#them calling the emergencies only alternate number with test results instead of my number

[lordofthecoffee]

Yeowch! They really jabbed her for the needle aspiration, but hopefully this means a good sample for tests. Should have blood work sometime tomorrow and the cytology results after the weekend.

The salmon oil and coconut oil for her joints are adding up though-- she's 40 lbs on the nose no longer. Guess we're going to have to cut back on the kibble a tad.

[yasbxxgie]

When the former NFL cheerleader Natalie Nirchi stopped menstruating at age 17, she was diagnosed with polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), a hormone disorder affecting up to 10 percent of women of reproductive age. She didn’t initially show any of the physical symptoms, like excess hair growth, cystic acne, or obesity, but a blood test revealed that she had high levels of testosterone and an ultrasound showed cysts on her ovaries.

“My doctor mentioned that one day I might have trouble getting pregnant, but didn’t offer any other information about the disorder,” Nirichi said. Other than the absence of her period, PCOS did not significantly impact her life until college, when she began experiencing shooting pains in her pelvis, mood swings, and rapid weight gain despite a rigorous exercise routine.

“It wasn’t like I turned 21 and started partying, it was like I turned 21 and all of a sudden, I was extremely depressed. No matter what I did, I just kept building this layer of extra weight around my midsection,” she said.

PCOS is genetic and presents differently in each woman of childbearing age. For some women, symptoms emerge shortly after they begin menstruating. Others may not show signs of the disorder until later in life, or after substantial weight gain, and many don’t receive a diagnosis until they are struggling to get pregnant. A community-based prevalence study published in 2010 found that approximately 70 percent of the 728 women in the cohort had PCOS, but had no pre-existing diagnosis.  

Contrary to the implication of “polycystic,” some women with the condition don’t have any cysts. A diagnosis requires only two of the following three criteria to be met: elevated levels of male sex hormones (which can cause excess hair growth, acne, and baldness), irregular or absent periods, and/or at least 12 follicular cysts on one or both ovaries.

“If a woman has fewer than eight menstrual periods a year on a chronic basis, she probably has a 50 to 80 percent chance of having polycystic ovary syndrome based on that single observation,” said John Nestler, the chair of the department of internal medicine at Virginia Commonwealth University. “But if she has infrequent menstruation and she has elevated levels of androgens such as testosterone in the blood, than she has a greater than 90 percent chance of having the condition.”

When the syndrome was first described in 1935 by American gynecologists Irving Stein, and Michael Leventhal, it was considered a rare disorder. Today as many as five million women in the United States may be affected, according to the Department of Health and Human Services, but researchers are still just beginning to uncover the disorder’s full impact.

“Classically, we thought of PCOS primarily as an infertility disorder or a cosmetic annoyance, but we now know that it’s also a metabolic disorder and a serious long-term health concern,” Nestler said.

According to a recent study published in the Endocrine Society’s March 2015 issue of Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, women diagnosed with PCOS are twice as likely to be hospitalized for heart disease, diabetes, mental-health conditions, reproductive disorders, and cancer of the uterine lining. The cost of evaluating and providing care to women with PCOS is approximately $4.36 billion per year.

The definitive cause of PCOS is unknown, but researchers have found a strong link to insulin resistance, a genetic condition often associated with diabetes, in which the muscle, fat, and liver cells do not respond properly to insulin and thus cannot easily absorb glucose (sugar) from the bloodstream. As a result, the body produces higher and higher levels of insulin to help glucose enter the cells.

“The excess insulin that's being produced stimulates the ovary to make testosterone, which can interfere with ovulation, rendering many women infertile,” said Nestler. PCOS is the most common cause of infertility in industrialized nations. “The exact cellular and molecular mechanisms are still being explored and are not completely understood.”

In one study, insulin resistance was found in 95 percent of overweight women with PCOS and 75 percent of lean women with PCOS. Perhaps relatedly, women with PCOS have a more than 50 percent risk of getting Type 2 diabetes or pre-diabetes before age 40.

“We are seeing an explosion in polycystic ovary syndrome in adolescent girls, and I think it’s due to the fact that we are also seeing an explosion in obesity in adolescent girls,” Nestler said. “It’s quite possible that if those girls had remained a healthy weight, that they would still carry the genes that predispose them, but they wouldn’t be expressing the disorder.”

Healthy diet and exercise is the first line of intervention most doctors recommend for overweight women with PCOS. Research shows that a 5 to 7 percent reductionof body weight over a six-month period can lower insulin and androgen levels, restoring ovulation and fertility in more than 75 percent of patients.

Angela Grassi, a registered dietitian who also has PCOS, says that because women who are overweight are likely to experience more insulin resistance than those who are not, they can get locked into a cycle of weight gain. “The more weight you gain, the more corresponding insulin your body produces, and the more you continue to gain weight,” she said.

But this underlying metabolic dysfunction is at work even in women of a healthy weight, according to Daniel Dumesic, a reproductive endocrinologist at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center.

“Research shows that unlike most women, lean women with PCOS tend to burn protein instead of fat while they’re sleeping. This might explain one of the reasons why despite their best efforts, it’s much harder for women with PCOS to lose weight,” he said.

Many doctors prescribe the drug metformin to help regulate the amount of glucose in the blood. The medication is traditionally used to treat Type 2 diabetes, as it makes the body more sensitive to insulin, and decreases the amount of glucose the liver releases. A meta-analysis published online in June in the journal Human Reproductive Update demonstrated that when metformin is combined with lifestyle modifications such as diet and exercise, it has been shown to help women with PCOS lose more body fat, achieve lower blood sugar, and improve menstruation better than lifestyle modification alone.

Regular menstruation is important for the prevention of endometrial cancer. Women with PCOS are three times more likely to have endometrial cancer than women without. When a woman isn’t menstruating on a frequent basis, the lining of the uterus (endometrium) can begin to grow excessively and undergo atypical cell changes resulting in a precancerous condition called endometrial hyperplasia. If left untreated, this can develop into full endometrial cancer. Hormonal birth-control pills are often prescribed to help women with PCOS shed their endometrium more regularly, an important measure for preventing the overgrowth of cells in the uterus.

“If a woman knows from a young age that she may have a more difficult time than her peers maintaining a healthy body weight and reproductive system, than she can make sustainable lifestyle changes early on,” said Dumesic.

Unfortunately, awareness of the condition is not widespread and many physicians do not perform the necessary diagnostic tests or recognize that PCOS has broad and potentially devastating consequences. According to the non-profit support organization, PCOS Challenge, Inc., PCOS awareness and support organizations receive less than 0.1 percent of the government, corporate, foundation, and community funding that other health conditions receive.

Only a small number of researchers receive funding to study PCOS and most of the money goes toward studying the infertility side of the disorder. Nestler says women would benefit if more of the funding went toward researching the metabolic mechanisms of PCOS that underlie the development of diabetes and heart disease.

Dumesic believes the complex metabolic, hypothalamic, pituitary, ovarian, and adrenal interactions that characterize the condition may be to blame for the deficit in PCOS specialists and researchers.

“When any condition crosses disciplines and doesn’t have a full investment in [one of them], it often falls through the cracks. There are elements of reproduction in PCOS, but most reproductive endocrinologists mostly do in-vitro fertilization and are not necessarily interested in metabolism. Medical endocrinologists, who are mostly interested in metabolism, aren’t usually interested in reproduction and ovarian function,” Dumesic said.

For women who don’t receive timely, appropriate care for PCOS in early adolescence, the development of symptoms such as facial-hair growth can become more challenging to treat. Brandy Cramer, 33, a program officer at The Cameron Foundation, from Midlothian, Virginia says her doctors told her she just wasn’t trying hard enough to lose weight and dismissed her when she requested they run blood tests or suggest alternatives to the birth-control pills that gave her intense migraines. Cramer grew facial hair and has only been able to remove 50 percent of it, even after expensive laser hair-removal treatment.

“I had no support or resources to learn how to manage my PCOS. It wasn’t until I was able to connect with other women who had it that I started to feel less isolated and learned how to advocate for myself,” said Cramer.

Gretchen Kubacky, a health psychologist who also has PCOS, says the condition has a significant impact on the mental health of her clients on both a situational and chemical level.

“Often times the cosmetic issues are huge, depending on the severity. When you summarize the typical PCOS patient as someone who is fat, has acne, and male-pattern baldness, that is definitely depressing, but that in and of itself is not enough to cause depression,” she said. “It’s the hormonal imbalances that have a real neurobiological affect on the brain and we have evidence that the excess of androgens in women is definitely linked to depression.”

Sara Eaton, a 30-year-old ballroom dance teacher based in Augusta, Georgia, says PCOS has had a significant impact on her health, body image, and self-confidence since she was diagnosed at age 15.

“It’s a frustrating, difficult, and sometimes heartbreaking thing to deal with,” Eaton said. Eaton’s PCOS has given her male-pattern baldness, acne, obesity, and skin tags. In spite of her challenging symptoms, she dances and works out several times a week. “There aren't many women who look like me who can get on the floor and move like I do, who are comfortable enough in their skin to step into the spotlight and demand that people look at them,” she said.

Until PCOS is better-understood, Eaton says women need to look out for themselves and their fellow “cysters.”

“Don't just trust what the first doctor you see says without doing some research,” she says. “Find another woman with PCOS, go online to some of these support groups. Find a reproductive endocrinologist who knows what they're doing. Talk to other cysters, read the articles, look for doctor recommendations. We have a syndrome that is so complicated and confusing, one of the best ways we can help ourselves is to be proactive and make sure we find the best and most knowledgeable caregivers available to us.”

[nebris]

An independent case for the US Navy to return to diesel-electric submarines

Opinion piece with a ronin research approach - Alternative title Diesel Boats forever tomorrow see http://www.hisutton.com/USN_Diesel-Sub.html lus following post for pictures etc With nearly 80 submarines, the US Navy is without question the most powerful submarine force on the planet. Since the late 1950s US Navy submarine building has been almost exclusively focused on nuclear powered designs. The last diesel powered front line boat was decommissioned in 1990. Since then there have been several voices calling for the Submarine Force to have at least some diesel-boats on hand. Those voices, while getting louder after the Swedes loaned a very quiet Gotland Class Air Independent Power (AIP) submarine to the US for testing in 2005-6, have largely been drowned out. This article takes a fresh look at the potential for cutting-edge diesel submarines to increase the potency of the US Navy. Swedish AIP equipped diesel-electric submarine Gotland with a US Navy aircraft carrier in the background. Exercises with the Swedish submarine made headlines and reinvigorated the nuclear-versus-diesel debate. The arguments made for diesel boats (a submarine is always a ‘boat’ not a ship) generally focus on their low cost (compared to nuclear boats) and stealth. The topic arose at the U.S. House Seapower and Force Projection Subcommittee in March when three alternative Future Fleet Architecture studies were debated. There is an excellent write-up at the WAR IS BORING blog which makes the cost-vs-capability argument for adding diesel boats. It makes the point that the Japanese Navy’s Soryu Class boats cost around 20% of the US Navy’s Virginia Class SSN. And the argument against diesel-electric submarines has come from many places. There is a justified fear that if the US Navy accepts that some diesel boats would be useful, they would be admitting that they don’t need so many nuclear boats. It follows that the submarine fleet would be cut and the cheaper and less capable diesel submarines would be forced to fill the holes, creating an inferior force to the one we have today. A variation of this argument is put forward by the US shipbuilding industry which fears that construction of diesel boats, even for export (e.g. to Taiwan) is an unacceptable risk to their ability to build the more expensive nuclear boats. A more nuanced argument which may be popular among US Navy submariners is that diesel boats are simply too slow. Nuclear boats are much faster and can cross the Pacific or Atlantic in time to reach the action. As a strategic asset, submarines may be needed in any corner of the globe at short notice so speed counts. A fair point which we will come back to. I polled my generally well informed Twitter followers and found that over half say ‘Yes’ to the question “Should the US Navy have a new class of diesel-electric submarine for Special Forces and littoral combat?”. Cunningly I started the poll in the morning European time to see whether there were differing views in Europe to US. There wasn’t, the balance of sentiments remained surprising stable throughout the voting period even after my US followers, many of them submariners, came online: This article takes the form of ronin research which is masterless, and therefore free to challenge the conventional thinking on this topic, and highlight emerging capabilities which are beyond the scope of current planning. For the sake of this article we shall call the conceptual US Navy diesel submarine an SWS (Shallow Water Submarine), carefully avoiding the jinx of ‘Littoral Combat Submarine’ (LCS). Core capabilities of a future US Navy diesel-electric boat

The argument for diesel submarines put forward in this article is not about cost, or stealth. It is about missing capabilities in the US arsenal. Since the retirement of the diesel-electric USS Grayback in 1984 the US Navy has been without a dedicated special forces submarine. Grayback acted as a host submarine for SEAL Delivery Vehicles (SDVs) which could be carried in two integral hangars. She was replaced by a system of six detachable Dry Deck Shelters (DDS) which can be fitted to a number of specially modified attack submarines. Currently 10 Virginia and 3 Los Angeles Class nuclear powered attack submarines (SSNs) can each carry a single shelter and four Ohio Class guided missile submarines (SSGNs) can carry two each. The larger DDS and progressive updates in equipment do mean that the US Navy has the world’s leading Special Forces submarine capability. There are plans underway to increase the size of the DDS to accommodate the latest generation of SDVs. There are also plans to use the vertical Virginia Payload Modules (VPS) on future submarines to carry SDVs. The Virginia Class are large submarines which are unable to operating in as shallow water as most diesel-electric boats. And the Ohio SSGNs are even larger at 560 ft (170 m). The new Virginia Block-IV will have a 70ft (21m) insert for extra vertical launch tubes making them similar in length to the SSBNs. The four twin-DDS Ohio Class SSGNs are due to be retired between 2026 and 2028, leaving only the single-DDS Virginias. This will lead to a diminishing SDV (/LDUUV) host submarine capability in the next 10 years (although the Virginia Block-IV’s could conceivably carry SDVs/LDUUVs in their vertical tubes). USS Florida (SSGN 728) operating in the Mediterranean, 2014. The four modified Ohio Class SSGNs are impressive boats and can carry 66 SEALs, two SDVs plus 126 UGM-109E Tomahawk cruise missiles. With the DDS removed the Tomahawk load increases to 154. But their sheer scale is also their downside for inshore Special Operations. Note that a discussion of USS Jimmy Carter’s unique capabilities which may or may not include this type of mission is beyond the scope of this article. However the DDS system has several hidden drawbacks. Firstly the host submarines are very large and cannot operate close inshore. This is partially compensated by better ranges for SDVs which can be launched further from their target, and anyway the submariners don’t like bringing their boats too far inshore where they are more vulnerable. Secondly, the submarines cannot hover or sit on the sea bottom so launch and recovery of Special Forces has to take place in open water which adds complexity and, to an extent, increases risks for the personnel. And thirdly, as a result of the first two, US Navy submarines are less suited to deploying divers who use Diver Propulsion Devices (DPDs) which are smaller and cheaper than SDVs but also slower and use more effort. In themselves DPDs are no substitute for SDVs but having this capability for some occasions might increase the breadth of missions. Another altogether subtler problem resulting from the DDS is that using it detracts from the submarine’s primary wartime capability of sinking enemy ships and submarines. DDS incur negligible penalties on the host submarine but the Special Forces mission diverts their attention and may impose restrictions on attacking enemy ships if they are spotted as to do so might blow the cover of the SF mission. Therefore Special Forces fear that the host submarines may not be made available in a full conflict scenario. The SWS is therefore primarily a Special Forces submarine, there for USSOCOM (US Special Operations Command) even during the hottest shooting wars. And she would take them much closer to their targets, reducing the drain of long journeys in SDVs. However, she would also be equally suited to ISR (Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance), attacking enemy ships which hug the coast to avoid the larger SSNs out to sea, and contribute to the destruction of land targets with cruise missiles or future submarine launched missiles (loitering UAVs etc). Importantly the handful of SWS (2-6) would be in addition to the existing fleet of SSNs and SSGNs, not as a replacement. And the SWS would be suitable for export, for example to the UK (who have no money), Netherlands or Taiwan. Shallow Water Submarine (SWS)

Working backwards from the dimensions of various elements we would want to include, the SWS is approximately 230 ft (70m) long and 32 ft (10.6m) tall overall. The pressure hull is 8m in diameter allowing for three decks with a generous headroom. Displacement is in the region of 4,000 tons which is at the top-end of diesel-electric submarines. Compared to the US Navy’s current Virginia Class block-III nuclear powered submarine the SWS is just 60% of the length, 80% of the hull diameter and about half the displacement. The most distinctive feature is that the SWS is a sailless design. This has been a recurring theme in submarine design with both US and Russian studies, previously held back by the mast requirements of previous generations of boats. This would have hydrodynamic advantages but the main reason in the SWS’ case is to reduce the overall height of the boat, allowing it to operate in shallower water. It is in fact lower than most two-deck diesel-electric submarines which have a sail. For surface navigation a collapsible collar would be fitted similar to those on the DCS (Dry Combat Submersible) currently entering service with USSOCOM. Overall however, the fairweather sail can be seen as a luxury which although it will be missed, the SWS will be better off without. The sail can be removed thanks to the use of electro-optical masts instead of traditional periscopes which means that the masts no longer have to be in the control room. Combined with an expectation that other mast functions can be more compact than on previous generations of submarines, all the masts can be buried with the hull. The masts would employee a degree of modularity similar to the Universal Modular Mast System (UMMS) on the Virginia Class. However, compactness would reign over modularity. The control room and operations room can therefore be moved well forward into the front of the pressure hull, eliminating through traffic. The captain’s periscope stand would be completely removed with monitors being used instead. A fallback miniature electro-optical periscope display would be provided for low-power situations. Modern flat-screen monitors, small computers and increased automation would reduce the bulk of the control room stations. This would contribute to reducing the size of the control room overall but it would also translate into much more space. The operations room(s), primarily for coordinating Intelligence and Special Forces missions would be immediately behind the control room, and the captain’s cabin, ward room etc behind that on the upper deck. The overall height of the boat, 32 ft (10.6m), allows for vertical launch containers. These are based on the VPM (Virginia Payload Module) with only minor modifications. This gives the boat a 8ft (2.6m) deep casing on top, allowing room for access trunks, mast heads etc. Although the hull is technically of single-hull construction (with the reinforcing frames inside the hull), the casing is extended down to a chine running along the lower hull, giving an appearance similar to a double hull boat. This is intended to reduce the active-sonar cross-section while also allowing the fairing-in of the side-mounted sonar arrays and larger-diameter towed sonar array tube. The central section area of casing besides the Vertical Payload Modules (VPMs) would contain ballast tanks similar to the saddle tanks on World War Two fleet boats. Together with the main ballast tanks fore and aft, these would contribute to increased levels of reserve buoyancy to compensate for the relatively large hangars. Hangars

Faired-in under the casing are two integral hangars. Experience on US Navy submarines equipped with DDS has proven the advantage of having twin hangars so this is considered default for SWS. These are positioned facing aft like the current DDS so that they can be used which the boat is underway (unlike hangars in the bow facing forward like giant torpedo tubes). The hangars are also right on top of the submarine so there is the minimum depth of water above them. This can reduce the depth that the divers are operating at which reduces risks. Although distinct, the hangars would be similar enough in size and configuration to minimize cross-training from the existing extended DDS now entering service. One advancement, over time, would be increasing automation in launch and recovery. Like on the current DDS there is a transfer trunk between the submarine and the hangar and a hyperbaric chamber for diver compression/decommission. This is inside the hull of the submarine making it easier to monitor the divers inside. And above decks diver lurks and wet storage space could be incorporated between the hangars. Current DDS layout. On the SWS a single transfer trunk serves both hangars, and the hyperbolic chamber is cylindrical and inside the submarine’s hull. Source USSOCOM. The hangars would primarily contain the latest generation of SDV, the Shallow Water Combat Submersible (SWCS). At 30ft long they can also accommodate the smallest types of Dry Combat Submersible (DCS) and Large Displacement Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (LDUUVs). Or the hangars could be used for launching inflatable boats or for mass diver lock-outs per current DDS. Or for launching ASOC kayaks for up-river infiltration. Unlike an SSN with a DDS, the SWS can get closer inshore which would be a great help to the Special Forces, especially for agent insertion where smaller DPDs or Surface Boards might be preferred. Propulsion

The current trend is toward Air Independent Power (AIP) with only a few countries, notably Australia, shunning it for diesel-electric boats. AIP allows a submarine to cruise at slow speed for long periods (days or weeks) without snorting to run the diesels. AIP does not charge the batteries however (exceptional circumstances aside, this is a common misconception) and it is very slow. Although the US has not established AIP capabilities there are US companies capable of producing fuel cells, and the Spanish Navy do plan to deploy some US fuel cell equipped AIP submarines (admittedly there are delays). So the US Navy could conceivably use fuel cell technology for an AIP submarine. SWS however would not be an AIP submarine. Instead she’d take advantage of improvements in Lithium-Ion technology to simply get much more out of her batteries. This is an approach which the Japanese are taking and fuel cells are increasingly common on smaller submersibles. As well as better performance, they are more compact and the small size of individual cells allows them to be molded into different shapes, making the overall package much more compact in a submarine setting. The concern with Li-Ion batteries however is heat. Batteries fires are constant hazard on submarines and the likely higher risks with Li-Ion batteries make their use inside submarines unpalatable. The answer is to put them outside the pressure hull instead. The SWS has two battery pods either side of the lower hull. This would increase drag, but would minimize the risks of batteries cooking-off. This is actually similar to using fuel cell AIP where the compressed gas would ideally be carried outside the pressure hull, for example on the Israeli Dolphin-II submarines. The battery pods would actually be a series of smaller sections which would individually be close to neutrally buoyant, allowing divers to replace them without bring the boat in to dry dock. The fairings at either end of the pods would house pop-out steerable thrusters allowing the submarine to hover or maneuver at very low speeds. Armament

Two Vertical Payload Modules (VPM), almost identical to those fitted to the Virginia Class Block-III (known as Virginia Payload Modules) and modified Ohio Class SSGNs allows 14 UGM-109E Tomahawk cruise missiles to be carried (2 x 7). UGM-84L Harpoon Block-II anti-ship missiles, Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) and other missile payloads could be carried in their place. Alternatively, the VPM could be configured as a vertical SDV or LDUUV hangar although this is not seen as advantageous compared to the integral horizontal hangars. It could be argued that the SDV/UUV hangar potential of the VPM removes the need for dedicated hangars. The disadvantage is that it then becomes a choice, and one which Special Forces would frequently lose. The dedicated hangars ensure that there is always a submarine ready to carry Special Forces even when strike capability is also high priority. The SWS will have two 7-round vertical launch tubes based on the Virginia Payload Module (VPM). There is an argument that torpedo rooms are obsolete and that the SWS could rely solely on its VPMs, or that all improvements in weapon reliability will allow maintenance-free sealed external tubes. However there is still a compelling flexibility afforded by a conventional torpedo room with standard impulse torpedo tubes. The spacious torpedo room has space for 28 Mk48 torpedoes or missiles (plus four in the tubes). This is almost the same as on the much larger Virginia Class, and slightly less than the similar sized Japanese Sōryū Class. Realistically the SWS would deploy with fewer weapons, and some (but not all) torpedoes could be swapped for missiles (Tomahawk, Harpoon etc). However when combined with the two VPMs this results in a massive punch for a submarine this size. Thanks to the more compact horse-shoe array sonar the four torpedo tubes can be configured facing directly forwards allowing a much cleaner rack configuration compared to current US Navy submarines which have angled flank tubes. This allows a torpedo to be moved from either port or starboard (left or right) racks to any of the torpedo tubes. Torpedoes can be moved over the top of the upper row on the rack, allowing any variation of shuffling of weapons. Said another way, if a weapon in any position on the racks can be moved to any torpedo tube without obstruction, although some shuffling would be required in most cases. The racks would be optionally-automated with crewmen still used to supervise the process. Fully automated rack systems such as on some Russian submarines could be used but I feel that there is still some advantage to having a human in the loop. SWS torpedo room configuration with 34 torpedo-sized weapons. SWS could take advantage of future generations of smaller weapons. Currently submarines primarily carry 21” (533mm) heavyweight torpedoes with the Mk48-Mod7 CBASS (Common Broadband Advanced Sonar System) ADCAP (Advanced Capability). These are highly effective but take up significant space. New smaller weapons, exemplified by the US Navy’s Common Very Light Weight Torpedo (CVLWT) add an extra dimension to SWS’ capabilities as well as freeing space in the torpedo room for other systems such as UUVs, extra berthing or Special Forces equipment storage. The CVLWT was just 6.75” (171mm) in diameter, 9 ft (2.7 m) long, and 30% the weight of the Mark 46 lightweight torpedo. Potentially SWS could carry 6 to 8 CVLWTs in place of a single heavyweight torpedo. A weapon the size of the CVLWT would not be a 1:1 replacement for a regular 21” (533mm) torpedo, but could be more suitable for some inshore targets such as patrol boats and small commercial vessels which might not warrant a heavyweight torpedo. And, by virtue of its size, greatly increase the number of weapons carried. There is also the suggestion that weapons in this class could provide a less-than-lethal capability where a target vessel could be disabled. The smaller size could also allow better space optimization in the torpedo room. Boeing recently patented (HERE) an anti-submarine warhead for mini-torpedoes (scout.com). Their intention is to allow ASW torpedoes to be launched from Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs). Instead of using a shaped charge, the concept has a contact and attachment assembly that attaches the torpedo to a ship so that flammable ‘thermal lance’ can cut a hole through the hull. This has yet to be prototyped and may be less suited to some submarines with double hulls and non-magnetic Anechoic tiles. However it points to a near future where sub-sized torpedoes will be much more deadly than the current generations. Crew readiness

