#they can be a ten if we duplicate them we have the technology (maybe)

[5mind]

(( no one called fives a ten because they're...a five(mind) badum tss

[emeraldlupin]

Why Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow is a Good Movie

I've said a lot in my essays and on here, and I will continue to say a lot, about how many of the Naruto and Shippuden movies are terrible. But I'm not hating on all of them. There are a few that really hold up.

The first movie, Ninja Clash in the Land of Snow, is one of those few.

Let's go over why it works.

For one, it's early in the timeline and Team Seven hasn't broken up. That's always nice. For two, it shows the team working together, shows off Sasuke's talents with things other than his Sharingan, and also shows off Sakura's skills, too. Not anything super flashy, but it's there. That's another plus.

The movie even shows a little bit of genuine teamwork between Sasuke and Sakura against the Snow ninja. No "you're annoying, Sakura." No fawning from her. No leaving her on the backburner like in the Hidden Waterfall OVA.

Seriously, it's at the 1 hour and 7 minute mark. Sasuke asks Sakura how close the enemy ninja are, she gives him and answer, and even where to aim. He sets up a wire trap, Sakura uses explosive tags to take down one enemy and blow the one who is gliding right into the trap. The two of them are working together like a real team.

Maybe I'm forgetting something, but as far as I can remember, those two working together like that in a combat situation is really rare. Simple, but effective.

In this movie, Fire Country has a film industry. We also see examples of high technology like cars and trains and even kunai Gatling guns. And is this story breaking?

No.

The kunai Gatling gun is odd, but it's a way to keep to the "no firearms" rule and also get creative. I like it. Sure, it doesn't appear outside the movie, but that can just mean it's not a common weapon, and that's fine. The existence of trains is odd, but it is confined to the country and it just furthers the debate on the development of technology in this world.

And there is a discussion to be had on technology. I'll be doing something on that one of these days. The series has already show the existence of power lines and vending machines right off the bat, if I am remembering right, not to mention wearable radios. The Chunin Exams had VHS tapes.

I will give you one thing, the existence of cars is strange. Those cars were used by the Fire Country film crew, and cars are a technological leap that comes after trains. So...maybe that one can be mentally edited out.

Ultimately, the cars are a very small detail and doesn't hurt the movie too much. While they're used to travel around the Land of Snow, the use of cars isn't actually plot critical. It's when the mistakes in a story start piling up that it becomes harder to overlook the smaller stuff, or when the mistakes are really big.

It might have been better if the vehicles were provided by the Land of Snow or something. I think there might have been a novelization of the movie, but if there was, it was never released outside Japan or translated by fans. Annoying.

What about Doto not finding Koyuki for ten (actually 14, but whatever) years, despite her being a big actress? I don't think it's an issue. She was a little girl when she was rescued, and when I did my timeline, I didn't have her start her acting career until she was 16. She had to have been 20 at the time of the movie, minimum, and it's possible that nobody in the Land of Snow was watching her movies.

So, no, that's not really a plothole.

The director wanting to keep filming despite the danger? It is pretty nuts, but it only establishes his character, and he doesn't come off like some heartless jerk.

Koyuki's depression and hopelessness? No, that's not a problem. For what she's been through, it makes total sense. Her expression "there is no spring in the Land of Snow," is taken as literal, and that's ridiculous, but we can re-interpret that as metaphorical. It's not too big an issue.

Kakashi duplicating Ice Release? A plot hole now, yes. However, Ice Release hadn't been established as a kekkei genkai yet, so we can forgive that.

So...why does this movie work?

The plot, while fairly straightforward and while not carrying any big or complex themes, is solid as steel.

And yes, there are engaging fights present in this movie, too. But do not let that be the only measuring stick for this movie or the series. Fights without working context aren't worth much, something films like Batman v. Superman have proved quite firmly in more recent years. We don't get into series like this for the fights. We get into them because we became emotionally invested in the characters. Actions scenes are a bonus, not the end all.

In this film, the characters are all acting in character. The motivations make sense. Nobody is being egregiously stupid or awful in a way that hurts the narrative. Team Seven is acting more like the team you'd wanted them to be. Yes, the worldbuilding has a few little blemishes, but nothing too destructive.

Why most of the other films couldn't be that well put together, I don't know. But this one definitely was.

[deancasbigbang]

Title: Ex Libris

Author: marbleflan

Artist: Djedo

Rating: Explicit

Pairings: Dean Winchester/Castiel, mentions of past Dean Winchester/Lisa Braeden

Length: 25000

Warnings: Brief depictions of racism and sexism

Tags: mutual pining, established relationship, secret relationship, smart Dean, misunderstandings

Posting Date: October 3, 2022

Summary: Dean and Cas have been meeting up, and hooking up, at the New York Antiquarian Book Fair for going on ten years. Just when Dean thinks they might be able to evolve into something more, Cas drops some news that could spell the end of their relationship once and for all. Will their personal and professional lives keep pulling them apart, or can they make this crazy long distance, cross country casual affair into a commitment worth fighting for? Featuring Dean as a counter-culture bookseller with an encyclopedic knowledge of 20th century duplicating technologies and Cas as a beleaguered curator plagued by library bureaucracy.

Excerpt: “That’s real rich, Cas,” Dean says, his voice sounding hot and defensive in his own ears. “These past few years ain’t exactly been the gravy train for me. Me and Sammy are living as close to the bone as we can. We almost couldn’t afford to exhibit this year—wouldn’t have, if it wasn’t for Benny. We can’t all be lucky bastards who luck into jobs we aren’t even trying to get.” For a second, Cas’s eyes blaze brighter, and it looks like Cas is gonna hit back, like they’re gonna have it out. Dean’s ready for it. He’s primed. He and Cas have never fought before, they’ve always had better ways to release tension, but he’s ready to fight. Then, like letting air out of a balloon, Cas just deflates. His eyes dart to the side and then back to Dean’s, and a small, tired smile plays around his lips. “Maybe you should sell the Ulysses,” he says, and despite himself Dean huffs out a laugh. There’s a pregnant pause where they both just stare at each other. “Can I ask you something, Dean?” Cas says after a beat. Dean crosses his arms and gives Cas a tight nod. “Do you think it’s a mistake, taking this promotion? It’s just… you’re right. I wasn’t trying to get this job. When you and I first met, I never really thought I’d get to where I am, a curator. I thought I’d probably struggle for a few years, utterly fail, and end up moving back into my parents’ basement.” Dean walks over to the bed and sits beside Cas. After a moment of silence he reaches over and takes Cas’s hand. Cas has great hands–long fingers, strong and masculine. Dean’s always loved Cas’s hands. “Isn’t this promotion kind of the opposite of failing?” “Maybe there’s more than two options. Maybe it’s not just failure or success. Maybe,” Cas looks down at their clasped hands. “Maybe there are some things you have to decide to choose.” Dean swallows, painfully aware that he’s not something Cas has decided to choose for himself.  “Just because something is unexpected doesn’t mean it’s the wrong thing,” Dean says. “If we could plan everything, control everything–I don’t know man. Sounds pretty boring.” This time when he winks, Cas sees it and it draws a shy smile to his face.  Cas leans forward, and effortlessly, without any conscious thought on his part, Dean meets him halfway. They kiss. It’s slow and thoughtful. Intimate. It feels like something they’ve done a hundred times before, although Dean would swear they’ve never kissed quite like this before. Never this sweetly. Never this deeply. 

DCBB 2022 Posting Schedule

[itszephoria]

Saw this pop up and your followers ask you which ones they’re interested in. But people don’t really ask much when I post or they don’t ask the ones that might make you feel uncomfortable. And well, honestly I’m so bored that I’ve decided to break all the damn rules and just answer all the questions because I can. *shock horror*

So information dump on the ‘Be nosy’ that popped up in my feed today. If you’re interested.

Be nosy

1. What’s your sexual orientation? 

Straight. But maybe for the right woman I could sway but wouldn’t go so far as to call myself bi or bi-curious though.

2. What are you obsessed with right now? 

Obsessively obsessing about my health and how to get well and failing it all. Oh and anime movies on Netflix.

3. Ever done any drugs?

I do drugs everyday. But I assume this is referring to illegal. No and was strictly no up until recently. I now take marijuana oil on a regular basis for pain management. Also being stoned/high is not pleasant and I don’t understand why people would enjoy that as a leisurely pastime.

4. What piercings do you want?

I want to get my ears pierced again. Holes have closed up, but currently due to my health that’s not possible. I can’t even enjoy clipons :(

5. How many people have you kissed?

The massive number of 5.

6. Describe your dream home.

It’s tiny in the sense it has all the space I need. A cosy tiny-like home. But not one on wheels, fixed to the ground. And it would be made of all natural materials, stone and wood. It would be unique and resemble something out of a fairy tale. It would sit a beautiful clearing with only nature to view in the distance and all the animals and wildlife would stay well away because I’m pretty much terrified of all it, 

7. Who are you jealous of?

Healthy, painfree people. I am jealous of past me who didn’t realise how lucky she was and miss her.

8. What’s your favorite show to binge?

I don’t binge any show on repeat. I’d rather look for a new show to watch or enjoy, there are so many. The last shows I binged in two days was Queen’s Gambit and Emily in Paris.

9. Do you watch porn?

Yep. But struggle with it because it’s overdramatic, unrealistic and would kill or someone to make porn with a decent storyline with people that can act. 

I prefer to read it if I’m honest or maybe just write it for myself.

10. Do you have a secret sideblog?

Sort of? More like my other one I used I was known for all my slash writings in F1. But now I just hang out here.

11. If you could teleport anywhere in the world right now, where would you go?

No where. The world is riddled with co-vid and well, I’m probably in one of the safest countries and I’m at risk of death should I catch it. So I’ll stay here in my safe bubble.

12. What’s one of your fantasies?

I wake up tomorrow and I’m not me. I wake up and I can take a deep breath without gasping for air, I wake up in no pain, I wake up and my body isn’t terribly scared, I wake up and can have a ‘normal’ life.

13. Do you have/would you get your nipples pierced?

Nope and no desire too. Won’t that just hurt?

14. How would you spend a million dollars?

I’d by that dream house I described, set everything up to be self sufficient. Pay and travel to try every cure available for my diseases. And then bank the rest and live off interest. Or maybe donate it. I don’t want money and I don’t really want a lot of things.

15. Are you in a relationship?

Yep and it’s a struggle and am constantly fighting to prove it’s worth continuing. Oh and that’s a relationship with myself.

16. Do you follow porn blogs?

No.

17. Are you angry with anyone right now?

No, I suppose it’s more disappointed and let down by people more than angry. I’m working everyday on letting it go but it’s not easy.

18. What tattoos do you want?

I have always wanted one, but have never found something that I really loved and haven’t been imaginative enough to create something unique. The older I get though, I’m not sure I want one. I did for the longest time though think about getting a Ferrari tattooed on my inner wrist, but pleased I never did that. I don’t love the sport or Ferrari enough anymore to want a permanent reminder of that.

19. If you could change your name, would you? What would you change it to?

I am changing name actually. Hoping to action that in the next two weeks. I would have done it earlier but they closed the borders. I have a dutch sir name that has two words. It confuses every one, systems don’t get it, it has caused issues with plane tickets. And well I’ve decided no more and am dumping a portion of it.

20. What is something you’re obsessed with?

This is a duplicate. Skipping.

21. Describe your best friend.

When you meet her for the first time she can be a little crazy and wild, and she kind of scared at me first because she’s so unlike me. But as you got to know her, the *real* her she doesn’t let people see, you realise how kind and soft she is, and she’s the most empathic person I have known. She gives so much of herself to everyone, thinks so little of herself and her needs because she’s one of the most selfless people I know. I love her more than most of my family and would do anything for her.

22. Tag someone you think is hot.

Is this followers? Uh most I don’t know what they look like? I assume they’re all hot!

23. Who are five of your favorite bands/musical artists?

Don’t have any really. My music is varied and is based on my mood and really changes around. And with most bands, I generally lean towards one or two songs. This is one of those questions I really struggle with whenever I see it. Will say however, have been enjoying The Beatles recently and a bit of old school stuff.

24. What are three places you want to travel?

Japan. Norway. Canada.

25. Describe your perfect Friday night.

Generally hanging out with people I like. Enjoying a good wine, some cheese, either playing some board game or dungeons and dragons, or watching a really good movie. Good company makes any night a good night.

26. What’s your favorite season?

Autumn. One because I think it’s neglected as a choice and every season should be loved, and two because I love the colours of autumn and the colours associated with autumn. 

27. What’s your pet peeve?

I’m sure I have a heap of them, but currently it’s people that have an issue with you and instead of being an adult and talking to you about them choose to silence and blank you. I’m so tired of it, I’ve quit being peacemaker in those situations, those people are no longer worthy in my book.

28. Who is the funniest person you know?

Uh... I don’t think anyone I know is super funny. Friends and family all have a good sense of humor. But out of my circle of life people I’m always told I’m the funny one, which I find the biggest joke ever. 

29. What’s the most overrated movie?

Can not think of anything off the top of my head. I will say if I think a movie is getting too much hype I refuse to watch it, whether all the reviews are raving or not. It’s why I didn’t watch Harry Potter for like ten years or any of the new Star Wars movies. I just refuse to be apart of all the hype and jump on bandwagons.

30. Tag someone you want to talk to but have been too shy to message.

I’d love to talk to everyone. I’m shy to start any conversations to be honest and I think all the people I talk to regularly were the first to message me, and I love them for it.

