, he endured the strange snippets of experience, like he was in another place, waiting, waiting, waiting-

Finally, they arrived. He stumbled when he stood, mind dizzy and distracted, and had to wave off Sai’s concern when he roused from his quietude to ask after his wellbeing. He stepped off the train at his station, where he could change trains and then get off at a station less than ten minutes from his house. He couldn’t wait to reunite with his bed and sleep off whatever weird sleep-deprived state he’d ended up in.

He stepped off the train-

Waiting

Stepped falteringly along the platform, head swimming, Sai growing increasingly worried beside him-

They’re nearly here

He was going to have to sit down, find a bench, he could barely think. Fuck, this couldn’t just be him being tired, it was suddenly so much worse, he had to be sick, or something. Hikaru staggered off the platform, looking around for somewhere he could rest for a minute, but then-

Then-

Oh!

There was a sensation like double-vision, like looking at himself, like seeing himself and Sai both, emerging from the platform, like he was seeing himself from outside his body-

It’s been so long, a thought that wasn’t his said, almost longingly, with a torrent of old emotion, old nostalgia, old regrets surging out as though from a burst dam. I forgot what he looked like! Not completely, of course, but – oh, look at him.

Old love, old hurt, a strange starburst of gratitude and joy. Hikaru swayed and would have fallen over if Sai hadn’t supported him, now thoroughly flustered about whatever was happening to him. He was talking. Saying something. Hikaru could barely hear the words, let alone understand-

….ah, whoops,

He looked over, mind caught horribly between two sets of visual input, and-

He looked over, and met the eyes of someone who looked very, very much like himself.

  “Shit.” Hikaru cursed, quietly, as the dual-consciousness thing passing between them immediately built into a screaming, overwhelming feedback loop of stimuli and confusion the second their eyes met. It was almost impossible to think past, and he could see – could feel – that it was harder on his younger self than him. Small-Hikaru had practically fallen over, Sai was holding him up and flailing frantically, the poor man, but he couldn’t really pay any more attention to that than anything else-

What was he meant to do? It was getting worse with their closeness, so – should he just – leave? Go away? Let himself disappear, or whatever was going to happen now?

It was probably sensible. It was…probably what he should do. But…

His eyes remained utterly, inexorably fixed on those of his counterpart, and he couldn’t budge an inch. He didn’t think he could have moved if he tried. All the while, the mess of confusion between them grew, and grew, and spiralled out of control-

Sai finally looked over, finally following small-Hikaru’s eyes, and froze at the sight of him.

“…Hikaru?” He asked, utterly bewildered, and Hikaru heard it-

Hikaru?

-through two sets of ears, two minds, two bodies-

They were too close, too far, their minds were ripping apart from the proximity but too distant to heal, it was too far, too far, it was going to kill them-

Somehow, Hikaru stepped towards him / stepped towards him, pulling Sai with him

“Hikaru, is that-“ / Hikaru, is that / he started, started, voice torn between them, broken up, scattered fragments of comprehension that wouldn’t integrate correctly,

Another step, another step / another stumble closer / still too far, too far.

“Help,” One of them gasped, maybe both of them, and they couldn’t have known whose lips the word passed, if it was both, if it was neither, there was no way of knowing. “Sai, help – help me move-“

“I don’t / “I don’t understand,” / Sai’s helpless voice filtered through their ears, nearer and further, closer and farther away, but he helped. He helped, he helped, he helped-

Hikaru reached out a trembling hand and Hikaru reached out to grasp it like a lifeline, and Hikaru and Hikaru shuddered and trembled as the unravelling pieces of them reached out and bound together, rushed together, remaking themselves in an overwhelming second of change and confusion-

They blinked, and were looking at each other, that double-vision still there, hand in hand. There were two sets of eyes seeing the world, two sets of ears hearing it, two bodies standing and two hearts beating and two people living and breathing in some random train station in the middle of Tokyo in 2001-

But there was only one mind.

Tentatively, Hikaru withdrew his hand. Both of them withdrew at once, and it was a weird sensation, two separate sets of movement, each processed individually but – linked.

“What the hell,” They said, and the words came in utterly identical timing and cadence from two separate mouths. They tried to look down, and both of them did it, the double-vision splitting into one adult man in bloody trousers and a cheap t-shirt, and a fourteen-year-old boy in the same clothes he’d slept in. “What the hell,” They said again, helplessly, and the only difference between the words was which throat they emerged from.

“…Hikaru?” Sai asked, in a small and overwhelmed voice, and they both turned to look at him, their dual vision filling with the sight of him, so familiar, so dearly-missed. “What – what is happening? Are you-“ He looked at one of them, and it took looking down again to distinguish that it was the older body he was looking at.

“Um.” They said, as quietly as they could, aware that people were starting to look at them weirdly and that they were in the middle of a train station. “…help me outside? Please?”

Sai stared at – him, older Hikaru, then looked to other him, and then between them, eyes wide and baffled and plainly anxious and his back stiff with tension. But, after a moment, he reached out. One hand for each of them.

It took a great deal of effort, when they reached out, to reach for separate hands, instead of both reaching for one. They didn’t entirely succeed. One of them took the right hand, but the other was still reaching for it, and trying to move it for the other hand instead resulted in the other one moving too, and it was so difficult to move them separately-

Sai, hesitantly, reached out to take the stray hand himself, and pulled gently at them. Helpless, and half falling over with every step, the two bodies of Hikaru allowed themselves to be let gently out towards the door.

  ---

End chapter.

Notes: one of the most indulgent story ideas I’ve ever had, and I like it a lot. I wrote it last year sometime, around November, maybe. Given it’s all about 5th May stuff it seems an appropriate release for today. Happy Hikago Day, everyone! (this story is also on ao3)

Story stuff: this story mainly exists as a concept so I can fuck about and also have a plausible scenario for chill, mostly un-angsty hikasai. Absolutely no underage herein. Details in this story are subject to change, e.g. Hikaru’s age. Also this probably won’t update for ages. Sorry!

This story is named after the first line of one of my favourite poems: Love after love, by Derek Walcott, shown here.

The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.

[failtoplan]

Future Imperfect - On Capitalism, Technology and Ideology

Looking out from the 31st floor balcony, it doesn’t seem high until you look down. Shenzhen stretches 80 kilometres east to west, but is only 10 deep, North-South. The city snakes laterally, littorally, between the hills of the Hong Kong border, along  Shenzhen Bay to the Pearl River delta, like a badly kept concrete lawn, with clumps of seventy and eighty story towers sprouting like steel weeds. The 115 story Ping An Tower, the worlds 4th largest, the town’s own tall poppy. When night falls, the entire town lights up like a circuit board, streaming with steel and light. The immaculately kept, perpetually swept, cycle path along the Dasha river is filled with office workers on dockless rental bikes, hired by the half hour, headed to one of the city’s many tech clusters, downstream, deeper into Nanshan district. They’ve phased out almost all the old taxis, replaced with a fully electric fleet. The same for the buses. Pretty much every transaction, from street-corner noodles to legal fees are carried out with QR codes and digital wallets. Cashless, silent, sleek.