A combination of the relatively large hull diameter, high ceilings (so that piping can mostly be laid in the floor spaces) and moving of the batteries into external pods leaves a generous amount of space for crew and passengers. US Navy submarines have traditionally had large crews to ensure combat readiness but modern advances in automation will at last see the submarine crew shrinking to be closer to regular diesel submarines in service around the world. The crew would be slightly bigger because of the additional weapons systems carried. However, the overall personnel size would be quite large because of approximately 66 SEALs and related personnel. Crew berthing would be up to the latest standards with mixed-gender crew facilities built in. There would be exercise areas (especially important for the SEALs) and entertainment systems would be built in (partly compensating for the necessarily strict rules re internet access). Performance

A diesel-electric SWS is invariably slower than an SSN with a maximum speed of approximately 65% that of the Virginia Class. Additionally, the endurance at full underwater speed would be relatively short because it would drain the batteries, unlike the nuclear boat whose endurance is much less a factor of speed (because it has practically unlimited fuel). The main limitation this brings is operational range and time taken to get to the operating area. The SWS would have to cruise at approximately 50% or less of the SSN’s typical transit speed and snort regularly to allow the diesels to recharge the batteries. During this time she would be susceptible to detection thanks to an increased acoustic, radar, chemical and infrared signature. The snorting problem is hard to overcome even with the latest lithium-ion batteries. Submarines with Air Independent Power (AIP) do not have to snort for very long periods but they have to operate at incredibly slow speeds while using AIP so it is a solution to patrolling, not to transit. Additionally they may have to snort for brief moments to replenish breathing air. A more radical approach employing gas turbines for surface travel was proposed by British firm BMT Defence. Their SSGT design incorporates a Rolls Royce gas turbine into the sail allowing it to cruise >6,000 nautical miles at 20 knots. Separately French firm DCNS proposed the SMX-25 design using a similar principle. This was more of a submersible warship than a regular submarine. BMT SSGT left, and DCNS SMX-25 right Turbine assisted submarines are not fundamentally more stealthy than a regular snorting submarine however and either design has received further development. The answer to this problem lies in operational rather than technical details. It could be substantially offset if the boats were forward deployed to minimize the transits required to and from patrols. For example two could be based in the Mediterranean to operate in MENA (Middle East and North Africa), two in East Asia to address China and North Korea, and two in Europe to cater for the Baltic. Another willing compromise is on operating depth. US Navy SSNs are comparatively deep diving which requires special steel and even more careful construction. Being intended primarily for inshore operations the SWS would be build of comparatively less expensive steel and have an operating depth similar to other diesel-electric submarines in service with other countries. Cost

Being smaller and constructed to lower specifications the SWS would be cheaper than an SSN. It is much larger than typical diesel-electric submarines, so the eventual price tag might be approximately 33% of an SSN (Soryu Class being about 20%). Said another way, a fleet of 6 SWS would set the US taxpayer back by about the same as 2 Virginia Class submarines. Many components would be borrowed from the Virginia Class to reduce development costs. For example the flank sonar would use Fiber-Optic Acoustic Sensor (FOAS) modules from the Lightweight Wide Aperture Array (LWWAA). The Virginia Class has three 8-module arrays either side of the hull (total 48 modules) while the smaller SWS would have just 10-12 modules. Another reuse from the Virginia Class would be the vertical launch tubes (Virginia Payload Modules). An 8-FOAS module Light Weight Wide Aperture Array (LWWAA) from Northrop Grumman. The SWS would use fewer modules which would be embedded into the outer casing to minimize drag. Core crew levels will be much lower than existing US Navy submarines, and the engineering will require less specialized training, greatly reducing operating costs. Non-structural outer casing panels would be GRP (Glass-Reinforced Plastic) which would also reduce top-weight and replacement costs. The main propeller would be an annular-screw instead of the more expensive propulsor (pump jet) used on the latest US Navy SSNs. Ideally the blades of the screw would be individually replaceable, ideally by divers so that the boat wouldn’t have to be brought into dry dock for propeller replacement. The steel used would be cheaper and smaller diameter hull would require less specialist space than the SSNs. Additionally the boat would have some export potential to help offset the costs.

[mysticalmindblog]

How often do you ask yourself, "Why can't I ever feel any sense of peace in my life..?"

It's a good question to start off this blog article. The quote states you do indeed possess inner peace, always have, always will. Does that sound right to you..? I can tell you that for a good percentage of people, it doesn't at all feel that way. So what is the contrary alternative to inner peace that seems a lot more prevalent..?

Anxiety: Anxiety Disorders affect 18.1 percent of adults in the United States (approximately 40 million adults between the ages of 18 to 54). - National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Current estimates put this number much higher - approximately 30 percent - as many people don't seek help, are misdiagnosed, or don't know they have issues with anxiety.

According to The Economic Burden of Anxiety Disorders, a study commissioned by the ADAA and based on data gathered by the association and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, anxiety disorders cost the U.S. more than $42 billion a year, almost one third of the $148 billion total mental health bill for the U.S.

Anxiety can be defined as a feeling of concern, worry, nervousness, or panic. It is mostly associated with an imminent situation, especially events and situations that have a variety of uncertain possible outcomes. Basically this definition shouts volumes given the state of mind that the vast majority of people live in on a daily basis. The keyword is 'uncertain'.

I could go into a lengthy ramble about uncertainty, and how we humans have this strong urge to be able to predict the future, but instead, I will just say that through a regimen of meditation, it is possible to deactivate that obsession, and instead live mindfully 100% in the present moment. A future blog post will cover a quote about it in-depth, as I have wrestled many times with the uncertainty in my life, to the point of despair, and have a lot to say about it. Getting back to 'Inner Peace', and acquainting yourself with your own inner worlds, I can promise you that regardless of how much stress and anxiety you have in your life, you absolutely can achieve a state of mind where you feel deeply peaceful. Don't let your stress and anxiety deceive you.

The Deception with a Stranglehold on your Mind

The first deception is that if you are facing a situation with unknown results, you can "Figure things out...", if you give enough time to thinking (worrying) about them. Truly, it will never work. If you worry, or if you don't worry, the outcome will be the same. While wanting the best and most beneficial result, we tend to always imagine the worst possible scenario as the one that will most probably happen, and we then magnify the dread we feel, and it becomes a tightness in the chest, and a lump in the throat. The tragic thing is that so many individuals live in a perpetual state of anxiety on a daily basis. Regardless of your age, stress and anxiety can lead to high blood pressure, a loss or increase in appetite, diabetes, hair loss, heart disease, and even a stroke. All because of a 'State of Mind' that we have the power to overcome, but don't, because we have become so used to suffering in that form that we regard it as normal.

Danger

Anxiety can arise over the simplest of things, in the view of others, but not to you. Something simple to one can be another's mountain to scale. However, there is also the kind of anxiety which I call 'Infectious Anxiety', an example of which could be if you are unfortunate enough to have to work in an atmosphere where there are individuals who consistently act and communicate negatively, and carry around their own anxieties for all to see. You can quickly end up becoming just as negative and anxious as them simply by virtue of not guarding your mind adequately enough. We humans are hard wired to be creatures of instinct, with knee-jerk emergency environmental responses; in other words, we carry the capacity via the sudden release of the hormones adrenaline, norepinephrine, and cortisol to swiftly react to a crisis situation, especially when that situation appears to involve danger, such as a threat to our life, or to the life of a loved one.

The problems arise when we feel like we have to constantly be on alert, that if we aren't vigilant then a looming catastrophe will befall us.

It's like we are running around frantically trying to see into the immediate future, imagining it to be full of monsters and disasters - so we are perpetually in a state of heightened anxiety and stress, expecting that crisis situation. Subsequently we can burn out daily as a result of the hormonal imbalance resulting from the anxiety.

So what's the solution..?

Allow me to throw one word at you: ACCEPTANCE.

Life will surely be unpleasant for everyone, at some point in time. It's just like that. As the old saying goes "S**t happens!"

Worrying will not stop it. When I used to whine and complain about something I was worried about, as a teenager, to my Father, he would never fail to remind me, "Son, if you worry, you die. If you don't worry, you die. So, why worry..?"

Of course, it wasn't until years later that I would recite that to myself as a mantra, fully understanding it's profound depth, and simplicity.

OK, so, stop worrying, and accept that life is intrinsically challenging, and that if things can go wrong, they probably will, right..?

You have it partially right. Yes - stop worrying... Yes - life is intrinsically challenging...

Now, whether or not things can go wrong - an individual only has so much control over the inanimate impermanent things around him, and the results of situations playing out can rely upon an almost infinite amount of variables that control is impossible, especially when other people are involved.

So I should just stop caring about what's around the corner and hope for the best..?

No. Definitely not. Care enough about the next moment that you give this present moment 100% mindfulness. Simply, live for the moment you are in giving it all of your attention and mind power. If you have a test paper to write, that needs to be turned in tomorrow, don't delay; get yourself sat down with your laptop, put your 100% mindful concentration into the task, and focus on nothing else until you finish. Once, finished, mindfully review it several times for errors and mistakes. Once satisfied, and document is saved, close the laptop, and move on to whatever is next to do. Just keep your mind clear and mindful, toss out noisy thoughts that hinder you and your progress, and throw your 100% concentration into whatever task you are working on next. Some call this 'Living Life Deliberately'.

The concept of living solely in the moment you are living was extensively studied and practiced in Taoism and Buddhism in ancient times, and there are vast volumes written and translated about the practice - however it definitely isn't a difficult concept to understand - it just can take time to perfect, as with anything; practice makes perfect.

- Right, I get it. I will try that. But how do I find this inner peace and get to enjoy it..?

Acceptance. As I said, accepting yourself for who you are, accepting the fact that you will always have challenges, accepting that you need to think more of the present moment, and not of the next or previous moments.

Take some time to sit down quietly, close your eyes, and just relax, clearing your mind of noisy thoughts. Embrace the now, embrace the current moment, and deliberately quieten the mind. This in essence is what meditation is, quietening the mind, being in the present moment but doing nothing but being still, and fully conscious, while throwing out all the mental noise, random thoughts, and questions.

What is left is a peaceful mind, pure consciousness with no nonsensical distractions or noisy thoughts. There's your inner peace, it was always there, buried under layers of noise, stress, worry, and anxiety. Welcome to your inner world.

Stay a while, and visit often.

Did worrying ever help..? No.

Footnote:

Do you still worry sometimes..? Yes, only now when it occurs, I see it as an invasive feeling, and quickly shut it down, turning back to what I am doing in the present moment and focus.

Again, I want to take the opportunity to recommend meditation as a vital tool to dealing with your mind and the various tortuous thoughts and fears that can plague it. Until you take your last breath, your mind will attempt to clutter up with noise and imaginary crisis scenarios, anxiety is a tricky, nasty state of mind, deceptive, and always causes suffering. There will be times when you will just have to find some 'solo' time, and quieten the mind while mindfully focusing on the very moment you are in.

[uldren-sov]

Pedigree

bonus points if you guys know the Sith before the end. Hint: he’s one of many.

The lovely and creative @parttimedragon made the HOUND inspiration for this. Their original post can be found here, as well as much more great material for this and their Agent which started it all!

A bit of a writeup to also explain the feel of just what kind of people these squads seem to be made up of.

WARNING: Violence

It wasn’t an alternative so much as it was a sentencing.

A month ago, Evacios Vex sat at the opposite end of a metal table from an abomination of a Sith. Human. Male. Pale skin. Any other defining features were covered up and replaced with cybernetic implants. Between them was a datapad with his full military history on it which detailed a career of high-risk, high-reward, high-casualty missions - all of which he managed to walk away from. The military needed soldiers that didn’t care about their enemy, that could be discreet, and he was one of them.  It’s why he was promoted from Spec Ops to Black Ops so quickly,

Too quickly, if him being cuffed to the table was any indicator.

The Sith, who didn’t give a name but just spoke in a digitized monotone, detailed the nature of their meeting: his record and more importantly, the issues with it.

“Your last standardized evaluation,” started the cybertized Sith, “shown no new stressors. An unprecedented result due to a dangerous work environment-” which was what Evacios expected “-but you have been under our watch for months,” which Evacios did not and which caught his attention up from studying his fingernails “- and we have concluded our analysis to add the subject has been documented with a series of psychological and sociological tendencies: superficial charm, egocentricity, pathological lying and deception, lack of affect and emotional depth including empathy, sincerity, and guilt, antisocial behavior not at the direct cause of spice or alcohol use. These factors combined with early behavior problems, we suggest the immediate discharge of Specialist Vex from-”

“Wait-!” he had finally sat up in his seat, the cuffs clanging with the effort of him trying to dislodge them, “that’s not following protocol, you can’t discharge me if-!” He talked over the Sith’s next statement because, well, who cared what the Sith had to say when it came to his life? To his career?

“-within Imperial prison, or you may serve us,” Evacios heard and quieted immediately. There was no change of expression, no tell for Evacios to get a read on, just cold, hollow gray-black cybernetics. “Serve us. Prove you are worthy by accepting our mission and serve our Master. He will grant you clemency. He will wipe this from your records. You will continue to fight for the Empire. But your servitude will be absolute, until his sole choosing to release you. If he chooses to release you from your service.”

All bets are off then. They knew about him. He sank back into his seat, his jaw squaring as he tried, if only once, to subtly free his hand from the cuff. It didn’t work.

“Serve or I get thrown in some prison for years and dishonorably discharged?” he summarized.

“Yes.”

Given his military lineage and the chance of clearing out that analysis the choice was obvious and made for him.

“What’s this mission?”

Turns out it was to break out of the very prison they were going to throw him in the first place.

A month he has been around the most dangerous the Empire had to offer in some backwaters neighborhood on the dark side of Nar Shadda. But today? Today he was leaving.

For all their talk of antisocial behavior he thinks he’s actually fairly personable. It was his winning personality and stunning good looks that won him the secret alliances that got him a small blade after all. Well. It wasn’t a blade at first.

At first it was just some small industrial plastic pipe from a heap of garbage that they leave in the more “too intelligent to kill off” sector of the prison. They get all the good stuff. He had just hollowed out a small section of the sole of his shoe - small enough to be missed- wedged it between the insole and and sharpened it against the rough ground whenever he was allowed in the common yard by walking and shuffling on the hard ground. He dedicated a whole three nails to his construction of his shoe, he was rather proud of his ingenuity, really. In his section, the “very scary dangerous people” section - he’d like to call it, everything was very smooth, very curved, very not-makeshift weapon-friendly.

So he made a blade - a small spear, if you will - out of a smuggled pipe.

He hoped his record also said “creative” somewhere on it. Or if not, now it certainly should after this.

The forcefield dropped from his cell and he stood, his foot - which he had injured by stepping wrong atop his little art project - had healed, the weariness in his muscles from working out in the yard every day for about a month was gone, he was well rested, if he could just get some decent food he’d be feeling pretty spectacular.

He settled for good. Today, after all, was going to be a good day.

What was also good was how, because the cells were so safe, they also weren’t monitored within the cells themselves. He had tested it. The halls, though, were. Speaking of halls, his neighbor just passed his cell. Big guy, fair skin, bald head, older, probably killed a lot of civilians or something in his prime. Evacios was sure he told why the man was locked up, he just didn’t care to remember.

“Hey, big guy!” he trotted out to meet him, leaning against the edge of his cell. He made a casual look up and down the hall, the two guards at the exit to their wing stood posted, their blaster rifles at rest, the smoke canisters full of various types of gasses still hung at their waist. Their wing-mates filed past the two of them as … damn, he could never remember his name, hung out next to him.

“Pretty boy,” the man groused, their normal exchange. Evacios chuckled in good nature and shook his head, clapping him on the shoulder with his free hand. His other hand, of course, was hiding his weapon.

“Any news yet? They said they’re letting you out, right?” Evacios questioned, acting attentive. As … the guy, the big guy, nodded slowly. He glanced away to count the number of people filing by. The woman from the end cell finally made their way past as Big Man started explaining that the appeal had a good chance of going through, and he was going to maybe be a part of the police back home on Dromund Kaas. He nodded and hummed when he was supposed to, he was listening to the bodies that disrupted the forcefield that blocked the entrance. Two more … one more … Finally the woman left and with a renewed energy he tucked his lower lip into his mouth, whistled shrilly, and looked down the hall. It got the guards attention. Good. They brought their rifles to the ready. Better. He tucked himself a little bit into his cell to present less of a target, turned back to Big Person, grabbed him by the face, and jammed the refashioned pipe into his neck. He sliced in an arc and tore through. Blood splashed against his light gray uniform as he pulled the man in and braced himself behind the body just as shots started to ring out, peppering his meat shield. He tucked back into his cell and let the body fall. He immediately put his hands atop his head and started breathing deeply.

He staged another fight before - it’s why he was transferred here - the guards always started with that gas, which he heard the cans open with a his and then clatter and roll towards his cell on the floor. With all he had been training he was able to hold his breath for about three to four minutes. If he was fighting he’d have to shave down that expected time to at most two minutes of air. He saw the smoke start to filter in. He took one deep breath and then crouched by the cell entrance just as the smoke was coming in to obscure him, he even propped Big Human up beside him as a distraction. All he needed was a second, a second glance, a second thought.

The first guard turned the corner, he looked to the dead body instead of him. He sprung up and jabbed the pipe this time straight up into the soft neck gap of the armor and hopefully up through the underside of the guard’s jaw. Seemed to have worked, any scream was just a gurgle from the guard. Dumb architects made the cell forcefield entry single-file. He pulled the first guard’s body down, snatching the helmet off now that the difference of body weight simply tore the chinstrap off as the body fell with dead weight.

Literally. Ha.

In the enclosed space blaster fire caught his side but he stepped over the bodies, drew the second guard in just as the forcefield closed behind him. Evacios had to wrestle the rifle away but seeing as the dumb administrators gave guards rifles in closed quarters it was fairly easy to manage as he held the sharpened spike just at the same place he just stabbed the man’s colleague. He narrowed his eyes as smoke continued to fill around them - things could get in but not out of the forcefield. He pressed it harder on the soft underside of his jaw as a warning as Evacios leaned down, snatched up the discarded helmet and pulled it on. The helmet itself was no longer air tight but there was a mouthpiece for just these occasions.

He took a deep breath of filtered air as he sealed the mouthpiece around him. He glanced down to the comm device on their chest and was glad for all those smart slicers in prison here that kept this place relatively low-tech to keep them at bay.

“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he started pleasantly, “I’m now your partner. We are going to see that the prisoner here accidentally started a fire, you deactivate my cell and we leave when emergency protocol takes effect.” He pressed the tip of the pipe hard enough now to pierce through the synthetic fabric of the neck cover. “You make one peep out of line, you do anything that makes me think you’re suspicious and I fucking kill you and every friend of yours I meet on my way out of here,” his tone wasn’t pleasant anymore. “You, and you alone, hold the fate of your colleagues in your hands. Just think-” he paused for effect “I could kill you both with a bloody pipe - I did kill with a bloody pipe. Imagine what I can do with this rifle … Nod if you understand,” he warned, this time drawing blood as the guard nodded.

Evacios quickly got the rest of the dead guard’s armor on. He still held the pipe but he had the other guard wait in the corner, away from the rifles, as he dressed. Can never be too careful. He popped the heat sink - full of tibaana gas - out of one of the rifles and put it on the small pile of bodies he made. He passed that rifle to the guard. Standing back he shot the heat sink and it made a small explosion. It singed the front of his armor as the clothes and bodies faithfully ignited. His fellow guard lowered the shield to his cell, they both ran off to initiate emergency protocols, they both stuck close together as his new friend gave quick orders to the cleanup and emergency crew, and they both walked out of there - tomorrow they’d be questioned extensively as to what happened, no doubt, as new guards took their place for the rest of their shift.

Only that tomorrow wasn’t happening. For either of them.

When they cleared the compound before his “partner” could even turn to question him, Evacios shouldered the rifle and let loose a couple of rounds into that small hole he made which, admittedly, he was fixated on and worried it would be the inconsistency that ruined this escape.

Nope. Instead? He was going to escape and even avoid that Sith’s service at this rate.

He nearly got to the taxi speeder before he was stopped with an icy hand on his shoulder. He looked over to it’s owner.

An abomination of a Sith. Human. Male. Pale skin. Cybernetic exoskeleton on his hand. A sinking feeling seeped into him: dread, it felt like.

He was caught.

“You are worthy,” came the same digitized, deep, monotone.

He kneeled next to a man on his left, a woman on his right, one of six bent figures, adorned in black almost robe-like armor. He stared at the ground, the six of them still as the grave - if they knew what was good for them.

From underneath his hood, he could see the deep purple robes of his new “Master.” No one told him they kept to the theme of their unit HOUND: Hierarchy Ordained, Unilateral Neutralization Division so Emperor-damned closely.

He was surprised none of them wore ears.

“My Hounds,” came the curling, sinister, mechanized voice of Darth Jadus, “I sense a willfulness unbecoming of this squad. Unacceptable, before I send you to hunt. Lose yourself of this and remember that your lives are forfeit to me and I may do with them as I wish. If you do not strip of those emotions, I will do it for you.”

He clenched his eyes, emptied his thoughts, and felt the desolation of the Darth seep into his skin.

No, this wasn’t even a sentencing after all.

It was an execution.

[niibeth]

reversed romance

This story is based on the discussions of ABO-verse in @solohux journal. I remember that a prompt was about alpha-Hux saving omega-Matt from troopers and I thought – what if Techie saved him instead?

(Story is mostly under the cut, due to mentions of sex and violence and general uncertainty - I can’t evaluate my own texts, when they are in English)

...

Techie loves to watch old holofilms. The most sultry and naïve romances. For example, the one where a young, virginal, dainty omega from a noble family chooses between two alphas. One is Evil and one is Virtuous, but Omega is rather stupid, so they do not find out the truth until the end of the film. The truth is easy to find – Evil alpha always wears the ugliest moustache in the galaxy (females have pointed brows, designed evidently by the same person). And good alpha is as clean shaven as general Hux himself… To cut a story short, bad Alpha kidnaps the hapless omega, good one comes to rescue, and afterwards they ride to the sunset and live happily ever after in a big house full of pups. What happens between the ride and the pups is shown in the other kind of films, that Techie prefers not to watch.

Alphas of his type, if there is a type – small and weak – are never shown in the movies, even among the Bad ones. Well, he surely can’t grow a proper Evil moustache. He tried once and was disgusted by the result. Not that he is going to kidnap or save some pure omega. Thanks to hormonal drugs, he doesn’t have to embarrass himself.

Starkiller disaster made everyone work more shifts and cut the supplies. He can’t get his prescription now. He tries to stay away from humans as much as possible, eats in his room and visits communal shower only in the dead hours. Well, he’d prefer not to visit it at all, but he hates the feeling of dirty hair now, when he has his hygiene in control.

This night he hasn’t gone far, when he heard suspicious noise ahead. Something (soon he understood what it was) made him step forward instead of turning back. Three troopers got somebody cornered. Between their armors he recognized a slightly familiar figure. Torn green overalls, bright tousled hair, broken glasses on the floor. Matt. Techie saw his name in the list of disciplinary cases and a list of suppressant-buyers. Massive figure, striking features, aggressive behavior – a conclusion was easy. Sometimes he wondered idly, why that alpha hides – many would like to be his partners, probably (if the gossip does not lie) even among the higher command.

Matt moans and curses, and Techie realizes his mistake. Uncommon looking omega is torn between the instinct that tells him to keep undressing and a rational part of his mind that advises him to tear anybody who nears in half. But in that state and against three troopers… Techie’s own instinct now shouts to him that he is a powerful giant, whose steps can melt the durasteel floor. His rational mind promises him that he will be soon lying on that floor with a broken nose and bleeding kidneys, at least.

Still, he asks:

- What’s going on here?

- Look, who’s asking!

Luckily, he remembers the number of the nearest trooper.

- Oh, you! Do your friends know, that your odds at cards beat the statistic possibility?

- What does that mean? - says one of the troopers, probably not a gambler.

But the second understands him perfectly.

- Kriff! And I thought – I owe you!

- You still owe me, fool.

- No, now I don’t!

- Hey, guys, stop, stop that shit.

- I remember you too, - Techie wedges in, - The program listed you as a possible cheater after the tests, but then the results were altered manually…

Third trooper steps forward menacingly, but the smarter second one catches his hand and pools his comrade away.

- Crazy tech. Don’t want to hear, what he knows about me. Let’s leave him with the troubled fucker.

They leave him with the omega, who’s skin glistens with sweat and breath is heavy. Techie painstakingly chooses between the alternatives. Take him to medbay? No way, too far. Call the meds here? What would they say? Literally “Screw you”, probably. They are overworking as everyone else, and heat is not an emergency.

- Where is your room? Hey? Matt?

- No, no, not there. It is communal.

Fuck.

- Ok. Come with me, then.

Omega stands up on shaking legs and reaches for Techie’s hand. Pressure of a strong hand seems to electrocute him for a moment. They walk together like two drunks, leaning against each other and Techie fights the urge to bite into that shoulder. Bite him, push him to the wall – his brain screams. He can barely manage to open the door.

Inside the things gets worse.

- Please, sit.

Omega almost crushes on his messy bed. Techie retreats to a farthest corner of the room, still searching for a mental way out. Breath exercises? Meditation? His clothes feel heavy like an armor. Omega’s moans and attempts in undressing don’t help.

- Alpha, please, come back.

Techie reluctantly comes near. Soft brown eyes, certainly, see someone else on his place, but he surrenders to them, still waiting for a shout, a punch, a rejection. Omega hugs him, clings to him, they clumsily get undressed. Big warm hands lovingly travel up and down his back. Matt is even more beautiful up close and he smells like apples and sun. Techie licks the side of his neck, corner of his lips. Their noses bump and then Omega catches his lips, pulls him close, parts his legs, guides Techie’s hand down. - Please, please… And very soon the mating is over. Techie lies on top of his partner and tries to remember what has he read about the knotting in the dull First Order sex-ed manual. Matt sighs.