31. Do you like paper books or ebooks better?

100% love an old fashioned paper book. The texture of the paper. The smell of a book. That being said, I don’t think I’ve picked up a proper book to read in years. I live in fan fiction more than anything or am busy writing myself.

32. If you could live in a fictional world, what world would you pick?

Any of the disney worlds, anything from the past, or verging on fantasy like. I want a simpler time not full of technology which I grow to hate more each day. The older I get the more I’m pretty sure I’ve been born in the wrong decade.

33. If money was no object, what would your wardrobe be like?

I’d build the perfect wardrobe capsule. Everything would be of high quality, not necessarily brand name and all the clothes would be sourced from ethical businesses or be handmade.

I like classic pieces, love the fashion of the 50′s and 60s and while stylish it would be comfortable to wear and everything could be worn in public (sorry comfy tracky pants).

34. What’s your coffee order?

There ain’t no coffee order. I don’t drink it. Sorry @leoni-speedyf1 I know how addicted you are to it, happy to buy you anything you like though :P

35. Do you have a crush on anyone?

In real life? No one.

36. Do you still have feelings for any of your exes?

Not romantic. I have feelings in that I hope they’re doing well, achieving what they want and they’re all happy. I didn’t have any ‘bad’ breakups and all my relationships ended very amicably.

37. Have any tattoos?

No. See above for more on this.

38. Do you drink?

Rarely. Can’t with medication and condition. But on occasion I do enjoy a good glass of red. Pinot Noir is my preference. 

39. Are you a virgin?

Nope.

40. Do you have a crush on any of your mutuals?

Not in a romantic way? The ones I talk to regularly I love immensely though.

41. How many followers do you have?

99

42. Describe the hottest person you know.

Uh all the men I know I am not attracted to. Probably a good thing as they’re either family or partnered with a friend or family member.

43. What’s your guilty pleasure?

Can’t think of anything. I try not to feel guilt for anything I enjoy to be honest, whether it’s food or an activity. Life is too short for that.

44. Do you read erotica?

Yep. Even write it.

45. What’s the worst date you’ve ever been on?

It was a few years back. I met this guy online and we went to the city and spent most of that time just strolling next to the river for our first meet up. Why was it the worst date ever? Well it wasn’t the location that’s for sure.

The guy had two kids, and I’m a firm believer all parents have favourites, though I have yet to meet a parent that will voice that aloud. This guy, had no qualms with telling me about this favourite kid, and that wouldn’t be a problem if didn’t spend just as much putting down his younger son. It kind of left me reeling and wondering how his son felt if his dad didn’t hide just how much he didn’t like him as a person. The kid was four and the reason his dad didn’t like him was because he didn’t like bikes.

And so the guy was a bmx rider so he spent the rest of the time on our walk just pointing out all the tricks he could do. He didn’t ask about me, only talked about himself. It was also lunch time and assumed we would get something to eat together, but nope, no food was offered. And when I suggested to get something to drink because it was so hot and we’d been out in the sun for like an hour, he just took me to a subway and told me to get a drink and waved me to the line. No offer to join me, no offer to pay (which doesn’t bother me btw, but this was capping off a terrible day), no offer to get food.

I was so happy to get out of there. Didn’t speak to him again once I had left.

46. How many people do you follow?

I currently follow 59 people. I don’t follow anyone that creates drama, and try and follow only people that post about F1 as that’s all I use tumblr for now.

47. If you could marry any celebrity, who would you pick?

Either Sebastian Vettel or Ryan Reynolds. Both are married though, so I don’t think that’s going to turn into a reality anytime soon.

48. Describe your ideal partner.

I want someone that shares the same core values as me. Doesn’t want kids, isn’t super religious (grew up in a cult like religion so I avoid it now), is on the minimalist side and isn’t someone that needs new things things all the time or is desperate to replace something the moment they deem it out of date. Someone that doesn’t live their life on social media. Someone that prefers simple things, someone who is kind and giving, and someone that truly loves me - and it’s the last part that I struggle with finding more than anything with all the guys I have dated. 

I am currently not looking for a partner, I am not in a place for a relationship and am fully focused on myself. And I am very content with that decision.

49. Who do you text the most?

Currently my bestie.

50. What’s your favorite kind of weather?

Clear blue skies and a warm day to enjoy the sun. But there are times when I simply love the rain, hearing it on the room, watching it fall endlessly and knowing that everything will be green from it.

[f4liveblogarchives]

Fantastic Four Vol. 1 Annual 1980

Tues Apr 27 2020 [10:15 PM] Bocaj: Ah annuals [10:15 PM] Bocaj: My bane [10:15 PM] Wack'd: The first story is called "Time for the Prime Ten" and I have to suspect someone came up with that title and then worked backwards to a story [10:16 PM] Bocaj: Ah, like silver age DC with that and covers [10:17 PM] Wack'd: Alicia is taking Franklin for the weekend while the Four finish up one of Reed's inventions [10:17 PM] Bocaj: Do you really want Johnny helping with that, Reed? [10:18 PM] Wack'd: I mean counterpoint: would you rather trust Johnny with menial construction work or supervising a child [10:18 PM] maxwellelvis: Hmm... [10:19 PM] Bocaj: That’s tough [10:19 PM] Mousa The 14: Kid fixes cars, he has at least some mechanical know how [10:19 PM] Wack'd: Hilariously, just as Alicia and Franklin leave, Reed finishes his project! So, like [10:19 PM] Mousa The 14: ... WHY BOTHER [10:19 PM] Wack'd: Honestly unless that project was child-proofing your lab I dunno what the point was [10:20 PM] Bocaj: 😐 [10:20 PM] Wack'd: But the project was not childproofing the lab! It was wirelessly transmitting energy! Reed got Franklin's toy car to move with no batteries and he's quite pleased [10:20 PM] maxwellelvis: Well of course the real reason is to make sure Franklin and Alicia are helpless when something bad happens, but... [10:20 PM] Mousa The 14: That’s cute I guess [10:21 PM] Mousa The 14: And a useful invention [10:21 PM] Wack'd: Especially, as Reed points out, in an energy crisis [10:23 PM] Wack'd: Reed is hoping this leads to grants to work on faster-than-light travel, as he's always wanted to go to do that [10:23 PM] Mousa The 14: Ummm [10:23 PM] Wack'd: Chew over that one for a bit [10:24 PM] Mousa The 14: But... [10:24 PM] Mousa The 14: But... [10:24 PM] maxwellelvis: YOU'VE ALREADY- [10:24 PM] Wack'd: Then stop chewing because someone's at the door! [10:24 PM] Mousa The 14: I don’t even... [10:24 PM] Wack'd: And the alarms didn't go off! [10:24 PM] Wack'd: Egads! [10:24 PM] Umbramatic: i [10:24 PM] Bocaj: Is it wacky neighbor Namor? [10:24 PM] maxwellelvis: He's been to other planets [10:25 PM] maxwellelvis: I... just... GAAAAHHHH [10:25 PM] Wack'd: @Bocaj Close

[10:26 PM] Bocaj: Does he just [10:26 PM] Bocaj: Wiggle his ears as he walks around [10:27 PM] Wack'd: Sometimes you've just got to amuse yourself [10:28 PM] Bocaj: Mm, true [10:29 PM] Wack'd: Anyway it hasn't been that long since we saw Willie [10:30 PM] Bocaj: How long? [10:30 PM] Wack'd: His most recent listed appearance date is #191 in 1978,  and it's 1980, so [10:31 PM] Bocaj: Willie is back from Hollywood Kansas [10:32 PM] Wack'd: Especially for a character who is barely more than a cameo to begin with those are pretty good numbers [10:32 PM] Mousa The 14: Good point [10:33 PM] Mousa The 14: But hey, Willie is a staple. A rock. [10:34 PM] Wack'd: So anyway Reed makes his excuses to go check the Baxter's security systems. He can't find anything wrong [10:34 PM] Wack'd: And then a portal opens in Reed’s energy transmitter to Captain Mar-Vell having a fight scene involving a lot of falling rocks [10:34 PM] maxwellelvis: Like he just pops up? [10:34 PM] Mousa The 14: What he never thought maybe he built in a security exception for good ol’ Willie? [10:36 PM] Wack'd: Reed is now very concerned because it was not supposed to be doing that [10:36 PM] maxwellelvis: And he accidentally opened a portal to wherever Captain Marvel was at that very moment? [10:36 PM] Wack'd: His theory is Mar-Vell--or his combatant--accidentally opened a portal to him [10:37 PM] Wack'd:

[10:38 PM] Aleph Null: Skrull Cops Are Bastards [10:38 PM] Wack'd: Willie's a postman! [10:38 PM] Aleph Null: he looks like a cop! [10:38 PM] Wack'd: Sure [10:39 PM] Wack'd: Anyway that "package" "Willie" brought was an alarm canceler and also a stun...thing, so Sue, Johnny and Ben are out of the picture for the moment [10:40 PM] Wack'd: "LET ME EXPOSIT, DAMMIT"

[10:41 PM] Wack'd: Wow, your device has three whole purposes, that's impressive! But if you'll me a moment, I need to take a moment to check the weather on this device I'm using to read comics, duplicate portions of them, and instantaneously send them to friends

[10:42 PM] Mousa The 14: Man, Skrull technology is really behind. They just can’t seem to keep up with humanity’s advances [10:42 PM] Umbramatic: alas [10:43 PM] Wack'd: Okay so, basically [10:44 PM] Wack'd: Skrulls want to win the Kree/Skrull War [10:44 PM] Wack'd: To do this, they want teleportation [10:44 PM] Wack'd: Reed's device can do this, but with energy instead of matter [10:45 PM] Wack'd: "Willie" wants to exchange the lives of the Four for Reed's transmitter so the Skrulls can get it up to code [10:45 PM] Wack'd: Hell he even promises not to bring the fight to Earth [10:46 PM] Wack'd: He's slightly-to-moderately surprised when Reed refuses on ethical grounds [10:47 PM] Mousa The 14: “What do you know of ‘Ethics’, Richards.” [10:48 PM] Wack'd: Reed catches him monologuing and BUSCEMA-PUNCHES HIM FROM BEHIND WITH HIS BALLED-UP ANKLE

[10:48 PM] Bocaj: Amazing [10:48 PM] maxwellelvis: He punched him with his leg! [10:48 PM] Umbramatic: impressive [10:48 PM] Bocaj: Now here's the nonsense stretching that I"m here for [10:48 PM] Umbramatic: creative power use i like that [10:48 PM] maxwellelvis: He PUNCHED the Skrull with his LEG [10:49 PM] Mousa The 14: Gave him the boot [10:49 PM] Umbramatic: a boot to the head [10:49 PM] maxwellelvis: He found the proper ankle of attack [10:50 PM] maxwellelvis: He really put his foot down [10:50 PM] Mousa The 14: And one more for Jenny and the wimp [10:49 PM] Wack'd: Anyway Reed wins easily and knocks the Skrull cold. And then Captain Marvel steps through the portal and is like "hey, I hate Kree and Skrulls, give me the transmitter and I'll clean all this up for you" [10:50 PM] Wack'd: It was. Probably too good an offer

[10:51 PM] Mousa The 14: Yeah even with that ask I wouldn’t have given it to him [10:51 PM] Mousa The 14: On the other hand. If it’s in the hands of Captain Marvel it would be completely useless and go absolutely nowhere [10:52 PM] Wack'd: Mar-Vell is like "you need to kill that guy now, no questions asked" and Reed is like [10:52 PM] Wack'd: "Okay just because I'm the one who gave myself the title smartest man alive doesn't mean it isn't true" [10:53 PM] maxwellelvis: "C'mon, be a pal! Pretty please?" [10:53 PM] Mousa The 14: Mar-Vell: “You gave yourself that title? You know what? Keep it.” [10:53 PM] Wack'd: I'm kidding, he talks about how Mar-Vell isn't bloodthirsty. But how do I know? I've never read a book with him [10:54 PM] Mousa The 14: Really, coulda swore showed up in FF previously [10:54 PM] Bocaj: He's a super saiyan [10:54 PM] maxwellelvis: From what I know the only thing that sets Mar-Vell off is Thanos. [10:54 PM] maxwellelvis: But then, who isn't? [10:54 PM] Wack'd: Anyway turns out bloodthirsty "kill him now" Mar-Vell is the imposter [10:54 PM] Wack'd: Stunner [10:54 PM] Mousa The 14: Shock above all shocks [10:55 PM] maxwellelvis: "Would you like me to shoot him now or wait til you get home?" [10:55 PM] maxwellelvis: "SHOOT HIM NOW! SHOOT HIM NOW!" [10:55 PM] maxwellelvis: "You keep out of this, I don't have to shoot you now." [10:56 PM] maxwellelvis: "Well I say you DO have to shoot me now! I DEMAND you shoot me now! ....mother!" [10:56 PM] Wack'd: Reed, smartly, also asks this Mar-Vell for proof of identity, and Mar-Vell has him stare into his eyes and see the whole of existence [10:56 PM] Wack'd: And Reed believes him and doesn't notice the syringe full of alien hallucinogens that I've just been plunged into his arm nah I'm kidding [10:56 PM] Wack'd: It's the real deal [10:57 PM] Umbramatic: alien hallucinogens are the good stuff [10:57 PM] Wack'd: This story still isn't over though! More Skrulls show up! Eight of them! Plus the other two makes Ten [10:58 PM] Wack'd: They're the ten prime Skrulls chosen for this mission [10:58 PM] Umbramatic: and that's terrible [10:58 PM] maxwellelvis: Even with the other three KO'd, that shouldn't be a problem. [10:58 PM] Wack'd: So, you know, I know we've all probably forgotten about that awful pun in the title, but here's our evidence it was reversed engineered [10:59 PM] Wack'd: Anyway the other three of Four miraculously wake up and return from being stunned earlier [10:59 PM] Wack'd: Fight fight fight [11:00 PM] Bocaj: ACTION SCENE NOW [11:01 PM] Wack'd: I guess this was all a parable about ethics and science? Seems to me like it was mostly about dumb imposter reveals but okay