This is not ‘The Future’, but it is ‘A Future’. Two days a week I commute from Shenzhen to Hong Kong. The journey takes around an hour and a half, but the time travelled is greater than the distance covered. After getting stamped out of Mainland China and into Hong Kong at the vast Shenzhen Bay checkpoint, coaches and cars spiral up onto the five-and-a-half-kilometre bay bridge to cross over to the New Territories. As we roll up the overpass onto the bridge, the plaiting of concrete weaves carriageways from right-to-left and left-to-right. The first sign that they do things differently here. At least for now.

Hong Kong, like Tokyo, represents a certain obsolete near-future in the collective imagination. Having had its image and form repeatedly appropriated by Hollywood as a stand-in for numerous dystopias, the familiarity can make it seem almost underwhelming. Hong Kong looks exactly like ‘Hong Kong’ - a trait it shares with New York. It also feels like yesterday’s vision of tomorrow. The stuttering neon signs and diesel-streaked streets, PoMo towers and marble-lined lobbies are a particularly sharp contrast with Shenzhen’s unironic modernity. From its peak in 1993, Hong Kong has declined from twenty-seven to less than three percent of China’s GDP. But beyond the numbers, it feels like a city in decline. Slowly, megaprojects such as the Hong Kong-Macao-Zhuhai bridge and the China High-speed Rail Link are stitching the territory together with the mainland, bringing Hong Kong’s greatest fear ever-closer, becoming just another mid-sized Chinese city. With the perceived erosion of its Rule of law, the Special Administrative Region has become a contested space. The acute confrontation over the ‘two systems’ principle, is also representative of a bigger conflict between two ideas. Two visions of what the future could be.

Words can be problematic; they are both the obstacle to articulating a thought and the best way to try. This clash of ideas, in which Hong Kong is just one front, isn’t easily reduced to opposing pairs as the Cold War once was. Capitalism’s ‘victory’ over Communism was always an artificial, lexigraphic binary that pitted an economic system against a total political, social and economic order. ‘Capitalism’ is synecdochic, an easy shorthand for ‘democratic capitalism’ and the free and limited, markets, open societies and shared small-L liberal consensus regarding the primacy of the individual. Democratic Capitalism is Limited Capitalism. And it was ‘Limited Capitalism’ that ‘won’. The front line crossed by the arcing span of the Shenzhen Bay Bridge is not the battle between capitalism and communism. Socialism with Chinese characteristics is Capitalism unencumbered by Democracy. It is the front  line between Total and Limited Capitalism.

Limited Capitalism was never an outright winner, but in its rhetoric, it strived to achieve the illusion of permanence. The rights of the individual – the societal sidekick to the economic superhero - has never been inevitable and maybe not even natural. Increasingly this relic of our post-Enlightenment experiments feels like a humanistic blip. In the face of Brexit and Trump, Bolsanaro and Orban, I have found myself increasingly having to defend the ‘pragmatism of the primacy of the individual’ to friends not just in Singapore and Shanghai, but Boston and Berlin. Yes, it is the freedom to screw up, but it is also the freedom not to be screwed with.

When measured in terms of human development Limited Capitalism has been a great success. But ‘Capitalist Democracy’ is a productive tension, not a synonymic pair. Capitalism privileges results, Democracy, the process. One is fast, the other is slow. The market is majoritarian, while the democratic enshrines the individual, not merely responsible to a simple majority. This makes elections, perversely, the least important aspect of a democracy. Limited Capitalism is an uneasy hybrid. You are free to consume, you are free to participate, but the between the two there is no equivalence. The human flourishing this has propagated cannot be measured by statistics alone. It is this tension that universalised the franchise, enshrined judicial independent and – aspirationally -declared Universal Human Rights. Less tangibly and more significantly it gives each of us a hope of genuine human dignity and all of us some faith in a societal-level trust. Maybe it was easier to win hearts and minds in the late 20th century with Right to Buy than the Rights of Man, but failing to promote the civil alongside the economic conflates consumption with participation, creating the opportunity for Total Capitalism.

-- Shenzhen’s subway tunnels are lined with motion-synced LED screens that animate adverts outside the carriage windows selling pizza and pet food station to station. My connected TV won’t switch on without first showing me a short film promoting the latest toilet paper or plastic surgery procedure. Pop-up ads and promotions are a pervasive part of every single product or service, physical or virtual that I use. Upsell, cross-sell, resell. The imperative to consume is everywhere, the Chinese Dream constantly reinforced as the route to individualisation and self-actualisation. Judged by the old Communist clichés of a “decadent West,” focussed on temerarious consumption, contemporary China is the most “western” place I have ever lived or been. One where I am no more and no less than the sum of my purchases. I buy therefore I am.

At the same time deep integration of seamless technology has evolved a new species of human as consumer, Homo Emptus. The local branch of KFC lets me buy a Family Bucket with nothing more than my face, using cameras linked directly to my virtual wallet which holds my credit cards and fictive cash. Recently I was walking through the precinct by my block, when a young woman ran up to me, apologising. Her cleaner’s phone had stopped receiving transfers and she didn’t have the cash to pay. Did I have any? Pulling a handful of 100 yuan notes out of my pocket, she pulled out her phone, scanned my wallet and transferred me the 300 kuai which I had in cash. In less than a minute I had become a human ATM. It was demeaning and thrilling at the same time, I imagine not dissimilar to the excitement felt by the freshly humiliated submissive.

Sometimes living here can feel like magic. But if you only immerse in the wonder, you miss the cost. Recently, a group of cyclists in Shanghai rode past a police officer, stopped by the side of the road, deep in an animated discussion with the driver they had just pulled over. The group, aware the policeman was otherwise occupied, slowly rolled through the red signal ahead, traffic light on a quiet Saturday morning. Fifteen minutes later by the time they had reached their café stop and pulled out their phones to pay, they had all been fined. Facial recognition cameras mounted on top of the police car had ID-ed them and then allowed the officer digitally ensure justice was done. When we are defined only by our consumption, this make complete sense, our economic life is simply ‘life’, giving the state unprecedented control in return for our convenience. Seamlessness may be fast, but to protect Limited Capitalism, we need seams.