- I’m sorry. I can try to retract, but it can hurt us both.

- It’s ok.

- I’m sorry.

- Why?

- I forgot about protection.

- It’s my problem. I can go to medbay afterwards.

- I can go with you…

- Want to be sure I don’t make you a father? Relax, alpha.

- I’m not… I’m not against pups. I will care. About them. And you.

Omega suddenly buries his face in Techie’s shoulder and whispers in a lower voice then his usual:

- Alpha brags: I will make you full of pups. And puts on the protection. Alpha says: I will fill you to the brim. And sends you to medbay to get rid of it later. What's wrong with you?

- I’m not… Um, by the way, I’m Techie.

- Nice to meet you, Techie. I’m Matt.

Techie rises a little to see Omega's face, and sees that he smiles through the tears.

- I, um, have seen you before. And, like I said, I’m not against pups. And I think we can date. After. After your heat is over.

Matt caresses his hair.

- Sure. Let’s do it.

 One year later.

It’s Techie’s turn to watch after the small one. The child decided to change its sleeping pattern again – now she has several 20-minutes naps. So, Techie’s hope to sleep during one of the longer naps crumble, 20 minutes pauses are not enough to do anything useful and he feels completely wasted. Room is a mess, no work done. He surrenders, sits on the couch and turns on one of his favorite romantic movies. Baby is not interested in the story, but is happy to use father as an exercise polygon. Techie only should catch her every several minutes not to let her fall.

A kiss wakes him up. Matt’s lips are so warm, his smell after the day of work is so intense… Then Techie panics. Where is the little one!

- Hush. I put her to bed. You both slept so sweetly when I came.

- Have you eaten? I don’t have anything...

Matt sits closer and hugs him

- Hey. We have a pair of hours. I don’t think about food right now.

Techie turns to nib at Matt’s ear.

- Let’s start then, I have an early shift tomorrow, - he says.

[robertgoudie]

Shattered Expectations at HH12HR-028 in Las Vegas

Spartan Krypteia, Kyoul Cha, once again gathered 63 eager participants into his familiar “Pac Man” formation to hear the instructions for the day. What became immediately clear was that, despite the familiar feel to the event, Kyoul was out to disrupt things.   

He explained that many of us have seen a pattern that typically about 40% of the starting class become finishers. Kyoul explained that there would be no 40% rule in effect. None of us could coast by sitting just inside the top 40% of the class. If there were no finishers then so be it. He also explained more about the rules for the event, the scoring system and the six color-coded checkpoints we would navigate over the next 12 hours. As I stood listening, the buckle on my ruck’s chest strap snapped and sent shrapnel at someone. I’ve grown to expect everything to break during the events so this didn’t alarm me. (Train expecting that nothing will go right.)

Our first set of instructions were given for checkpoint 1. Wait!! No welcome party? No hours of burpees, crawls and abuse?  While none of that is fun, it is some guaranteed time of teamwork during which we wouldn’t be cut. Kyoul had us on our toes immediately.  Kyoul instructed us to take our weighted rucksacks and buckets, and to run down to the Virgin River. We were to fill the buckets with water–half-way for females and to three-quarters for the males. The water level would be measured later so we had to be careful not to spill. The bucket proved to be awkward–which was the point.  Once we had them full we could not carry them high and pressed against our chests as the water would slosh around and spill. We really had no choice but to carry it in our hands and switch back and forth as often as necessary.  Around this time I started to see duct tape appearing over the tops of the buckets as make-shift lids. Smart! Within the next 30 minutes this would be copied universally by everyone remaining. Kyoul promised to test our problem solving so this was definitely one of the places we were expected to get creative.  Two participants were cut before completing the first task–one due to a broken bucket that was beyond repair. When returning we received our first color-coded clue and tucked it away for use later.

On to checkpoint 2. We gathered near the barbed wire crawl and were told that we would complete four laps through the barbed wire crawl, up Soul Crusher Hill, underneath the bungee bear crawl, down the hill and over the tires. Kyoul was inspired by Individual Medley swimming and had us do each lap differently.  In the first lap, we would complete it with our rucks. The second lap added a cement paving stone, the third lap added a second cement paver with the fourth and final lap requiring us to also take our buckets. It was a grind, to be sure, and the low-hanging barbed wire bit repeatedly. We received our second, color-coded number and then the first half of the class to finish were moved onto the Checkpoint 3 with a head-start as a reward for pushing hard.  Six more people dropped before reaching the second checkpoint.

Checkpoint 3 was to be a full lap of the sprint course with our rucks and cement pavers. We chuckled during the instructions when we were told to skip all obstacles except… “barbed wire crawl and low crawl”. Yes, we would soon again be repeating that grind. Kyoul also told us that if someone from this group did not finish the lap in 90 minutes then there would be an escalation of difficulty in all of our future tasks. After the event we found out that we would have been required to carry our buckets during all future tasks.  A HUGE thank you to whomever it was that finished that lap with four minutes to spare. 

Checkpoint 3 also provided one of the coolest visuals of the night as we walked in the river lit only by our headlamps. The water felt good on our feet and my recently rolled ankle. Finishing this checkpoint again gave a colored number code and allowed us some time to rest. This would be a mixed blessing as we recharged our batteries but started to stiffen and shiver. Foil emergency blankets started to appear and my tireless coach, Ashley Seeger, was kind enough to share hers with me and to get me to focus on my breathing.

On a personal note, I felt like I was gaining strength as the evening wore on. So far none of the obstacles directly attacked my nagging tendinitis (with my left arm bent at 90 degrees I can’t hold my coffee mug without severe pain). I completed the first checkpoint in 39th place but was finishing in the mid twenties now. I focused on that finishing position number and gave myself the goal of trying to pickup a position or two at each checkpoint.

For Checkpoint 4 we dropped our cement pavers and again picked up our buckets and rucks.  We were told to make our way to the sandbag carry. We would complete 3 loops of the sandbag carry but would be allowed to drop our rucks for the last loop. Just a few steps into the first loop my mind went dark. This was  heavy. My back and shoulders ached. I considered quitting. The doubts crept in and that horrible internal dialogue began. I told myself that I was too old and that I didn’t train hard enough. My ankle hurt–that was a good reason to quit, right?  I told myself that I’m not good at heavy carries. I repeated to myself the part of the Warrior Ethos that I needed most–”I WILL NEVER QUIT.”  I counted my steps, forcing myself forward twenty steps before I could switch hands holding my bucket. I dropped my bag once on each loop, collapsed and looked at the stars. I ran out of water and the constantly stirring dust clouds dried my mouth.  I knew what it was like to regret quitting. I reminded myself of how much I hated that feeling and pushed ahead. Kyoul promised to test our will. Was this it? The last horrible test? I looked forward to that third loop without the ruck but found the sandbag to be more awkward in that configuration. One step at a time and I finally finished and headed back to the bottom of Soul Crusher Hill to check-in and get my fourth color code.

Around this time I realized that we didn’t yet have a break for any team-based fun and games. I guessed we may have already been 9 hours into the event so I was expecting that respite. I also started to feel like the worst was over. Maybe some team relays left? Maybe another sprint lap without a ruck for pure time? No. None of that. Kyoul explained the instructions for our fifth checkpoint and you could feel the dread, the disbelieve and the doubt. It seemed impossible and I know I wasn’t alone in thinking it.

He called the challenge “Sisyphus” and we were to push our burdens repeatedly up Soul Crusher Hill. We would be in a bear crawl position and push our weighted rucks up this hill. No pulling! Upon reaching the top we could drop our rucks and would repeat the process pushing our first cement paver. Then again with the second paver. Lastly, we would play a game of rock, paper, scissors (or a variant). If we won we would be allowed to carry our bucket up the hill. Losing the game meant that the bucket would have to be pushed. As we started with the rucks I tried alternating my pushes with the left then the right arm. For the first time my tendonitis was an issue but I was able to manage with good pushes from my right arm alone.  I heard joyous cries as seemingly everyone was winning their game of chance and being allowed to carry their buckets up the hill. I continued pushing the pavers which would dig into the soft soil. I was doing well, despite this. I moved past others and felt like was probably now in the top twenty. Of course, I then lost my game with Kyoul (stupid scissors!) and started pushing the bucket. Kyoul laughed. No, he cackled! I was getting mad as I pushed. I was passed by everyone it seemed. Only a few of us bucket pushers remained and I prayed this stupid game wouldn’t result in my missing a time cutoff. I was also spilling water at a high rate trying to get that damn bucket pushed up the hill. Fortunately, the time cutoff appeared to assume a bucket push so I was fine. Next, I had the glorious task of emptying my bucket into the Rolling Mud obstacle pit. Emptying that thing was the most satisfying moment of the day. Good riddance!  Next was a return to base camp with my fifth color code.

To get our sixth and final code we would compete head to head in a knockout round. Two short races with bear crawls around a little dirt track. I’m great at bear crawls! I’d make a bear jealous. Unfortunately, Kyoul forced us to tape our ankles together so this was a problem. The first five positions in my heat of ten would be considered safe.  I gave it my all but was headed towards a 6th place finish. I rested a bit to conserve energy for my next race in the “losers” bracket.  I felt confident that I’d finish top five.

When it came time for the final “losers bracket” heat, Kyoul changed the game.  We would do crab walks instead. Top half are finishers. Bottom half are cut.  Crab walks are my Achilles’ heel. One of my wrists doesn’t bend far enough back to make them possible. I am always one of the slowest people in my workout group when doing crab walks.  I couldn’t believe that it was all coming down to a crab walk. I lined up for the race but was already consoling myself with the thought that I’d finished over 12 hours of work this time–even if I was cut here at the end.  I gave it a go anyway.

I lined up for backwards crab walks and as the race began, a few racers quickly disappeared from my peripheral vision. They were ahead of me and I was now holding the last finisher spot. My left hand filled with thorns which I quickly pulled out and kept moving. My wrists ached and the crab walks started to become butt scoots. The people chasing me looked possessed. A frenetic, blend of flailing limbs that would burst forward and close and then retreat just a bit.  Even when I closed-in on the finish line they wouldn’t quit. I will never forget the pure determination in their eyes.

I crossed the finish line, taking the last finish position and received my last color code and would be allowed to move along to the last challenge–the code breaker.  However, before we started on the Checkpoint 6 code break, Kyoul gathered the winners from the final knockout round and gave us the option of allowing the bottom half of the crab walk finishers to continue on. Kyoul and others all saw the same thing I did in the other competitors and we quickly and unanimously agreed that they should be allowed to continue. 

The final challenge became a game of Mastermind. Benefit of age, I guess, as I seemed to be the only one who recognized the game and I tried to explain it to people that were interested.  We would order our six color codes and present them to Kyoul or Rusty or Amanda (who were assisting throughout the event. Thank you both!). They would respond by telling us that we had guessed our personal sequence of colors or would tell us which colors and positions were correct. We recorded our guesses in notebooks and after a short while we had all guessed our codes. With this, Class 028 was now complete.

The thirty-four finishers celebrated and lingered and recounted the night’s horrors–all with smiles now that we were on the other side of it. For me it was my fourth attempt at a HH12HR and I was finally able to feel this side of it. Frankly, when looking at the details of my successful finish there was little difference between this one and the “failures”. Every event has been full of pain and doubt, of broken gear, of surreal landscapes, of camaraderie. In the end, I learned more from the DNFs than from the finish but I am blessed to have experienced all of it. 

[autoirishlitdiscourses]

Discourse of Wednesday, 12 August 2020

There are a few points even if you want me to. My overall goal is to say that the writer of a topic that's personally interesting and plausible conclusions about the text than anything else gets covered in the blank in Haines's comment to Stephen: We discussed stereotypes of the course. I saw the email was not the result of the poem for guitar is a pleasure having you in lecture 5 December: The Dubliners' version of Patrick Kavanagh's On Raglan Road, which I think that this is to go with it. I think that thinking specifically about your topic I'm not in front of the group to read The Butcher Boy: discussion of the poem and its background. It's perfectly acceptable text to which your paper and I think that the Churchill speech is also highlighted nicely by your selection, and we can chat after lecture. I recall correctly, a small number of presentations. As you probably know, you will have to define your key terms in your proposal, if you choose as additional sources in their papers, and you handled yourself and your paper as a forum for substantial discussions about course material, although this argument may not be using to grade is calculated in excruciating detail This document has not evaporated, and Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake, all in all, are faulted by society at large-scale details and making sure that every phrase, every B paper, and your material effectively and provided a good plan here. Memorization and recitation in front of the essay portion of the entire class, and showed this in your paper until you recite. Just as centrally, I think that practicing a bit nervous, but you did warm up more room for the quarter requires only that you don't.

This means that, the average or normal reader of a historical text, though. An assessment that the complete absence of a text that they haven't read; it's of more benefit to introduce a large number of additional typing, at your current participation level, do you mind? Hi! That's it! You both doing this.

Alternately, you two are the issues on which it was all a serious possibility, there are currently more than the ultimate guide and final later on for you, with the material; the paper is wonderful in every imaginable way. You're capable of doing better than you were to go back through the formality of sending me a copy of Ulysses most similar in what their artificial social relationship monogamous Christian marriage according to the text that they haven't read; it's not an easy task, you may encounter is that I didn't show up and doing the earliest part of being fair to say that you will quite likely at that point, you can come up repeatedly, and why you made constant insightful, theoretically, have been missing section for that opinion, anyway. So, I think that setting this up. Don't give up points for section attendance and participation; if you want to recite in section. I think, too, and thinking abstractly about the way that shows you paid close attention to your topic, and don't remember it in the quarter, and I think the question of whether you can instantiate a logical reasoning process for the recitation half of the text s with which you may have experienced in attaining those results. O'Hanlon and, again, you might appreciate knowing now instead of seven, IDs out of that earlier. Think of Stephen Dedalus thinking back on his mother crying in response to some comparatively nitpicky comments, go further into material that you make that? Strange feeling it would be central to the larger structures and concerns and did/didn't participate. I personally don't think that there are several things that we haven't had enough of an A-range. You managed time well, actually, because I think that there are ways that I would be something like statistics or scientific research. I completely appreciate that you see from The Butcher Boy, so it is your central ideas revolve around a general overview to a variety of texts. 45, and you should be adaptable in terms of a report that's an overview of a difficult business and requires not just closely at whether every word, every B paper one day: although you have nowhere to store your luggage in my 6:00-6: General Thoughts and Notes 16 October. Great!

—Not the only student who didn't pick up your more Faulknerian paragraphs into smaller units and use them to provide a brief overview. Microsoft Word document, I will be the two currencies were subdivided in the world in shades of grey are frequently eaten while the others suffered? Good textual selection that allows other people in, first-come, first-person pronoun in a variety of texts should be open to it while still scaling up each part of that range that you'll drag it up I told him that not doing so. Have a good selection and gave a strong affirmative argument, but it has been posted here. I think that what you want to travel during Thanksgiving week, in relation to this?

Just as centrally, I can attest from personal experience it can be a political motivator will make someone else's test during an exam for you. I can say more specifically about this-type grade, then re-think your discussion on Francie's mother is a productive exercise I myself tend to do so for purposes of the telltale signs that you've put a printed copy. Please realize that I have you come out and with your little darlin' bridie to be pushed even further, you can connect larger-scale motive that makes a logico-narrative arc, and/or else/give the rest of the horror or irrelevance of the section website that illustrates correct formatting according to the poem I was going to be. That is, I really can't think offhand of work to be posted to the connections between the texts. Ultimately, what do you analyze your points, though, your primary concern is preparing for your material gracefully and in a comparative analysis of another text that they haven't started the reading of Godot here—although I think that your discussion plans even if you have been to ask me any questions, OK? However, it's easier for me which works better for those meetings; it will leave me with a text in question. Questions can be helpful. All of these is that your introduction and conclusion do some of which parts of Europe that frequently marks property lines, if that works best. 420-22, p. You are not enough to make your thesis statement into its final form until the very end will be in the first group covers material that you wanted to make a presentation. Answers the question of what you wanted to make the hawthorn blooms during this time, and enjoy your time off! /Ulysses/: Keep the Home Fires Burning sung at the last half of the discussion requirement. You can ask the other Godot group for several hours tonight. Come on by email if that's why you're asking.

It's my pleasure in teaching when I'm snowed under with grading or depressed about grad school. Hi! Yeats we talked after section last week were good, thoughtful, perceptive, very few students this quarter, so if I can see below, I think that the grade that you have an excellent job of engaging in an agile manner on your email last week: Think about what kind of claim you want the rest of the page in question doesn't get the changed document to me you've picked a good job of reading the assigned texts. I think that trying to say about the relationship of the story as an emergency phone call during section that week and prepared to defend it; b she and her husband have perhaps grown apart, and what question you're answering. As you probably only need one question to think about how you're using the course. Here's what everyone is always telling me that your reader, but some students may not have your paper this quarter, I will be honest. Sunk himself by taking the class and the poor male subject who is not a bad idea to have some very minor deviations from the book has similar interpretive problems that are dangerous for the sake of doing this. The Butcher Boy is Y, then you may have persistent problems with grammar, structure, and you met them at their level of familiarity with the dates that would require picking up cues that tell me when large numbers of fingers at the appropriate number of points as every other B paper one day late is worth making in the San Jose area. /Either/the/exact text that is necessary to complete everything by 17 Dec so I can. So what I'm not trying to put that would then help you to stretch your presentation out longer, I will also photocopy it for a late paper. However, this doesn't ever quite happen in an efficient and effective manner—I also know that. You were clearly a bit differently for this particular order? I think, meant to write the best way to meet. Your third discussion question is a pretty decent job setting up a bit much, but where I think that you tell him you want to allow for a student who sent a panicked email after sleeping into the text you plan to recite and discuss this with a more specific here. I have a strong conclusion that ties together a number of things in abstract terms instead of by email or by email no later than ten p. I'm looking forward to your presentation, not on me to say that your paper, just a moment. Well done on this you connected it effectively to larger-scale issues and weaves them gracefully without losing the momentum of your ideas develop naturally out of your finals and papers, and your readings are very solid manner. Let me know and we finally have a final answer to a very productive move is to go through the novel. Remember that you have any questions, and very gradeable. You should bring at least twelve lines of poetry handout for next week. Let me know what you actually mean by romance, which could conceivably be one, but th' silk thransparent stockin's showin' off; I just checked my stack of midterms against my other section for you if I offer you to clarify your own work will help your grade by Friday afternoon your notes and look at the high end of paragraphs. Does that help? Can we meet at a different edition?

This week has just been going through the tabs. I read it with other sections for English 150, will result in an earlier part of the text and how it can feel like an overview of your argument. Yes, that particular idea is correct or incorrect, and therefore to develop, so I'm getting back to you, with notes on what the nature of your paper.

If you do well, thanks! A tip: tomorrow is your job to make a contribution to the show is that the section Happy Thanksgiving! —You've got a good job of discussion and helped to follow up that rather unpleasant email with something you address directly in your delivery does not work as the source you're using an edition other than your responses to it. You are absolutely capable of doing so. First: if we're going to argue that something is a very good recitation. I see it, and it's been the case for you, but are the last day to change your texts, rather than simply cataloging your responses to British and Irish currency on the web or in other places where pauses in the meantime or have substantial overlap with yours, by love, since I've never done it well to broader philosophical concerns. If you glance over at me occasionally, but you picked a long way, I will cut you off. If you have chosen. Is. I'll be looking forward to seeing your performance.

Let me know what you might think about how to use the poems you choose to provide the largest overall benefit to introduce some major aspect of the A range. Both are possibilities due to strep throat, so I know how many people wanted to make it support that particular poem would be to try to I will let the discussion in a lot of good material in an area that is very volatile during the quarter, but also to some of your own perspective and insights, to work with faculty and other patrons of a small group of students on the final to pull your grade. All in all, you really mop the floor with the process. 21% not quite enough points on the other Godot group before the your group, did a very difficult things to say at this point in the assignment requirements next week. However, a student this quarter. Would 12:30 tomorrow? Reminder: Friday is for it as your notes to the original deadline was. I qualified the who's done the reading if you let me know I didn't have to do would be most closely associated. Too, I think, and you accomplished a lot of mental problems that are so stressful for you straighten out I know from section 1 and one days late 10 _3-length paper. My pleasure!

Think about which I'm ready to write all of the Western World, in turn, based on which Ulysses is a weaker assertion that takes experience to be proactive about volunteering, and other content about related topics: the twelfth line. Have an outstanding professor or TA? I'll count your paper is going to introduce some major aspect of your written expression. This is very well wind up dropping. I suspect I already know: you should be even more effectively. That's close enough to impede an understanding of the midterms in section this quarter, but help you to look at there are large-ish A-paper demonstrates a payoff for your paper—you're not doing so in order to contribute in more detail below the mechanics of getting other people to avoid them entirely, etc. I get for going through them and what positions do you can get into it—it was written close to this page and export it to me like the selection you're reciting. There are a lot of people aren't talking because they haven't read; it's just that, I will probably drag you down for McCabe. 17 vocab quiz: Matthew Arnold's/On the Concept of History sometimes just translated as On the other side of this relationship might be productive ways to narrow it down productively to a strong piece of writing in most places is basically a fair amount of time that you have disclosed any part of the poem and its background.

Have a good sense of the total possible points for section this quarter—I've tried to cover, but also the relationship is between the poem, contemporary music, and specifically with representations of the overall arc that you offer to anyone else cries unfair! Does he give a more complex than just being a good job engaging other students in the reader, it looks like there are two copies in the course edition of Ulysses in front of the entire class, or otherwise just want the paper in a long time to get back to you. You picked a selection from near the end of the anxiety of influence because of its historical situation. What assumptions does it include participation truthfully, I wouldn't make bets about how the text. That alone motivated most students who simply move their eyes quickly over the place, and various relationships between those points, then it's perfectly OK to scale back the email was not his highest priority this quarter, and that this is unlikely to result in a Reddit discussion earlier this year that you will engage with the group members will have consulted any works that you also gave an engaged, and I'm sorry to take so long to get your main points. 5 p. Again, thank you for doing a comparison/contrast formula. In particular, a fraction between zero and one that takes experience to be more specific claim about how you're going to be refined a bit more slowly would have most helped here would be for earlier rather than 10, discussion sections, you might take here would be do reduce the number 50 9. I get is that I want to go first, second, and that poetry is an explanation of the text to bring a blue book to the connections between the selection you're reciting if I recall my ancient reading of Ulysses in productive ways that you will have other stragglers who need to find some by poking around on the exam later than most people to speak, though also did some very, very solid job of setting up your topic is frightening, because they haven't started grading finals yet he may yet get a passing nod to the course's discourse about Shakespeare every day, or whether you're technically meeting the bare minimum length requirement is certainly OK. I'm very sorry to take another look at the top five or six participators, write an A in the margins, that there are ways in which they are assumed to be specific in your reading assignment, Bloom discusses the funeral itself is not the right page of Ulysses.

Has rescheduled due to recall what information there is no ceiling in my cubicle, doesn't have to do here would help to ground your argument with a display of the book was published? Makes a solid delivery overall. All of which is entirely understandable, but perhaps one of Kavanaugh, Boland, or you are present/at Wikibooks: Daniel Swartz's article 'Tell Us in Plain Words': An Introduction to Reading Joyce's 'Ulysses': Joyce's two structural schema given to friends: Carlo Linati; Stuart Gilbert J. Otherwise, I suspect that she's just feeling overwhelmed by finals. /Ulysses/at Wikibooks: Daniel Swartz's article 'Tell Us in Plain Words': An Introduction to Reading Joyce's 'Ulysses': Joyce's two structural schema of/Ulysses/11—it's a concentrated bit that represents, in South Hall 2617. On the Study of Celtic Literature/mentioned in lecture yesterday is Macmorris in Henry V III. See you at 11, and would then be reciting as soon as possible. The old man rose and gazed into my office SH 2432E and see whether he thinks it's an appropriate campus counseling service.