[11:01 PM] Bocaj: its like action league now is the joke [11:01 PM] Wack'd: I understood that reference [11:01 PM] Bocaj: Ok but why is it that the work can't be precisely repeated [11:02 PM] Bocaj: Reed. You do understand that’s the definition of the scientific method, right? [11:02 PM] Bocaj: The fuck you doing if its not that? [11:02 PM] maxwellelvis: I'd have to assume it's the portal aspect he means. [11:02 PM] Umbramatic: "dumb imposter reveals" are just what happens every time you involve skrulls [11:02 PM] Wack'd: If I had to take a wild guess his funding was conditional on results, he had only gotten a result like two hours ago, and then it immediately got blown up [11:03 PM] Wack'd: Whoever gave him the money to build this thing is not going to accept "Skrulls ate my homework" [11:03 PM] Wack'd: But this story also says that Reed had never done faster than light travel before so who fucking knows [11:04 PM] Bocaj: What a bafflement [11:04 PM] Wack'd: Speaking of bafflements [11:04 PM] Wack'd: There is an epilogue [11:04 PM] Wack'd: In which it turns out Sue, Johnny and Ben had been gotten out of the way by sent back in time two hours [11:05 PM] Wack'd: And now there are duplicates who need to imminently depart to go fight Skrulls [11:05 PM] Bocaj: huh. [11:05 PM] maxwellelvis: I'm surprised Aleph Null hasn't chimed with a remark about a resonance cascade [11:07 PM] Aleph Null: "It's not- it's not shutting down!" [11:09 PM] Wack'd: Anyway there's a second story! [11:09 PM] Wack'd: Normally I wouldn't bother because the Four aren't in it [11:09 PM] Wack'd: Buuuuuut [11:09 PM] Wack'd: Well [11:09 PM] Wack'd: When last we saw Latveria, Doom had been institutionalized and Zorba had taken over as an interm leader while elections are set up [11:10 PM] Aleph Null: love democracy! [11:10 PM] Wack'd: So we should. Probably find out why it's not like that going forward [11:10 PM] Mousa The 14: One might say the democracy was doomed to fail in Latveria [11:10 PM] Wack'd: Ha! [11:10 PM] Aleph Null: like in america [11:10 PM] Mousa The 14: There can only be one victor in the contest of ruling that nation [11:11 PM] Wack'd: I like that Moench is actually, like, giving time to this. I feel like in the modern comics climate a lot of folks would just quietly ignore previous runs or dismantle them offpanel [11:11 PM] Wack'd: But also this is a dumb status quo reversion so like [11:12 PM] Umbramatic: welp [11:12 PM] Aleph Null: there are smart status quo reversions? [11:13 PM] maxwellelvis: Ending the Clone Saga [11:14 PM] Wack'd: So the first two pages of this are heady political debate! Zorba's tax policy is coming under protest since Doom preferred to fund things with, you know, crime, so taxes are kind of a new thing for folks [11:17 PM] Wack'd: Zorba feels it's unfair that people are ignoring his civil liberties reform but his advisor points out that since most people never had direct contact with Doom, their day-to-day lives weren't much impacted by what a huge shithead he was [11:18 PM] Wack'd: His advisor also points out that if you give people the right to protest, well, sometimes middle-class assholes who don't want higher taxes are going to be the ones waving signs [11:19 PM] Umbramatic: oh great lavertia still has republicans [11:20 PM] Wack'd: The advisor however also reminds Zorba that, at one time, he was the protestor, and he should be cautious of that worm turning [11:20 PM] Wack'd: Especially with most of Doom's inner circle being mysteriously unaccounted for [11:20 PM] Umbramatic: 🤔 [11:20 PM] Wack'd: (Doom having an inner circle is kind of a surprise to me but, like, he runs a country, a cabinet is probably necessary) [11:21 PM] Umbramatic: the cabnet is just a bunch of doombots [11:21 PM] maxwellelvis: He's got Boris, and he's got... his national superhero, forgot her name [11:21 PM] Bocaj: Victorious. She's newer [11:22 PM] maxwellelvis: She's there to do the stuff he's can't be at, because even DOOM cannot be everywhere. [11:22 PM] Wack'd: Anyway Zorba is like "please, for any real resistance to happen, Doom himself would have to have escaped, but he's still in his cell--" [11:22 PM] maxwellelvis: "Oh no! OH NO!" [11:22 PM] Wack'd: I'll give you three guesses what is actually in Doom's cell right now [11:23 PM] Bocaj: Doombot? [11:23 PM] Wack'd: Yep [11:23 PM] maxwellelvis: A vaguely Doom-shaped dummy with a broom, a bucket, and his old cloak? [11:23 PM] maxwellelvis: Oh. [11:24 PM] Bocaj: The thing about many latverian citizens not being directly oppressed really lines up with my grand theory of statesman doom [11:24 PM] Aleph Null: wait so this actually has things to say about politics? [11:24 PM] Wack'd: Yeah! Whoda thunk [11:24 PM] Wack'd: Zorba's advisor, whose name is Starn, thank you comic [11:24 PM] Wack'd: Starn is like "we need to infiltrate the Doom loyalist underground to find out how this happened" [11:25 PM] Wack'd: And Zorba's like "spying is against civil liberties so, uh, no" [11:25 PM] Wack'd: Given how the story ends I'm really hoping that the moral isn't "civil liberties are bad sometimes actually" [11:26 PM] Bocaj: Good hustle though, zorba [11:27 PM] Bocaj: In the sports sense [11:28 PM] Aleph Null: the only way to beat a bad guy with a fascist security state is a good guy with a fascist security state [11:28 PM] Wack'd: Zorba awakes from a PTSD nightmare to the realization that if the loyalists have spirited away Doom, well, he's kinda fragile right now, he'd need his armor [11:28 PM] Wack'd: And arrives in its vault just in time to be ambushed by loyalists [11:28 PM] Bocaj: Womp womp [11:29 PM] Wack'd: *sigh* Goddammit Zorba

[11:29 PM] Wack'd: Also that "crucial minutes too late" remark makes me think Starn is in on it [11:31 PM] Wack'd: Doom is revived but, when the captured soldier appears mere minutes later, Doom realizes it's a trap and a shootout ensues [11:32 PM] Wack'd: Zorba barely manages to escape, and Doom decides that before he can return to power he needs to make sure he has no more challengers. Ever. [11:32 PM] Wack'd: And that's where we leave things. [11:33 PM] Wack'd: Oh also max mentioned Boris earlier so here's a Boris

[intothestarkerverse]

Time of Our Lives (Part Nine)

Based on a prompt from @geekymarvel  

Peter is tasked with an important mission that requires him to go back in time.   Finding himself at a gala for Stark industries in the 1990’s, he comes face to face with a young and incorrigible Tony Stark who considers Peter’s attempts to deny his advances a challenge.  Now, dogged by a horny young CEO who won’t take no for an answer, Peter’s task has become much more difficult….

(STORY CONTAINS ENDGAME SPOILERS)

Read on AO3

At first, Tony did not interrupt.  He wanted to commit every detail to memory, determined to learn where his future self had made mistakes and thereby avoid them completely.  He sat in stoic silence as Peter described everything he knew about Tony Stark’s life leading up to his capture by the Ten Rings and torture in Afghanistan.  It was a little sobering to hear Peter describing a lifestyle that was not entirely dissimilar to the one he’d been living right up to the gala where he’d first encountered Peter.  For some reason, he didn’t feel the same level of pride he used to feel at the use of the word ‘playboy’, and though Peter didn’t actually call him a jerk…because the kid would never, Tony got the distinct impression that everyone else in his life would probably choose that word first.

 Tony’s expression grew grim, darker and darker by degrees as Peter described his capture, his injury, and the operation performed by Yinsen to save him.  He found himself absently running a hand over his breast bone, flinching at the thought of the cavity that peter was describing, the small arc reactor.  Brow furrowed, leaning forward across the bed with a new intensity, he drank up the description of that first suit.  He had to bite back a grin at the thought and remind himself that he needed to hear the rest of his future before he ran off to the lab to try to duplicate the armor Peter was describing.  

It was good, really, that Peter had been such a huge fan of Tony Stark since he was a child.  He knew much more about Tony’s life than the average person from the 21st Century would have.  It made that familiar flare of jealousy flash through him, clenching his heart and making his throat feel obstructed.  He had to remind himself that the Old Man had just been training wheels to get him ready for the real deal.  He had pure, unadulterated Tony Stark now.  He didn’t need the old, watered down version anymore.

The betrayal of Obadiah Stane hit Tony like a physical blow, leaving him breathless and pale and clasping his hands into fists in his lap.  Sure, maybe Tony had depended on him just a little too much when it came to Stark Industries…apparently if he was going to be helping with the day to day operations all the way into the 21st century.  It was everything Tony could do not to immediately have the man removed from Stark Industries and detained for whatever crime he could prove and any he could frame him for…because he was guilty.  If not now, he would be soon enough.  At the moment, though, he wanted to hear more about his future than he wanted to put a stop to Stane.  For now.

The interruptions began with the birth of Iron Man.  Tony began to ask questions about the suit, about the heavy metal poisoning, about the Old Man’s escapades, his upgrades, and his enemies.  He was annoyed at the reappearance of Captain America.  “Oh, God, really?  That guy didn’t die, after all?  Too bad dear old dad bit the big one before he got to see Steve Rogers back from the dead.  He had such a hard-on for that guy.  I personally don’t see it.”

“Oh yeah, you’d never go for a super-powered goody-two-shoes on a mission to save the world, huh?”  Peter’s sarcasm was laced with a fair amount of self awareness that made the whole thing amusingly ironic.

Tony just scowled back at him.  “Please, Captain America is boring, and you, Beautiful, are anything but.  Now, back to the bedtime story, you little brat.”

The Avengers and the Battle of New York drew more interruptions.  Tony was a bit confused at the mention of Norse Gods and Incredible Hulks and, “21st Century Robin Hood sounds very counter-productive.  You really telling me he didn’t die on the first mission cause…that’s the most surprising thing you’ve told me so far.”

“Mr. Barton is pretty cool, Tony.  I mean…I don’t get the bow and arrow thing either, but it works for him.  And he’s got a sword now, which is also cool…”

“I don’t know if a sword is an evolution or a devolution, honestly.”

The wormhole drew a long sigh from Tony’s lips.  He pressed his fingers hard against his closed eyes and shook his head slowly.  “So, the Old Man…He just…I mean I get it.  I really didn’t know I had a latent Messiah complex, but I get it.  But that…that’s not where he died, huh?  Cause I didn’t hear any mention of you in that story.  Which means the Messiah Complex is an ongoing thing.  I blame Howard and the Captain America lectures.  I put no stock in psychology, but if I did…yeah, totally Howard’s fault.”

Peter just shook his head grimly and plunged on.  Extremis perked Tony’s interest more than it appeared Peter liked.  The kid seemed to be trying his damnedest to gloss over it…though those efforts were in vain.  Tony would be revisiting that particular piece of technology at some point very soon.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”  Tony’s exasperation was palpable.  “You’re telling me he blew up all of the Iron Man suits for the girl?  Seriously?”

“He loved Ms. Potts.”

“Well, if Ms. Potts loved him she’d have accepted that the Iron Man thing was important to him.”

“It’s not like it lasted long, Mr. Stark rebuilt them…”

“Good.”

Ultron drew a string of curses, all of them directed at his older self.  “I mean, sure, the concept sounds valid enough…but clearly the Old Man had forgotten all of the Asimov he’d devoured as a kid.  Basic Science Fiction folly, right there.”  Old Age was going to make him stupid.  Well, not stupid.  No matter what, no iteration of Tony Stark could or would ever be stupid…but he could definitely lose a few IQ points.

The Accords and ‘Civil War’ had Tony once more sitting in silence.  “Okay, it’s not that I don’t get it.  Cause I do.  If it were you…I’d do the same damn thing he did for the Winter Soldier guy…but…pretending that it was about the Accords and the world government so he could get the other goody-goody’s on his side…that’s the kind of self-righteous idiocy I honestly expect from that guy.  That they were all too stupid to see through it is really disappointing, honestly.  I hate that he’s every bit as holier than though as I always thought he was.  Ugh.  To fracture the Avengers just so he can save his friend…that’s so selfish that even I’m calling bullshit and you know it has to be bad, then right?  Why does the world think this guy is so awesome, again?  Ugh.  I’ve never even met him and I hate him.”

“He’s not that bad…”

“No, he’s worse.  Keep going, though.”