The reality is though that our willingness to conflate commercial choice with civil freedoms has makes it easy for us to walk backwards into Total Capitalism. Using ‘Capitalism’ as a shorthand for so long has meant a lack of focus on the social and political dimensions that has allowing the market to perform as a poor stand-in for the whole. This has led to declining trust in the very institutions that underpin both our societal freedom and our consumer choice. The recent World Values Survey shows a minority in both Europe and the US of people born after 1970 believe it is ‘essential to live in a democracy.’ If this is the case then we have collectively failed to remind ourselves what ‘democracy’ really entails. It has also led to the bizarre inversion for many on the neoliberal right who see any democratic limit placed on the market as ‘undemocratic’

The rising indifference to the democratic can be seen in part as a consequence of Limited Capitalism’s success. Just as a fish does not know that it is wet, we take for granted the protections afforded the individual. We have collectively and systemically failed to remind ourselves of the importance of the water we all swim in. Political leaders and populist demagogues who owe their very existence to the small L liberalism that underpins Limited Capitalism have failed to give credit, choosing instead to pee in the pond for short term gain. Taking our collective socio-political foundations for granted has led to their erosion. Ignoring them has also reduced the success of a state to its economy alone. Whilst freedom of speech won’t feed my children, GDP won’t make them happier or more morally rich. This tyranny of the economic means that states which favour the fast and the outcome will be judged the best performing, outshining those that optimise for the slow, the process, the individual. By judging a state by its economy rather than their humanity, we set up a framework in which the Total Capitalism is not only increasingly easy to admire, but objectively ‘better’, with no way to quantify its glaring qualitative flaws. The fallacy that our economic lives are an adequate stand-in for our civic ones provides the ideological misdirection to pull the trick off. Only what is counted is valued.

Total Capitalism, by succeeding on these terms, promotes a worrying model of growth and unfreedom, chipping away at the old liberal consensus. As pervasive technologies allow ever-greater accumulation of information, we are reaching an inflection point, two divergent versions of how this data is used and its implications for how we live. Progress marches an there is a decision to be made, inaction is not possible. A battle that is waged by only one side, even one of ideas, is not without bloodshed; it is a massacre.

Unencumbered by the limits that the state apparatus of Limited Capitalism places on it, technology can quickly become dystopian. The Limited Capitalist model is not just a check on economic entities – as the EU has proved with its fines on Google and Microsoft - but also on governments. And it adds an implicit societal dimension to the economic role. When Apple refused to provide a back door to iPhone for the FBI, it was asserting its social responsibility, not just its economic function. It helped that these two impulses were congruent here, but the difference between that and the case of the Shanghai cyclists is stark. Tencent, makers of the ubiquitous WeChat Wallet in question, were doing nothing wrong by allowing the state to pick pockets; they were fulfilling their duty, legally obliged to do so in the People’s Republic. The FBI’s response to Apple’s refusal was that American lives might be lost, but people died enshrining the rights Apple was upholding. Do we still believe the defence of the individual is worth dying for?

It would be worth asking that question to the millions of minority Muslims constantly surveilled, or interred in camps in Xinjiang. Advanced monitoring technologies, sharpened to scalpel-like precision, have created an unprecedented digital panopticon. The whole region is monitored at a level of detail that previously would have taken vast armies of watchers and handlers. Now instead, the state has the ability to micromanage human life at a macroscale;  facial recognition, device tracking and digital monitoring turn an entire country-sized region into a prison colony. Xinjiang is not just a tragedy though; it is a testbed. China has rolled the same systems across the entirety of its domestic train network as well as at every airport, port and major public area. More disturbingly, it is a showroom for the implementation of its own particular strain of Total Capitalism. A sinister demonstration of how to unshackle the market from democracy, providing economic liberation whilst maintaining total control. For parts of the world that were previously faced with the choice between an all-inclusive version of modernity, open society and all, China offers an alluring alternative, a cake-and-eat-it model powered by pervasive technologies and financed by Belt and Road loans. And it is one that has succeeded by our own ‘Capitalist’ yardstick.

Total Capitalism is by no means inevitable, and its vision of the future not the only one. Technology is neutral and can be used co-opted for community as well as commerciality. The liberal limits within Liberal, Democratic, Limited Capitalism have allowed it to do both. But our willingness to collapse the social, political and economic into one big flat now have left us at a critical juncture. Hong Kong’s fight is an imperfect allegory for the decision that we need to make about what we should measure and what really matters, particularly in the developed world. We cannot take for granted what we already have. An era is only named after it has long passed. It is up to us to decide if we are to witness the end of this one.

[charissadescandelotter-blog]

Stop It Now Lets Road Trip [2018] Stop It Now Lets #RoadTrip in #SouthAfrica Port Elizabeth and make a great #StopMotionAnimation in 2018

[bloglinespe-blog]

Stop It I Like It Lets Road Trip [2018]

[zgm99]

5 examples of unsuccessful advertisement

Nivea:

This Nivea advert is both unsuccessful in the message it promotes and in its design. The message is clearly not something that should have been included, whether it be a mistake, unintentional or not. It would, and likely did, anger the population, and for good reason. Along with this, the design of the ad, to me, does not promote what it is trying to successfully. If you removed the image of the antiperspirant, would you be able to understand or explain what the ad is trying to sell? 

KFC:

Clearly the imagery used in this advert is offensive, making it unsuccessful. In many ways the advert can be seen to be mocking the religion, swapping the women’s hijab for a KFC bucket with a hole cut out of it. Along with the offensive imagery the small body of text is quite unsettling. It does not have a capital letter at the start of the sentence, and more importantly, in terms of design, it is not centred with the imagery, making the image harder to look at.

Asda:

This Asda advert situated on a bus stop is very boring, lifeless and mundane. The design of the ad is too simple, considering the fact that it is trying to promote that Asda is the superior supermarket compared to its competitors. Along with this, the ‘mysupermarket.co.uk’ portion of text does not make sense, being half yellow half green, whilst also being in italics. The background colour of the piece also doesn't make much sense to me. The bottom section of the advert uses a white background, however, the other section uses an odd green colour. This green does not look appealing to me, and ruins the consistency of the image.

Panasonic:

The message of this advert clearly needs to be rephrased. Whilst the message ‘Shoot your girlfriend.’ is understandable in the context, accompanied by the picture of the camera, it also has a different connotation, which can be seen as rude and inappropriate. Along with this, the background of the image is quote dull and uninteresting, along with the rest of the piece. Personally I think that the advert could use more detail in the backdrop of the image to make it look more appealing to the audience which it is trying to promote its product to.

Nike:

For the popularity of Nike, you would expect all of their adverts to be top of the range. This is not the case with this advert. The first of three things wrong with this ad is the header. The caption ‘The shoe works if you do.’ does not make much sense in relation to the trainers it is advertising. If it were advertising a range of sports shoes, then it would, but not in this case. The second problem I have with the piece is the imagery used. The soles of the shoes are dirty, which to me does not make the product look appealing at all. Whether this is intentional or not I am unsure of, but it could potentially be to fit an urban theme. The final issue which makes the piece unsuccessful is the body of text used below the image. For a poster this is too much and makes the advert look cluttered and personally I believe to be unnecessary as it does not add anything to the image.