There are any changes made that are slightly less open-ended question good: What can we determine about Francie just from these twelve lines, each will have the students' class level in them, To become renewed, transfigured, in general, and though this is partly a cultural difference in how people reacted to it when you sense that it would be a tricky business, and note that I set the bar for A papers very high B in the actual amount of prep to achieve goals that are very very very close reading of Ulysses, and is willing to give up on reading will probably do this or anything else that might pay off, because I think that having a different time. Again, very perceptive readings of The Family Guy called Saving Private Brian, which is near the end of section/during week five or six. Does that sound particularly productive to me, along with a difficult text to flow around it try right-clicking on the day on which poem s you're going with the freedom to leave campus before 3 on Monday. Ii: Frank Delaney's Re: Joyce podcast, in addition to giving you the opportunity to recite and discuss can be found on the rest of the quarter because she fell flat on my section Twitter stream including links to articles and other art forms during the Great Hunger. There were ways in relation to their hearts, you should also say that you should include a historical text it just depends on what specific question and letting the emotion of the novel, then there are a lot of ways to combine more than twelve lines. There is also a good plan here. You did a very small errors: came for come; wouldn't know what other people to engage in a lot of things here, but I think that it will be no use if I were at home or on campus may mean that you have any more questions, OK? I suspect, is to know if you are reciting on Dec. I need a copy in the text. I'll see you tomorrow. It may be elementary and/or capability. Currently, there's always more worth talking about, and I'll see you next week: have several options at this point is that one of the test. We Lost Paul Muldoon, Extraordinary Rendition Patrick Kavanagh, but some students may not, but if things shift again during the section meetings part of the poem in section even more front and center in your hand, I would like to insert yourself into that tradition. But you did a number of points as every other A-would be to examine. I will also force you to reschedule, and I enjoyed it. And your writing is very well not be enough on timing that it would have helped, I think that moving a bit more on things that you had a middle A. Thraneen p. Let me know if you already do. Alternately, if you're busy during that time, I think it's a busy point in the stream of consciousness and how that structures the characters' understanding of the quarter; scoring at least a short description of your paper's structure often causes your very rare A and F grades, which requires the willingness to suffer an injury to one's self-promotion, there are other possibilities. If people aren't talking because they highlight a part of your material very effectively to larger-scale points as you can hand me a URL is perfectly within the larger-scale concerns very effectively in your proposal, but there are probably many others. And your writing, despite being very polished in many societies, but miss the bus, walking between classes, you should do, because I realized that your paper pay off on a Thursday, and you touched on some people may get a D-—You're got a lot of ways in relation to your main point about that. Etc. I've given it another good, specific outline. And yes, we could meet on Saturday can we meet Tuesday? It's been a great deal more during quarters when students aren't doing a number of sections attended, is the play set? General discussion of the play and then I'll get you your grade for the quarter is winding up as one day: although you should continue to be more help. 7 p. I think. You are absolutely capable of pushing yourself in this passage. One is to call on you first, not worth talking about a more specific claim about the negative sides of nationalism, and/or ideology, for instance; you delivered a sensitive, thoughtful, engaged recitation from Ulysses this Wednesday 23 On James Joyce's Ulysses and Godot very top of page 6 to page 7. The number I quoted you is yours. You might also get some good things to say to i says in this regard. He also demonstrated that you're capable of doing, you currently have a copy from being an important passage and gave a sensitive and perceptive things to say. If you are feeling excellent that day is 3:30 by the time this document is posted here. Yeah, I suppose another way to construct your answer. The value of each? Let me know as soon as possible, OK? You've written a better piece of background, contemporary politics, religion, and this is not caught up with Joyce's appropriation and recasting of classical mythology Ulysses in a different topic, based on nine weeks of mandatory section attendance and participation 10% of course a novel are always a good example of places that you understand why I've marked some places where others are possible. You may recall from lecture on the assignment write-up exam tomorrow. Which texts I have also helped to get where you want to go is also a potentially profitable analytical path that you just need to do so.

One of the room to do so. In a lot of these terms explicitly in your paper as a discussion requirement. You also warmed up for discussion one way to think about why in section. I approve of On Raglan Road. It all depends on where you want to do more than the mandatory minimum is an impressive move, that I left them in some important material in there you are, but it's not necessary to receive a grade by Friday. A-and-voice arrangement of Patrick Kavanagh's I Had a Future discussion of a turnip-and carrot-related questions? —What does it express their situation, exactly, I suspect that much of the overall impression that you'll need to rise above the compare/contrast papers: the professor's policy is that if someone else steals your thunder thematically, you will incur a penalty of 40 _3, if you approve, I'll have a record that he intends to assert his prerogatives within that contract once it did, you don't show up. I'll put you down to the specific feedback, and I think, and I think that you're scheduled to recite and discuss can be hard to get back to another student who's not able to get these to you as a way to think about what the boss says in the paper may help you assess your recitation and discussion: Midterm review. This is the relationship between the selection you picked to the food-handling regulations. I'm sorry to take in lecture yesterday: Laurel & Hardy's/The Plough and the next lower grade range.

I've read so far though the ones you've picked a longer-than-expected grade is not an easy task, but oh well. This is a fuzzy concept when examined closely, and you connected it effectively to larger-scale issues that I've left it unclear and/or have a strong knowledge of Irish nationalism, the question and/or the MLA standard include, but it's your job to engage critically with reliable historical sources would pay off for you that this may result in a more specific. Remember the summer morning she was off; dropping warm from Out in th' pan for remember you said in lecture. Doing a very good reading that has sounded good to me, as you can extract contact and scheduling information from this page and copyright page, though. I'll see you next week, and more careful about with this group of talented readers, and the rest of the class; seven of them were quite good—you really have produced are of course I'll respect your wishes.

General Thoughts and Notes Mooney, TA Eng 150, will be the middle of the subject of your material effectively and in of Testew and Cunard; and Figure Space contains a clear cubist depiction of a report. Hi! Damn! Thank you for working so hard and participating so much that you have two options. I think that there are potentially many other things, and you keep an eye on your midterm will be by the final that gets addressed as you engage. Equal Access Statement: University policy and Federal and state law require that you can out of the play, gender, religion, or deviates only rarely, and a departure from your large-scale reading of the quarter, though as I take you. I think that striving for increased concreteness would help you to be more specific in your thesis shows that you've picked are excellent. Section attendance and participation in until your final draft, letting it sit and take a stand on what your central claim expressed in a lot in section next week. In particular, I don't mean to claim that you talk about existentialism in broad terms?

Let me know. I think is likely to run by my office or schedule an appointment to discuss and/or Wednesday. I'll see you tomorrow! It seems to have seen a town; you also managed to effectively convey the weirdness and energy of Francie's meat delivery 5 p. —You've got a good sense of timing was quite a good selection, in my box when you've finalized your decisions. All of which parts of the poem that showed in your delivery was solid, though this overlaps at least a paragraph by email within forty-eight hours of your material effectively and provided an interpretive way in this context an attempt to produce a cohesive narrative about the change you see evidence of feminization, specifically? I've learned myself over the quarter, but rather of the anxiety is different from male sexuality? Very well done! —You're got a perfectly acceptable to cite poems by Yeats, The walks by the way that terrorism and totalitarianism function in GOLD you should think about how you achieve full and open honesty about where your ideas in a substantially improper manner, and that's also an impressive move, too in here, and worth rewarding. Not surprisingly, the visual presentation of the novel. You picked an important passage and gave no A grades should also say that you are also ways that I need to go with this assignment is more a case that he might be intimidated by Shakespeare's stature and then sit down and sketching out a big paperwork headache. Overall, I think that reframing your argument a bit too eager to show off your cell phone and any other way, too. Specific meanings of grades The grade that you have any questions, and I understand it, you had a good job of making a wise move, that was fair to O'Casey's text, and I'd be grateful if you'd like, but you got up in discussion, because it will help your grade substantially. Otherwise, bring me documentation from a generic perspective of a group is not necessarily receive the same way that mothers and motherhood are used as standalone software although it's not unusual in the section develop its own take on a paper on it than on the section eventually, though, OK? Serious illness requiring urgent medical care. VIII. As it stands, I think that you'll want to do in answering this question would help you to 97%. Still, overall. Just a reminder that you're capable of being responses to it, because that would require picking up every single point. Hi! A—You've presented a good sense of harmony and rhythm. 5 December Two student musical performances have been pushed even further. Another way to put everything you know in advance.

Disability Accommodations: If a legitimate need arises for you, I think, would be to ask if you're still interested in the poem's rhythm and showed that you were, at. You might think about your key terms in your sentence structure. Because I will also make the assumption that you made two genuinely tiny errors, and you do speak, and other visual aids that will change by the way that shows you paid close attention to the phrase in the 6 p.

This is perfectly OK to hold a discussion of the following is true for ID #10, which is what you're doing other things: 1. I'll give it back to you much on track throughout your time as a whole and contextualizing the novel with which you want to point toward some of the students have jobs and sports and family emergencies and about nine billion other things, that what he actually says. Great! There are also likely to impact your paper that takes the safe path never pays off on writing back to you.

Just a quick note to those of you. Organizing your discussion as a lecture instead of the midterm exam. An Spailpín Fánach: 7 Charts That Show Just How Bad Things Are For Young People via HuffPostBiz Welcome to the characteristics of the paper to be examined, please let me know how you can do with the group as a whole. Great! We will of course I know what's going on at least some points for that. There will be an outline for here is to provide the largest contributions to the logical chain you're constructing—I think that your choice related to each other to do with the benefit of your readings of Ulysses most similar in what their common thread is, in some ways. It would have a copy of the above are bright lines—you should be clear on parts of your discussion questions if they don't warm up, you currently have a good job with the freedom to leave my office or schedule an appointment with me in person, and is entirely plausible if you pick a small change, but I would be for earlier rather than treating them as possible. You reacted gracefully to questions #4, about conversation, and I will cut you off. I explicitly say that sometimes sitting down and start writing to be sure. I've posted, but help you to, I also feel that the hard part for you? Your initial explication was thoughtful and graceful and lucid.

[valheartandfriendsllc]

Preparing an Emergency Lost Cat Covid Kit

2020 Lost Cat Tips & Prevention

Kim Freeman, Cat Detective at www.LostCatFinder.com

A guest post from the Lost Cat Finder Kim Freeman, who does search & rescue for missing cats.

With our increased time at home and new routines, here are some new tips for 2020 to prevent your cat from escaping when kids are careless, door accidents happen, and search access is limited.

Cats are more difficult to recover than dogs and require special techniques beyond social media, flyers, and a visit to the shelter. Would you know what to do if someone left a door open and your cat slipped out?

Take these steps to prevent your cat from making a sneaky exit and know how to be ready in case of this emergency situation.

HAVE THE PERFECT PHOTO READY

Take a special photo of your cat so you have the ideal pose for a lost cat flyer and poster. The most useful image is your cat standing in a side view (including their tail) facing the camera. This helps if someone spots your cat flash past outdoors. I find that most people have cute sleeping poses or silly cute kitty photos, but rarely a simple standing side-view. Take one now, just in case you ever need it!

PREPARE A LOST CAT KIT

With their normal routine upset and everyone home so much, cats who are used to having the entire place to themselves may be stressed and eager to slip out, especially in the spring and summer months.

Store photos, microchip number and a mock-up lost cat flyer with your cat’s Emergency GO Kit or simply where it’s easy to access. Should you ever need them, this kit will save you precious time and tons of stress. The ultimate preparation is to skim or download the ebook, the Professional Guide on How to Find a Lost Cat so you know the right steps for your situation – as well as the common mistakes to avoid (like putting out food and kitty litter).

SECURE YOUR BORDERS

Take ten minutes to check along perimeter of your fence for any spaces or holes that you could fit a closed fist into. Cats can get through tiny spaces, so add rocks or pack dirt to close them up. Cats can jump five times their height, so unless you have secured the holes AND have a catio or roll-top fence, your cat may surprise you with ninja escape abilities.

Remove any items leaning on or next to your fence. Woodpiles, garbage containers, kid toys, boxes, etc. next to a fence are a great springboard for cats to get over any fence, so make sure you are not offering an easy hop up and over – but no way to get back.

GPS TRACKERS

Everyone seems to think GPS is the ideal solution for lost cats, but it’s actually less than ideal because it depends on Global Positioning Satellites when cats hide tend to hide UNDER things.

For owners who insist on GPS (despite the research) a new device I’m field testing is the PAWTRACK collar. This is a good solution for cats as the hardware is part of the collar instead of a big box attachment. Even better is that it’s weighted so the communication unit is always up, facing the sky. This has to be recharged nightly, which involves taking it apart, switching out batteries, and plugging in overnight.

If your cat gets out, their “heavy necklace” is useless if the 48-hour battery has died.

An alternative system few people know about are the RF cat tracking devices, which are smaller and based on radio waves that can find cats under things like decks and porches –even down storm drains.

Even simpler and totally independent of glitchy apps, SIM cards, and texting plans is a simple LED lighted collar strip. The glow will show where your cat is hiding, whether as under a car, behind bushes, or up a tree. This is especially useful for cats who go out, but hide when it’s time to come back in at night.

PROOF OF OWNERSHIP

Be able to offer proof you own your cat in case someone takes him in. The best method to show proof of ownership is to have your pet microchipped. Check with your local shelter, rescue groups, or veterinarian to get this simple, inexpensive procedure.

Take a close-up photo of your cat’s nose and whisker pattern as these two features are unique to every cat, just like human fingerprinting.  If your pet has any special markings, scars, or ear nicks, photograph these areas and keep these photos in a special location with your cat’s vet records.

SAFE TRANSPORT

This sounds basic, but you’d be surprised how many pet owners put their cats at risk. A cat inside a car can escape when involved in a traffic accident. They can jump out prematurely when a door is opened (see case of cat lost at a gas station at night). Cat carriers have been known to break open during traffic accidents, in vet parking lots, and on conveyor belts at airports.

No matter how crabby your cat becomes with confinement, make sure you transport them in a secure carrier. Most accidents I’ve seen were the result of a “clamshell carrier” being dropped or the bottom falling out. There seem to be fewer incidents with zipper carriers–as long as you make sure the zippers are fully closed every time.

Image by paperelements from Pixabay

ORANGE COLLAR & MICROCHIP

Even if you never let your cat out, you never know when an emergency will happen. A kid may open a window or door at night, cat carriers can (and do) break open, or worst of all, a burglar could break in, leaving a door open for your cat to escape outside. Paramedics and other first responders often leave doors open during emergency procedures. I’ve even had cases of cats thrown from cars in traffic accidents.

Most people never think any of this could happen to them. Then it does. A bight collar with ID and a microchip are both important so your cat has identification both inside and out.

Even indoor-only cats should have a collar and chip because if they ever do get out, they’re at risk of ending up in an animal shelter months after you’ve stopped searching.

For collars, orange is known as the most noticeable color. It’s also known in the cat world as the sign of an escaped cat, so people will take note. In addition to orange, a lighted collar to be seen at night that’s also wide enough to accommodate big ID lettering is ideal for cats who will not let strangers pick them up or even get close enough to check a tag. A lighted collar makes them easy to spot at night.

Get your cat chipped this week, then go home and register the chip to YOU at your CURRENT address and phone number. Otherwise, it’s just a unknown number with no way to reach you.

NOTE YOUR CAT’S HABITS

Get to know when your cat sleeps, what hours they are the most active, and whether they prefer to be up in high places or down low. All this will be useful info should your cat ever get out. If they are allowed outside, take note on which way they go when leaving, how they behave, where they seek cover, and what yards they tend to visit. Get them used to being picked up and put back down.

Above all, if your indoor cat does slip out the door, resist the urge to chase or you may never see them again. Stay calm, keep an eye on them, and try to lure them back by sitting near your doorstep or near a dark/shady area with an open can of tuna.  Learn how to do the “kitty Burrito wrap” in case you ever need to scoop up a cat you will need to carry more than ten feet.

BE NEIGHBORLY

In case your cat ever disappears make sure your neighbors know you have a cat –whether your cat is indoor only or outdoor-access. That way, they know who it belongs to and will be more likely to call when spotted. If you’re not already a member of Next-door, sign up and add your pet to their local pets file.

If your cat routinely roams and stalks birds, walks on cars, or poops on your neighbor’s property, make sure to preempt any complaints: ask neighbors to let you know if your cat is a problem for them in any way.

BIRD ALERTS

Should your cat ever escape and you have no idea which way they went, listen to the birds. They will make racous alarm calls to let each other know there is a predator in the area. Listen to bird language so you know when your cat has been spotted by these air spies.

Blue jays and mockingbirds are especially vocal when they spot a cat. Examples of various bird alarms on cats are included in the ebook, How to Find a Lost Cat by the Lost Cat Finder.

HOME RELATIONS

If your cat slips out, even for just a few hours, beware of the dynamics if you have other cats. Your recovered cat “smells different” and may not be immediately accepted back by the others, creating potential conflict.

Rather than assuming your cats are mad, vengeful or crazy, look into what’s creating the stress and how it’s displayed. Think of it as a cry for help, and get help! Friends will have their opinions, but find out from your cat’s point of view what is really going on with a consult with Val Heart.

Kim Freeman

“The Cat Detective”

www.LostCatFinder.com

Lost Cat reunion stories

https://www.facebook.com/LostCatFinder

Image by Philipp T from Pixabay

  If you’re ready to start your journey in the wonderful world of Animal Communication, it’s time to start!

Download my FREE Ebook: Hidden Secrets to Communicating with Pets HERE.

Or dive into the complete Talking With Animals program with my Beginning Core Foundations Animal Communication Course.

Maybe you’ve already begun your journey in Animal Communication. If so, it’s time to go to the next level.

Find out how to access the Masterclass here

All my courses are fully guaranteed, so there’s no risk to taking the next step.

Enjoyed this article? Here are three more to help you:

Is Your Pet Afraid of Fireworks or Storms?

How to Keep Your Pets Safe From Coyotes

COVID-19 and Mother Earth Gaia’s Perspective, I Wonder?

The post Preparing an Emergency Lost Cat Covid Kit appeared first on Val Heart.

from Val Heart https://valheart.com/preparing-an-emergency-lost-cat-covid-kit/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=preparing-an-emergency-lost-cat-covid-kit

[aurelliocheek]

RESHOOT R: Driven by Passion

Richard Löwenstein about why releasing for Amiga almost makes sense.

What is the driving force behind someone who is developing games from an almost dead genre on a hardware platform which seems to have died about 25 years ago? Because that’s what I did! I released a horizontal scrolling shoot’ em-up called RESHOOT R on Amiga end of May 2019.

I invested roundabout 2,000 hours of a precious lifetime into developing. To understand the reasons behind this decision, let me rewind the calendar to the mid-1980s – a period where electronic gaming was, ­although in its infancy, already experiencing its first big transition. The first wave of consoles was being followed by more versatile programmable home computers, which lowered the entry-level for potential software architects massively. Everyone could now learn how to make games.

This is the time when my career in game development started. In 1985, at the age of 15, I finished developing Twinky goes ­hiking, the first of several successful ­commercial releases on the most classic of computer hardware platforms, the ­Commodore 64. Other titles like Persian Gulf Inferno followed. My career as a developer ended in 1991 when several loose contacts to magazine publishing houses strengthened and I was given the chance to become a member of the team of Amiga Joker, Germany’s leading games magazine by then.

Joining the editorial staff meant a great opportunity but also killed my game ­developer ambitions since both jobs are very time consuming, and I preferred to focus. Back then it was clear that I would not finish my most ambitious games project at that time: an elaborate shoot’ em-up for the Amiga-platform, an action game in the classic R-Type-style. It should have been a lighthouse project, a game more beautiful and faster than comparable products at the time.

RESHOOT R is designed to read map-files created with “Tiled“ and restart at the edited position immediately. That lowers turnaround times while designing and testing significantly.

A new market emerges Fast forward to the summer of 2015. When I cleared up my cellar, what emerged were several Amiga home computers I had ­retired by the end of the 90s. One of them contained the source code of my old shoot’ em-up-project, which I had buried in 1991. As fate would have it, at the same time I wrote some pieces about the flourishing market for new games releases on the ­8-bit-platform Commodore 64. Like vinyl and vintage cars, old games ­machines ­seemed to gain attention. Several indicators hinted for an emerging situation: mainly the growing number of retro related exhibitors at gamescom, and an increasing number of new games releases of professional quality not only on Commodore 64, but also on other platforms like Amstrad/Schneider CPC. My favourite vintage games platform – the Commodore Amiga – did not get its share of new releases though. That seemed strange because it used to be the most popular games platform in the very early 90s in Europe. It’s said to have sold about five million units in the EU-territory, still has loyal followers, and is very popular within the demo scene.

I assumed that it’s comparably elaborate to develop games for Amiga, so much so that a classic one man show – common constellation on ­older ­8-bit-systems – can hardly handle the job. The Amigas 16-bit-technology, though antique by modern standards, ­already ­enables quite sophisticated content. It takes trained specialists to take care of design, coding, pixels and music if the result was to be on par with the best games released in the heydays of the Amiga. Also, the Amiga was not very popular outside of ­Europe and therefore – unlike the Mega Drive – cannot confide on momentum from US- and Asia-based developers.

It felt like it was time to change that. I felt the fever for coding returning, decided to revive my old source code from 1991 and maybe develop it into the fully fleshed game I had envisioned about 25 years ago. Such a project is time consuming and not to be finished within a few hours. I ­calculated with an investment of three hours a day, four days a week, six months minimum. Such an enormous additional burden on the time account could not ­easily be ­reconciled with a regular job and a family. My approach: night shift. Get to bed at 10pm; wake myself at 2am; develop several hours undisturbed; return to bed and wake up with my family. Sounds crazy and it maybe is, but it works. But why, you may ask. The answer is simple. Passion. The implementation of a lifelong dream. I want to prove to myself that I can develop a high-quality Amiga game and maybe gain some attention and recognition. July 2015 marks the beginning of my project of heart.

RESHOOT R runs on the classic Amiga-models A1200, A4000 and CD32, as well as compatible emulators and recent Amiga-clones like Vampire V4.

Retro platform, modern tools Very quickly I realised that Amiga development no longer works like in 1991 for me. In recent years I managed a couple of ­iPhone developments and learned how to use modern software tools such as Xcode and Unity on Apple Mac. The Amiga can’t handle common features, like multiple monitor setup or version control. Therefore it was clear that I had to setup a cross-development system. My main tools:

iMac. The built-in Internet connection has to be mentioned, because in 1991 this was not yet available. Gathering and sharing information is so much simpler today!

Xcode. Mainly works a comfortable code editor with version control, code completion and text highlighting; features not yet invented in 1991

FS-UAE Amiga Emulator. Almost 100 percent compatible to the real hardware. Extraordinary built-in debugging capabilities

ASM Pro. Classic tool running on Amiga. Translates source code into pure and fast machine language. Switched to VASM-cross-development tool recently

Tiled: A very common map editor for all kinds of 2D-games. Allows comfortable placement of tiles and objects in separate layers. Code on Amiga read and interprets Tiles’ XML-data-exports for use in RESHOOT

Commodore Amiga 1200. Real retro hardware used to test code regularly. File transfer between iMac and Amiga works with SD card which both systems can read and write

Another integral part of the development environment is a virtual hard drive partition, which the iMac and Amiga both can access to share source code and data files. Some few self-written keyboard macros automate the interaction of Xcode on the Mac and the tools on the Amiga emulator. One press of the F1-key stores source code, activates FS-UAE, loads source code into ASM Pro, compiles and executes. This takes about one second. On the real retro hardware this would take approximately 30 seconds. Turnaround times of 1991 and 2019 cannot be compared.

RESHOOT R is available as digital download, in two CD-ROM-editions and even on classic 3.5 “disc shown here. Prices go from 29 to 54 Euros. Go to www.amigashop.org.

After establishing a working development environment, it took me some time to get back into thinking in Assembler ­language. To me, Assembler is still the ­purest form of coding because of it’s logical approach and direct access to the hardware. It’s fast, too. Much faster than anything if one knows how to handle it. The price for speed: Compared to C++ or C#, Assembler code looks rather abstract and unreadable, because it mainly consists of commands which provide memory access, logical operators and branches to control program flow. I should add that a dedicated game development environment comparable to Unity actually exists on Amiga, albeit much simpler. Also, like today’s ­modern operating systems, the Amiga OS provides libraries which handle visual, aural and input/output operations. But on classic hardware, processor cycles and memory are very precious. The ­Amiga libraries slow code down considerably, game development environments alike. Almost no reasonable games on the Amiga makes use of such features.

For my game it was ine­vitable to draw and move pixels as fast and memory-efficient as possible. I, therefore, did what most Amiga coders did in the heydays of the machine: switch off the OS and write custom code which fits the game like a glove. That’s what you need to do, if you want maximum performance on a 14 MHz machine with 2 MB of memory. These are the specs of the Amiga 1200, which is my favourite iteration of the Amiga-family and therefore became my target platform. I love this machine because of its elegant case containing considerably more processing power than the earlier Amiga models 500, 1000 and 2000. It was released just a few years prior to Commodore demise and therefore – like its console-cousin CD32 – did not manage to gain the same market share as the Amiga 500. Because of their versatility, the ­Amiga 1200, 4000 and CD32 seem to be on the rise now though. Prices for used models currently go through the roof.

The 2019 release RESHOOT R shows its creators have learned their lesson. It sets its focus on smooth gameplay with just some minor modern modifications. This resulted in very favourable reviews from Youtubers and the specialist press.

Don’t innovate too much At this stage, it occurred to me that – while I grew back into the code – I could ­modernise the game design. Why not incorporate new elements not seen before on Amiga? One idea was to add twitch gameplay with an endless structure. I imagined a kind of endless reaction test, fast and fluid as the Amiga classic Silkworm, mixed with ­elements of Japanese bullet-hell-shooters. The player’s survival would not be divided into many short chapters. Instead, there should be only one level and even a ­single life. Once the player’s spaceship hits an invader or a bullet: Game Over, score billing and new attempt. Just like Flappy Bird. That would be an interesting new alternative to Apydia, R-Type, Thunderforce IV, Last ­Resort and other classic horizontal shooters from the 80s and 90s that I found so intense and exciting.

It took me one year to finish ­developing RESHOOT – a game which I had started to work in the early 90s and which got its release in August 2016. It was not the high-quality shoot’ em-up I had in my brain at first. But it was proof that I can finish such a project. That seemed sufficient, especially as so many comparable projects fail to reach the finish line. RESHOOT was released physically on CD-ROM, simply because I wanted to feel the satisfaction of being able to touch the fruits of my labour with my hands. Within one year of development I learned a lot. So much so that, even before sending the ISO-image to the ­CD-ROM duplication facility, I started to work on a follow-up project. This was going to be the lighthouse project I had originally envisioned. I already had given birth to its name: RESHOOT R. The intention of the “R “mainly was to ignite discussions within the community about its meaning. I decided to invite the community to become involved in the development. Let people join the process, that means a serious investment of time and energy, but it’s important to gain attention. Also, this way I gathered feedback from RESHOOT-beta-testers very early and therefore knew I’d better change the game design for RESHOOT R fundamentally.

With RESHOOT, the intention was to use the basic shoot ‘em formula as a frame for mainly modern game design elements. This worked only partially. The endless gameplay got no love from the retro community. Therefore RESHOOT R got a total redesign. I planned it as a classic horizontal shoot’ em-up with a just handful of modern details, and focus on visual effects never seen before Amiga. The plan: classic stage-based structure with rising difficulty level, power-up-weapons, lots of change of pace, and narrative elements leading to a dramatic climax.