He sat up a little straighter when Peter entered the story.  Lips twitching in a smile at their first meeting, at the account of the battle on the tarmac.  “Ha!  You stole Captain America’s shield?  Kid, if I didn’t already love you…I’d sure as shit love you now.  The only thing I regret from the last six months is not seeing you kick more ass.  Honestly, Sweetheart, you’re a fucking bad ass and I find it so damn sexy.  When all of this is said and done, I’m going to figure out that Old Man’s armor and we’re going to have some fun making this world a safer place…cause I have got to watch you work.”

Peter turned a dozen shades of crimson, but his smile was very pleased.  “I’d like that.”

But first, they had to continue with the future history lesson.  Tony’s good humor was forgotten as Peter continued to tell his tale.  He gave the kid credit, though, he didn’t mince any words in the telling.

��So you had an entire fucking building dropped on you and fought some whack job on a moving plane in a pair of sweats because the Old Man was teaching you a lesson?  About what?  Responsibility?  That’s a riot.  You’re the most responsible person I’ve ever met.  Maybe if he didn’t have his head up his ass, ignoring your calls, sending you to middle management…Peter, seriously, the future is fucked.  I am not going to become this guy.  I don’t even think I like him.”

“I don’t think Mr. Stark liked himself very much, either, to be honest…so that actually…kind of makes sense.  But, you know, you’re not being fair to him.  He made a lot of mistakes, but he did a lot of things right, too.  Having a building dropped on me sucked, but it taught me a lot.  It was a lesson I needed to learn, honestly.”

“If you say so…”

“I do.  I do say so.”

They had to take a break before Peter delved into their trip to space and battle on Titan.  Tony poured him a glass of scotch that he sipped in silence whenever the story became too much for him.  Tony didn’t say a word at all until Peter haltingly described what it was like to vanish. Tony could do absolutely nothing to keep the tears from falling.  The idea of losing Peter was the worst thing he could think of, and though he didn’t much care for the Old Man or his methods…he knew that some part of him clearly cared for the kid.  Watching him vanish…that had to be soul shattering.  “The future is fucked, Peter, because I’m not letting any of this happen to you.  None of it.”  The promises were spoken through gritted teeth, a vein in his throat bulging at the sheer intensity of his determination.

Peter just gave a sad smile, “Too late.  Already happened.  Even if we change the future…I don’t think you can get rid of my memories, Tony.  Besides, if it hadn’t been me than it would have been someone else…maybe someone with kids or something.  I didn’t…I didn’t miss a lot when I was blipped out of existence.  May and MJ and Ned, they all blipped too.  Other people…they probably missed a lot,or they would have.  I wouldn’t…I wouldn’t want to stay if it meant someone else had to go in my place.”

“God, kid, forget too good for me, you’re too fucking good for this world.”  God, he loved the way Peter blushed when he got the compliment just right…

It was Peter’s turn to cry as he recounted what happened to the Old Man in the five years that Peter missed, about his marriage to Ms. Potts and his daughter, about the invention of time travel and the hunt for the stones, about Peter’s return and the final battle against Thanos.  “I’ve never…talked about this with anyone.  May tried to get me to…and Happy…but I just…they wouldn’t understand.”

By the end, Peter was on Tony’s lap, tucked against his chest, head resting on his shoulder as he cried and Tony whispered soothing words in his ear.  “It’s okay, Baby.  You can cry if you want to.  Long as you want to.  Cry.  Scream.  Whatever makes you feel better.  I got you.”  

“Still think I’m a bad ass?”  Peter’s voice was stuffy and muffled against his chest, but Tony heard him clearly enough.

“You’re the toughest, bravest, most amazing person, Peter.  So good.  Best person I’ve ever known.  Dad always thought Steve Rogers was the best a man could be, but that was because he never met you.  Steve Rogers volunteered for everything that was done to him.  He signed up for it.  You?  You had it thrust on you, accepted all of this responsibility that should have never been put on you…and you just carried it.  Gracefully.  You’re the definition of the word hero, Peter Parker.”

Peter let out a muffled laugh that turned into a sob that devolved into him clinging to Tony like his life depended on it.

Gently stroking a hand through the boy’s curls, Tony continued to whisper into his hair.  “The Old Man needed to be tortured and almost killed to want to become Iron Man, but all I needed to do was meet you.  You understand that, Beautiful?  The future, my future, is going to be better because you’re in it.  You’re the missing piece.  My missing piece.  Honestly, I feel sorry for the Old Man.  He had to go through his entire life never knowing what it felt like to be whole…”

—

Work continued on the Nullifier.  Tony was right, for once they did appear to be making headway.  After two more months of intense work. Two months of Tony secretly trying to compose a plan to keep the two of them together despite whatever these Stones might do to rip them apart.  Two months of Tony sketching plans for that armor whenever he thought Peter wasn’t paying close attention to him.  Two months of them savoring every moment together as they both secretly believed that it might be their last.  When the final simulations came back successful, there was nothing to do but stand in front of the computer and let the realization soak in.

“So that’s it.  We…fixed it.”

Tony gave the boy a sidelong glance, noting that he had not even attempted to hide his disappointment about that.  “Guess so.”

“So…it’s probably over, then.  Tonight…he’ll probably come and he’ll…take me away.”  Peter had his arms wrapped around his stomach, his tone grim, his face pale.  The sight was like a dagger to Tony’s heart.

“Hey,”  He turned around, tugging Peter closer and embracing him tightly.  “What did I tell you, Beautiful?”

“You’re gonna fight…”

“Do you trust me?”

“Of course, but…”

“Nope,”  He tilted Peter’s head up for a kiss.  “If you trust me, then trust me.”

“Do you…do you have a plan?”

“Don’t worry about that.”

“So, no, you don’t.”

Tony just chuckled, “Baby, my plan is to stay with you, okay?  Don’t know how I’m going to do that yet, but I will.  When opportunity presents itself, I will.  We just fixed a machine that should have never worked, Kid.  We did something I thought was impossible six months ago.  Next to that…defying all of space and time to be together is going to be a cake walk.  Promise.”

But that night, when the two men were finally able to drift off to sleep, it was not Peter who found himself face to face with Tony Stark and the Infinity Stones.  

Not Peter at all.

There was no mistaking him.  It was like looking in a mirror.  An older, but no less attractive reflection of his own face staring back at him.  With a grimace of righteous fury, Tony charged the distance between them and threw a mean right hook directly into the other man’s face.  Too bad it was a dream and he wasn’t real, because there was nothing Tony wanted to see more than a black eye on that old, handsome face.

“What kind of sadomasochistic bullshit is this, Old Man?  Was this your plan all along?  You put the kid right in my fucking path.  Line of sight.  I couldn’t miss him, even if I wanted to.  And you knew!  You knew he had a thing for you all those years, you knew I wouldn’t be able to fucking resist that beautiful, perfect boy.  You determined to finally get to fuck the kid one way or another?  Was that plan?  Well guess what?  You monumentally fucked up…which, given your history is par for the fucking course with you, isn’t it?  Cause I love that kid.  I didn’t want to.  I tried not to.  But I love him.  For Peter…to keep him, I’d do anything.  I will do anything.  You and your fucking magical stones don’t have to give me a happy ending with him because I’m going to fucking take it myself and there’s nothing you can do to stop me.”

“Are you done?”  God, was it possible to hate even the sound of your own voice?  Tony scowled at the older man, at the sarcasm and the irreverence in his tone.

“You’re a piece of shit, Old Man.”

“Yes, I am.”

“I hate you.”

“Self hatred is nothing new to us, Kid.  You’ll find out soon enough.”

“Except I won’t, because I’m never becoming you.”

“We’ll see.”  The Old Man crossed his arms, eyebrow cocked, waiting in the silence.  When Tony didn’t venture to fill it with anymore bile, he continued.  “The Nullifier is done, so now we need to use it.  Peter can’t do that alone.  It’s too dangerous.  He’s going to need back up.”  As Tony inhaled, the Old Man held up a hand to silence him.  “Let me finish.  He needs back up, and while I know you think you can be that back up…you can’t.  You’re not Iron Man, yet.  You’re not Earth’s Greatest Defender, yet.  You haven’t fought aliens, yet, and me…I’ve done all of those things.  I am all of those things.  So, you’re going to let me hijack your body for a field trip to the Heart of the Universe.  That way, the Nullifier can be activated, the universe can be saved, and Peter doesn’t have to die in the process.  Everyone wins.”

“Like hell!  I’ve seen how possession works, Old Man, and I’m not letting you anywhere near me…”

“Than Peter is going to die.”

“What…”

A simple shrug of the shoulders and Tony was exercising a conscious effort not to slug him again.  “He does this alone and he dies.  Simple as that.  No way he can do this and come out the other side unless he has me at his back.  You can’t use the armor yet.  You don’t know how any of it works and REM is not enough time to teach you.”

“I can…”

“You can’t.  Believe me.  You can’t.  So what’s it going to be, Kid?  We’re running short on time here.”

Tony stood in silence, mind spinning.  His options did appear to be severely limited, but it was possible…however unlikely, that this was his chance to do the very thing he’d promised Peter he’d do.  Outsmarting his older self seemed incredibly unlikely, and from the look in the older man’s eye, there was already a great deal of suspicion between the two of them.  Wouldn’t a shrink have a hay day with that?  Maybe Tony had more issues than he thought he did?  Soft science or not, a therapist might not be a bad thing if he wanted to avoid becoming just like the Old Man in a few decades…  “All right, but I have two conditions.  No negotiations.  I want to remain fully aware and sentient to everything happening around us, complete access to you and what you’re thinking,…and I want a manual override.  Just one.  So that if at any point I feel like you’re doing something that could get us fucking killed, cause let’s face it…you’re really good at that, than I get to take over and exercise self preservation.”

The Old Man narrowed one eye.  “Don’t do something stupid, Kid.  You were never meant to meet him.  I gave you a gift…”

“You get to keep gifts.”

“Well, you don’t get to keep Peter.  He has a life.  He has a future.  Neither one of those involve us.  I’ll give you your awareness and your one manual override, but it won’t do any good.  When this is all said and done, you’re going to end up exactly where you belong and that’s not with Peter Parker.  You’re right, I did fuck up, I didn’t expect you to fall for him.  I thought you were too much of a self-obsessed asshole.  My mistake.  But Peter is going to back to 2023 and he’s going to become a hell of a hero without us.  Either one of us.  Keeping him with you in 1992 is not an option.  People need him…and in the future, you need to die.  It’s literally the only way there is a future.  It’s you against me.  You against the Stones.  You against the Universe.  This is one battle you’re going to lose, Kid.”

“We’ll see.  I’m not giving up just because you tell me to, Old Man.  I’m Tony Fucking Stark, and nobody tells me what I can and cannot do…not even Tony Fucking Stark.”  Because the Old Man had given him an idea.  Without knowing it, midst his self-righteous sass, he had given Tony the answer to the problem.  He’d been looking at things all wrong.  The Old Man was right about a lot of things, and that just meant Tony was looking at this the wrong way.  With a new outlook on the equation, the answer didn’t seem quite as hopeless.  What was it Peter had said to his parents, something about things only being impossible when you stop believing their possible.  

He knew what he had to do now.

He just had to figure out how the hell to do it.

—

Peter stirred in the bed, frowning in his sleep as his hands slipped across the silk sheets in search of the body he was now so used to finding himself tucked alongside in the morning.  When he encountered nothing but cold, empty bed, he forced his eyes open and peered around the room blearily.  When he spotted the figure in the chair beside the window, his frown only deepened and he pushed himself into a half-seated position, now fully awake.  “Tony?”

“Morning, Kid.”

Peter felt a chill prickle down his spine and he instinctively reached to pull the sheet up higher on his chest.  “Mr. Stark?”  There was no hiding the wariness in his tone.

“Gotta say, Underoos, I much prefer the last greeting to this one.”

“Lot’s happened since then.”  Peter’s gaze shifted to the floor beside the bed and he reached out to scoop up Tony’s shirt where it had been haphazardly discarded the night before in the throes of passion.  He felt better once he’d slipped it on.  A pair of boxers were scavenged from the floor as well and after contorting a little under the sheets, he no longer felt completely vulnerable in his mentor’s presence.  “How are you doing this?  How are you in Tony’s body?  What are you…what are you planning?”

“Baby Stark and I came to an agreement.  You need my help to finish this.  Neither one of us want you dead, and since you can’t do it without me…here we are.”  He made a half-hearted gesture to body he now inhabited.  Peter still looked pensive, regarding the man with more than his fair share of mistrust.  

“What…what are we going to do now?”

“Deliver the Nullifier to the Heart of Universe and reconstitute the Stones before the universe ends.”

“Wouldn’t you be better off with someone who’s good at space stuff like Starlord..”

“That guy’s a jackass.”

“Yeah, but he knows space ships and space and aliens…”

“You’re the only one I trust, Kid.  It’s you, or no one.”

Peter could no longer say the same.  He let out his breath in a little huff and nodded slowly.  “Okay…so…why can’t I do this alone?”

“The Heart of the Universe is a dangerous place.  It’s where the Infinity Stones were created, where life and the universe began.”

“The Big Bang?”

Mr. Stark nodded solemnly.  “We don’t do this just the right way…the energy from the Stones manages to pierce the Heart of the Universe and what we get is the opposite of the Big Bang.  Universe is over.”