[nathjonesey-75]

A Decade Away

In August (which already feels like last year), I passed over an interesting date on my calendar, as on the 22nd – somewhat incredulously – I had been living abroad from Wales and Britain for ten years. A decade outside Europe. Ten years ago upon leaving, I had nothing to lose but a wide-open space in which to travel, discover and meet all variations of people, cultures and places.

  In this crazy time, I have lived on two continents, changed careers (a few times again); witnessed modern slavery, seen the remnants and after-effects of colonialism in new and old lands, learnt stuff, dropped habits, restarted those habits and dropped them again, realised what I missed while sacrificing those things for work; confirmed myself as an atheist, met someone in another land - who grew up, just a mile away from me – and married them; learnt more stuff - had young students die tragically, lost friends to cancer, worked under ridiculous conditions, made friends and lost acquaintances; had lots of surgery, seen equality rights improve but be violently opposed, seen my country finally qualify for a football finals tournament, owned my first dogs and love them like kids, seen the horrific, evil right-wing shadow cast over the world so bewilderingly subtle that I cannot recognise the world from ten years ago. And breathe.

 As I pulled away from the glamour of Llanelli railway station on that date in August a decade ago; parents tearful (I was thirty-four and had left several times by this point – go figure); it seemed like the adventure it was about to become. Like the Lord Of The Rings story, I was to travel through some questionable places but alternatively - observe sights I wouldn’t have imagined. In my first hour of Doha life, seeing a woman in different attire to the usual Trostre car park attire in 2009 – ordering a shop worker around like a slave. “Get me this…get me that…” while repeatedly prodding his shoulder. Mind blown. Like I was watching a rich Caucasian American family from the late 1700s - jump to the 21st Century with their shopping techniques (Just to clarify - it was the manner and behaviour, not the attire which caused the bigger shock). The aisles of Asda in West Wales suddenly glittered with freedom. Yet somehow I stayed in the dusty, humid backward land for four years.

  Not having record shops, comic or other book shops nearby – and the advent of a pub being a ‘membership only’ do – with very little else to do in Qatar, became a four-year strain. Although, the carnage of Friday brunch – paying the equivalent of £40-80, depending on the hosting hotel – for stuffing your face with all readily available food and guzzling sparking wine or beer for three-to-four hours until you stumbled out, into the hot sun – had a degree of rebellious sun about it. Away from the narrow lanes of daily Qatari constitution and archaic religious laws.

 Realising that Melbourne was an escape route (by this time both Mr and Mrs Jones were infused by the travel bug – a return to Blighty was not an option), we visited the city in February 2013; kindly subsidised by Katherine’s future – and previous – employers. Our first encounter starting on a high street (for more than one intended pun reason) being that of intoxicated-to-oblivion bodies being dragged out of both McDonalds and KFC on a Friday night. Now this is more like home. High streets with open drunkenness and debauchery. Sign us up.

  Not only that, but the self-appointed, clever social secretary – Mrs Jones – had organised what was to become my personal Australian favourite – its wine, through a vineyard tour of the Yarra Valley. If we could have been sold Melbourne – and Australia – any better in one week, I would be surprised. Plus the British and Irish Lions were touring here from June that year, so it could possibly be a dream come true, of seeing one of their test matches. It had to be Melbourne.

 Of course, when you’re itching to leave a spiritually toxic place, yearning for a new social catapult in a new home – positives are mostly what you’ll see. Which is why living around the world – leaving the rough times with hope; expecting – or at least wishing for the rough to become smoother – it can be the most exposing and openly blatant aspect of life as an expat. Not knowing what will come next can be an exciting part of an adventure. It can also be of huge personal detriment should you not hit the ground running and settle into the new environment. While I have lived with immense pride at how my wife’s career has glowed in Melbourne, to say my working journey in Australia has been stop-start is like saying a Tarantino move ‘may contain violence’.

  We can all live in a media-controlled bubble, wherever we are in the world. I would guess that most British people above thirty-five years of age would retain the idea that Australia is more alike the sun-drenched, ‘barbie’-having, beer-drinking eternal summers, as seen on Paul Hogan’s old adverts, Home and Away – as well as England’s Ashes tours are played in hot conditions. The thing with the validity of Paul Hogan’s Foster’s commercials – as good as they were, no-one in Australia drinks it. If it were the only thing available at a party, I’d have water. That’s always been my opinion of the uric juice. Australians have a joke about why they sell it to Britain because ‘Poms are stupid enough to drink it’. Thus, the irony and paradox of Foster’s being a symbol of Australia – it is not like Britain in the sun. You have to live here to know the hidden nuances. Sometimes, the hard way.

 For instance, no-one would have told you that despite all your experience in certain industries in Britain – if you haven’t got “local” experience in Melbourne, then you won’t be employed (https://www.bbc.com/news/business-29206260). Hundreds of my unanswered job applications are testimony to that. Not many people can identify a Welsh accent. People will guess you’re Irish, English and Scottish - then run out of ideas of where else you could possibly come from. Rugby is not important in Melbourne (despite Australia having won the World Cup twice). Neither is driving or speaking fluently. Just abbreviate everything and end each word with an ‘o’. First world problems for graduates of an English and Culture degree, who still value their own culture and wonder why professional instructors are not mandatory in a Western, developed country.

  First world problems or not – a decade later, third world problems seem to be entering the first world. Tomorrow, the general election of the four nations which are anything but united by royalty – and would certainly find it difficult to describe Britain as ‘great’ these days; regardless which side, fragment or definition of politics – you follow. It has become so depressingly divisive that it has split families – and societies right through those home nations. Politics across the world has become so murky and manipulative that no good comes of it. Social media, fake media, fake politicians, social tension – nothing is real. Apart from the poverty, confusion and disunity which has come from misinformation, lies and no real leadership.

 When I left Europe, I wanted to find both myself – and my home. As mentioned, I had nothing to lose at the time – had my country been a thriving place, filled with opportunities – very much how Australians feel about their country – I may not have felt such wanderlust in my veins. I wanted to find my place. A place of belonging. In my home land, not only is it an industrial corpse which has become increasingly depressing to see its degradation in the past decade with each visit – but now won’t trust anyone so will seemingly vote for the ones who have harmed it most. If I really believed statistics being published this week about voting trends; Welsh voters now have lost their own moral compass and found a new level of Stockholm Syndrome, it would seem. My fingers are crossed to breaking point – in hope that those figures were nothing but propaganda. In 2019, anything is possible.

    Wales – which has never had a Conservative majority – and rightly so considering its utter negligence of Wales - also now even being bandied as ‘West Britain’ by the future plans of the aristocratic parties, based in England – relies on tourism and the export of agriculture to survive. Universities help finance some aspects of the very few small cities we have, but outside of these urban entities, there is little growth. Considering the gentrification of larger cities (mostly in England) in the 2000s, isn’t it high time it happened in provincial towns?