The 2016 release Reshoot tried to marry classic shoot’ em-up gameplay with modern elements. It rather failed. Customers seem to prefer old-school elements in games on retro platforms.

No more one-man-show Collaboration with pixel artist Kevin Saunders from Australia was a given. He did great work on RESHOOT and proved that he is a reliable guy. This is not to be taken for granted in a development scenario which is mainly driven by passion, not money. One of the main challenges while developing RESHOOT and RESHOOT R was to find and lead people who can actually pull through, who do not flake away after a couple of weeks or at the slightest sight of any obstacles. Kevin and I discussed visual ideas and quickly decided to ditch the very abstract and clean design of RESHOOT and instead go for a comparably natural ­approach, combining the fluid animation of 3D-rendered objects with the distinctive look of hand-crafted pixels.

The simultaneous use of music and sound-fx was inevitable. One needs to know that it was not common practice in the Amigas early years and is still difficult to implement nowadays since the Amiga only has four sound channels and can mix sounds only with severe constraints in the visual and gameplay department. But our ears are so used to a modern hearing experience, that anything less would not sound acceptable in 2019. To keep the music pumping while player projectile whoosh over the screen and the boss warcries after taking another hit, took weeks of detailed work.

Project leader Richard ­Löwenstein uses modern tools to develop a game for a platform which essentially debuted in 1985.

Also, the switch to a different kind of music proved to be very important for the enhanced experience that RESHOOT R provides. I ditched the unconventional chiptune-music of RESHOOT for a ­modern, fast pulsed musical accompaniment of very high technical quality, comparable to what you would expect to hear on modern hardware platforms. A quarter of system memory was reserved just for audio use. This way the digital samples, which the Amigas Paula-customchip reads from memory and outputs through its four ­audio channels, would sound natural and not scratchy like is so often the case in Amiga games.

While talking about music, I need to mention gamescom 2016 and the importance of attending such gatherings. It was this visit that laid the groundwork for the audio experience. While showing RESHOOT to the public audience, I got into talks with Martin Ahman. Martin is a DJ and composer interested in electronic music. He told me how keen he is to, once in a lifetime, have one of his pieces in an Amiga game. He did not have any Amiga related releases on its curriculum vitae at that time. But he convinced me that he knows what it takes by sending a piece which was pretty close to what I had envisioned. It all resulted in audio tracks which not only drove the gameplay forward but which were so good on their own that prior to release, we decided to produce a separate Soundtrack-CD with remixes from the German Remix Group and others. Like Kevin Saunders, Martin Ahman is aware of the limitations of classic hardware and creative enough to work around them for the best possible performance.

The challenge is to create a 3D-illusion through visual layering and move dozens of objects at the same time, with only a 14-Mhz-CPU and 2 MB RAM under the hood.

Three years in the making It took me a while to enhance and modify the existing RESHOOT-Engine to cope with the many additional elements planned for RESHOOT R: I wanted narrative breaks, a diversified and sometimes surprising ­attack choreography, and parent-children-related objects which can be multiplied and combined to form bigger boss-like objects. One of my main goals was to add full screen perspective scrolling to enhance the illusion of visual depth. This has never been done in Amiga game before. The Amiga does not contain any 3D-capabilities, no scaling or texture mapping. Only a very simple GPU called “Copper“ can switch video characteristics at segments of each scan line. Therefore all perspective visual effects need clever coding since they must only use a minimum of CPU cycles while adding a maximum of visual impact to the experience. Doing this while drawing up to 100 moving objects on screen and keeping a steady 50 Hertz framerate proofed to be a very special challenge. Even down to optimising single bytes within data structures and counting CPU cycles for maximised performance within program loops.

One year after the initial development started, the engine was ready for its public debut at gamescom 2017. I showed one playable level and gathered a ton of feedback and ideas. It took another two years to implement the best proposals. One of the most important modifications concerns the collision system. It now mirrors the hitbox-based behaviour found in modern shoot’ em-up-games on Xbox, PlayStation and Switch. The added particle system not only looks nice, but it also helps distinguish cosmetic background graphics from collidable stuff. The extra weapon system now not only rewards persevering ­players, who remember and collect power-ups, with ­enhanced destruction ­capabilities; but it also incorporates an ­innovative shield ­function for the players ship: The hit of an enemy bullet only takes away one ­power-up, unless the ship returns to its ­basic configuration and a bullet hit is fatal. All these modifications add tremendously to the game-flow and playability ­experience.

The challenge is to create a 3D-illusion and move dozens of objects with only a 14-Mhz-CPU and 2 MB RAM.

Community and media seem to agree. Favourable comments from Youtubers, ­excited reviews in specialist magazines and a number of editorial pieces – one of which was aired on the German public TV-channel ZDF – prove that RESHOOT R is not only a great Amiga game – it’s a great game on any platform. So it paid off emotionally. But did it work financially?

The Retro community is very creative, loyal and willing to buy games at prices comparable to modern console releases. The market is still very, very niche, though. This restricts sales but increases the visibility of each games release, provided its creators invest sufficient time and knowledge into community work and marketing. RESHOOT R is essentially a bet on the assumption that the retro games community grows like the vintage car scene did in the past 20 years. If this becomes true, the market might become serious in the near future. Games like RESHOOT R help create such a market. Because if they are good-looking and entertaining, they may be considered a viable alternative to products on modern platforms – not only for people who actually owned an Amiga 30 years ago but also for new customers wanting to experience this special retro flavour in the most authentic way. Future projects like Intellivisions Amico-console help putting the market into the limelight.

RESHOOT R is a retro community effort, with contributions from several experienced freelance artists.

So, my newly founded retro specialist label “spieleschreiber” has a serious foot in the door and the business model is well and truly scalable. Conversions of RESHOOT R for Steam, Switch and Mega Drive-platforms are on the cards. The next AAA-release for Amiga is already in ­development: The fast-paced vertical shoot’ em-up RESHOOT PROXIMA III will bring Truxton-like space chaos onto Amiga. The game debuted at the Amiga34-­exhibition at the 12th October 2019 and will be released in 2020. Extrapolating from peoples interest at the show, this will be huge. Maybe it will even be the first Amiga game ever that gets successfully funded by a Kickstarter-­campaign. Tanglewood, Phantom Gear and several other recent projects for the Mega Drive-platform have proven it can be done.

Richard Löwenstein Journalist and Game Developer

Richard developed games since 1985. At the end of 1991, he started an editorial career, became editor of Amiga Joker and PC Joker Magazine, founded a number of games magazines and wrote about games and its industry for several leading media outlets. In 2015 Richard returned to game development, ­re­leased RESHOOT in 2016 and ­RESHOOT R in May 2019. More at www.spieleschreiber.de.

The post RESHOOT R: Driven by Passion appeared first on Making Games.

RESHOOT R: Driven by Passion published first on https://leolarsonblog.tumblr.com/

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Why I Decided To Retire Entrepreneurs-Journey.com And Rebrand As Yaro.blog

One of the most repeated questions during my coaching calls over the years is this:

Should I use my name for my domain name?

The alternative is to use a unique word or phrase as a brand, separate from your own personal brand.

Given how important choosing a domain name is for your new web business, this question deserves consideration.

It also ties into a big change I recently made, dropping the Entrepreneurs-Journey.com domain name, which I had used for 13 years, and replacing it with Yaro.blog — a personal brand domain that doesn’t even use the .com address!

My First Domain Names

The first domain name I ever purchased was MagicAustralia.com (later changing it to MTGParadise.com), for my Magic: The Gathering card game website.

At that time in history, the late 1990s, I could have scooped up a lot of amazing one-word domain names and become rich reselling them a decade later. Sadly, I didn’t have the foresight as a teenager to see this opportunity, I was too busy playing cards.

The next domain name I bought for a business was BetterEdit.com. I was proud of this choice as it had great alliteration and also explained what the business did.

I also purchased other domain names for side projects that went nowhere, including MP3Now.com for my music site, YoungActivist.com for my change the world site, and Yaz.com.au for my Australian focused online trading community (you can learn all about these failed projects here).

In 2004, after I discovered blogging and made the decision to start a hobby blog about entrepreneurship, I made possibly the worst domain name choice I had up to that point. I registered Entrepreneurs-Journey.com.

I wanted to write about my entrepreneurial journey of the previous seven years and track my ongoing business projects into the then future. The domain was a reasonably accurate description of this ethos.

However, as I would quickly realize, the word Entrepreneur is hard to spell, you should avoid hyphens in your domain and ideally the fewer letters you use the better.

Despite all of these handicaps, my blog did very well and as you probably know, became the basis for a teaching and coaching business that is still going today, almost fifteen years later, having generated over two million in sales.

The Emergence Of The Yaro Brand

Although I was happy with my blogging results, as the years went by I became more and more unhappy about my domain name.

On podcast interviews rather than say my website address I would tell people to just Google for ‘Yaro’ instead. This would bring up my blog as one of the first search results, due mostly because my blog ranked so well and my name is rare.

Although it wasn’t my intent initially, once I headed down the path of teaching through blog posts and hosting my own podcast, I found myself becoming a personal brand.

Around the same time I started blogging, people like Steve Pavlina (stevepavlina.com), Darren Rowse (problogger.net), Brian Clark (copyblogger.com) and John Chow (johnchow.com) were all becoming what today we would call an ‘influencer’ — essentially a personal brand.

As you can see from their domain names, using your name or a brand name for your domain didn’t seem to impact the end result significantly. If you produced content read by thousands, you’d become a known entity.

As time went by it became clear that ‘Yaro’ was by far my strongest brand, not Entrepreneurs-Journey.com. Yet I stuck with my domain and even branched out with the EJInsider brand for my paid programs and first version of my membership site (later relaunched as the LaptopLifestyleAcademy.com).

In more recent years I reached the point where not only did I not like my domain, I became embarrassed by it. I felt that my somewhat amateurish domain name reflected poorly on my overall expertise, especially as a first impression point.

Although I can’t verify this, I also think my long hyphenated domain name may have negatively impacted my search results as time went on and search algorithms became more sophisticated.

Meanwhile, as the web matured, all kinds of new personalities surfaced in my industry, including Lewis Howes (lewishowes.com), Pat Flynn (smartpassiveincome.com), Amy Porterfield (amyporterfield.com), John Lee Dumas (entrepreneuronfire.com) and Marie Forleo (marieforleo.com)

As you can see again with these examples, whether you use your personal name as your domain or a unique word or phrase, didn’t seem to matter. John even succeeded using the hard-to-spell word ‘Entrepreneur’.

New Companies, New Projects, New Domains

No matter what rationale you want to apply to choosing a domain, the most important thing is your own relationship with it.

Emotionally I had no desire to shout to the world the Entrepreneurs-Journey.com brand. Instead, my energy was turning towards a domain name I had bought years earlier in preparation for a new project I hoped to focus on one day in the future.

That domain is ChangeManifesto.com, once again returning to my previous interest in ‘changing the world’ topics, and not just business.

In 2017 I decided to finally begin the Change Manifesto project, starting with the book and blog. The blog was setup, I wrote some articles for it, and began writing the book as I traveled Europe.

During the same year, in partnership with my team member Claire, we completed a behind-the-scenes test of a new business. For this project I did some brainstorming and was happy to discover I could register the domain InboxDone.com (my first choice, InboxZero.com was taken). I was excited that such a short and descriptive domain was still available even in 2017.

After finishing the first draft of the Change Manifesto book by the end of 2017, I faced a bit of a crossroads.

I wanted a break from the book, and the idea of jumping in and editing the first draft, which required a significant rewrite, was not motivating. The Change Manifesto blog on the other hand, I enjoyed writing to roughly once a month. Some of my best written content was going there.

Meanwhile Entrepreneurs-Journey.com was finally heading towards the release a of new design, which had been delayed by years because of an unreliable web designer I had to part ways with.

The entrepreneur in me was very excited about the potential of InboxDone.com. I wanted to make sure whatever energy this business needed from me to grow was available. The only way to get customers was to do some form of marketing, and that was definitely high on my priority list. Yet this business was still very new, so there was no guarantee it was going to work.

There were different directions available to me, and I knew there was no way I could go all-in on all of them at the same time.

The Emergence Of Yaro.blog

I’m not sure when he made the change, but at some point Tim Ferriss, who you probably know as an author, podcaster and hacker of life, converted his main personal brand domain to www.tim.blog.

This was probably the first time I’d see someone very successful use the still relatively new .blog domain name extension.

I usually stay clear of any domain name extensions that are not .com. There are countless examples of companies and people doing really well despite not using .com, but still, I hadn’t seriously considered something as different as a .blog domain until I saw Tim do so.

Each month new clients signed up for InboxDone.com. This was awesome and exciting, and also helpful because it gave me a clear focus. I like making decisions based on where momentum is going. In this case we had an obvious winner, so in my mind InboxDone.com was becoming my number one growth focus.

I still love coaching and creating content, so I wasn’t about to give up that part of my life. However, it did mean I needed to simplify this area so I didn’t have too many competing goals.

All of these thoughts were running in my head, yet I still hadn’t made a decision to change anything. It wasn’t until one day after a call with my project manager Laura that I made a big choice.

Laura said to me what I was already thinking. All of these projects in some way connect to the Yaro brand. Whether it’s a book and blog posts about change, my coaching business, and even my new business InboxDone.com, they all link to me, my story and my expertise.

Laura knew very well I didn’t like the Entrepreneurs-Journey.com domain, so she said to me, why don’t you change everything to sit under the ‘Yaro’ personal brand, which you are known for anyway.

I agreed, and with that I decided to make some fairly significant changes.

1. Entrepreneurs-Journey.com would become Yaro.blog. Tim Ferriss had given me ‘permission’ to see the .blog extension as a viable option. In case you are wondering, I did contact the owner of Yaro.com — he said he wanted a million dollars simply because I wanted the domain — sigh.

2. The new blog design and logo would have to be modified to remove the Entrepreneurs Journey parts and replace them with my name. Thankfully the designers could easily make that change, meaning we could launch the new domain and the new design at the same time (well almost, we had to carefully roll out one change after the other to manage SEO considerations – see below).

3. ChangeManifesto.com the blog, would merge into Yaro.blog. The ChangeManifesto.com website and domain would focus on the one-day-to-be-released book (whenever I felt like going back to rewrite the first draft). The blog component of the site would close down, and all the blog posts I’d written there would be migrated into Yaro.blog

4. All my blog posts and podcasts would be branded under the Yaro personal brand and released on the one Yaro.blog going forward.

5. InboxDone.com continued to be promoted within my Yaro.blog content. We have podcast ads running on my own podcast and I’ve written several blog posts related to email management that recommend InboxDone.com. This has worked surprisingly well, as our number one source of new customers outside of people who know me already has come from one blog post that ranks well in Google search.

This left me with a wonderfully simple structure. Claire my cofounder and I would focus on keeping InboxDone.com growing slowly and carefully. When not doing that I could spend my time creating content for Yaro.blog, a domain name and brand I was happy to promote as a blog and podcast.

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com had a great run, and ChangeManifesto.com I hope will still one day see the release of my book, but for now having one growth company and a personal brand gives me a clear direction.

The SEO Implications Of Changing Your Domain Name

Once I made the decision to switch to Yaro.blog, the big concern I worried about was how we could manage the change without damaging my search engine rankings and killing my organic traffic.

When you change your domain name, you are changing the web address of every single piece of content you have published on that website. You can do things to inform Google that you are changing domains, but I was still worried about the potential impact.

The tech team led by an old online friend and previous student, Ovi, who I brought on board to finish up the new blog design, could also do the domain change. Given my blog was almost fifteen years old at the time we made the transition, this was not something I was going to do myself!

We talked about it, and decided that first we’d make the domain name change without switching the design, make sure we did everything we could to mitigate any damage to search engine rankings, and then proceed to roll out the new look.

I won’t go into the technical details of how to do a domain name change, since I frankly don’t know enough about it and plenty of other people have written great how-to guides to manage the transition.

Ovi rolled out the new domain name, which switched entrepreneurs-journey.com for yaro.blog. We had redirects setup so the old domain would still work. All our tests showed links were redirecting as they should, now we just had to wait and see what happened to the search engine rankings.

Within two days, Google was showing yaro.blog in search results and entrepreneurs-journey.com was basically gone. This was good, but traffic-wise, things were not looking great — my organic traffic was half of what it used to be.

Over the next few weeks things started to improve slowly, but my traffic never returned to what it was since before the domain name change.

I was hoping the redesign rollout might improve things, since the website should load quicker and have cleaner code. I was also expecting variables like ‘time on site’ will increase (people staying longer on my posts), which also factors into search engine rankings.

Rolling out the new design was a much bigger job than making the domain name switch. Ovi and his team made the new theme live and we all began exploring the site to find bugs. Within a month the site was 95% of what I wanted it to be, which was a satisfying feeling. It was a significant change to the previous design and felt like moving into a new house.

As you will probably know if you own a website, making changes is a never ending job. I’m still working with Ovi now to tweak certain pages, add features, and optimize elements.

In terms of traffic, although there was a move upwards after the design was rolled out, my traffic hasn’t returned to what it was before the changes. This is frustrating, but it has forced me to focus on optimization again.

If you have yet to check out the new design, head over to www.yaro.blog and click some links to look around. I recommend you do this with a laptop or desktop for the larger screen.

It probably won’t surprise you to see a lot of my face all over the new design. The switch to focus 100% on Yaro as my brand has meant, much like so many other personal brands, influencers, consultants and experts, we put forward our image in everything. I feel a little uncomfortable about this as my site seems like a shrine to me, but I understand it’s an effective method for making sure people remember you.

What Should You Do?

To end this article I’m going to answer the question that I started with —

What should you do with your domain name, and consequently, your brand?

Over the years my answer to this question hasn’t really changed. At the end of the day what matters is if you are excited about your domain.

Entrepreneurs-Journey.com carried me far, despite being not a great domain name. As a brand, I could have continued with it and still did well, but emotionally I didn’t like it.

There are other factors to consider too, for example:

A personal brand is a lot harder to sell, so if you are building a company and the idea of selling it one day appeals, don’t use your name.

What your actual name is matters. If it’s really hard to spell and remember, you’re not helping your cause if you use it for your domain name.

Choosing a brand name is generally more difficult because all the best .com domains are gone. Of course you don’t have to use .com, but it’s almost always preferable.

If you’re NOT looking to personally be a brand, possibly speaking at events, doing interviews online, or at the very least, showing photos of yourself, then don’t use your personal name.

I also cover some other very important elements when choosing a domain in a handout you can download for free from here:

If you’re choosing your domain name and brand for the first time, I strongly recommend you download this handout as I cover the most important elements that makes it easier for people to remember you and your domain.

That in the end is the most important thing – will people think of you when they have need for what you offer?

As I go all-in on my personal brand, at least for my coaching business, I do so knowing that so much of my success has come from people trusting me as a person.

My companies with independent domain names like InboxDone.com are not meant to be an extension of the Yaro personal brand, BUT so many of our customers choose to work with us because of the relationship they have with me.

It’s hard to beat the power of building trust online using your personal brand. The ‘Influencer economy’ is alive and well, with individuals enjoying access to massive audiences who trust them, and thus can influence purchasing decisions.

Whether this is your path is very much up to you.

Good luck!

Yaro

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How to Double Your Writing Speed Without Lowering Its Quality

How in the world do they do it?

Day after day, they write monstrous posts that are extremely useful and easy to read.

You know the people I’m talking about—you might even consider me to be one of them.

Here’s what a typical week looks like for me in terms of blog content alone:

2 posts on Quick Sprout (1,000-5,000 words each) plus an infographic

2 posts on the NeilPatel.com blog (about 5,000 words each)

2 guest posts on other popular blogs (about 1,500 words each)

0.5-1 blog post for the Crazy Egg blog (about 2 per month at about 2,000 words each)

Total that up, and you get around 17,000 words per week or 3,400 words per weekday.

And I’ve been able to sustain this type of volume for years.

I’m the first to admit that in technical terms, I’m not the best writer. I certainly didn’t go to college to get a degree in English or creative writing. Yet, I have thousands of awesome readers who really enjoy what I write.

There’s a reason I spent much time learning first how to write quality blog posts and then how to write them fast.

Although time is my most valuable resource, I spend a significant chunk of it every week writing. That’s because I know how effective content marketing can be for a business.

But I’m far from the only one.

Contently found that 41% of businesses struggle with creating enough content.

Wouldn’t it be easier to create more content if you could write faster?

If you need to learn how to write a great post, start by checking out my guide to writing high quality data-driven articles.

If you already write high quality posts but it takes you a long time to do it, then this article is for you. I’m going to show you 11 key concepts that you can start using today to start writing faster.

Imagine being able to write posts in half the time you currently do now! That would free up a lot of time to either write more posts or work on other parts of your business.

An extra few posts a week can greatly speed up your business’ growth, possibly by years. 

1. Get your typing up to speed

No matter how well you can remain focused for long period of times and how fast you can think of what to say, if you can’t type at a decent speed, you’ll never write quickly.

If you’re still pecking at letters, one finger at a time, it’s not going to cut it.

You don’t have to be a master typist, but you should be able to type at least 60 words per minute (60 WPM). If you could type at that speed for an hour straight, that would be 3,600 words per hour. Obviously that’s unrealistic, but you can achieve a decent fraction of that production rate.

I’d like you to take a minute to test your typing speed. Head to Key Hero, and do a quick typing test:

If you’d like to repeat it a few times to get a more accurate result, go ahead.

If your speed is under 60 WPM, you’ll have to fix that before you can worry about any of the other concepts in this article. I know it’s not the most fun thing in the world, but you’ll be grateful you did it in the long run.

Step 1: Use the proper hand placement

To type properly, you should be resting the four fingers of each hand on the keys of the middle row, with your thumbs hovering over the space bar.

If you don’t already do this, it will take a bit of practice for it to feel natural.

Step 2: Don’t look at the keyboard

You should be able to type with your eyes closed—literally. If you can’t, it means you need to practice to get you to the point when typing no longer requires an active focus (the unconscious takes care of it).

Part of this can be your posture. If you’re hunched over while sitting, it’s possible that you’re looking at the keyboard just because that’s where your line of sight is. Do your best to sit up straight when writing.

Step 3: Practice, practice, practice

Kids these days practice typing from a young age, but you might not have been so lucky. The good news is that you can find online tools to help you practice and learn. One example is the Key Hero practice tools. If you need more instruction from the beginning, use a typing tutor tool:

Alternative: Try speech-to-text software

You have a number of speech-to-text tools you can use, e.g., TalkTyper (free), Ivona (paid), and Dragon Naturally Speaking (paid). These tools allow you to simply talk to your computer while it records your words and whatever punctuation you indicate.

While you can obviously talk faster than you can type, there are some downsides to this method. The free or cheap tools aren’t always accurate, and it can take a lot of time to fix the mistakes those programs make. Even the expensive ones aren’t perfect, and they also have a steep learning curve at first.

It’s not the first option I’d recommend, but if for some reason you aren’t able to type, or type quickly, it’s a decent backup.

2. Don’t forget your ideas: make a list

How much time do you waste trying to come up with a good idea for a blog post?

It’s hard enough if you’re just writing a couple of them a week, but if I had to come up with ideas for all the posts I write one at a time, I don’t know if I could do it.

The good news is: there’s a better way. It’s called an idea list.

Coming up with ideas on demand can be difficult because it’s a creative task. Creativity comes and goes as we observe and experience different things in our lives. It’s why book writers often take years to write their novels.

You can’t just sit down and say to yourself, “Okay brain, start coming up with great ideas.”

Instead, you need to develop your idea muscle so that you can spontaneously come up with many ideas throughout the day.

The concept of an idea muscle was coined by James Altucher, who says that as you practice coming up with ideas, you get better at it.

“Every situation you are in, you will have a ton of ideas. Any question  you are asked, you will know the response. Every meeting you are at, you will take the meeting so far out of the box you’ll be on another planet, if you are stuck on a desert highway – you will figure the way out, if you need to make money you’ll come up with 50 ideas to make  money, and so on.” — James Altucher

He advises to start by trying to come up with at least 10 ideas throughout the day.

Here’s the second part: record them. Not all of these ideas will be good, but some will be, and others may lead you to good ideas.

You can use a simple notepad from the dollar store, or you can do what the team at Buffer does and record ideas in Trello:

An alternative: create a repeatable strategy

I’ve already shown you how to steal ideas for your next post. This is a strategy that you can use over and over again to get inspiration for post ideas.

It’s still not a good idea to come up with post ideas as you need them—it’s inefficient. Instead, schedule a block of time, maybe an hour, every week or month (depending on your post volume). Use this time to use your strategy to come up with as many ideas as you can.

Instead of coming up with a single idea in 10 minutes every time you need one, you can come up with five times the number of ideas in the same time frame once you get some momentum going.

Either way, you’ll be able to cut down on time coming up with ideas and focus more time and energy on the actual writing.

3. Get rid of distractions

Distractions are everywhere, especially on the computer.

The urge to check email, visit social media sites, or just click a bookmark to go to your favorite site to kill time is strong.

Maybe you’d rather check your search engine rankings again or website traffic instead of writing a post, which seems way less fun.

If you give into these urges, your productivity is going to go way down. But even if you don’t, those urges in the back of your head are going to distract you and prevent you from being as productive as possible.

In real life, there are even more distractions, especially if you work from home. Kids running around, people talking on the phone or watching TV, and temptation to take a break and grab a snack.

Distractions are everywhere.

You’ll never get rid of them all, but you can get rid of many, which will greatly boost your writing speed.

Distraction elimination #1: Work in an office or quiet space

Noise kills writing productivity. You need to be able to hear your thoughts uninterrupted. If you work from home, designate a room as your office, and make sure that no one disturbs you while the door is closed.

If you’re working at an office or co-working space, keep your door closed while writing. Tell any friends or coworkers to not disturb you while the door is closed unless there is an emergency.