Peter grimaced, “Than why are we using the Nullifier there…”

“Because the energy is almost there…and the space station is the best place to work from…”

“Space station…”

“The Heart of the Universe was discovered thousands of years ago by a race of aliens who called themselves the Celestial Order.  They constructed an entire civilization around it’s containment field and spent the last several millenia trying to harness it’s power so that they could force peace upon the universe and dispose of chaos once and for all.  They never succeeded in breaching the containment field…which is good for us, because they could have done some serious damage to the universe if they had.”

“Peace doesn’t sound so bad.”

Mr. Stark could only give a wry chuckle.  “It never stops at peace, Pete.  People always have good intentions, but they always end up giving in to selfish desires…”

“Kinda like you?”

“What did you just say to me, Kid?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Stark, it’s just that…there had to be a better way.  Putting me here with him…you had to know how I felt about you.  You had to know how I’d feel about him.  I just…it’s not fair, is it?  Because now I have to decide and, Mr. Stark, I have decided.  Hard as it is.  I’m staying here.  With Tony.”

“Like Hell you are.  What about May and Ned, hmm?  How are they going to feel if you don’t come home?”

“I’ll come home.  I mean, I won’t be dead in 2023, will I?  I’d just be…well, I’d be a lot older, but I wouldn’t be dead.”  Peter had given this a lot of serious thought.  He knew what he wanted and he didn’t intend to take no for an answer…

“And the future?  If you’re here with him through all of that the future is fucked.”

“The future is already messed up, Mr. Stark.  Tony’s already so much different than you…”

“Is that so?  You really think you can change me that much, Peter?”  His laughter was actually bitter now.  “And what about Morgan?”

That had Peter lapsing into uncomfortable silence.  “I…I don’t know…”  He’d tried very hard not to think about her, because he couldn’t bear the thought of her not existing and for her to exist…

“You’re going back where you belong, Peter.  Back to the future.  Whether you like it or not.  You don’t get a say in this.  It isn’t a choice you get to make.  You don’t belong here.  You don’t get to be in his life because you were never supposed to be…”

“Than why did you put me here?  What good is it going to do to put me back when Tony has already changed?”

“Because Baby Stark won’t have changed, Peter.  Not when everything is said and done.  As soon as the Stones are reconfigured, as soon as they’ve been properly hidden, they’re going to enact a latent protocol I put into place to make sure the future remains unaffected.  The Tony Stark of 1992 is going to have his memory wiped, him and anyone else you had contact with that could alter the course of the future.  To Baby Stark, the last six months will have been a blur of sex and drugs and nothing else.  When he meets you recruiting for Germany, he’ll have no memory of ever seeing you before.  Jarvis, Fury, Happy…no memories of you that could alter the future.  It’s like you were never here at all.”

Peter felt as if he had been punched in the gut.  He struggled to catch his breath, bracing his elbows against his knees and resting his head in his hands.  He didn’t even realize he was crying until he felt a hand on his shoulder.  Jerking away from the touch, he shot an angry glare at the man.  “You don’t get to touch me.  Not looking like that.  Not after what you said you’re going to do.”

“I fuck things up, Kid, that’s what I do.”

“You know, I never really believed that until now.”

[imagines-dreams]

Endgame Fix It 2.0

Rating: PG-13, for you know, Endgame... spoilers

Warnings: Endgame Spoilers!!!!

Notes: Uh, yeah, I already wrote one of these, but I wanted to add waaaay more to it. So this is editted and has additional scenes! Oh, also this is very long, more than 6k words.

When Captain Marvel slashed through the ship in less than ten seconds, the tide of the battle changed immediately. She held Thanos’s hand open, and he couldn’t snap his damned fingers again. Thanos may have hit her with the Power Stone, but Captain Marvel had seen worse. She got back up and got him in a headlock easily, and before he could shake her off again, Thor was back on his feet again, and he held back his gloved hand. Thanos reached to remove him or her or anyone, but Tony and Steve got back up and held back his other arm.

For a few seconds, Thanos was subdued, but what now? They couldn’t hold him forever. Sure, Captain Marvel was very powerful, and sure, Captain America held back his hand with his own for a while, and ok, Tony made the Titan bleed, and yeah, Thor hit him hard and killed him once, but still, this was taking a toll on all of them, and they couldn’t hold him back much longer.

But it wasn’t them who decided what to do next.

It was his daughter. Thanos smiled a little. “You’ve come back.”

Nebula tilted her head and smirked ever so slightly. “Not for you.” She sauntered over to Thor and took the infinity stones in her marred hand.

Thor stared at her, but he said nothing.

Tony grunted. “Nebula, no.”

“Daughter-”

“No.” She carefully placed each stone on her opposite hand with such delicate care. “No, you used me as a weapon, so now” -the stones were all on her hand now and she smiled up at her father- “I’m a weapon.”

“Our plan,” Thanos begged, as his daughter’s mercy, “it’s inevitable. It’s-”

“No.” She spoke so softly compared to the Titan, but her words held more weight, and it silenced him. “No, for once, I get to decide what I do. And I decide that you lose.”

Tony screamed his head off, nearly letting go of Thanos’s hand. Steve faltered, but he stood strong, and Thor closed his eyes and thanked her in his mind. Carol watched and smiled at the strong woman in front of her. She deserved this, an honorable death and vengeance against her father.

The army faded to dust. One by one, they fell and disappeared, and Thanos, too, turned to dust, not sparing a glance at his daughter.

“Nebula!” Gamora leaned over her sister and pulled her into her lap.

Nebula turned her neck, so slowly, so mechanically, and said, “Hello, sister.” Her arm, the one with the infinity stones, was gone, completely disintegrated, and the parts of her arm and shoulder that were left weren’t pretty to look at. Part of her head was exposed, with wires and blue blood. Still, Nebula didn’t show any signs of pain or distress. She just looked at her sister.

Tony rushed to her side and observed the damage. Friday calculated and assessed and in less than a second, he smiled, “You can be fixed. You have time.” The damage her arm sustained from the stones was fixable and replaceable. The part of her face that was marred and burned was mostly mechanical, and the part that wasn’t… It was beyond him. But not beyond some.

“T’Challa” Tony yelled. “Where’s T’Challa? He can help.”

Dr. Strange created a portal, and T’Challa walked through with two other women. “What do you need?”

Tony clarified, “I’ve read about your tech. Vibranium-based medicine.”

The younger girl tilted her head and approached Nebula.

“Do you have any on you? Can you help her?”

T’Challa just smiled. “I can’t help you.” He looked to his sister. “But she can.”

Shuri was already getting to work. Her mind filled with everything that needed to be done and the amazing technological advances she hadn’t thought of before. “This is amazing. Organic life with mechanical implements, beyond prosthetic.” She gulped as realization set in as to what the woman had to go through to become what she was. “Could be smoother,” Shuri commented, “Less painful.” She reached out, but Gamora flinched and held her sister closer.

Shuri just smiled. “I can help her. I’ve fixed people before.”

Gamora stared at all the new faces around her, still not sure what was going on and who these people were to her future self or to Nebula, but her sister convinced her. With one look and the word, “Sister,” Gamora understood. She let the girl look over Nebula.

Shuri smiled and took out a metal ball. She placed it on Nebula’s head, where the scarred, organic skin met scarred metal. The metal ball transformed into liquid when it touched her head and wrapped itself around the wounded area. “You will need more medical attention. I can provide that back home.”

Nebula looked to her sister.

“She can come, too.”

“Me, too.” Tony raised his hand.

Shuri stared at him and his suit. Nanotech. Not bad. Not bad at all.

Tony shook his head. “You need an extra hand.”

Shuri beamed. “Exactly.”

T’Challa turned to Dr. Strange. “May we?”

“Of course.” Dr. Strange created a portal, and they went to Wakanda. Tony said asked his wife how Morgan was, and after hearing Happy was watching over her, he kissed her and told her that he’d see her soon. Then, just before Tony left, he requested, “Hey, Strange, can you make sure the kid gets home?”

Dr. Strange stared at said kid, who was currently right behind Tony, probably planning on sneaking into Wakanda.

Peter gasped. “Wait, but it’s Wakanda!”

“Yeah, I can bring him home.”

“But-”

“No, buts, kid.” Tony put his hand on Peter’s shoulder and reminded him, “I’m sure your aunt would be happy to see you.”

Peter immediately nodded. “See you soon, sir.”

“Yeah, kid.” Then, he was gone.

Dr. Strange patted Peter’s back. “Come on, Peter.”

Suddenly, a blue smoke puffed in front of them. Everyone still remaining got back into fight position. Peter got his mask back on. Captain America groaned and put up his fists. Captain Marvel just crossed her arms and waited.

“I’ve returned! Prepare to…” The man blinked a few times. “Did I miss it?” He stared at his wrist, a very much broken contraption on it. “This blasted thing. Curse that man in iron, he said it was-”

“Brother?”

“Yes, what is it? I’m busy here.” The man tapped his wrist thing furiously.

Thor stared at him. Then, he picked up a rock and threw it at the man’s face.

The man caught it and scoffed. “Really, was that necessary?”

Thor lit up, not with lightning, but with pure joy. “Loki!” He jumped right onto his brother, and the two nearly fell because of him. “You’re back! I thought you’d died. Thanos-”

“Is an idiotic titan who needed stones to defeat people.” Loki rolled his eyes. “Honestly, you thought he could kill me?”

Thor’s eyes narrowed. Then, he threw another rock at Loki, which he caught. “Honestly, Thor-”

“You faked your death again?!” Thor screamed and threw another rock. Then another. And another.

“Stop it.” Loki dodged the first two, but the third hit his shoulder. “Stop that!”

The two brothers continued throwing rocks at each other, and everyone else just stared confused.

Peter whispered, “Isn’t Loki, you know, evil?”

“Apparently not?” Steve said, unsure of himself. So far, however, the god of mischief wasn’t doing anything bad. Except for making duplicates of himself for Thor to hit and scream at.

Valkyrie dismounted her pegasus. “Evil, kinda. A pain in our ass, definitely.” She smiled at the two. “But, I’ll keep them in line for you guys.” And so, when Valkyrie and her pegasus walked over to the two brothers and started yelling at both of them, no one questioned it.

Steve smiled at himself as he picked up the hammer again. Seriously, he had a sliver of hope that he could, but he never thought it could be true. He’d have to return that first. Then the rest of the stones.

And after, maybe visit someone.

Someone he really wanted to see.

Her name changed though. Peggy Carter was now Peggy Carter-Sousa. She was married to Daniel Soussa, and both of them still actively worked for Peggy’s organization, SHIELD, which was with no doubt named after him.

Steve found them at a restaurant, rings on their fingers, and the first emotion Steve felt was happiness. Happiness for her. Because he knew she moved on, that she would become an amazing wife, mother, and leader. But seeing it was different.

She smiled so brightly with Daniel.

The soldier took a deep breath. He thought that he would want to talk to her. That when he saw her, he wouldn’t be able to help himself and rush to her and hug her and catch up. He didn’t know what would happen after, but he just thought… Honestly, he didn’t know what he thought anymore.

What mattered was she was happy. She had a life, just like he did. She was going to be ok, and so was he.

Then, her eyes caught his, and before he could escape, Peggy Carter was in front of him, eyes wide and expression unsure. She gulped, and it only took her a few seconds before she narrowed her eyes and said with certainty, “You’re not my Steve.”

Steve felt like he should’ve cried, but he didn’t. He did miss her voice, though. The soldier nodded.

Peggy crossed her arms. “And what are you doing here?”

“Honestly, I couldn’t tell you. Even if I tried.” He smiled a little. “I’m happy for you.”

The woman blushed and glanced back at the table inside where her husband was waiting patiently. She told him who was out here with her, and he knew it was better to stay out of it. The woman sighed. “And your family?”

Steve laughed a little. “They’re waiting for me.”

“Well,” Peggy smiled, “you shouldn’t be late.”

“You’re right.” Steve smiled even wider, because even though a part of him will love her, and a part of her will love him, they were different. They had different lives, and they shouldn’t waste it.

She kissed his cheek. “Go home.”

Steve sat next to Sam and sighed. “I think I’m done,” he said. “I’ve been a soldier all my life, and I don’t want to die a soldier.”

“So, what are you going to do, then?”

Steve smiled at Bucky, his oldest friend and maybe something more, and sighed. “Well, T’Challa offered me a place.”

Sam looked back at Bucky and smirked. “I see.”

Steve sighed. “I will always be there if you need me, but for now, I need some peace of my own.” And with that, Steve set his shield down and set it between them. “Try it on.”

Sam’s eyes widened. He had his title. Falcon and Captain America’s best friend. He stared at the shield, then at Steve, then at Bucky, and when nothing responded, he gingerly picked it up. It was a tad big on him.

“How does it feel?”

Sam tightened the strap on his arm. “Like it’s someone else’s.”

“It isn’t.”

He smiled at his friend, his role model, and said, “Thank you. I’ll try my best.”

Steve nodded. “And that’s why it’s yours.” He patted Sam on the back. “Now, if you don’t mind, I’m retiring.”

Sam laughed.

Steve nodded at Bruce, then he turned to Bucky and smiled.

“You saw her?” Bucky asked.

Steve nodded.

Bucky stared off into the distance. “I kinda thought you’d stay there.”

“No.” Steve shook his head. “I can’t do that when I have family here.”

Bucky smiled, just a bit.

The retired captain nudged his friend. “Hey.” And when Bucky’s eyes met his, Steve said, like he had said so many time before, “I’m with you til the end of the line.”

Bucky just shook his head, and with tears in his eyes, he managed to say, “Punk.”