 The fact that some of my family – have told me they would probably vote Conservative this week – shows the predicament and alienation which is comparable to that of the 1930s in Germany and brought forth intolerance of racial and cultural variations. “Let’s vote for those who promise the most, have the least recent blemishes on their vague moral compasses – and hope for the best” – seems to be the strategy of casting a vote. The state of the NHS alone should be enough to veer the vote away from Captain Buffoon and his Blue Bigot Army. Elimination should be purely by track record, or by granting new chances. Not by being duped by rhetoric which will be forgotten in six months’ time apart from when a journalist raises the point - when it’s too late. Being loyal to your punisher is such a classist, British trait which seems to be perpetuated.

 Now, at the end of the decade – it should be said that I probably still have little to lose. With no dependents apart from my little canine children, the next chapter now depends on what effects Brexshit will have on travel and work opportunities in Europe and the Northern Hemisphere. As an ex-teacher, hospitality pro and semi-professional DJ and producer – using the “anything is possible” to my advantage is the watchword. With social and international reasonability at an almost-anarchic state of suspended reality, the “one life, one chance” motto has to be imprinted on my mind.

  In my mid-forties, it feels like that the wanderlust needs to be summoned again. I’m finding it harder enduring bad road rules, taking orders from millennials who think they know everything, missing watching my teams at reasonable times, missing festivals which only happen up north, missing comedy such as Vic and Bob; time zone difficulties and being so far away from my interests, as well as friends and family. Coming to Melbourne with a completely open mind was something I’d repeat, should I head for a new habitat. Bearing in mind and researching cultural differences is definitely something I’d do, emphatically and thoroughly. The older you get, alarm bells ring louder with each situation. You just don’t want those bells to be a daily chime, after a while. So the most liveable place for me - would have an essential checklist of being – tolerant, multicultural, musical, a maximum of 3 hours’ time difference to Britain, with an effective infrastructure and not over-expensive. Now, where could that be?

[tomisgar]

Burger King | Initial idea generating

Using the idea generating tips from Mark Stephton’s lecture, I began to jot down a few rough ideas for the Burger King brief. > Sexualising the Whopper - caught in the act, inside the car, porn magazine (thick, juicy, burger lover)  > Zombie Whopper - infectious, can't stop eating the Whopper, halloween themed? > KFC chicken shortage - play on the 2018 KFC chicken shortage > Fast food mascots - Ronald McDonald selling the Whopper > Sarcasm - play with the different Whopper stereotypes (use of liquid smoke, painted on grill marks) > Poo on the self service machines (McDonalds) - playing with the topical story > Drug addict Whopper - payed out like drugs, potential for underlining message > 90′s themed Whopper advert - over-the-top, as if the Whopper is the next big thing, trending topic > ASMR Whopper - Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, sounds of eating/cooking, describing the burger - taste/look, meme, trending topic

[dwestfieldblog]

IT SEEMS TO BE NOW OR FOREVER/ A NEW DISORDER OF THE AGES

(Or is it only ancient and unjustified?) Hail Eris...I escaped England on the day Boris Johnson became the newest puppet of masters, vested interests, donors and manipulators. The evil of of two lessers. 23rd of July, Sirius day (The sun behind the sun). British people prefer characters these days more than actual character. Put it down to the Reality TV facebook twitter lifestyle. A loveable eccentric eh? Blonde and bumbling, good for a laugh huh? Despite the fact that he is a serial barefaced liar, was a very dubious lord mayor of London with highly expensive/ridiculous ideas and utter bollocks at being Foreign Secretary. Boris wrote in 1999 'I am a raving Euro federalist...a pro European of the most violent, dyspeptic and incurable disposition'. (That was until he saw 52 percent of Brits wanted to leave the EU and thought AHA! I smell a way to power.) We all forgive a rogue with boyish charm don't we? Let's see how long the United Kingdom survives. On the day I flew back The New York Times front page had a column: 'Is Johnson how Britain will end?' 

Depressing advert seen on the side of of red London bus...'Bucket Life (KFC) delivered'. Buckets of antibiotic pumped peculiar half 'chicken' type chemicals straight to your door. Good to have the empty bucket handy after one has consumed a feast fit for vomiting straight out again. Obesity well on the rise over there, he says, wolfing an entire packet of chocolate waffles with half a litre of cold milk.

Religion/politics...Nice quoted headline from a Taliban spokesman last month: 'We will not bomb schools or hospitals'. How very decent and noble of them after all these years, perhaps there aren't enough left to bother with. Today on the BBC news their spokesman said they 'never targeted civilians'. Well quite a lot seem to have been accidentally blown up by roadside and suicide bombs...Hard to imagine a decent future for the non fanatical people of Afghanistan, especially the females and shameful that the west is withdrawing because 'peace' is so near. Fnord. Perhaps they will get a cut in the opium profits/prophets. 'Mission accomplished'. Really? Saudi Arabia will now allow women to go out without permission or a guardian. In '2019'? Surely they will microchip them under the veil and have them followed by drones. How long did it take the sheiks just to accept female drivers? Nice folk who agreed to release a woman's rights activist only IF she said she hadn't been tortured. Swine.

'Can Christians in the US survive without bibles? The answer is probably not'. Thus spake the Global Times newspaper, run by the allegedly communist party of China. This, in response to hearing of new US tariffs on Chinese goods...guess where their bibles are made? That's right. 'The spiritual world of most American people is based on China's industrial capability'. Fascinating sentence on many levels. Take five seconds and think on the implications of that, if you will...

I watched several Trump debacles on CNN this summer. As usual, the 'fake news/liberal media' (etc etc) doesn't actually need to make any stories up, he provides a limitless supply of verbatim goodies with which to play. And then tries to deny he ever said them by using outright lies and obfustication (exactly the same as Boris's 'dead cat on the table' idea.) The four congresswomen of colour Trump ranted about...the chanting crowd 'Send her back'....'I didn't like that they did that and I started speaking very quickly'....Live TV coverage showed it took him 13 seconds before he spoke over them, while he turned left and right...and just for a second got that look of shiny eyed pride. His sentence that he had been 'down there' with the first responders on Nine Eleven. Surely his supporters (apart from QAnon who is either a moron, brilliant comedian or Kremlin sock puppet) must know he is lying in their faces..perhaps they really don't care. Like Melania's coat.

One of the congresswomen (Born in Somalia and a naturalised citizen) had made a non racist comment that some congressmen appear to have received money from Israeli businesses to promote their interests. Well..seems likely and fair enough, that is how it usually works everywhere. Those with money pay politicians to dance and the dosh is gleefully accepted. Not just Israel. It looks as if Trump seized on this as a useful way of stirring up manure. Criticising the state of Israel and her government is not racist just because they are Jewish. Corruption is corruption, whatever the colour or creed. And a prostitute is a prostitute. How many of Trump's KKK followers and Republican Christian haters of abortion actually support Israel? Take a calm guess on the percentages of probability. How many 'acting' people has he around him now? (One way of keeping them on their toes...) 'Fat tangerine racist with the brains of a McNugget' indeed. Hopefully he will continue to take no unhealthy exercise and maintain his cheeseburger diet.  