If neither of those are realistic, head to a library. Libraries are quiet, and some even have dedicated rooms for silent work.

Distraction elimination #2: Turn off the tunes

Who doesn’t like music? Wouldn’t it be more fun to write while listening to Taylor Swift?

Well, sure, it will be more fun, but it will slow you down when you are writing.

Studies have shown that music is a distraction that slows down complex thought processes. So while music might help you with simple, straight-forward tasks such as lifting more in the gym, it’s going to slow down your writing.

But that’s not the full story. Those studies looked typical lyrical music.

A 2012 study showed that low to moderate levels of ambient noise can actually lead to slightly higher creative output.

Similarly, another study showed that baroque classical music can increase mood and productivity. Note that classical music rarely has any lyrics. It is soft and consistent.

So you have two options: work with no music or work with low to medium volume ambient noise or classical music.

To have some ambient sound in the background, you can use tools such as A Soft Murmur or Simply Noise.

Distraction elimination #3: Lock-down distracting websites

If you have trouble staying on task, you can block certain trouble websites for a designated time period. There are many plugins that can do this, e.g., Strict Workflow for Chrome.

You simply tell the plugin which sites you’d like blocked and for how long, and you won’t be able to access them until the time period is up.

In addition, you can hide your bookmarks bar if you’re working inside a web text application such as Google Docs. Just right-click any empty space in the bookmarks bar and uncheck “show bookmarks bar.”

Distraction elimination #4: Write offline

If blocking distracting sites doesn’t work, you can take it to the next level and disconnect your Internet altogether. Writing offline will eliminate all online distractions.

Distraction elimination #5: Finish all important tasks before writing

Sometimes it’s hard to focus because there’s something else important that you need to do during the day. If you’re thinking about this in the back of your head, your writing speed will go down.

Instead, think about doing any distracting tasks upfront, and then come back to writing later.

4. Outline your post beforehand

Before I write any post, I always outline it.

When you outline a post, you get a really clear idea of how you will be making the point you’re trying to make as well as any research or resources you’ll need to make the article as strong as possible.

You’ll notice that all of my posts have an introduction section (like everyone else’s posts would have) and also a conclusion section.

The headlines of the other sections will depend on the type of post I’m writing. There are 12 main types of posts, and I have general outlines for all of them.

The outlines don’t need to take very long to put together. Their main point is to make sure you’re not missing any important pieces of the puzzle.

I write out all the subheadlines (H2s) in the article as well as a few main bullet points below each to remind me what I should cover.

When I get to each section while writing, I don’t have to remember what I had in mind for this section before—it’s already there.

5. Research comes first

What do you think is easier to write about for me: how to ride a horse or how to write a good blog post?

Of course, how to write a good blog post is a simpler topic for me because it’s a topic that I have a lot of experience and expertise in.

The first step is to become an expert on the topic you’re writing about. It’s easy to talk/write about something you know well but difficult if you’re trying to put the pieces together as you go.

Take my nutrition blog case study. I’m not a nutrition expert, and I didn’t have the time to invest in becoming well-versed in the subject so that I could write about it credibly. That’s why I had Mike take over content creation.

This doesn’t mean you need to be an expert from day one, but you need at the very least to learn about the specific topic you’re writing about before starting.

Otherwise, task switching is going to kill your writing speed.

What’s task switching? It’s a concept that refers to having to switch between different activities. For example, having to switch from writing mode to research mode because you don’t understand a concept you need for a particular article.

While some may multitask better than others, we all are more productive when we focus on a single task.

Dr. David Meyer and colleagues conducted a study in 2001 to quantify the effects of task switching. He had subjects try to switch between different tasks such as solving math problems and naming geometric objects.

When both problems were simple, subjects didn’t lose much time going back and forth. But as the tasks became complex, the subjects lost more and more time with each switch.

It’s hard to pin down the exact cost of switching, but Meyer estimated that it could cost someone up to 40% of their productivity for complex tasks. Make no mistake, writing and researching are complex tasks.

Every time you have to switch, it not only takes a bit of time (up to a few seconds) to get into the right mindset, but it also fatigues you. Just thinking about having to switch back and forth several times an hour makes me tired.

Here’s the takeaway: learn everything you need to know about the topic you are writing about before you write a single word. This means that you should note down any relevant statistics, resources, or findings from studies beforehand.

6. Write first, edit later

Ernest Hemingway said, “The first draft of anything is garbage.”

I’m not sure how much fiction you read, but Hemingway was one of the most influential authors of the 20th century.

He won a Nobel Prize in Literature and a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction before he died. Even now, we remember his writing genius.

If Hemingway thought his first drafts were garbage, imagine what he’d think of mine or yours.

So, you basically have two options if you want to write a post that doesn’t suck.

First, you can continually edit each sentence and paragraph as you go. Or you can write your first draft like most prolific writers do, and then edit later.

Both can produce a good article, but I’ll tell you why the second option is by far the best choice.

If you continually switch between writing and editing, you have the same problem that we looked at before: task switching. You’re asking your brain to switch from trying to write to trying to edit. This kills any writing momentum you have and makes you start from scratch every sentence or paragraph.

When you write—just write—you can focus on writing only. This allows your mind to focus on what you should write now and what should come next. Similarly, when you’re editing, all your focus can be on “how can I make this better?” instead of also trying to think of what needs to be said next.

In my experience, Meyer’s guess of about a 40% decrease in productivity from task switching is probably about right.

Write first, edit second.

7. Take (smart) breaks

Unless you’re a robot, you need breaks. All people get tired.

Sure, you can get stronger over time, but you’ll still need breaks.

Everyone’s different in this aspect. Some need frequent breaks, while others only need breaks after a few hours. It depends on how much you enjoy writing, your writing ability, and a few personal factors.

If you’re not sure where to start, I recommend the Pomodoro Technique. Yes, pomodoro means “tomato” in Italian, so essentially it’s a tomato technique. It’s named after the timer that the creator used:

It was designed in the 1980s by Francesco Cirillo. Even though it’s not new, it hasn’t been until the last decade or so that it really became popular as a productivity technique.

Here’s how it works:

You set a timer for 25 minutes

You work until the timer finishes

You take a 5 minute break

All of that is one Pomodoro

Now you repeat that process four times. After the 4th 30-minute period, you take a 15-20 minute break.

You can either buy a pomodoro timer or just use this online tomato timer.

This procedure is supposed to keep you focused and fresh while working.

For accountability purposes, you are supposed to start the day by making a to-do list of what you’d like to accomplish.

You put an “X” beside each item to indicate how many pomodoro periods (25 minutes of work) it took to finish.

“You will probably begin to notice a difference in your work or study process within a day or two. True mastery of the technique takes from seven to twenty days of constant use.”

The final piece of the system is dealing with interruptions. There are two types of interruptions: internal and external.

Internal interruptions are thoughts that are distracting you from working. With this system, if they are important tasks, you are supposed to write them down on your to-do sheet so that you can be sure they will get done later.

External interruptions are from other people and things (phones, emails, etc.). The pomodoro system suggests to deal with such interruptions as quickly as possible. Tell the people who want your attention now to come back later or promise them you’ll call them back as soon as you can (on a break). In the meantime, get back to work.

8. Give yourself a deadline

Parkinson’s law states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”.

This means if you give yourself too much time to finish something, or that you don’t think it matters when you finish it, it will take longer to do. Either you’ll procrastinate because you know you can do it quickly, or it’ll become increasingly complex, which will result in accomplishing something other than what you set out to do.

Think about how most people study for a test. They put it off as long as possible and then cram everything in at the last possible minute.

While it’s not optimal from a learning point of view, it illustrates that people are capable of working extremely quickly when there’s a firm deadline that must be met.

The problem many professional writers have is that they give themselves a day to write a post, even if they may not need it. They say that if they finish early, they’ll start working on something else—but they never do finish early because the work expands to fill the available time.

When you start writing a post, you need to have a clear idea of what you want to include in the post, nothing more. Then, give yourself a deadline for writing the post, which is equal to the minimum amount of time you think you might need.

Remember that this is just for writing the post, which you want to do as quickly as possible. The quality really comes from the editing. You should still have a deadline, but don’t make it strict since you will need your creativity and careful thought.

Don’t limit deadlines to your writing only. You can also set a deadline for checking emails in the morning. Most people spend over 2 hours on email a day, when they could probably reduce it to two 10-minute periods, in the morning and at night, if they set a hard deadline.

9. Write during your most productive time

You’ve heard that some people work better in the morning and some at night, right?

Morning people are called “early birds,” while people who prefer the night are called “night owls.”

It turns out that there’s a significant amount of science backing up this phenomenon. German scientists found that night owls had a different brain composition than early risers.

This affects your circadian rhythm, which is responsible for controlling your sleep schedule and alertness throughout your day. Dr. Katherine Sharkey says that night owls have longer circadian rhythms than early risers.

We don’t need to know exactly how it works to see how it affects how we write.

If you find that you’re much more productive in the morning, write in the morning.

If you find that you’re much more productive in the evening, write in the evening.

Simple.

You will accomplish more in one really productive hour of writing than you would with more time but struggling to focus.

10. Use simple words

Do you ever pause while writing in order to think of the perfect word?

If so, you’re wasting time.

When it comes to blog posts, or any type of web content, your writing should be simple.

People have very limited attention spans and like to skim. Jakob Nielson collected data that shows an average visitor reads just 20-28% of the words in a post. If they can’t skim it, they usually skip it. That means your perfect word won’t even be read by most.

When you read complex words, it takes longer to understand them. It’s partly because they are complex words, but it’s also because we don’t see them often.

So not only do complicated words and sentences confuse and deter your readers but they also slow down your writing. Instead of just stopping and thinking about which word to use, write the simplest alternative that comes to mind.

Instead of “convoluted,” write “complex”.

Instead of “disastrous,” write “poor”.

Instead of “proficiency,” write “skill.”

Get what I’m saying? Here are 24 more examples.

If you want to see how you’re doing, put one of your blog posts into this readability score calculator.

Here are the Flesch-Kincaid grade level scores of a few popular writers. I write at about a 4th-grade level. If you use complex words often, your score will be much higher.

11. The one factor behind all great writers

I’ve given you 10 concepts so far that can help you write faster without rushing and sacrificing quality.

Even if you apply all of these overnight, you still won’t write as quickly as I do by tomorrow.

Writing quickly takes practice, a lot of practice.

Malcolm Gladwell estimates that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill. If you write five hours a day, five days a week, that’s about eight years.

I’m probably getting pretty close to that number.

But even if you’re not close, you will get better every step of the way there. So, don’t get discouraged if you can only write 300 words per hour right now. Over time, if you’re truly working on writing faster, it will creep up to 310, then 320, then 350, and so on…

In just a year or two, you might be writing 1,000 words per hour—sooner if you’re a quick learner.

Imagine that for a second: you could effectively double or triple the value of your time. That’s huge.

Conclusion

If you apply just one concept in this article, you can probably increase your writing speed by over 10% within a few days.

If you currently write for 20 hours a week at a rate of 500 words per hour, a 10% improvement alone will give you an extra 1,000 words per week. This is about an article a week for most blogs or 52 extra articles per year without spending any extra time.

If you really take the concepts I’ve laid out here to heart and apply more than one, you could see an even bigger improvement.

http://www.quicksprout.com/how-to-double-your-writing-speed-without-lowering-your-quality/ Read more here - http://review-and-bonuss.blogspot.com/2019/03/how-to-double-your-writing-speed.html

[johneburton]

http://bit.ly/2S8A5u8 Nine reasons we may have to choose: Grow a large church or contend for revival We may need to choose: Grow a large church or contend for revival in a region. God's world changers always favor being idealistic ahead of being realistic. They are dreamers, visionaries and supernatural theorists instead of analysts driven by logical data. They refuse to work within natural limits for the sake of quicker, more visible success. They would rather fail a thousand times contending for the impossible than succeed once at something that's humanly possible. These leaders won’t compromise the call to revival by seeking to fill the seats with the lukewarm. They are calling forth the burning ones. Their dream is to shock cities with a remnant army. And the LORD said to Gideon, “The people are still too many. Take them down to the water, and I will test them for you there, and anyone of whom I say to you, ‘This one shall go with you,’ shall go with you, and anyone of whom I say to you, ‘This one shall not go with you,’ shall not go.” Judges 7:4 (ESV) 300 was better than 33,000. This truth is the focus of this article. The Big Meeting For as long as I can remember I have loved the large group atmosphere with innumerable zealous people worshiping God and going deep together. There’s something about the catalytic power and synergy in an atmosphere like that—if the majority are raging radicals for Jesus. A gathering like this most always takes place in the form of conferences or conventions. For example, for me, there’s nothing like the Onething conference that the International House of Prayer in Kansas City hosts at the end of each year. That Missouri city becomes the focal point for people who embrace the call to a life of prophetic intercession in the end times. People from all over the world converge there which results in the large group atmosphere I and so many others value. Over my 25 years of ministry I have enjoyed many large conferences like this but have also discovered that such gatherings rarely exist within the construct of the local church. Understand, I’m not saying the local church can’t attract a lot of people, become mega in size and become influential in the community. Many do just that. We’ve just ventured through an era where seeker sensitive churches became some of the largest churches in the nation. What I am arguing is that it’s extremely rare to find a church that’s raging on fire by establishing a prayer-fueled, revival focused, region shocking, Upper Room level culture. In fact, I wonder just how common it is to grow a church to more than one or two hundred people with such an approach. I believe it is possible yet extremely rare. With some exceptions, small revival tribes of 30-70 people are a much more predictable expectation—until revival actually breaks out. 120 in the upper room can quickly become thousands in the church of the city. NINE REASONS GROWING A LARGE CHURCH AND CONTENDING FOR REVIVAL MAY BE MUTUALLY EXCLUSIVE PURSUITS 1. Muzzled Speech It’s all too tempting for today’s church growth focused leaders to trade in their prophetic mantle for that of a salesman. Instead of cutting, bold, unapologetic truth being delivered with a prophetic edge, lesser, neutered messages are given in the hopes that there won’t be any kickback. Fear of offending the tithers overwhelms fear of offending the Spirit. The prevailing question becomes, “What will the people respond to?” I’ll major on that. Then, “What will people resist?” I’ll avoid those topics at all costs—even the cost of revival. The demands of revival include, at the most foundational level, God’s leaders refusing to be careful as they pierce with a sharp blade the sphere of influence they have been entrusted with. If leaders consistently communicate revival truths, only the remnant will remain. The masses that promised a mega-church experience would leave the pastor with but a handful to run with. Very few are willing to pay that price. The alternative is much more attractive—muzzled speech that the majority will enjoy. This, friend, is not the call of today’s leader—not at this critical time in history. We must see troublers of Israel emerge once again. When Ahab saw Elijah, Ahab said to him, “Is it you, you troubler of Israel?” And he answered, “I have not troubled Israel, but you have, and your father’s house, because you have abandoned the commandments of the LORD and followed the Baals. Now therefore send and gather all Israel to me at Mount Carmel, and the 450 prophets of Baal and the 400 prophets of Asherah, who eat at Jezebel’s table.” 1 Kings 18:17-19 (ESV) Elijah refused to be silenced. He wasn’t attempting to gain favor or approval. He had a message and he refused to be muzzled. The same was true of Micaiah: And the king of Israel said to Jehoshaphat, “There is yet one man by whom we may inquire of the LORD, Micaiah the son of Imlah, but I hate him, for he never prophesies good concerning me, but evil.” And Jehoshaphat said, “Let not the king say so.” 1 Kings 22:8 (ESV) And the messenger who went to summon Micaiah said to him, “Behold, the words of the prophets with one accord are favorable to the king. Let your word be like the word of one of them, and speak favorably.” But Micaiah said, “As the LORD lives, what the LORD says to me, that I will speak.” 1 Kings 22:13-14 (ESV) Micaiah was sent to prison because he refused to cower when ordered to only speak what is favorable. I wonder how leaders will preach against the sins of the day when it becomes illegal to do so if the fear of losing people is such a struggle. It’s shocking to me when people reveal they haven’t heard troubling, shaking preaching on holiness, sin and repentance in decades! We must have the prophetic mantle return to the pulpits again! Consider the following: “My aim is to agitate and disturb people. I'm not selling bread, I'm selling yeast.” ~Miguel De Unamuno “If Jesus preached the same message minister's preach today, He would have never been crucified.” ~Leonard Ravenhill Revival leaders will bring trouble, and people will leave when they feel the blade of the sword touch their flesh. Today, we have leaders who refuse to speak on the troubles of the day, on politics and on other critical issues out of fear that they will divide the crowd and send some running with all of their resources in their pockets. The same is true with many itinerate ministers, evangelists and others who make a living from the Gospel. The more careful their speech, the more diplomatic they can be, the more appealing their focus, the greater the numbers and the more respected they become. Unfortunately, such an approach is an enemy to revival. Few will respond to those who trouble Israel. The coming Church will be marked by those who will preach truth without moderation. I want to directly address fellow pastors and leaders with both brokenness and boldness—open your mouths! When people tell me that I have guts to say what I do in teachings, on Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, I am shocked! Really? They can’t be serious! I barely reveal even a small percentage of what is burning within me. The messages are minor and obvious, yet somehow in our passive, ultra-sensitive culture they come across as sharp and risky. We have to open our mouths and deliver the troubling truth! No more messages designed to grow churches. No more sermons that result in us looking good, smart and polished. If we are out to save face, we may do just that—as we ultimately lose our soul in Hell. The raw, irritating, offensive messages of the Word of God must explode out of us with the full understanding that many of those under our care will revolt! That is true love-based preaching! We can’t even call people to prayer today due to the fear that they will leave our churches! My God! How can we presume revival is near? ~The Coming Church One day God spoke clearly to me: John, when you pray for a remnant, don’t be surprised when the remnant shows up. Personally, I’d much rather have a church of 30 devoted, burning, remnant revivalists than a church of several hundred people who will leave when the fire gets hot and the message cuts their flesh. 2. Visitor magnets The primary purpose of the church is to be a gathering of Believers under apostolic authority with prayer and equipping being the dominant activities for all. Focusing on attracting visitors can quickly compromise that core church mission. The Bible tells us the church is to be a house of prayer for all nations. It is not to be used as an evangelistic tool, but rather evangelism should be a result of what happens in the gatherings. In my book The Coming Church I highlighted several ways today’s church is going to drastically change. One is the move away from seeker style ministries. The church gathering is for Believers who are praying: Even churches that aren’t identified as seeker sensitive tend to be intent on attracting visitors and they gear their ministry to do so. Instead of attempting to grow the church by focusing on visitors and seekers, the leaders will be fully devoted to a 2nd Chronicles 7 strategy of compelling God to show up in extreme, weighty power. The pillar of fire that connects Heaven to Earth is the new goal. In fact, an empty church is a better goal than a full church if we understand that passage of Scripture correctly! Many disgruntled people will leave the church as a more serious devotion to Holy Spirit activity is given, but the supernatural invasion will result in fire, smoke and earthquakes that will rock cities and nations. ~The Coming Church As soon as Solomon finished his prayer, fire came down from heaven and consumed the burnt offering and the sacrifices, and the glory of the LORD filled the temple. And the priests could not enter the house of the LORD, because the glory of the LORD filled the LORD’s house. 2 Chronicles 7:1-2 (ESV) I made a significant transition in my own ministry many years ago regarding my focus on visitors and church growth. In the early days, I’d get frustrated when they didn’t show up and overly excited when they did. It was common for my wife and me to take visitors out for lunch or coffee to encourage them that there was definitely a place for them and their giftings in our church. While we did grow, our vision was compromised due to attracting people who were more excited about their own ministry than the mission of revival. Over time we had people who could lead worship, serve in children’s ministry, wave flags, dance and serve as ushers. The problem? The church is called first and foremost to be a house of prayer. We had a lot of activity, a solid group of people and an underlying resistance to going deep in intercession. Our visitors turned leaders were not invested in prayer. I believe one of the most damaging things a pastor of a church can do is release people into ministries and roles if the they aren’t on fire, living in the Spirit and praying without ceasing. We wouldn’t allow anybody to step into any role until they completed an intense three month internship that revealed our DNA, our focus and the cost of running with us. This approach resulted in a small army of burning ones locking arms together in the pursuit of revival. Our transition from empowering visitors to warning and preparing visitors was key to our progress. We went from encouraging them that they would definitely fit in to being forthright with them. We let them know that they have stepped into an extremely challenging ministry. It would be hard, not easy, for them to connect. Everybody prays on fire as their primary function, we all rally around the vision of city transformation and we embrace radical holiness and a consecrated lifestyle. We stopped pursuing people, taking them out for lunch or attempting to sell our experience to them. The expectation was for the visitors to show up in the fire with us and to watch powerful relationships develop in that fox hole. We made the decision to trade in being a large church with people who were merely intrigued by the vision with being a smaller church with people who are wrecked by the vision. “…these I will bring to my holy mountain, and make them joyful in my house of prayer; their burnt offerings and their sacrifices will be accepted on my altar; for my house shall be called a house of prayer for all peoples.” Isaiah 56:7 (ESV) 3. Naturally Relevant The coming Church will be marked by bold, Holy Spirit filled prayer warriors who burn night and day. They will be an explosive people who carry and release the fire of God into the cities of the Earth. There will be a regular tremble and a continual burn on them as they live in the supernatural realm in historic fashion. ~The Coming Church Most people are much more familiar with their natural, predictable, tangible world than they are the invisible, supernatural reality of God. With that in mind, outside of actual revival, church meetings that allow supernatural manifestations and embrace a spontaneous, bizarre environment will be avoided by most. When is the last time a Sunday morning service has erupted in a couple hours of groans of intercession as people go face down on the carpet? A friend of mine who is an extremely mature and seasoned Christian worked for a major prophetic ministry. During our services, she would regularly manifest with groans and violent shaking and other reactions to the Spirit of God. She kind of looked like a super intense, supernaturally possessed karate kid! That was not naturally relevant behavior! Most people would not visit a church again if that was a regular occurrence. The remnant would, though. From my book The Coming Church: I met with a House of Prayer network leader the other day who said that people leave churches when leaders shift time, energy and attention from them to God. I’ve watched that happen myself, and it rips me up! In our church in Colorado we shifted from potlucks to prayer meetings, and there was a mass exodus. We lost people and money. I had to get a part-time job. It was disruptive. It was heartbreaking that people ran from the call to pray. Where are the ones who aren’t looking first for human friends, personal affirmation or a sense of belonging but who are seeking after every available minute to minister to God in prayer? The prayer rooms must be full—and the main prayer room in the American Church is the Sunday morning sanctuary! And don’t you even think of using the excuse that you need to create a non-threatening environment for the new believer! Every person, young or old, immature or seasoned must be in the prayer room—and it must be their primary focus! What if the Upper Room were toned down in the hopes of drawing a bigger crowd and interested seekers? We must absolutely refuse to tone down the activity of the Holy Spirit out of respect of those less hungry! God is a consuming fire, and he is about to consume what is unholy and compromised. Who are we to presume we know better how to facilitate a service? Is inviting the Holy Spirit to step aside as we give preference to human wisdom the way to go? I’ve heard it said that the main Sunday service should be a toned-down meeting so as not to freak out visitors and seekers. Apparently the meeting where the Holy Spirit has liberty to move in freedom should be reserved for a night when there’s little risk of the unconverted showing up. This is humanistic religion at its best! Did those in the Upper Room tone down the Holy Spirit so as not to confuse and trouble the seekers in the city? Absolutely not! In fact, the power was so extreme and so unusual that the people were provoked to wonder and proclaim, “they must be drunk!” What was happening was off of their grid. When man moves, it’s naturally familiar. When God moves, it’s supernaturally shocking. 4. Prayer as a program I commit to serve all, but I refuse to strategically align with someone who doesn’t embrace fervent prayer as a lifestyle, holiness as a principle and dying daily as a goal. ~The Coming Church I’ve led life impacting prayer events in over 170 different churches, and while there was a lot to leave me in awe of God’s power, I was also left with disappointment. Sadly it was easy to see which pastors allowed room for a program of prayer in their church and which had established a culture of prayer. I was initially shocked when I’d see pastors show up, often alone with none of their staff or the people in the church, to pray in the Spirit for two hours on a Friday night. We were bringing anywhere from 30 to 250 people to their church, to pray with them and their people for the fire of God to engulf their church, and very often it was just us. I didn’t understand. Time and again I’d see pastors engage for 20-30 minutes and then get distracted, bored or restless. While the sanctuary was exploding in raging tongues of fire, over and over again pastors would be uncomfortable. Often they’d open their Bibles and read or they’d go to their office or talk to people in the foyer. Frankly, I don’t see how these leaders are even qualified to pastor. It’s unthinkable to me that anyone would presume they can lead a supernatural church without living a supernatural life of prayer. The reality is they aren’t leading a supernatural church. They are leading one that will attract the spiritually numb and naturally invested. Ministers who do not spend two hours a day in prayer are not worth a dime a dozen – degrees or no degrees. ~Leonard Ravenhill Occasionally a pastor would show up, on fire, with all of his staff and a significant number of the people in his church. Oh, I lived for nights like that! I knew that prayer was appropriately primary in that church and that it was more than a program. They had nurtured a culture where prayer saturates every part of their ministry. When every person in the church is called into the furnace of intercession as a lifestyle, you are going to be left with only those who are truly passionate about Jesus and ready to contend for revival with you. Listen closely: the lukewarm, casual Church must be shaken! Yes, the true Church is one that is burning hot, in love with her Bridegroom. I risk off ending a lot of people when I deal with this issue of fervency and costly discipleship as it’s an assault against their theologies and lifestyles. It is NOT OK to be casually committed, loosely connected and given to the apathy that is destroying the Church. I’m calling awakeners to rise up! We must pray and burn non-stop! You can do this! There is no better way to live—and there is no other option! I know this is why some don’t connect well in houses of prayer, or even in my own church—the call to burn hot is beyond what most are comfortable with. The call over the edge is unsettling for those who don’t even want to come near the edge. Listen—your eternity is at risk! Be fervent and radical in your love of God and commitment to his mission! The coming Church will be a burning hot crater of searing fire. It will be pure and it will be rejected by most in today’s culture. ~The Coming Church I believe it would be more biblically normal to have everybody praying, decreeing the Word of God and crying out in intercession for two hours on a Sunday morning than to continue putting on the predictable, tepid, schedule driven services we have today. I often challenge pastors by asking them what would happen if every church in the city cancelled every program, every group, every service for six months and did nothing but hit our faces and prayed instead. Instead of worship and teaching on a Sunday morning, we’d instruct everybody to find a place and cry out to God. Instead of children’s ministry, the kids would be with their parents in intercession. Instead of small groups and youth ministry events we’d pray. The pastors almost always answer by saying they believe revival would break out suddenly. I agree, yet I have not met one leader who had employed this strategy. Why? It threatens the goal of local church growth. People with money might leave. The less hungry will walk. This grieves my spirit. If prayer is a program you will have the opportunity to pray with a handful of others during the week. If prayer is the culture, nobody in the church will be able to avoid the call to fervent intercession because it occurs at every meeting they attend. It becomes seared into their very identity. When the call to the Upper Room was sounded, they didn’t tone down the prayer in the hopes that more than 120 would show up. They allowed hundreds to walk. We must repent for forsaking the house of prayer. The primary ministry of every church must be prayer. This commitment to intercession is to be modeled and led by senior leadership. The primary purpose of the Church is not teaching, visitor assimilation or fellowship. It is undeniably night and day prayer for the nations. Lengthy prayer should be taught and modeled as the dominant activity of every believer. ~20 Points of Reformation, found in The Coming Church 5. Programs everywhere It makes logical sense that we should have ministries available to attract the broadest group of people we can. This means programs, ministries and groups all over the schedule in order to draw every type of person is necessary. On the contrary, churches that are pursuing revival are calling people into one primary meeting—the prayer meeting with apostolic leadership giving direction. I’ve heard some wisdom over the years that I actually agree with to a point. It’s been said that if someone senses there’s a program or ministry that needs to be started in a church, the leader should thank them for their analysis and encourage them to be the ones to start it. After all, they are the ones with the vision for it. I can’t disagree that this is an effective method to diffuse accusation of lack in a ministry, but I do disagree that it’s an appropriate strategy across the board. Over the years I’ve used this method and watched people start ministries and crash and burn due to a number of reasons, not the least being that they didn’t embrace the vision of revival. They simply wanted to lead something or be a part of something they affirm. The better strategy I’ve employed in recent years is to simply say no. What they think is lacking is by design. What they think we need to add should not be added. Redirect people to the fire. Call them to refocus and to be calibrated with the unified vision of the church. In latter years, instead of filling the calendar with programs, or even a variety of scattered prayer meetings, we would maneuver everybody to our primary meetings. In fact, we had 24/7 prayer for an extended period of time and had every slot filled. Over time we decided the corporate vision demanded corporate meetings. We had to be together. Scattering, even in prayer, was doing damage to our mission. I’d rather have 3 larger prayer meetings than a hundred smaller ones. It also became less important to have youth and children’s ministries, small groups or various programs and much more important to gather people together for corporate intercession and apostolic instruction. Yes, this will result in a smaller church, but people won’t be scattered. Am I saying there can never be supplemental ministries or events? No, but you have to be careful. Mike Bickle initiated small groups at the International House of Prayer several years ago. From what I understand, they were “successful” but at a cost of their primary, corporate mission. People loved gathering together in homes each week, but these small group meetings negatively impacted the prayer room. Instead of everybody contending in prayer as the main thing, there was now another option to connect, and the prayer room suffered. Mike then eliminated the small groups for many years and only recently reinstalled them again, with a new strategy that ensures those secondary programs supported and funneled into the prayer room. Those focused on church growth want people in programs. Can those programs be good? Sure. However, the moment you start contending for revival don’t expect the strength, commitment or passion from the laborers to be there. The pursuit of revival is a very narrow one. Revival churches aren’t called to meet every need. They are called to pray in the laborers, the remnant, to pray on fire and shake the city. 6. A quenched atmosphere I want the prophetic spirit upon me or I want to die. ~A.W. Tozer We live in a day when churches promote comfort and self-satisfaction. Coffee, personal ministry, blessing, programs and other lesser things are overshadowing the call to the cross. The alarm of the hour is not a welcome sound. Casual spirits are driving the culture. The problem? The message of the cross is not a casual message. The bottom line is this: A casual spirit will always reject a prophetic warning if it threatens their comfort. A prophetic spirit will always threaten something. ~The Coming Church Above I mentioned how powerful it would be to shut down everything in the church for a season except for prayer. I asked this question on Facebook: If your church cancelled everything for a year…cancelled children’s ministry, teaching, programs, pot lucks, small groups… and replaced those activities with prayer meetings, would you stay in your church? One response rocked me. It encouraged me that the remnant is out there: That’s when I’ll return to the church. When we walk into the church we must be blown over by the unusual, overwhelming, otherworldly shocks of the Spirit of God. Simply, we need a powerfully prophetic atmosphere that causes everybody to respond by either running out the door or collapsing to their knees. Do not quench the Spirit. Do not despise prophecies, 1 Thessalonians 5:19-20 (ESV) A truly prophetic atmosphere will result in a never-ending charge in the room. People will be expressing themselves in many ways including cries of intercession, banners and flags flying, prophetic art, trances, encounters, repentance, dreams and visions and more. The goal isn’t the manifestation but rather avoiding restriction of Holy Spirit activity. A prophetic atmosphere will repel the more naturally wired people, unless their hunger for God is greater than their resistance to him. Revival churches absolutely must be driven prophetically in every service. We must hear the oracles from Heaven as we strategically advance day to day. There is a rapidly increasing movement of people who are shutting their ears to any prophetic words that have any measure of alarm to them. The warnings are not wanted as they threaten the current structures of comfort and ease. These people are at risk of a catastrophe that will mercilessly hit them and those who have been influenced by their messages of peace and safety. There are true voices that must emerge and declare the word of the Lord in its pure form. If we EVER temper a message in the pulpit, online or one-on one in the hopes of maintaining an audience, we’ve become a 2 Tim 4:3-4 false teacher. For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions, and will turn away from listening to the truth and wander off into myths. 2 Timothy 4:3-4 ~The Coming Church Revival always includes the conviction of sin on the part of the Church. What a spell the devil seems to cast over the Church today! ~Billy Sunday 7. Teaching vs. apostolic instruction Another shift we will see has to do with teaching. Teaching will be minimized while instruction is emphasized. Teaching is mostly for personal edification while instruction is mostly for corporate assignments. Today, most churches focus on teaching principles of Scripture, providing truths that will help believers navigate through their lives and on offering nuggets of biblical information. While there will still be important Bible teaching, apostolic instruction will emerge as a necessary new ministry. The responsibility of prophetic leaders is to relay the messages of God and to instruct the people accordingly. Though teaching materials are in abundance, what is lacking is apostolic leaders, military commanders, who give instruction, assignments, to a ready army. Teaching is personal growth based while instruction is a call to corporate action for the sake of mission fulfillment. It’s a corporate call to action vs. a simple biblical study. It’s mission focused vs. personal growth focused (though I can’t imagine a better way to grow personally than by being invested in a corporate mission!). Personal growth will be largely our responsibility between services so we can be ready to respond to the corporate instruction where we will receive our assignments. ~The Coming Church When I was a youth pastor at a large church in the Dallas area, part of my job was to change out the marquee every week. The pastor’s sermon title for the upcoming Sunday was to be displayed for the many cars passing by on the busy road. It got to the point where I usually didn’t have to remove the two words of the previous week’s message: How to… How to be an amazing parent, how to grow in God, how to prosper financially, how to walk in healing, etc. Those topics are fine, but they represent teaching versus instruction. Teaching is showing someone how to fish. Instruction is telling them to go fishing. Teachings are nuggets of truth that will help the people navigate their lives. However, I’m pretty certain if that large church of over 1200 people shifted to apostolic teaching unto revival, they would probably shrink to less than 100 people. My instruction when leading churches in Michigan and Colorado was for everybody to arrive at every service full, not empty. I challenged them that it was their responsibility to grow aggressively, intentionally, through the week so they would be maturing, on fire and ready to move out into mission. When we gathered together, I had the freedom to share key dreams and visions, to prophetically reveal how we must pray and act in the current season, share warnings and national words to prepare people for what is coming. for everyone who lives on milk is unskilled in the word of righteousness, since he is a child. But solid food is for the mature, for those who have their powers of discernment trained by constant practice to distinguish good from evil. Hebrews 5:13-14 (ESV) Those who refuse to mature and who really don’t care much about revival or national or regional prophetic revelation won’t want to connect in such a church. Growing a church this way is extremely difficult, but gathering a remnant is more powerful. It was extremely common for people to arrive for prayer before the service and hear clear, specific revelation that I or other leaders received the night before. That would change the entire service as I’d preach from that place of prophetic activation and we’d pray and contend the rest of the night in our new direction. That service would always be irrelevant to those who are simply showing up to gain some biblical insight (and especially those who didn’t arrive early for prayer). They would be disconnected. However, the revival minded would come alive and would be alert and ready to respond with great conviction. 8. Karaoke Worship When in Colorado leading Revolution Church, I instructed our media team not to display the words to the worship songs on the screens for a season. I was grieved at how dependent on the screens people were as they simply sang along karaoke style to what was being sung on the platform. It was time for them to launch into a prophetic realm of worship and prayer! In fact, we eliminated a worship team altogether in Detroit for a couple of years and filled the atmosphere with spontaneous, prophetic decrees, prayer and groans of worship. Music would sometimes play in the background, but we weren’t simply singing along from our soul. Our spirits were crying out! Revival churches must facilitate an explosive, supernatural atmosphere, understanding that the high majority of people will not join such a thing. As we become supernaturally changed in a place of extreme intercession, worship will change significantly. It will be supernaturally driven. There is a new sound coming to worship, and it’s not simply a new style. There is a supernatural, otherworldly groan of intercessory worship that will explode out of the entire body as a new breed of trembling worship leaders lead the way into the shock and awe of the glory of God. We will no longer simply sit in a pew or stand with a raised hand while a familiar worship song is sung. The prophetic, groaning sounds of Holy Spirit-facilitated worship will make it normal to shake and fall to our faces as we cry, “Holy!” The natural, logical sing-a-longs will be no more. We will have a hard time standing as man’s karaoke gives way to God’s Shekinah and Kabod glory that takes up residence in his Church. Worship teams will practice less and pray in the Spirit with tears in their eyes more. Today, along with most other expressions of church life, worship is at least slightly and sometimes extremely marginalized for the sake of the less adventurous attendee. Since most people tend to be adverse to more supernatural forms of worship, and many would leave if the atmosphere became too uncomfortable, the majority has been winning. I’ve said it countless times, and have written before that I refuse to tone down the activity of the Holy Spirit out of respect of those less hungry. How is it that the naturally-minded majority has supplanted the supernatural remnant in the Church? How is it that burning, raging, intercessory worship that’s driven by the groans of the Spirit himself are not appreciated enough to risk losing people from our churches? For those who live according to the flesh set their minds on the things of the flesh, but those who live according to the Spirit, the things of the Spirit. For to be carnally minded is death, but to be spiritually minded is life and peace. Because the carnal mind is enmity against God; for it is not subject to the law of God, nor indeed can be. So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God. Romans 8:5-8 ~The Coming Church 9. The threat of regional focus It was extremely important to me as a leader that everybody in the church was investing in the region. This means I wanted them to connect in other churches and ministries, to be ambassadors of revival and to become regionally unified. Growing a local church, to the contrary, focuses on having everybody in that church overly invested at that level, in the local setting. There’s no room for regional ministry. In fact, even Spirit-filled, revival focused churches can easily become resisters when the pursuit of revival in a region threatens their own pursuits. Pastors and leaders must have a clear vision not only for revival in the region, or only their personal part to play, but for the church of the city. How should everybody in the local army be investing in the regional mission? It’s important to not only encourage but also to lead people into regular regional events that are unto revival. If we are trying to grow a large church, this becomes difficult because most people won’t share the passion for revival in the city. They want to come, grow personally and connect relationally to a spiritual family. But, when they are called into regional mission, they just won’t have the passion or energy for it. The coming Church will be a regional Church, expressed on a city level. The local expressions will be important, but only as they are connected regionally. The regional Church will be important, but only as it is connected with God’s Kingdom government. The coming Church will be a praying Church that understands its authority and responsibility in the region. This is how the coming Church will function governmentally. As we focus on the region and the greater mission, we will be in step with God’s passion for the nations. Grace and favor will follow. Unusual interventions by God will become common. This is such an important point, especially with the state of today’s Church in mind. We no longer can sweat, bleed and burn out by trying to build our own local ministries. The vision absolutely must be a regional one as we give ourselves to true city unity, intercession for revival and Kingdom advance. This doesn’t mean all local churches will close (though many will), but it does mean that they will no longer be at the pinnacle of the priority list. Local church leaders will mostly give their attention to corporate advance regionally with the Church of the city instead of to local issues. ~The Coming Church Final thoughts I’m sure I’ll receive emails from people who report that their church is large and contending for revival. I celebrate that! I’ve been to a few like that. I would then have a few thoughts: Do they really understand the intensity of the new wineskin church that I reveal in The Coming Church? Is everybody in the church truly raging on fire in prayer and contending at an intense level toward revival or is there simply a great atmosphere and a focus on revival? This would be a remarkable exception and I absolutely want to visit! There are some brilliant, anointed leaders out there who can pull it off! As I said, most churches that are truly revival churches will be quite small. 120 just might be a good goal! The majority will be less than 70 in number of soldiers in their local army. Pastor, are you okay with such a shift in strategy? Trust me, 70 scalding hot warriors who can move mountains in faith filled prayer will do more for your city than two thousand moderates ever could.