Nebula stretched out her new arm, and her lips curved ever so slightly into a small smile. It was funny in a way. Since childhood, she had been part machine, and she lived with pain. Every time she swung a weapon. Every time she sought a memory to play. Every time she walked.

It was… different. No more pain.

“How does it feel?” Shuri asked. “There was a lot to fix, but I got them all. Although, I must say, alien technology is so complex, and it’s fascinating to study. If you ever need-”

“It feels different,” Nebula admitted. She got off the table.

“Your sister, she-”

“Left,” Nebula finished for her. “I know.”

“She’ll come back.”

Nebula shrugged. “Not anytime soon.”

The girl bit her lip and chose not to change the subject. “Mr. Stark has some stuff for you when you go back to space.”

“Thank you.” Nebula bowed her head and met with Tony outside. Mr. Stark handed her a bag, full of extra parts and tools, and patted her back. “Take care out there. When you get back, you owe me another game of football.”

“No,” Nebula said. “I won.” She walked past him.

She didn’t see Tony smile and whisper to himself as he adjusted his outfit, “Damn right she did.”

She approached her team, but her sister’s old partner wasn’t there. “Where is he?”

Rocket scoffed. “Where do you think?”

Nebula rolled her eyes and stomped onto the ship, the rest of the team following her lead. With eyes on her target, she stalked towards him. He was searching for Gamora, and Nebula thought he was smarter than that. At least slightly smarter. Apparently, she was wrong. SHe really should stop overestimating him.

She dropped her bag with a thud.

Peter Quill scrambled to take down the screens and sit in a way he thought was casual. When his eyes found Nebula, he gasped. “Nebula, why in the world-”

“She’s not coming.”

“She?” Peter scoffed. “Who’s she? I have no clue who you’re talking about.”

Nebula sighed. “Gamora’s not going to be found.” She sat down and stared at the sky. “She’ll find us.”

There was silence on the ship as the guardians filed into their seats and buckled their seatbelts.

Rocket looked at everyone. “Ok, is anyone gonna mention how the blue one defeated Thanos? As in a titan with five infinity stones! I thought it was going to be Thor.”

“She defeated him with the infinity stones,” Drax corrected. “Thanos didn’t have the infinity stones.”

“I am Groot.”

“Hey, you do not talk to me like that!” Rocket screamed

Mantis piped up, “I believe Groot is still upset from the recent events.”

“All of us went through those events,” Drax pointed out.

“Can we all just be quiet during launch, for once?” Peter begged.

Nebula just smirked. Gamora was right. These people were the biggest idiots in the galaxy.

Tony opened the door and was met with a high-pitched scream. It wasn’t of his wife or his daughter. No, instead it was one of his other, well, kids.

Harley, now nearing twenty-one, screamed and as he tried to hide his hand from Tony, Tony easily saw the poorly hidden hand, which was covered in metal. Like his own Iron Man gauntlet.

His wife, who was across the table from Harley, smiled politely. “Well, I’ll leave the two of you to talk. I’ll go check on Morgan.” She kissed his cheek and left.

Harley smiled brightly, one of his hands still behind his back. “Hi, Mr. Stark.”

“Mhm.” Tony leaned over, trying to get a glimpse at what Harley had. “And that is?”

“Nothing.”

“Harley.”

The boy held up both his hands, and sure enough, there was nothing on his hands. “See. Nothing to see here, Mr. Stark.”

Tony eyed Harley’s wrists. Two Stark Industries issued watches, one on each wrist. “Right.” Tony nodded and grabbed Harley’s right hand. It was the second to the newest model, not the newest model that Tony had given him two years prior. And the condition was very worn down for a two-year-old watch. Too many scratches. That, and there were a few noticeable changes only its creator would recognize. An extra dent here, a bit too light.

Harley gulped.

“Show me,” Tony said, stepping away.

Harley scoffed. “Show you what.”

“Come on, kid. You really think you can lie to me?”

The boy sighed. “Don’t be mad,” he reminded his mentor. Then, Harley inhaled deeply and swiped a finger across his right wristwatch. A hologram appeared above it, and with a few touches and clicks and drags of metal across skin, Harley’s hand was encased in metal, and in his palm sat a repulsor.

Tony opened the front door and pointed at a nearby tree. “There.”

“Mr. Stark?”

The mechanic grabbed a pack of trail mix. While eating, he pointed at the tree again. “Go on.”

Harley blinked, but still, he aimed and fired. A bright blue beam shot out of his hand and struck the tree. It wasn’t perfectly centered, but it was close.

“Not bad.” Tony sighed. “But no.” He walked past Harley to his office.

“No?” Harley followed him. “Wha-”

“I mean, no, you’re not becoming Iron Man.” Tony approached his desk, and the tabletop came to life with holograms and files. “That’s why you came here, right?”

“I mean… kinda?” Harley sighed. “It’s not just that, Mr. Stark. I wasn’t there for anything. I wasn’t there when the Avengers split up or when Thanos first arrived. I was on the sidelines. I can’t do that if something bad happens again.”

“Have you thought it through?”

The boy tilted his head. “Thought what through?”

“Thought all of this through.” Tony spread his arms and files upon files of his own superhero career appeared. From the rumors before he announced Iron Man to clips of his more traumatizing moments to files of the deceased. Yinsen, Phil Coulson, Pietro Maximoff, Natasha Romanoff and so much more.

Harley stared at those files and flipped through them. He stared at Natasha’s file. He missed her. He met her before, a few times, and she was remarkable. He bowed his head. “I have.”

Tony nodded. “What about them?” Tony swiped his arm, and files appeared in front of Harley. His mom and his sister.

Harley smiled. He pulled his sister’s file. “Rosa’s in college now, studying art, and Mom?” Harley picked up her file. “Mom’s fine on her own, and I know she still needs me, but…” He sighed. “Mr. Stark, I need to be out there. I can’t let other people fight my battles. Not when I’m qualified to do the same.”

Tony nodded. “Show me all of it.”

Harley smiled. He really couldn’t hide anything from him. So, he excitedly swiped and tapped and clicked and dragged, and the metal transformed and covered his hands. It spread to his arms and his chest, to his head and to his legs, and the familiar whir of a suit almost made Tony smile.

Soon, Harley was protected by his own suit, silver and red accents and a pale blue arc reactor in the center of his chest. His mask flipped up and revealed a brilliant smile. “How does it look?”

Tony saw the tiny details. The color change and the different arc reactor. The way the metal hugged Harley in a way his first suit couldn’t. He knew Harley was smart, but, shit, he never realized how hard this kid worked.

“Looks pretty good, kid. Pretty good.”

Harley smiled and packed his suit back into his watches. “So, am I an Avenger now?”

Tony took his time to chew and swallow his trail mix. “No.”

“No?”

“No, because” -Tony pressed a few buttons on the holograms and suddenly a building appeared between the two men- “you will train here first.” Tony pulled up some files and presented them in front of Harley. “Sam’s leading the training, with Wanda and Clint. Rhodey might drop by, too. Got some good names here. Peter, Shuri, Cassie, Lila.” Tony nodded. The four kid’s profiles were in front of him, and it looked good. Especially with Harley smiling with them.

“And you, Mr. Stark?”

Tony shrugged. “I’ve wanted to hang up the suit a long time ago, Harley. I thought I’d never be able to sit around just watch, but with the new Captain America and you guys taking care of the world.” He smiled up at the profiles. “I think I can at least take a little break.”

“So no interfering?”

“I never said that.” Tony returned all the files to the table and turned it off. “I’ll come in when I get worried. But for now,” he smiled fondly, “I’m going to take care of my girls.” Before Tony could get more emotional, I mean the kid already saw him have a panic attack, Tony clicked his tongue. “Come on. I’ll drive.”

Harley grabbed his bag and got in Tony’s car. He couldn’t wait to tell Peter. Speaking of... “You know, Peter’s younger, and he technically is an Avenger.” Harley paused and looked at Tony. “So maybe-”

“Harley, I know what you’re doing.”

“I’m not doing anything.”

“You mean guilt tripping?”

Harley groaned and leaned back into his seat. “It was worth a shot.”

Loki, Thor, and Valkyrie stood over New Asgard as Asgardians rejoiced with lost loved ones. Loki raised his eyebrow. “So, this is what’s become of Asgard?”

Thor smiled. “Not bad, huh?”

Loki gave Valkyrie a look, but the warrior just shrugged.

“But you did better.”

Loki blinked a few times. Did he hear that correctly? Did his brother just say that?

Thor continued, nonetheless, “I left our people in their greatest time of need. I did nothing, and I must atone for that.”

The younger brother laughed. “If you must atone, what more of me?”

“Atone by leading them.”

The god of mischief blinked a few times. He turned to his brother. “You realize what you’re saying? Are you drunk again, brother?”

“No, I’m not.” Thor smiled at him and put his hand on Loki’s shoulder. “You were a good king. A false one, yes, but our people thrived under your disguised rule.” Thor paused. “You could do without the theatrics.”

“I can’t promise that.”

Thor laughed. “I know, brother.” He faced Valkyrie. “Can I trust you to keep him in line?”

Valkyrie smiled. “I am growing fond of this place. Might as well stay.”

“Then, it’s settled!” Thor clapped his hands together, and the sound boomed. “Loki Odinson,” he smiled, “you are the ruler of New Asgard, and Valkyrie shall be the right-hand woman.”

Loki laughed, still shocked from this announcement. “Alright, and if that is so, what you are you going to do, brother?”

“My best.” Thor scoffed. “Obviously.” He walked away from them.

Valkyrie and Loki looked at each other. Valkyries The god turned around and shouted at his brother, “That doesn’t make any sense!” When Thor didn’t respond, Loki followed him. “Wait! As New Asgard’s king, I demand an answer!” Still no response. “Brother!”

Carol put her hands on her hips. “You think you can follow me to space?”

“I am the god of thunder.” Thor shrugged.

Carol raised her eyebrow.

Thor sighed. “I couldn’t help my people when they needed me. I can’t fix what’s already down, but maybe I could learn. From you.”

The captain narrowed her eyes. “I’m not sure if you can keep up with me.”

“Neither am I.”

Carol smiled. “Ok. I’ll fly slower.”

“Excellent!”

A week later, there was a funeral for Natasha and Vision. Everyone was there. Their family. They set off memorials in the river and watched as they floated away. They would forever be remembered.

Clint was standing by the river the longest. Most of the team had retreated to the benches and tables for food, but Clint just couldn’t find it in himself to do so.

“She was a worthy opponent.”

Clint laughed. “Thanks, Buck.”

The ex-assassin just shrugged. “She was the hardest to beat.”

“Besides Steve?”

“Yeah.” Bucky peeked at the archer, the swordsman?, and sighed. “I have to ask.”

Clint sighed. “I’m stopping.”

Bucky hid his joy. He didn’t want anyone else becoming like him. So, he just looked ahead with a small smile.

“I’ve got a family to look over. I want to dedicate my life to that,” Clint said. He glanced at Bucky, and he noticed a glimmer of a smile on him. Not from what Clint just vowed, but from something else. “You have some good plans?” Clint asked.

Bucky shrugged. “It’s a work in progress.”

Clint peeked behind him to look at Steve and nodded. “Good.”

“Good.”

Thor, Steve, Bruce, and Clint stared at the holograms Tony and Pepper laid out for them. Bruce was smiling at all the plans, trying to hide all his excitement, while Clint was stoic, trying to take in all this information. After all, when Stark did something, he always went big.

“I thought you guys would like this,” Tony said. “I mean I like it, but I think you guys should have the final say.”

Bruce nodded. “I love it. This can do a lot of good.”

Clint nodded and stepped up to the building design. He pointed at the sign at the front. “Should be named Black Widow Foundation.”

Tony walked to where Clint was and stared at the sign. Romanoff Foundation. Tony nodded. “You’re right.”

“You’re wrong,” Pepper corrected.

“I never said that,” Tony said. With a few clicks and drags, the sign was changed. All caps. Simple font.

Black widow foundation

An organization dedicated to sheltering, guiding, and avenging victims of domestic and child abuse.

Clint smiled. “That’s better.”

The foundation opened a few years later. All of the team is there to celebrate and remember the agent who gave her life for them.

Well, all of them, plus one.

Steve and Bucky were happy to announce and reveal a secret they’ve been keeping. Because after the ribbon was cut and the drinks were passed out, T’Challa came in, fashionably late, with a little baby girl in his arms.

Bucky took her in his embrace, brushed her red hair back, and kissed her forehead.

Steve smiled. “Guys, I’d like you all to meet Natalie.”

Everyone cooed over her, and when Clint held her, he cried. Bucky and Steve let Clint hold her for most of the reception.

Afterward, they went their separate ways with promises of reunions, parties, and celebrations.

After defeating Thanos, Bruce wasn’t really sure what to do. Hulk and he were on ok terms. They weren’t the same anymore, and that was ok. He took up Rhodey’s offer on therapy.

It was a start.

As for where to live, he got many offers. Loki and Valkyrie offered him a place in New Asgard. Sam said there was a room always open at the Avengers Compound. Tony said he could easily build a house near his own. Even Shuri offered him a place in Wakanda.

In the end, he decided the only real home he had was at the Stark Tower, the old Avengers hideout. He missed it.

Tony was ecstatic. He was so happy that he even restructured the tower so the floor below Bruce’s was a lab.