And Yet Another mass slaughter by a man/boy with a gun. In protest at the 'Hispanic invasion'. In Texas. That's right Texas, which used to belong to the Mexicans before the old land grab in the name of oil. Trump rambling that bigotry, racism and white supremacy have no place in America. Well apparently they do and are not diminished by your former and continuing outright lack of total condemnation over the last few years. Although they have been strengthened by your petulant little blonde boy Hitler youth type attitudes towards blacks, Moslems, Native Americans and Mexicans. Germophobia because of colour? (unless the showers are golden) Does darker skin seem dirty to you? You approach black sportsmen and musicians with a type of benevolent fascination rather than actual friendship.  

Extinction Rebellion...Hmm..'And yes, some of us may die in the process', as one of the English leaders of the movement said. Unlikely the 52 year old with a PhD meant himself. However, a placard I saw held aloft by a young protester read; 'WHY AM I BEING EDUCATED IF YOU DON'T LISTEN TO THE EDUCATED' was a highly salient point (albeit without a question mark at the end.) Scientists amass careful evidence of global warming and the politicians, being paid regular large sums by oil, gas, precious metal companies etc, ignore long term survival for the sake of all following generations. Leave it for the kids to inherit a wasteland. However, in the XR handbook, it mentions the protests causing the 'necessary material disruption and economic cost'. Costs which will be mostly paid by those on average to minimum incomes...doesn't really square with XR also seeking the 'redistribution of wealth'. Marxist twats masturbating their egos. Personally, I am far more on the side of the rebellious, always have been and will be, just seems a shame XR seem so full of smugness, radical unbalanced vegans and hatred. (and I would like to know exactly where their funding comes from) Not possible to be a quiet, determined but peaceful fanatic. I have always liked Jaz Coleman's old quote that 'Fanaticism is the only way of dealing with a situation of overwhelming odds.' At last reason makes perfect sense! And speaking of those who love Mother Earth...

Who didn't love Putin's wonderful speech to a manufacturing and industrial forum in Yekaterinburg?....Hilarious stand up comedy as he asked 'How many birds are dying?' (By flying into wind farm turbines.) And followed that heartfelt classic up with 'This is no joke, the worms crawl right out of the ground' (due to the shaking...) 'This is the consequence of these modern forms of energy production'. In other words, keep buying oil and gas and sod clean solar and wind power because some worms and birds have a problem with it. How does the universe not laugh him into a Siberian gulag? Trump had said that wind turbines 'are killing all the eagles'. He didn't mention the worms. Don't mention the worms! It is lovely to know Mr Putin cares so much about our feathered and slimy friends. (Good to see Russia welcomed back into the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe after 5 years out in the howling wilderness for its invasion of Crimea. Well, the PCE were running very low on funding and Russia owed them a lot of well needed roubles. These assemblies cost money...and souls for Yog Sothoth)

Many hundreds of protesters have been arrested in Moscow over the last couple of weeks. They had been asking a fair question of where all the opposition parties and leaders had gone for the local elections. And the main opposition leader was moved from prison to hospital (and then back again) due to having had 'an allergic reaction'. Well, poison can do that to a man. Especially when he thwarts the Kremlin in any way. Whoever described Russia as a democracy? Not Solzhenitsyn. 11th August, one week after it told America that it is watching its missile programme VERY closely and will 'match every step with one of our own', Russia tells Google to stop advertising 'illegal demonstrations' or it will take action against it. Lovely news.

Meanwhile in Hong Kong...How long before the veritable Mrs Lam 'invites' the tanks in to help? Good luck with freedom people, be careful. At least Li Pcheng is dead. (one of the minds behind the June 1989 massacre of students in Peking) As one newspaper over here said 'One butcher is gone, others remain.' Detention Centres/'Vocational Schools' have been set up in Tibet where lucky students 10-20 years old can 'learn law (!) language and employable skills' and renounce the Dalai Lama. The latter is non optional. And the former. China has said the camps are 'all expenses paid humane boarding schools'. Humane is not a word for semantic realists to associate with their regime. One more time, Tibet is NOT China in any way whatsoever and certainly not spiritually. A fair number of Huawei workers were educated at and worked with and for China's varied military agencies. Enough to be worrying that Britain has yet to refuse them contracts involved in building the 5G mobile network. Smart phones for foolish people. Are these really the folk to have linked up to a telecommunications network in a democratic country?

Speaking of which...Seems that most folk in Britain have not got the smallest idea how much they have been manipulated. Direct links between Boris, (still in close touch with Steve Bannon) Farage and Trump. The well interwoven threads of populists pandering to the lowest common denominator in the name of self gain. The democracies of the western world are being turned against themselves in the name of foul hearted demagogues. Lack of balanced education has made a deep mass unawareness of actual facts. Human emotions are being weaponised to make choices based on wrong information.  It has always been so but it is far easier now due to false twitter accounts/facebook et al. Trump's entire vision is based exactly on genuine false news and what he and the other similar familiars are promoting is a virus of illusion and outright lies.  

Psyops..(psychological operations) have been used for centuries. There is much wrong with the EU, but they are way closer to us (Britain) in spirit and democratic culture than Russia and China. Those voting for more control of borders will eventually be gifted with less and less freedom but at least it will have been their democratic choice. Arf. The majority of Britons believe they are making patriotic choices. They are not. They are assisting in the break up and destabilising of friendships based on level headed, pragmatical agreements. And into this weakness will move those whose only interest is mass control. We are serving our enemies.

But that said, it is good to be aware that 'Opinions result from perceptions and perceptions reinforce opinions which then further control perceptions, in a repeating loop that logic can never penetrate.' Stasis and decay result unless a little shock of the new is introduced one way or the other to 'startle the brain enough to re-frame its experiences'. So there you have it. Or as Buddha said, 'We are the result of everything we have thought.' Makes you think, doesn't it? Ha. How do you know you are thinking? So...You knew that would happen but you did it anyway...

Back to normality....

While in London, I played with my band and after we had played a fast song called Natural Chaos, (a classic) the bass player told me I had shape shifted and looked like a reptile. No drugs involved. Very disturbing to be told this as I have various theories about those who look reptilian. Oh well, perhaps cold rage and evil are still within. Shame. I spent three and a half hours one afternoon freeing a bumble bee from a large black spider's web in the garden. Got it out, gave it a couple of flowers to suck from and get energy, some rain drops of water to help clean itself, tiny tiny bits of hedge twig to gently attempt to get the web off like a careful brain surgeon. Got two legs free, very gently helped clean one half of the head (it didn't fight or try to sting me) Put it in sunshine for some seconds to power it up, then back into cooler shade and back to work. Absolute focus of three hours. Web is VERY difficult to get off. I left it alone with some more rain drops from a flower tray to drink from. Went back, tried again until darkness fell. Had to leave it by side of flower bed, still half covered by binding web. In the morning found the bee was dead but had managed to remove the rest of the web itself and die clean. The energy it must have spent would have been massive. Wondered about attempting to mess with nature and whether it is justified but I could not have left it wrapped up and trapped. So, I am a hippy reptile. And according to someone in my family I am also a Socialist and cynical. Cynical I can live with (having checked the exact meaning and origin) but bollocks to Socialism. Labels are truly ridiculous...Libertarian anarchist is closer to a useful definition. Or failed mystic. Arf arf arf. The wizard without any whizz. Maybe.