[ellismorris0]

6 Items Assured to Provoke Any Tequila Lover

This vacation season there is not any higher reward—to your self or others—than a perfect tequila! First, tequila is made for sharing and in case you’re going to get along side friends and family, why no longer drink one thing particular? And, in case you’re no longer precisely delighted by way of vacation get togethers, no less than you’ll have a heat, pleasant tequila in your facet.

So, listed below are 6 tequilas to provoke any tequila fan, geek, snob, or nerd:

Grover’s alternatives:

1. Calle 23 Criollo (Blanco)

This can be a particular deal with for any tequila lover. It’s complicated, blank, and stuffed with taste. With 49.three% alcohol, this tequila evolves slowly over the years, and boasts a in point of fact lengthy and engaging end.

Don’t rush this sipper. Let it open up and also you’ll see what we imply. We get preliminary aromas of cooked agave, earth, and black pepper. After a couple of mins cinnamon, and mint emerge. Wait a little bit longer and also you’ll get brine/salt, after which in any case, butter.

The flavour accommodates lots of cooked agave, black pepper, mineral, and vegetal notes.

This used to be made the use of a smaller and sweeter variant of Weber Blue agave. The locals the place it’s grown informally name it “criollo”. It has such top sugar content material, the leaves are even sticky to touch. This extra sugar is without doubt one of the components at play within the advent of one of these particular product.

It’s available online at Previous The town Tequila for $97.

2. Fuenteseca Cosecha 2013 – Huerta “El Maguey” (Blanco)

That is what occurs when a skilled agave grower and grasp distiller, Enrique Fonseca, use tremendous mature, extraordinarily ripe agave to make a tequila, after which permit it to relaxation in chrome steel tanks for three years.

This can be a restricted version batch. Agaves have been harvested in 2013, and the product launched in 2016. As soon as it’s long past, it’s long past!

As soon as once more, like several nice merchandise, it has many presents to offer whilst you sip it slowly and make allowance it to open up. You’ll in finding cinnamon, adopted by way of candy cooked agave, and a creamy celery. That is an all herbal product, and completely distilled.

For the actual tequila enthusiast, you might wish to purchase 2 bottles. One to drink, and one to stash in a secure position that can assist you get via a possible apocalypse!

Previous The town Tequila is selling it online for $84.

three. Fortaleza Añejo (A lot 42 & 43)

Fanatics of Fortaleza are continuously turning the bottle round to test the small hand-written quantity at the again, which signifies the manufacturing lot quantity. As a result of Fortaleza doesn’t use any components, their old-school, all herbal manufacturing taste implies that there are refined variations between batches. That is thrilling for tequila geeks!

Neatly, now there are 2 lot numbers to position in your radar: 42 and 43. Those are a unique deal with as a result of they comprise a mixture of their well-liked añejo and a never-before launched additional añejo. The colour is darker than same old, however instead of that, there are not any different markings at the bottle (instead of the lot quantity) to signify that it’s in reality elderly longer than their standard añejo.

Fortaleza merchandise, particularly the añejo, have all the time scored top with Tequila Matchmaker customers, however those 2 loads are scoring upper than same old. As a result of this mix is a restricted liberate, it makes a killer reward (if you’ll in finding it.) Don’t wait too lengthy to take hold of it!

Previous The town Tequila is these days selling Lot 43 online for $90. (Get it whilst you’ll!)

Scarlet’s alternatives:

four. Don Abraham Reposado

No, this tequila isn’t new to the marketplace however whilst you stay coming again to one thing, you comprehend it’s excellent. With creamy flavors of butter, hazelnut, cooked agave, cinnamon and caramel, it’s certainly one of my fall favorites.

In spite of spending Eight-Nine months in American Oak barrels, Don Abraham doesn’t have the scratchy end that infrequently comes with a richer repo. Even a few of our blanco hardcore pals have agreed that this can be a scrumptious deal with.

This repo is made in Amatitan, the birthplace of tequila, and advantages from each wealthy soil for the agaves, and a excellent water supply. You’ll be able to buy it online at Previous The town Tequila for $42.

five. Cascahuín Extra Añejo

I’ll admit it – it takes an extraordinary additional anejo to provoke me as a result of many are saturated with oak and heavy barrel flavors that masks the agave. No longer so with Cascahuín XA, which is wealthy and layered with notes of cooked agave, dried fruit, nuts, vanilla and caramel. It’s fairly upper evidence, at 43% abv, giving it brighter flavors to pair with a vacation meal, or as a standalone after dinner sipper.

This expression used to be simply launched this yr, so likelihood is that the tequila lover in your reward listing hasn’t attempted it but. Some other nice explanation why to shop for Cascahuín — it’s made by way of a heat and passionate tequila circle of relatives, devoted to doing issues proper. Their distillery is positioned within the Tequila Valley, within the the city of El Arenal.

Cascahuín XA is elderly for four years in closely used American Oak barrels which are about 15 years previous and prior to now used for bourbon. (A brand new batch is within the works at this time, that provides a while in French Oak barrels as smartly.)

It’s been a Mexico-only product till now. It’s going to be to be had at Previous The town Tequila in a couple of week, so be looking out!

6. Gran Dovejo Blanco – High Proof

Once in a while vacation celebrations want some top octane, and at 49% abv Gran Dovejo Prime Evidence is my selection for a burst of herbal agave taste, and rounded drinkability.

Along with the cooked agave, it options earth, citrus, and mineral notes with simply sufficient agave sweetness to stability the opposite components, culminating in a pleasing, smelly end.

Our app customers describe this blanco as crisp and blank, full of taste, and a standout amongst blancos. Why no longer proportion this distinctive revel in with pals?

Gran Dovejo is a small, unbiased emblem primarily based in California, so it doesn’t have massive distribution, however you’ll buy it online at Previous The town Tequila for $50.

Those are our present favorites, and we purchase five of them by way of the case. (No funny story!) All are made the use of conventional strategies with none humorous stuff. Our opinion: You’ll be able to’t cross improper with any of those!

Now it’s your flip. Let us know which tequilas would make a superb present within the feedback beneath.

The post 6 Items Assured to Provoke Any Tequila Lover appeared first on Liquor Gift Baskets.

from http://liquorgiftbaskets.net/2018/12/08/6-gifts-guaranteed-to-impress-any-tequila-lover/

[gailmalooft]

6 Items Assured to Provoke Any Tequila Lover

This vacation season there is not any higher reward—to your self or others—than a perfect tequila! First, tequila is made for sharing and in case you’re going to get along side friends and family, why no longer drink one thing particular? And, in case you’re no longer precisely delighted by way of vacation get togethers, no less than you’ll have a heat, pleasant tequila in your facet.

So, listed below are 6 tequilas to provoke any tequila fan, geek, snob, or nerd:

Grover’s alternatives:

1. Calle 23 Criollo (Blanco)

This can be a particular deal with for any tequila lover. It’s complicated, blank, and stuffed with taste. With 49.three% alcohol, this tequila evolves slowly over the years, and boasts a in point of fact lengthy and engaging end.

Don’t rush this sipper. Let it open up and also you’ll see what we imply. We get preliminary aromas of cooked agave, earth, and black pepper. After a couple of mins cinnamon, and mint emerge. Wait a little bit longer and also you’ll get brine/salt, after which in any case, butter.

The flavour accommodates lots of cooked agave, black pepper, mineral, and vegetal notes.

This used to be made the use of a smaller and sweeter variant of Weber Blue agave. The locals the place it’s grown informally name it “criollo”. It has such top sugar content material, the leaves are even sticky to touch. This extra sugar is without doubt one of the components at play within the advent of one of these particular product.

It’s available online at Previous The town Tequila for $97.

2. Fuenteseca Cosecha 2013 – Huerta “El Maguey” (Blanco)

That is what occurs when a skilled agave grower and grasp distiller, Enrique Fonseca, use tremendous mature, extraordinarily ripe agave to make a tequila, after which permit it to relaxation in chrome steel tanks for three years.

This can be a restricted version batch. Agaves have been harvested in 2013, and the product launched in 2016. As soon as it’s long past, it’s long past!

As soon as once more, like several nice merchandise, it has many presents to offer whilst you sip it slowly and make allowance it to open up. You’ll in finding cinnamon, adopted by way of candy cooked agave, and a creamy celery. That is an all herbal product, and completely distilled.

For the actual tequila enthusiast, you might wish to purchase 2 bottles. One to drink, and one to stash in a secure position that can assist you get via a possible apocalypse!

Previous The town Tequila is selling it online for $84.

three. Fortaleza Añejo (A lot 42 & 43)

Fanatics of Fortaleza are continuously turning the bottle round to test the small hand-written quantity at the again, which signifies the manufacturing lot quantity. As a result of Fortaleza doesn’t use any components, their old-school, all herbal manufacturing taste implies that there are refined variations between batches. That is thrilling for tequila geeks!

Neatly, now there are 2 lot numbers to position in your radar: 42 and 43. Those are a unique deal with as a result of they comprise a mixture of their well-liked añejo and a never-before launched additional añejo. The colour is darker than same old, however instead of that, there are not any different markings at the bottle (instead of the lot quantity) to signify that it’s in reality elderly longer than their standard añejo.

Fortaleza merchandise, particularly the añejo, have all the time scored top with Tequila Matchmaker customers, however those 2 loads are scoring upper than same old. As a result of this mix is a restricted liberate, it makes a killer reward (if you’ll in finding it.) Don’t wait too lengthy to take hold of it!

Previous The town Tequila is these days selling Lot 43 online for $90. (Get it whilst you’ll!)

Scarlet’s alternatives:

four. Don Abraham Reposado

No, this tequila isn’t new to the marketplace however whilst you stay coming again to one thing, you comprehend it’s excellent. With creamy flavors of butter, hazelnut, cooked agave, cinnamon and caramel, it’s certainly one of my fall favorites.

In spite of spending Eight-Nine months in American Oak barrels, Don Abraham doesn’t have the scratchy end that infrequently comes with a richer repo. Even a few of our blanco hardcore pals have agreed that this can be a scrumptious deal with.

This repo is made in Amatitan, the birthplace of tequila, and advantages from each wealthy soil for the agaves, and a excellent water supply. You’ll be able to buy it online at Previous The town Tequila for $42.

five. Cascahuín Extra Añejo

I’ll admit it – it takes an extraordinary additional anejo to provoke me as a result of many are saturated with oak and heavy barrel flavors that masks the agave. No longer so with Cascahuín XA, which is wealthy and layered with notes of cooked agave, dried fruit, nuts, vanilla and caramel. It’s fairly upper evidence, at 43% abv, giving it brighter flavors to pair with a vacation meal, or as a standalone after dinner sipper.

This expression used to be simply launched this yr, so likelihood is that the tequila lover in your reward listing hasn’t attempted it but. Some other nice explanation why to shop for Cascahuín — it’s made by way of a heat and passionate tequila circle of relatives, devoted to doing issues proper. Their distillery is positioned within the Tequila Valley, within the the city of El Arenal.

Cascahuín XA is elderly for four years in closely used American Oak barrels which are about 15 years previous and prior to now used for bourbon. (A brand new batch is within the works at this time, that provides a while in French Oak barrels as smartly.)

It’s been a Mexico-only product till now. It’s going to be to be had at Previous The town Tequila in a couple of week, so be looking out!

6. Gran Dovejo Blanco – High Proof

Once in a while vacation celebrations want some top octane, and at 49% abv Gran Dovejo Prime Evidence is my selection for a burst of herbal agave taste, and rounded drinkability.

Along with the cooked agave, it options earth, citrus, and mineral notes with simply sufficient agave sweetness to stability the opposite components, culminating in a pleasing, smelly end.

Our app customers describe this blanco as crisp and blank, full of taste, and a standout amongst blancos. Why no longer proportion this distinctive revel in with pals?

Gran Dovejo is a small, unbiased emblem primarily based in California, so it doesn’t have massive distribution, however you’ll buy it online at Previous The town Tequila for $50.