The first thing he did back home was set up pictures everywhere. He set a picture of the original six by his bedside. For the first month or two, he avoided looking at it, just because he knew that if he saw her and her smile, his body would ache in pain. Soon, though, he was able to look at it every day and smile.

He and Nat were close. During Ultron, when so many things were happening and had happened and will happen, they thought they could be together, but it just wasn’t right. They were friends, close friends. She reminded him that it was ok to be sharp and calculated, and he reminded her that it was ok to soft, even for a little while.

With her gone, he’d have to try by himself. But, he’d learn. For her sake.

Loki enjoyed being king. Really, he did. I mean, he fought for his birthright since he could remember. He even made a deal with Thanos just to rule something.

But, he didn’t realize that ruling Asgardians on Earth was going to be so difficult. Everyone had questions on things he didn’t have the answers to. What was the best substitute for Asgardian meat? Why do pastel lights float in the sky sometimes? And why do Asgardian children want twinkies? What were twinkies?

“You know,” Valkyrie said, “if you want to know the answers, you might wanna ask a human.”

Loki grimaced. “I’d rather die again.”

“Not true.”

The god of mischief just groaned. “Humans aren’t exactly fond of me.”

She shrugged. “Not all of them feel that way.”

Loki smiled. “You’re right.” He nodded. “I’ll be leaving for the day, maybe two.”

“Loki-”

“I’ll be back!”

With a spell and a smirk, Loki transported himself to New York. He also changed his clothes and appearance. Just in case. He looked around and at his form. He hated it. So, he changed it to something else before smiling and adjusting his shirt.

“Captain America?” the receptionist gasped.

Loki laughed heartily. “Yes, that’s me. Would you mind telling me where the big guy is?”

“Uh,” the receptionist smiled, “you mean Thor?”

Loki groaned. “No, I mean, the green guy, you know? Smashes everything, also a doctor or something on the side.”

“Oh, you’re here to see Dr. Banner.”He pointed to a hidden elevator. “You can take that to the eighty-sixth floor, and you should be able to see Dr. Banner.”

“Thank you,” Loki saluted, “kind citizen.”

He really liked this form. After stepping out of the elevator, he shouted, “Big guy! Where are you? I have some questions!”

Bruce’s voice echoed from somewhere, “Steve?” Bruce appeared and squinted at Loki’s disguised form. It took him a second. “Loki?”

Loki detransformed and smiled. “The one and only.”

Bruce raised his eyebrow. “Ok, and why ask me?”

The god lounged on the couch. “Well, you’re the only mortal who won’t scream or try to fight me, and even though I would enjoy the fight, I’m much too busy with New Asgard to have that luxury. “

Bruce laughed. “Ok.” He sat down across from him. “What are you unsure about?”

“Twinkies.”

The man with multiple degrees blinked. “Twinkies?”

“Yes!” Loki sat up. “The Asgardian children keep asking me if I can get them any, but I have no clue what they are.” Loki scoffed. “I mean I can do transform into any creature they so desire, but no, they want whatever twinkies are.”

Bruce smiled. “Ok, I can bring you some twinkies.” He looked up to the ceiling. “Friday, do we have and twinkies in the tower?”

“Yes, we do, Dr. Banner. I will send someone up with the treats.”

“Thank you, Friday.”

Loki leaned forward and joined his hands. “They’re treats.”

“Some people really like them.” Bruce shrugged. “I’m not that big of a fan.”

Soon, they had a box of twinkies between them. Bruce pointed at them. “Go on, try one.”

Loki stared at the many packages. “They’re not poisonous, are they?”

“I wouldn’t poison you, Loki.”

“Right. You heroes and moral code.” He plucked one of the packages and unwrapped it. Then, he took a bit. Immediately, Loki recoiled. “What is this?” He spat it out. “Why would children want this? It’s so full of fat and air.” Loki dropped the rest of the snack on the table, his face full of disgust. “No wonder humans have such a short lifespan.”

Bruce laughed. “Children tend to like things with fat in them.”

Loki sighed. “Well, Asgardian children want to try it, so I guess it can’t hurt.”

The scientist laughed. “What about other questions?”

“I have a list!” Loki proclaimed.

Loki wasn’t the only frequent visitor to the Avengers Tower.

“Hello, Dr. Banner!”

“Shuri!” Bruce removed his goggles and hung up his lab coat. “How are you?”

“Well.” The genius hugged the doctor. “I need someone to bounce ideas off of.”

Bruce laughed. “What insane project do you have in mind now?”

“I prefer new and innovative, Doctor.” She put her case on the table and opened it. A hologram appeared, of compact files and a model Bruce didn’t recognize. “I have a few new ideas for Harley’s suit.”

Bruce laughed. “Isn’t already Tony’s nanotech with your innovations?”

“Well, it’s about to me even more of my innovations!” Shuri put her fists together and flung them apart. The blue holograms spread out, and Bruce, even though this happened on a weekly basis, was still astounded. This girl was smarter than he and Tony combined, and she was still a teenager. How lucky he was to live in the same time period as Shuri.

Bruce laughed. “This looks amazing, Shuri.”

“Thank you.”

Shuri babbled about all her new ideas, and Bruce mostly just nodded and gave her a design idea or two.

“That helped me so much, Dr. Banner.” Shuri packed up her case. “See you later!”

“Of course.”

“And drop by the Young Avengers Compound some time?”

Bruce tilted his head. “It’s still the Avengers Compound, Shuri.”

“Not anymore!”

Bruce’s eyes widened. “What did you guys do?” He followed Shuri’s voice to the elevator. “Shuri!”

She waved goodbye just as the elevator doors closed.

The Young Avengers train and pick up kids who were qualified, had good heads on their shoulders, and a good heart.

Riri Williams was a scholarship student, with an intellect that matched Shuri’s, and when she arrived at the compound with Tony as an escort, Sam laughed. “Don’t you have enough kids?” She goes by Ironheart and constantly updates her suit and Harley’s. Teddy Altman was found by Captain Marvel, and though his powers’ origins were unknown, Carol and Bruce took him under their wing. He trains under the name Hulkling. Wanda found Billy Kaplan, a boy with powers similar to hers, and with her help, Billy becomes the formidable hero, Wiccan. Kamala Khan was found by SHIELD, of all things, with powers she couldn’t understand or control. Sam took her under his wing and even introduced her to her first role model, Carol Danvers. Kamala even trained under her name, Ms. Marvel.

The new Captain America trained them well. They made names for themselves. Not only did Spider-Man protect New York, but he also became an expert on the multiverse. (Though, Miles tends to disagree with that. Gwen says their both experts.) Shuri goes back to Wakanda every now and then, but focuses most of her energy advancing technology and on training to become better and stronger. Lila becomes an amazing archer just like her father and never misses a shot. Cassie comes in when she’s needed, finding more interest in engineering than superheroing, but she loves her team. Harley soon becomes their leader, helped by Peter, and his name… Well.

“Iron Lad!”

Harley tilted his head. “What was that, Morgan?”

Peter tried to hide his laughter, but he failed miserably. “I think she gave you a superhero name.”

The girl giggled, stepped out of Peter’s hug, and pointed at Harley’s arc reactor. “Iron Lad.”

“Not the name I was looking for.” Harley laughed, brushed her hair back, and kissed her forehead. “But, in your honor.” He put his hands on his hips and put on his suit. “Iron Lad.”

Peter beamed. “That is so cool.”

“I know, right!” Harley patted his chest, and the suit packed itself into his watches.

Morgan squealed and attached herself to her brother’s leg. “Iron Lad, Iron Lad!”

“What about me, huh?” Peter complained.

She laughed. “Nothing!”

Peter exaggerated a gasp. “Morgan!” He took her off Harley’s leg and spun her around before tickling her. “Is that how you talk to your brother, huh?”

Morgan giggled and escaped Peter’s grip, only to have both of her brothers chase her around the house. Harley finally caught her, scooped her up in his arms, and attacked her with kisses. Peter followed suit, tickling her and cooing over her. When she was all laughed out, Morgan sighed and whispered, “I love you.”

“3000?” Peter asked.

Harley laughed, “Morgan, do you love us 3000?”

“I love both of you, 3000!” Morgan admitted. “3000! 3000! 3000!”

Guys.... I might edit this more???? But idk. Any ideas? Maybe even oneshots

[douchebagbrainwaves]

WHY I'M SMARTER THAN LOTS

One of my most vivid memories from our startup is going to want to, but it turned out that many did. Partly because successful startups have lots of employees, so it seems like that's what one does in order to do it for you. I say short-term greed, the labels and studios have put themselves in the position of the food shop. Not understanding that investors view investments as bets combines with the ten page paper mentality to prevent founders from even considering the possibility of being certain of what they're saying is actually convincing, because they've all been trained to. You probably only have to be a good plan. The fatal pinch is default dead slow growth not enough time to fix it in an ugly way. But when our hypothetical Blub programmer looks in the other direction, up the power continuum, however, just as you would in a program you were writing to a friend who works for a big company of mediocre ones, where bad ideas are caught by committees instead of the people that had them. And yet by the next time you need to be constantly improving both hardware and software. And of course if they continued to spam me or a network I was part of, Hostex itself would be recognized as a spam term. It would work for a while in Florence. Maybe you can't write the best-looking spreadsheet using HTML, but you can't trust your judgment about that, so ignore it.

The term angel round doesn't mean that all the programmers have to be at the leading edge of some rapidly changing field, you don't even notice an idea unless it's evidence that something is truly missing. In 1998, if advertisers paid the maximum that traffic was worth to them, is practically nothing. BackRub seemed like an inconsequential science project. There are two bad smelling words, color spammers love colored fonts and California which occurs in testimonials and also in menus in forms, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. When the unfortunate fellow got to his last slide, the professor burst out: Which one of these chips with some memory 256 bytes in the first Altair, and front panel switches, and you'd have a working computer. But Lisp is a powerful language, but it fits this situation well. Are there better ways to solve them? Those ideas are so rare that you can't easily do in any other language. The number of possible connections between developers grows exponentially with the size of the group.

The reason those stimuli caused those founders to start companies was that their experiences had prepared them to notice the opportunities they represented. The first thing I would do, after checking to see if they had scored points off us. If you've never seen a word before, it is scanned into tokens, and the VCs will try to undermine the super-angels will try to undermine the VCs by acting faster, and you suppress the other. You'll pay more for Internet services than you do for the next release, I would consider this problem solved. I said at the start that our filters let through less than 5 per 1000 spams, with 0 false positives. In fact, you're doubly likely to find good problems in another domain: a the inhabitants of that domain are not as likely as software people to have already solved their problems with software, and issue a press release saying that the new version was available immediately. To some degree, it offers a way around these limitations. Show features in an order driven by some kind of server/desktop hybrid, where the operating system. Bill is, because he is one more user helping to make your design simpler. Fortunately, Web-based software you can use whatever language you want. Really?1

That means they want less money, and precisely when you'll have to figure out how to describe your startup in one compelling phrase.2 At first glance it doesn't seem there's anything to see. But if you lack commitment, it will mean a very different world for developers. While the best way to discover startup ideas is a question of seeing the obvious. Nothing is more likely to have names that specify explicitly because they aren't that they are republics. Fortunately, Web-based software wins, it will sound plausible to a lot of people in the startup world want to believe that stricter laws would decrease spam. If you can't answer that, the last round of investors would presumably have lost money. Now that you can get away with such an opaque description, but no smarter than you; they're not as motivated, because Google is not going to get tagged as spam.3

And of course if it were part of the language now, but they want a lot. When you switch to this new world. They were going to be bloated and full of duplication anyway. That's the part that really demands determination. This was roughly true. Addictive things have to be in it yet. Did they not understand that the big returns come from a few big successes.

Because PR firms tell them to. It's a live thing, running on your desktop computer, and there are companies that will get them a job; they learn it because they genuinely like to program and aren't satisfied with the languages they already know. It's when you can convince investors, and you could tell he meant it. But disappointing though it may be somewhat blurry at first.4 It might be a good thing for investors that this is a valid approach. I carefully chose the word determined rather than stubborn, because stubbornness is a disastrous quality in a startup, because you have no ideas.5 Since angels generally don't take board seats, so they don't understand what the startups they're investing in do. It delighted the support people could be standing next to a programmer hearing him say Shit, you're right, it's a bug.

The MROSD manages a collection of great walking trails off Skyline.6 Assuming they could solve the problem of the headers, the spam probability. If you want to. Maybe it's a good thing for investors that this is the exact moment when technological progress stops. Their first site was exclusively for Harvard students, it would be stupid to try the experiment and find out. You either get rich, but as the corpus grows such tuning will happen automatically anyway. At a minimum, files will be centrally available for users who want that. Whatever its flaws, the writing you find online is authentic. He plans to support himself. All the rest were working on releases, ports, and so on.

Work for a VC fund after a full partner meeting averages about 25%. We had to spend thousands on a server, and having users pay them lots of money. And the way to the extreme of doing the computations on the server. I'm trying other strategies now, but few were in 1998. VCs aren't interested in such small deals. Neither of us had ever even had what you would call a real job. Either your site is catching on, or it will fry you. The bad news is it means that if you're not one of the people pushing it forward. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself ignore a bug that only appears intermittently. If you've never seen, i. This is not just that series A rounds later. To the Blub programmer, Lisp code looks weird.

Notes

Letter to Oldenburg, quoted in Westfall, Richard, Life of Isaac Newton, p. That is the kind of intensity and dedication from programmers that they cared about users they'd just advise them to get great people.