'Whatever is done for love is beyond good and evil.' Hmmm...First, try define Love.  What do you seek? Happiness and learning, Freedom and magick...Balance?   Between the I and the AM, there sparks the relay of Will and vision and so, creation. 'Not until the male become female and the female becomes male shall ye enter the kingdom of Heaven, Jesus (Yeshua ben Yosif) in the Gospel of Thomas....So, All together now..Yod-He-Vau-He...(To couples too withdrawn to truly open their hearts, fearing pain or too guilty to express their inner nature to their partner or themselves.) Sex without true passion leads to orgasm but without connection by those who have been taught or who have learned to be afraid of love. Chasing orgasms is a fraction of the colossal energy and brain change possible. When Earth blends with Heaven, the astral is born and all take on aspects of the other, empowering all. Merge the fields, unify the forces and don't rush before the fields are charged. Open and focus.

I read in the New York Times today about various problems with tumblr...would be a pity if it vanished. All I have seen in the years I have been on, has been of far more heart and good spirited humour and care than other sources of individual expression on line for free.  All the best back to school...All Hail Discordia and see you with Love at Halloween. Keep expanding your reality labyrinths until now or forever....

[deliciouslymycollectionstuf-blog]

IHOP Menu Prices

IHOP Menu Prices

They appeared like fridge but they're greater than that. It’s actually closest to Sonic the Hedgehog 3, as it has lots of that entries powerups (like an electric shield that lets you double leap and entice rings). It’s not just the display that’s improved, although. Berkeley cigarettes NJ, cigarette costs naples King William, Canada slim cigarettes, Newport cigarette purchase, More cigarette content. Parliament cigarette USA, buy Extra contact, Prince cigarette hoodie, order on-line cigarettes Junedale, Davidoff cigarette strengths, prime cigarette brands, regal cigarettes competitors, Richmond kretek cigarettes, Superkings cigarette filters. My dad and mom beloved their Durian Cendol (forgot to take a pic) that got here with giant blop of durian puree on high of the shaved ice which looked so attractive that Capn't Hook asked for one too! It also came with fries and a few dipping sauces. Melamine comeback that China's market order, particularly the dairy market needs more commitment to reform relatively than reform courage.

I have never thrown away a single chew of an ice cream cake from Dairy Queen, however I have thrown away almost whole cakes from other locations. Extremely really helpful. Two of the opposite Dessert options that have been out there included a Tres Leches Cake and a Gluten-free Brownie Sundae. Nonetheless there's a lot more choices than iceberg lettuce. That's it. So there will not be a whole lot to say. How saddddd. I say keep the Chickens recent foreverrrr! Now, is this any more of a revelation than Supersize Me, i.e. that if you eat McDonald's day by day and exercise it's healthier than consuming McDonald's each day and never exercising? Finally, Olive Backyard increased their gross sales as a result of the publicity made people suppose about eating spaghetti. Olive wood is available in numerous shades and it may be resistant to decay. I imply it is quick meals so it is not like they can make it Medium Uncommon. Still among the best commonplace burgers within the quick meals world. They spend most of their time sitting and consuming, however they don’t hibernate like other bears as a result of their food supply is accessible year-round. How often will we observe issues which grew to be outdated and forgotten from the previous out of the blue develop into fashionable yet again.The relationship between vogue and time never ceases to shock me.

I’m 30, so minus the 4 years I was away for school (regardless that I used to be residence in the summers), I've been riding the subway commonly, if not each day, for over twelve years. Sell Revenue progress has accelerated and practitioners over the earlier 12 months, export volume, total profits, complete taxes and fixed-asset investment growth have come down. Situated near Luang Prabang you may rent a boat or songthaew to take you the 25 km down river. The intelligence of border collies could make training very effective so long as it is different sufficient not to get bored. To get a bus that goes throughout the border from Don Det to Cambodia simply shop round to search out one. Additionally by no means get a tear drop under your left eye, Meaning that you have killed somebody within the joint. The South Seashore Food regimen means choosing the proper carbs and the precise fats to eat wholesome and drop some pounds. kfc jamestown

Is it legal for a man living in North Carolina to be buried in South Carolina? Publisher: randthq1su Why Man Skinny Jeans Are Essential In early times males are usually not anxious about their dressing and elegance which was working along the trend world. I don't assume the cashiers are trained nicely right here. Publisher: rahul roy Suppose about pizza varieties and you'll be shipped to a terrain of delicious pies that you have already savored together with the types which can be but to be relished. Lobster recipes are recommended by the doctors for all patients with some type of coronary heart troubles. Leave the lobster within the refrigerator until the water is boiling and you might be prepared to start cooking. These are the brand new Walls. There are several pizza locations in my city. And you might be all set for the pizza occasion within the backyards with your pals.

You know, the kind you see flying in the air from that pizza store in downtown New York. Coupon - See page three of Kohl’s advert for particulars. They will utilize this code as a White Castle coupon on their following go to to the company’s restaurants. With the final of their savings, they opened The Cheesecake Manufacturing unit Bakery and began promoting Evelyn’s cheesecakes to eating places all through Los Cinnabon on facebook Angeles. So the final one up was actually the one I was most excited to strive- the BLT Crunchwrap Slider. Severely, every little thing. I'll have one of each menu merchandise please! He's considered one of six shuttlers from Petaling Badminton Membership (PBC) who've received an official invitation letter from BAM to join the nationwide group on the Academy Badminton Malaysia (ABM). Learn how to Cook Thick-Reduce Bacon How many Calories in a Turkey Membership Sandwich on Wheat? There will be some menu cuts too. Before selling any product online or at eBay you need to ensure there is a demand for the product. Going inside the restaurant there was a mini display of well-known American stuffs like the HARLEY DAVIDSON bikes. There you may have our record of the 10 best Sonic video games.

little caesars detroit style hot n ready is the best budget pizza in america go ahead @ me

— Tyler Coleman (@JoobMagnum) October 29, 2017

I have a recipe that may be very condense with carrots and spices. Do not miss this. You and I've a life to live. They are also great picks for candidates who are looking to broaden their profession into lead chef roles sooner or later. The icy blue, snow-capped determine loomed in the gap like a mythic colossus, its mystique compounded by the truth that it seemed to teleport away the minute you stopped looking at it. PPJ's, canoeing at all times jogs my memory of visiting my Uncle Elbert and summer season camp the place I went for eight years and Pat Summerall's voice at all times brings me again to my youth. Located in Grand Atrium of Al Ain Mall, the 4400 sqft restaurant has a seating capability of 170 and aims to transmit an genuine Californian atmosphere. After a long run look, we will observe that the current sign is unattractive for buyers.