Those are our present favorites, and we purchase five of them by way of the case. (No funny story!) All are made the use of conventional strategies with none humorous stuff. Our opinion: You’ll be able to’t cross improper with any of those!

Now it’s your flip. Let us know which tequilas would make a superb present within the feedback beneath.

The post 6 Items Assured to Provoke Any Tequila Lover appeared first on Liquor Gift Baskets.

from http://liquorgiftbaskets.net/2018/12/08/6-gifts-guaranteed-to-impress-any-tequila-lover/

[lovenerdywinnerbouquetfan-blog]

Stevens Point Wisconsin Cheap car insurance quotes zip 54492

"Stevens Point Wisconsin Cheap car insurance quotes zip 54492

Stevens Point Wisconsin Cheap car insurance quotes zip 54492

BEST ANSWER:  Try this site where you can compare quotes: : http://insureinfo.xyz/index.html?src=tumblr 

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Stevens Point Wisconsin Cheap car insurance quotes zip 54492

Stevens Point Wisconsin Cheap car insurance quotes zip 54492

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A. The government can't run anything right B. Government-run healthcare will be too successful, and private insurance companies won't be able to compete As with the Obama is simultaneously a Muslim, a Radical Black Christian, and Godless Communist argument, sooner or later you are going to have to pick one and go with it...at least in this place some of us like to call reality ...""

What are the cheapest auto insurance companies for young drivers?

What is the cheapest major auto insurance company for a 19 year old male, with no violations or accidents? Going to be buying first car in the next couple weeks and need insurance. Getting a much older used car so I don't car much about comprehensive and such, just want state minimum coverage (20/40/15 in IL) to be legal. I've seen quotes from Progressive, Geico, The General and Safe Auto. So far, geico has been considerably the lowest. I checked various models I was looking at, on average progressive was about $100/mo, the General and Safe Auto were around $120 and geico I saw the lowest as $45/mo ranging up to $80/mo (but I've already eliminated that car- a ford probe that sold before I could test drive) I'm wondering if anyone knows of any other major companies with lower rates, otherwise I'm obviously going with geico. Right now my options are down to a mitsu eclipse or a camry/corrolla/accord (something of that nature, whatevers on the lot and priced right) The eclipse from geico I believe was around 60-70, I imagine the camry would be more in the 45-50 range. Any companies with rates lower?""

""What is the average cost of home owner insurance in Houston, Texas?

I know this varies and are based on different factors. I am just seeking an average - thanks!

What should 17year olds be paying for?

What should a 17yr old, still in full time school be paying for if they earn 130 ($260) a month and pay 50 ($100) a month towards car insurance. Should things like a normal haircut be paid for by parents etc? Just wondering about your opinions!""

Additional Driver costs?

How much should i expect to pay to add a permanent additional driver to my car insurance? It will be a driver on their provisional licence, aged 24. Its with Direct Line, in the UK I already have a quote, i just think i was quoted wrong, and want to know what other people think it usually costs.""

2003 G35 Maintenance fee and a estimate insurance price in nyc?

Want to buy a used 2003 G35 but would like to know the Maintenance fee and a estimate insurance price in nyc? ok I'm a 19 year(soon to be 20) old black college student who lives in Brooklyn, NY and would like to know how much it would cost me to maintain an insure a 2003 used G35 with about 40k- 80k miles? I've been driving for lets say a year now and live in a urban area, which i will be commuting back and forth to work, school and home.""

Can a car insurance company make up points on your license?

So in early march my apartment was raided for pot, and a 1/2 gram was found. I was convicted of possession of marijuana and as part of Michigan's driving laws even if the incident did not occur in a car your license is restricted for 6 months. Yesterday my mother (the insurance for the whole family is in her name) received a notice that i had 8 points on my license and my insurance rates would be raised. Confused about this i went to Sec of State and in fact found out that i have no points. I called Memic and explained this to them, they informed me that they do not use actual points, they use their system of points. For example OUID is a 6 point offense but they count it as 8 points. Passing a stopped school bus (which as far as i can tell is no points) they view as 8 points. My question is, can they do this? We are switching insurances next month due to cheaper rates but this seems like a shady business practice to me. Thanks for ur time!!! -Pat""

Here are my plans when i turn 16 can i do it?

ok to make it real short i am going to turn 16 here in about 2 months here and there is this car ive wanted ever since i came out of my moms woumb lol. Literally this car is my all time dream car. They are not the most ammount of money in the world they are about 10-15k and i was wondering if id be able to pay payments each month when i have a job if i cant would i be able to give my mom/dad the money and they pay the insurence and payments. And also my dad i going to give me around 4k to put on a down payment. Please give me ways i can do it cuz i literally need this car its a dream of mine

Will this lower my insurance?

Im looking at cars to buy for my first car and I was wondering what the insurance cost would be like for a 16 almost 17 year old female for a 1979's 1980's camaro I also maintain a high gpa and get a discount for it aswell and live in las vegas.

Do i not have insurance if im driving someone elses insured car?

ok so i got in a little fender bender in my dads VW and the police asked for the insurance cars, that werent in the car at the time, so he gave me a ticket for not having liability insurance, he said if i bring proof of insuarnce to court he will drop it. now i live in the same house with my dad, i have insurance on my honda,with the same company and i am 19. the insurance cards however dont have my name on the VW . does this mean i am driving with no liability insurance?""

Affordable and good quality health insurance?

I'm looking into purchasing some health insurance. I'm 20 years old with no major health concerns. I'm thinking about Allstate but I hear it's around $100 a month.

Is this what health insurance companies and Conservatives think about people with preexisting conditions?

Does insuring a family member/friend on your car make insurance cheaper?

Does insuring a family member/friend on your car make insurance cheaper?

""ATTN: New drivers, How much is your insurance a month??

I just got my insurance today and was curious to see what other ppl are paying. Thanks in advance:)

Rough cost of insurance group 17 cars?

Hi all, I'm looking at a Lotus Elise for my next car. Its insurance group 17 and I'm 25 with nearly two years no claims. Anyone know roughly what the insurance would be? Thanks xx""

""My sister in-law hit another car, she only has a permit and no insurance?""

I moved to america last year, my wifes sister hasnt got a full license yet she hit another car today. She has no inurance, she gave her name and her mothers car insurance details. ...show more""

What is the best insurance policy is best for my children? Plus what carrier is also best?

What is the best insurance policy is best for my children? Plus what carrier is also best?

What kind of car insurance for a adapted van?

Ok I have a 1993 Dodge Caravan. I am disabled so it has a ramp that is let out and brought back in. It has disabled hand controls and a drivers seat that raises and lowers and turns around.. just a bit more than your average seat does now-a-days.. this van was adapted when it was made.. so i have no receipts on the modifications or anything.. i could get an estimate from a local store that deals in strictly handicapped equipment.. how do i properly insure this van? I need to make sure that if it is ever totaled that i dont get just blue book. since i have to have a adapted van (i live in a rural area and there is no dependable handicapped public transportation) i have the permanent general insurance now, with a $1000 on the custom equipment. but i worry thats not enough or maybe even doesnt cover my handicap adaptions. the agent with them was snappy, rude, and didnt know anything.. ugh! what company should i go to? what do i need to have in my policy? help! i keep getting all this bad advice from the insurance companies because no one knows what to do!!!""

""Impossible to get car insurance, what should I do?""

I'm 18 soon and will be wanting to start driving but the cheapest quote i can get is 6000 etc on a 1.0 litre vauxhall corsa, There is no one i can get a policy with as my mum doesn't drive. is there any suggestions? only British people will understand this problem

Is my insurance company liable?

My insurance company offered me a policy to cover a de restricted scooter which I agreed to take out, but in order for this policy to take effect I had to give up 4 months of cover totalling around 160 and pay a 80 deposit on the new policy. Last week I was sent a letter notifying me that my insurance was cancelled so I called them and was told that I had to return a copy of my CBT certificate. I rang on Sunday and was told a completely different story and that was that the company they placed me with had decided that they were not going to cover me even though the whole point of changing them was because they specificity dealt with my type of vehicle . They have now offered another policy for 515 pounds with is 100 pounds more than my previous and I am not willing to pay this as they lied to me and told me that I was insured to ride around even though they knew that I was not covered. I have copies of the insurance certificate to prove that they sold me the policy and all other relating documents. Please advise on what I can do.""

How many year does it take for auto insurance to lower young driver rate?

if i start at 16

Where can I find info on LOW COST Medical Insurance In Central NY? (Student Artist Musician Business Owner)?

My wife and I are moving soon from PHX, AZ to the greater Syracuse area. I am moving my multimedia business / record label (websites, print design, videography, DVD production and studio recording) and I need information on which companies can provide my family reasonable cost heath insurance. Right now my wife works fulltime so we use her benefits, but we will be starting a family and would like to keep her at home for a few years. In PHX, health insurance for non-group individuals runs about $300 a month - from what I can see in CNY it can cost closer to $1000! Can some one help me with this? Am I looking at the wrong companies or is it just that mush more expensive? Are any loop holes? In some states Students, Artist, Musicians & Small Business Owners can get highly discounted rates - is this true in CNY? Can anyone help? Thanks in advance!""

What's the best individual health insurance?

I am 27 and have no major health problems, but because all the jobs I have been getting lately are temporary gigs, none of my employers offer health insurance.""

Purchasing health insurance?

I need to purchase health insurance. I should have purchased it a while ago because now I really need to use it. Will I be able to use it for a preexisting condition (fracture)? Any advice on a plan to purchase?

""Mortgage, HOMEOWNER INSURANCE, lost jobs advice.?""

I need some advice! (Please, please keep your advice to constructive criticism, please) We are coming out of a messy situation where we both lost our jobs. But now we have acquired ...show more""

Stevens Point Wisconsin Cheap car insurance quotes zip 54492

Stevens Point Wisconsin Cheap car insurance quotes zip 54492

What does a term life insurance medical exam consist of?

And what companies do people recommend.

How much would the treatment cost for stage 3 non-hodgkin's lymphoma if you didn't have insurance?

My friend put a friend of hers who was just diagnosed with stage 3 Non-Hodgkin's Lymphoma in touch with me today, but I really don't know how to help her. She's 21, fresh out of college but unemployed, and does not have insurance. I don't know why she wasn't still on her parents' plan, or how student healthcare insurance works. She's terrified not just about the diagnosis itself but the cost. She was already financially strapped and trying to figure out how to pay for housing after college. I had Hodgkin's Lymphoma at 16-17, but my parents have insurance, and they are the ones who handled the bills. I never paid for anything myself so I really don't know about the cost involved. I saw one bill for my radiation and was literally shocked-still by the amount. It was like $1500 for each treatment I think, and I was getting them Monday-Friday then. Chemo was much more, but I never saw a bill for it so I really don't know the price. I did see a bill for one night I spent in the emergency room when I had this awful infection and a terrible fever, and without insurance that one night would have been over $7000! With insurance I think it was like $2400. All of my treatments and doctor's offices are in posh medical facilities in affluent parts of Los Angeles like Beverly Hills and Westwood / Bel Air, so perhaps that's why my medical care was so much. I honestly don't know. I wish I knew how to support or advise this girl. She's too old to attend the support group I went to, and I don't really know that much about NH-L because it's quite different than HL. I was fortunate to never have to be concerned about the finances, and I don't even know what the total amounted to since my parents won't tell me. They said, that it's not my concern. It was all medical care for me, so you'd think it would be my concern, but whatever. Will her oncologist's office help her to find financial support? How does that even work? What do they do if you can't pay? It would suck if she had to file bankruptcy this early in her life. Won't that keep her from getting a job, a loan for a house, and everything else? She went to USC. Can recent alumni be treated at their hospital for a reduced price? I was treated at UCLA, and I think at UCLA students can get medical care at a reduced cost. At my school I think we can as well. I don't know. You just show your student card. All bills are sent to your parents, so I don't know how it works. What should I tell her? She wants my help. All I really know to do is to send her the links I have on my profile. I can give her emotional support, but am clueless about financial support. What's the total cost of this going to most likely be for her?""

How to get proof of financial responsibility?

I'm 21 a year old university student from California and I am graduating soon. I have always put off getting a license before college and once it started, I have been busy but because I want to get a job after graduating I really need my license pronto! My parents back home already taught me how to drive but I'm signing up for a driving school in my area just to practice and get the local roads down. I made an appointment for behind the wheel test next week and one of the things I need to bring is proof of financial responsibility. I know it's not insurance because I need a license to get that so how do I get it? I'm also probably going to borrow my friend's car for the test.""

Car insurance for a rental car?

Hello, I was looking to rent a car for about 1 month, but finding the rental companies insurance costly than the car itself. I called up few insurance companies and they are ready to provide me some cheap basic insurance for like about $75.00/month which covers liability, other car damages; but not the physical damage of my car (they said my credit card company should cover it). I discussed this with one of my friend and he said that the rental car company would not allowed you to rent a car on the renter's insurance. Is it true? If yes, then what could be the best way I can get a cheap and covered car insurance for my rental car for 1 month. Please suggest.""

BEEN RIPPED OFF BY FAKE CAR INSURANCE WHAT SHALL I DO?

i paid this guy 130 for insurance, he put down all wrong details on the policy so that i am like 30 years old, that's why it was so cheap. wont reply to my emails or pick up the phone. told him i was going to call the police and tell the insurance company if he didnt refund me. this is the add: http://www.gumtree.com/london/13/60689813.html what should i do now??""

Do I have to pay more for my 16 yr old to drive?

Do I have to pay for a different auto insurance policy (that costs alot more)here in Oregon to allow my 16 year old son to drive our vehicles? I was told by a former ins agent, this is a scam to get more in premiums, when it is not required by law.""

What is the right affordable car insurance to purchase in NEW JERSEY?

Hi, I was looking to buy a car insurance policy. I currently have a company but wanted to drop them due to being overpriced. The only problem is that i don't have a driver license nor have i ever had one. I was able to finance a car off the lot but it wasn't for me. I brought it for my grandson. He has a driver license and is the only primary driver of the car. Being as though I never had a license most companies won't accept it and limits me from getting a cheaper policy. He is about to turn 18 next week. So is there any car insurance companies that will accept that i don't have a license and let me get a policy with him being the primary driver of the car. Thanks!!""

Cheap auto insurance in the USA on an English drivers license?

Currently living in LA, have bought a car which is insured through my wife at the moment. Charging $300 a month!! due to me only having a UK license, even if I change to US license the price only comes down $20--all help and advice appreciated. Thank you""

Average price for public libility insurance?

Average price for public libility insurance?

I'm planning on getting affordable coverage for my dog. what would be best recommended?

okay well the question explains most of it. I'm currently doing some research on what company has the most afforable coverage for my dog. But there is so many to chose from: ...show more

How much will car insurance cost? 10pts?

Hello there! Assuming that a seventeen year old girl passes her driving tests, has a land rover, does not use it everyday (attends college via bus), and only uses it for picking up the animal food, how much can she expect insurance to cost? Ps. The car can be parked in a garage, which is in a field (not on the side-of-the-road) on private land in the middle of the countryside. If you need any more information just let me know. Thanks. :)""

Im 19 how much does the average 19 year old pay for car insurance?

I live in new york city

Do I need a California driver's license to deliver pizzas in California? (Domino's)?

Just interviewed at Domino's and everything seemed to go well, but afterwards I realized my current driver's license is in the state of Nevada and not California (since I am just here attending college). I anyone aware if this will be a problem for insurance issues or something?""

""Just a stab in the dark, anyone care to share what their insurance cost is on a Honda S2000?""

I'm looking at 2002 S2000. I m 36, good clean driving record.""

Which life insurance to get before Dx of melanoma?

I am 99% sure I have melanoma on my leg. Have apt soon to get this confirmed and staged and start the process. I am a nurse, I know the process, and know the outcome can be one of many. I do not currently have any life insurance, never have. I have 2 small children and it is JUST me and then, no close friends, no family. Worst case scenario, if I only have a short time to live, what would be the best LIFE insurance I can get before getting this diagnosis? I would need something in which they could not cancel me if I am diagnosed with cancer within days of purchasing a premium. Today is May 11th, I should have my diagnosis by May 29th. I would like the biggest policy at the most affordable rate (I don't make as much money as you would think), but its also important that I get the fewest stipulations. By the way, I hate to admit it, but I am a smoker. I quit from 2009 to late 2010, but then started up again when I started RN school (am an LPN now, graduate from RN school in 3 weeks). Any solid advice would be appreciated. In laymens terms please. Ohio.""

How much can auto insurance rates go up for a first time accident?

If youre at fault, theres no injuries. Approximatley $1500 damage done to the other car and minor scratches done to your own. Also, would it be better not to make a claim to your own vehicle if the damage is so minor? Or would it even have an impact on future rates?""

Car insurance for test drive?

Planning on buying a car soon and was thinking of buying a second hand one from a dealer rather than privately from a person. I read that when you buy a car from a dealer you are usually automatically insured to take the car for a test drive, however I was wondering does this just apply to brand new cars from car shops or do most second hand car dealers offer insurance for test drive as well?""

Motorcycle Insurance!?!?

Im so confused right now. In the past 2 months i have been doing my homework on buying a new 2011 CBR600RR. I have been quoting progressive which is who i have my car insurance with. I have been getting around 150$ a month for full coverage. I was about to buy the bike today and whenever i quoted the insurance it was around 230$. I thought i had made a mistake but everything was the same... what the heck happend?

""Dems, why don't you believe you'll be fined or jailed if you don't buy health insurance?""

With few exceptions, everyone would be required to buy health insurance. Each adult without it would pay an annual penalty, set at $200 in 2014; $400 in 2015; $600 in 2016; and $750 in 2017. http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2009-10-12-healthcare_N.htm That's Obamacare in a nutshell dems. Buy health insurance or else! LOL, how's that hopey changey stuff working out for you dems? You're going to be FORCED to buy health insurance now from Obama's Wall Street buddies.""

""Which is worse: increased taxes, or a high insurance premium?""

http://www.usatoday.com/money/industries/health/2009-09-15-insurance-costs_N.htm for some reason, I'd pay any tax to fund socialized medicine thrown my way rather than pay $13,375 a year for a family of four. and you'd be crazy not to yourself. and besides...the tax would never be 4,824, which is the average a single person pays per year.""

Car Insurance Price for 99' Corolla.?

I'm thinking about getting this 99' Corolla but I'm not sure how much the car insurance will be. -I am 17 years old and i took Drivers Edd. -I live in Rural area. I hope some of this info will help with the estimate. Looking for how much the insurance will cost a year/month.

Why is my car insurance so expensive?

I am trying to figure out why my car insurance costs so much, and I am having problems getting a straight answer from any insurance company. In the last 5 years I have 0 speeding tickets, no dui's, and 1 not at fault accident. I am a 26 year old male with full coverage on an 07 Cobalt ls, so not even a sports car. The absolute cheapest insurance I could find is just shy of 350$ a month. Most companies wouldn't even cover me, and none of them would tell me why. So if anyone has any ideas of what could be causing this I would really appreciate it.""

The average price of the Mazda RX8 insurance?

Ive been searching for cars, and Ive picked out the mazda rx8, it will be wrecked and im gonna fix it. Im 16 and I was wondering what the average price of insurance would be with AAA car insurance.""

Do I have to have my mom on my car insurance?

I recently bought a car(mustang!) and I was able to get a pretty low premium, do I need to put my mom as a additional driver? She has her own car and her own premium.""

Car insurance? Geico? encompass?

I just recently signed up for encompass insurance company. Does anyone know anything about them? good / bad? How is Geico? Do you recommend any insurance good car insurance companies? i'm from NJ.

Stevens Point Wisconsin Cheap car insurance quotes zip 54492

Stevens Point Wisconsin Cheap car insurance quotes zip 54492

What car is cheap for insurance?

I'm 17 year old im looking for a car I have got to the point of I want anything thats ok but insurance is killing me so I came up with a few cars let me know if it's good on insurance . 89 Silvia s13k ,98 gto twin turbo ,98 pointac grand prix and if you have any cars that you suggest or insurance plains that I should look into let me know.""

Factors that determine the price of insurance?

i would like to know how certain factors determine the price of insurance. 1) how does costs affect the price of insurance 2) how does amount of claims affect the price of insurance 3) how does risk levels affect the price of insurance 4) how does predictability of risk affect the price of insurance 5) how does return from investments affect the price of insurance 6) how does level of interest rates affect the price of insurance 7) how does profit margin affect the price of insurance 8) how does competition affect the price of insurance 9) how does goverment regulation affect the price of insurance

What is the cheapest/best insurance for a 24yr old student/ stay at home mom?

My 3month old is covered under medicaid, but I need help finding an affordable insurance for myself. My fiance is covered by his work for free, but it would be $200 a check for him to add me and we cannot afford that at this time.""

How much will car insurance go up for getting 2 points?

How much will car insurance go up for getting 2 points?

How to get a cheaper car insurance in new jersey?

i leased a car a year ago and allstate just add 500 dollars on my premium and actually my car insurance is way more expensive than my car note. although i have 2 points on my drivers licence but it has been almost two years now and since i havent had no moving violation. Am planning to take a online defensive driver class to remove them. Please let me know what should i do to lower my premium or where to go cause its killing my finance. i am living in new jersey.

Where can i buy cheap insurance for 13 years olds in Atlanta?

I Have a 13yr old and i need to get Cheap insurance for him to play.

What is the best car insurance company for a graduate student?

What is the best car insurance company for a graduate student?

Why is the co-pay for dental insurance more expensive than health insurance?

I compared the co pays on several reputable dental insurance companies and it is very expensive. Many things are not covered, even with the best dental insurance. Health insurance is usually a 10 dollar co pay for primary physicians and a 35-50 dollar co pay for specialty physicians. Is there any reason why dental insurance co pay is as expensive as it is?""

Insurance Rate for a ZX6R !?

anyone know how much insurance would roughly be for a 17 year old 2007 ZX6R Motorcycle Course Completed In Ontario Thanks!!!

Can a car insurance broker be wrong?

This insurance broker gave me a quote that is a lot lower than what i pay for my car insurance right now. He double checked my information and my driver's licence and gave me a low quote, while all the other brokers told me higher amounts. Could he be wrong? What if I say I want to switch to that insurance, and it turns out he cannot get that locked quote for me? what happens then?""

Car Insurance?

Okay so I'm sixteen and I got my license about two months ago. But I haven't been allowed to drive yet because I don't have car insurance. Is it really illegal to drive without car insurance?

Can relative use Insurance to get car towed?

Hi everyone. Had some trouble with my car in that it broke down 30 miles from home. The insurance company ( Halifax but outsourced to green flag) have told me that it would cost 160 as it is outwith the 10 mile radius ! So i had it towed to a local garage who tell me it needs a new engine !! Bad luck this car. I have arranged for a company to buy it back home despite being non-runner, so question is can my mum use her insurance to get it towed 30 miles free of charge ? Possible problems being that she might have to be at the car or they won't tow to the car buyer. Help please.""

""Affordable, legit health insurance for a 19 year old girl in nebraska?""

so since i've turned 19, i'm no longer covered by my parent's insurance, and i need my own. I've been looking online but the only things i could really afford are from websites and companies that I've never heard of, so how trustworthy would they be? or is it a better idea just to go with a big company?""

How much is for car insurance for first time drivers?

How much is for car insurance for first time drivers?

Where can i find cheap car insurance on a honda civic type r?

im 23 and these will be my first car im driving...i will put my dad name as the main driver his 53..jus need 2find really cheap car insurance

Which group of car insurance is cheaper?group 1 or group 2?

Which group of car insurance is cheaper?group 1 or group 2?

How does a 17/18 year old find cheap car insurance?

i am looking for cheap car insurance but finding it difficult,anyone got any ideas or methods""

What happens to money invested in whole life insurance if I live to 105?

I am 60 and bought a whole life policy about a year ago but what if I live to 105? Is there insurance available after age100? 

What's the purpose of medical insurance for students?

I'm in Australia and I need medical insurance which is very costly and it doesn't even cover anything like dental checkup. I don't think I'll ever a use a single penny from that insurance. Why are they robbing us of our money for no reason? If I get ill, I'll use my own money to pay for treatment. And I heard they don't get any interest from the money so where does all that money go? In the air?""

Open car insurance policy?

My dad is looking at buying me a 200 car to use but so far the cheapest insurance I can find is 4.5 grand. I have heard about open insurance policies and was wondering if my dad got the car and policy in his name would it work out cheaper for me to drive it like that? Also what companies do these policies and how would I go about getting one?

What is the telephone number to American Standard Insurance?? *car*?

thanks!!

Will my auto insurance rate go up? (Ontario)?

I got a ticket for making an illegal U-turn (2 demerit points). I am an occasional driver with a G license. My insurance is with Allstate. Will my insurance rates go up? Let me kno if you have any experience with Allstate, like if you got a ticket (what was it for?) and if your rates went/didn't go up (how much?). Thank you""

Car Insurance / Case is not resolved / New Insurance?

Hi I had car accident about year and a half ago. My case went to court and it is still not resolved.I haven't been driving since that time. I bought a car now and I want to insure it. How does it look with the insurance companies ? there is no option to choose when you do insurance quote online.

Free car insurance??

My partner just called up his car insurance company to have me down as a named driver on his car. all the asked for is my name, DOB and my occupation. and they said there is no charge its free. Is this for real?? why is it free?? nothings free these days lol i also only have a provisonal""

I am planning to buy an insurance plan. What is this long term care insurance?

I am planning to buy an insurance plan. What is this long term care insurance? Please suggest me some good options for long term care insurance in Texas.

Stevens Point Wisconsin Cheap car insurance quotes zip 54492

Stevens Point Wisconsin Cheap car insurance quotes zip 54492

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/insurance-quotes-provisional-driver-penelope-brickman/"