[hannahkingviscom]

ADVERTISING RESEARCH

Advertising can be defined as the practice of getting public attention to a specific product, service, event, need etc. Adverts can be seen within the media of newspapers, magazines, TV adverts or billboards.

GOOD ADVERTISING

COMPANY - NIVEA

AGENCY - TBWA\NEBOKO

This ad is very simple yet effective at promoting its product. Using the placement of niveas night cream tub lid to form a moon crescent creates this. This successfully coveys the product of night cream across to the audience as well as the brand of nivea. Due to its brand colour of navy being used throughout. This ad is also well suited to its older audience due to the simplistic and easy layout that feels mature.

COMPANY - IBM

AGENCY - OGILVY & MATHER FRANCE

IBM has created an interactive and functional poster for their “Smarter Cities campaign”. In the form of outdoor ads that can be physically used as ramps, shelter or benches. I believe that this form of advertising is very successful, due to the public interaction. Allowing the advert to stay within the publics mind as it was helpful to them within their day, not just a poster that looks nice on a wall. It was designed to be “not only beautiful, but useful to city dwellers”. As well as this it is placed around a city where the campaigns target audience will be to see the advert. Visually all the posters work well as a group. All having the same composition of text, being in the top right corner. Furthermore a very simple image used to help illustrate the posters purpose. Yet the only change being to the colour.

COMPANY - IKEA

AGENCY - MOTHER LONDON

Ikea’s campaign to announce a new store opening in Sheffield is very visually interesting to me. At first look it doesn't correctly communicate “new store opening” well, apart from the text. Yet the advert is successful because of this, as it causes the audience to look more closely at the image to see what its message is. The message being announcing a new store opening, so household items are placed in suspended preparation. The objects are floating in anticipation for the home storage that ikea will bring. On a whole the 3 posters work well as a group, due to all using a pastel colour pallete and same grid composition. This invites the audience to examine the advert.

COMPANY - THE SURFRIDER FOUNDATION

AGENCY - POLLINATE

Surfriders ad campaign creates a dramatic impact to the audience. For me I was firstly stricken by the visual of sushi wrapped in rubbish/plastic. Of which successfully communicates the ads slogan of “what goes in the ocean goes in you”. Conveying the fact that we are ruining our oceans and fish by littering in them. 

COMPANY - WWF

AGENCY - LEO BURNETT

WWF’s campaign at first seems rather gory. But due to this goriness the ad becomes successful at gaining the audiences attention. Of which WWF needs to do to save species from extinction. Much like surf riders campaign the imagery used is successfully at conveying the ads slogan visually. WWFs campaign demonstrates that if we stop one aspect of the animal trade then we can break down all the other aspects due to the supply and demand of the market. Creating a sense of consciousness as we are the only ones who can stop animals from going extinct.

BAD ADVERTISING

SOURCED FROM MAIL

Personally I feel that this is bad advertisement. Even though the flyer successfully conveys the company of tree and garden services. Done by the green imagery of trees the type does not. They used a detailed circus/retro style font for the word “quality”. In my opinion this type does the exact opposite of quality, and actually down grades the services. Giving the customer the impression of tackiness.

SOURCED FROM MAIL

This food advertisement first strikes me as cheap and tacky. Due to the bold clashing colours and pictures used. The ad is also very cluttered to include all of the menus deals and info on the front. So cluttered in fact some of the type over laps with the image in an unappealing way. To improve this advertisement I would stick to using 2 typefaces and limit the amount of garish photographs of food used.

COMPANY - NIVEA

At first look this ad looks very visually pleasing. However when you read further into the type the advert is bad due to their misleading slogan. “white is purity” can be seen as a very racial statement, especially when targeted at a middle eastern audience. A less discriminatory slogan would help improve this ad. The slogan doesn't really have much relevance to the brand either. At least a relevance that will help boost sales of this product.

COMPANY - KFC

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=2&v=KykM1kwdaOA

KFC’s “nothing but the chicken campaign” is unsuccessful at promoting the fast food chain. Due to the advertisement making me feel sympathy for the chicken. The cute chicken can connect with the audience and actually prevent them from wanting to eat the chicken. This advert is also very negative and could be seen as upsetting to vegetarians watching the ad. As well as this the ad can be seen as false advertisement, due to it being well known that kfc chicken farms are unethical.

COMPANY - PANASONIC

There seems to be a running theme between the bad ad campaigns I have found. This theme being that the slogan can be seen as offensive or unethical. For example “shoot your girlfriend” may seem humorous to some viewers, yet to others may be hurtful. Also the slogan doesn't really promote the panasonic camera, nor does it make me want to buy it.

[mydayasitwastoday-blog]

08/02/2017 - Accidental Vegetarianism

my day as it was today was a realisation that would shock and appall my father ... I've accidentally become a vegetarian. I mean, I haven't in even the slightest way but I kinda have. and if I didn't catch it this early it could've become a thing. I've not even considered having any meat to eat since Sunday, for any meal. and I know what you're thinking, you're thinking "SUNDAY! that was three days ago ...," and you'd be right to be skeptical but I always have the meat (stop it ...). I was brought up in a family where every meal was completed with some kind of meat - and I don't just mean my nuclear family, but I mean my entire extended family on both sides. I was vegetarian before for a month. but that was mostly just to see if I could do it, and I couldn't before ... we (me and my friend Pat, my best friend from life), we made a documentary about it called 'Matt and Two Veg.' and when I say we made a documentary, you should here read, "we thought of a funny title and made the first two minutes." we made great movies in our younger days; we made a Star Wars film called Star Wars, Episode VII: Rebel Assault and, honestly, it was probably 4000x better than The Force Awakens ... I've kept my shock vegetarianism a secret, until now. I've finally decided to out myself and tell the world - the 12 people that read this blog (okay, fine, 3 people ... ). I think I couldn't be veggie before, I can say veggie now because I am one, because I was eating the wrong stuff. too many people think they're being a good vegetarian and just eat chips and crisps all day long. that's why you get loads of fat vegetarians, they're not even eating vegetables ... like they're carbotarians if anything - I know a few carbotarians, they're called EVERY FEMALE IN THE WORLD! I am having to go to extreme measures to nip this in the bud, and have planned a huge massive Sunday roast ... maybe then my Dad will forgive me. but only maybe ... once was more than he could handle. also I keep seeing an advert for a bucket of KFC Zinger Mini Fillets and physically drooling all over myself, so I think this vegetarian phase (much like this post) is all a load of bull ... there's 5 minutes you're not getting back. BYE NOW ...