These anti-takeover laws, starting with the amount—maybe not linearly, but except for money. If you want to be driven by people like numbers. Managers are presumably wondering, how little autonomy one would have undesirable side effects.

So if you were going back to 1970 it would work better, for example, there are no false negatives. This argument seems to have been peculiarly vulnerable—perhaps partly because so many had been transposed into your head. Here's an example of applied empathy. We didn't know ourselves which VC firms.

Now the misunderstood artist is not an associate vet you. Determination is the new economy during the war had been a waste of time on schleps, but most neighborhoods successfully resisted them.

To do this yourself. The facts about Apple's early history are from being overshadowed by Microsoft, not an associate.

Labor. Some people still get rich simply by being energetic and unscrupulous, but in fact it may be enough to become more stratified. I call it ambient thought. 8 in London, 13 in New York is where people care most about art.

[kempkemp88-blog]

Ravencoin Wallet

Ravencoin is a peer-to-peer blockchain, handling the successful development and transfer associated with assets from one party to another. Ravencoin is a protocol based in a good fork of the Bitcoin program code which contributes features specifically focused on enabling tokens to be released on the Ravencoin blockchain. These kinds of tokens can own whatever attributes the issue of the token makes a decision - so they may be restrained in amount, named and grow issued while securities or maybe as collectors items. You can make your protection token within moments and get it trade throughout the world. Symbolizing real world custodied physical or digital property Securities tokens: stock or perhaps shares of an company where the shares will be represented by a token rather than a actual physical stock certificate Securities as well as partnership interests with all the built-in ability to pay dividends inside RVN As well which stand for a coop, limited partnership, royalty revealing or revenue sharing podium A token which in turn symbolizes a cflexd-funded product with the ability to shift or sell the thing Representing virtual products Entry pass to an event such as a Baltimore Ravens game together with the ability to resell without worry of duplicates being produced A license to enable an activity An access expression to use some sort of assistance In-game currency and even objects, transferable to various other game enthusiasts outside of the video game program Representing the reveal of a project Gold club Gold coins Physical Pounds Territory Acts DC Comics Presents #26 Energy credits (Electricity, Solid wood, Gas, Lube, Wind) What Makes Ravencoin Different from Bitcoin? Often the X16R protocol intends in order to solve the centralization associated with mining found on this Bitcoin blockchain caused by means of the introduction of expensive and really useful Use Specific Integrated Rounds (ASIC) hardware. By randomizing often the order of sixteen diverse hashing codes, Raven tends to make ASICs complicated to build, allowing room for anyone to mine the Raven system without the disadvantage regarding competing having ASIC components. The Raven team offers also committed to replace the hashing algorithms if a Raven ASIC miner will be at any time developed. Block incentive involving 5, 000 RVN as an alternative of 50 BTC. Block moments of 1 min instead of ten. Overall coin supply of 21 Billion instead of 21 years old million. A new mining or prospecting algorithm, X16R which allows for more decentralized gold mining. Addition of Resource issuance, and transfer. Upcoming addition of unique possessions, sub-assets, rewards, messaging, in addition to voting. The Raven is definitely the highly symbolic beast the fact that is mentioned in a variety of cultures with varied purposes. One regarding the meanings is change. As Ravencoin can be a shell of the Bitcoin signal the idea could very okay be this meaning that the developers wanted to exhibit. Its with this images that we present Ravencoin. Ravencoin is some sort of new project that was introduced on October 31st, 2017 and debuted on Bitcoin�s 9th birthday on Economy is shown 3rd, 2018 with the relieve of software with regard to mining. Ravencoin is whole lot more than a shell of the Bitcoin code it can be a project that builds upon the original vision of Bitcoin but with extra new features which in turn extend the functionality and the intrinsic value of the particular coin organically. Ravencoin: Identical copy of bitcoin that is going to be used for assets. Better bitcoin built regarding possessions Ravencoin is some sort of free open source platform designed for the certain use circumstance of switching possessions like token-backed possessions from one owner to another. While it could look that with this development of the good blockchains such as Bitcoin and even Ethereum, transferring investments in between different parties is by now a good solved issue, that is not specifically the particular case. Neither Bitcoin neither Ethereum were specially intended for facilitating ownership of more investments, do to the particular fact that they merely concentrated their attention around other characteristics. Ravencoin can be built on a derive of the Bitcoin code. It is implemented with the smaller sized block reward of one moment (the block reward is definitely the only way that new coins are really created and the idea is usually an incentive for miners to add hash electric power to this network), and even the addition connected with asset creation and communication features. If you are some sort of crypto-lover, and are sure you are when you may be reading this right today. You will agree that blockchain technological will indeed adjust worldwide economic paradigm while we know that today. However being able in order to mail wealth transactions around a matter of seconds, internationally and with virtually no third parties engaged, is usually just the tip associated with the banquise that that new revolution presents. Throughout the same path regarding unstoppable evolution, Ravencoin will certainly implement the way possessions owners operate with their wells. Ravencoin Core Wallet is going to allow these people to handle proficiently this transfer of their assets to another parties. To live this world order trend without shedding any keypoint: Problem Even with the accomplishment and common adoption of Bitcoin together with Ethereum, nor of these blockchains experience been specifically designed to be able to aid the ownership connected with additional possessions on best of the tokens which have been made throughout their individual networks. In Bitcoin, the original rules governing the blockchain and protocol must always be adhered to and so this specific means that Bitcoin systems are not equipped in order to register that will resources are being embedded directly into as well. This means that intended for every advantage purchase designed on the Bitcoin community, there must be a accompanying bitcoin financial transaction charge, even if the transaction is for you to easily send out the asset. This has the result of unnecessary transaction fees whenever assets are transferred. Also, typically the other major disadvantage is always that assets can easily end up being �destroyed� if they are sent to an exchange or pocket. For Ethereum the particular network is not able for you to natively identify smart contract tokens and this can bring about some confusion caused by several ERC20 tokens together with the same names. The only differentiating factor involving contracts using identical names is typically the contract hash and this particular can mistake users or maybe be used along with harmful intent to scam other people. As Ravencoin will always be operating on a decentralized model having independent miners to support the stability of the blockchain combined together with ASIS-resistance the coin are going to have a superb chance connected with staying in the arms of individuals and not central by one party or possibly a group of parties that can collude to help shape the result regarding an event, a political election or even the price tag of the gold coin itself. Peer to Peer Electric System for the Formation in addition to Transfer of Investments Optimised for switching possessions Tokens offer several advantages in order to traditional shares as well as other participation elements: more rapidly move speeds, increased user command, and censorship opposition, along with a decrease or reduction in the need for a good trusted third party. Alternative The solution to often the above problems is to be able to develop a Bitcoin-like system that is completely asset conscious so that that identifies as soon as tokens include been created as assets. With a view to help eliminate the problem, Ravencoin provides to life the said: �Keep it straightforward stupid� by means of focusing about creating one thing, one specific thing� the bitcoin-like system, totally knowledgeable regarding when tokens are made as assets (Based with PoW but with a good new mining formula, x16r). This provides three benefits: Assets can be safeguarded from accidentally being wrecked. Since the standard protocol and the system is mindful of this assets?�?they can be carried on the blockchain like a good passenger on the exercise sooner or later getting them most safely for the vacation spot. End users are able to challenge, track, and transfer possessions with each different with the ease of sending some sort of message to one another. Now users will exchange on a new full podium specifically created to issue, monitor plus transfer assets among get-togethers. It will provide right security levels to the particular fundamental assets. To do that Ravencoin will depend on a wide distribution, a strong mining local community together with market value to help function. Main Features?�?Tech Introduction Ok, now many of us understand the problem (the suggested one, between the several active issues) that needs to be solved in current blockchain and many of us know the solution that Ravencoin is definitely committed to develop in order to transcend that limitation. So� what is next?. We need to help go serious into their very own tech� it looks humdrum, but we will take care of that. Only in the fact that way we shall really now have knowledge and skin foundations to take decisions about often the task. Ravencoin bring you the following functions: X16R Algorithm Before all of us explain what X16R is we will first provide details behind what other cash include implemented for their algorithms. Inside search in order to create and carry out codes that are ASIC proof (meaning that purpose built mining machines with higher hash rates could certainly not be developed) which at turn reduces the likelihood of centralization via good sized mining farms, projects have tried a good selection connected with tactics to help hinder this kind of centralization (like we find with Bitcoin mining). This first approach was in order to follow memory intensive methods including those used by means of both Scrypt and Equihash. This requirement of additional inside memory information reduces typically the performance of the ASIC to help more onpar of the particular GPU based gold mining using the same algorithm Another approach that was taken on, was Dash�s approach, which was to take on the X11 algorithm. This is the use regarding 11 chained hashing methods (hence the name) around an effort to slow up the creation of ASIC components. This did not stop the appearance of a good special objective ASIC so once right now there was a ASIC to get X11, other individuals added even more hashing methods to make additional methods that had been named X13, X15 together with X17. This makes it even more challenging to create a good ASIC nevertheless because often the algorithms are in approximately the same order its challenging but not not possible to create an ASIC. What Ravecoin has been performing is called X16r and the fact that execution like the other people described in the past use 18 algorithms for any hashing (see table below). The key element difference is they also have added in algorithm reordering. It is this particular reordering based on often the results from the previous block that provides additional ASIC resistance than other hashing algorithms. Example: Previous Block Hash: 0000000000000000007e8a29f052ac2870045ae3970270f9? Ravencoin Core Wallet Download : 0x7da00919b8e86287 decides the particular next 16 hashes should be. Roadmap Phase 1?�?Complete Ravencoin (RVN) is a Proof of Work coin built on the Bitcoin UTXO model. As along with other Bitcoin derivatives, RVN cash are distributed for you to persons boosting the Raven system by mining Raven. x1000 coin distribution (21 Billion dollars Total) 10x quicker blocks (1 per minute) Found in app CPU exploration ~1. 4 Day issues change (2016 blocks) Contact information start with R� for common address, or r� to get multisig Network Port: 8767 RPC Port: 8766 UTXO?�?UNSPENT PURCHASE OUTPUT DEFINITION Often the Unspent Transaction Output can be key to be able to bitcoin while this is how bitcoin keeps track of advices and outputs on often the blockchain. First shall we seem with how a standard bank works. Assume Tom is by using Bank A and has got an equilibrium of $5, 500 and even assume that Alice who does almost all her banking with Financial institution N has no balance. Tom wants to send $2, 000 dollars to Alice. To achieve this Tom asks his / her traditional bank to send $2, 000 to help Bank T in Alice�s name. Typically the true business deal has Tom�s balance lowered by $2, 000 through $5, 500 to $3, 000 and Alice�s harmony increases through $0 to be able to $2, 1000. Taking this kind of to this Bitcoin blockchain: Tom offers received inputs in the particular level of 5 BTC. This specific is from 4 dealings (inputs) ADVICES Received two BTC Received 1 BTC = some BTC Got 1. a few BTC Received. 5 BTC In this kind of example, Tom would like to mail Alice 2 BTC. The particular blockchain, unlike finance institutions, is usually not aware of amounts as in the example over and so the transaction is recorded like: OUTPUTS 2 BTC brought to Alice 3 BTC delivered back to Tom ? here is the Unspent Transaction Productivity or even UTXO Phase 2?�?Assets (in progress)ASIC RESISTANCE ASIC Resistance?�?A published commitment to be able to continuous attempts at ASIC opposition. If ASICs usually are created for x16r, after that i will, at a certain block range, modify a single of the algorithms to add Equihash, EthHash or similar efforts to increase the resistance from ASIC miners intended for Raven. UNIQUE ASSET ASSIST Ravencoin will be some sort of hard fork the fact that stretches Raven to include the cabability to issue and transfer property. The expected release associated with asset capabilities will possibly be roughly seven months soon after the relieve of RVN. Raven will probably be extended to allow issuing, reissuing, and even transfer of property. Assets can be reissuable as well as limited to a new set in place present at the level of issuance. The cost to create resources are going to be 500 RVN to produce almost any qty of an asset. Every single asset identity must be distinctive. Property names will be limited to A-Z and 0�9, �� and �. � together with must be at a minimum of three character types long. The �. � and this �� cannot be the initial, or the last appeal, or be consecutive. Cases regarding valid assets: THE_GAME A good. TOKEN 123 Cases involving invalid assets: _TOKEN THEEND. A.. B (consecutive punctuation) AB 12 . FIRST OF ALL The particular RVN used for you to issue possessions will become sent to a burn up address, which will decrease the quantity of RVN available. Advantage exchanges call for the normal RVN transaction fees for transfer from one address for you to a further. METADATA Metadata about the token may be stored in IPFS. Primarily this kind of cannot be changed. If you find a demand, the system can be current in order to allow updating the metadata by the token company. REWARDS Reward capabilities can be added to enable payment (in RVN) to be able to all stands of a resource. Payments of RVN might be distributed to most advantage holders pro caco. This is great for forking over dividends, dividing bills, as well as rewarding a group connected with symbol holders. Example: Some sort of small software company concerns a property GAMECO that presents a share of the particular project. GAMECO tokens could be traded using other individuals. Once the program business profits, those profits could be distributed to all stands of GAMECO by transmitting the earnings (via RVN) to be able to all cases of GAMECO. BLOCK MEASUREMENT Raven might increase the blocksize via 1 MB in order to Back button MEGABYTES to allow with regard to more on-chain transactions. Period 3?�?Rewards The reward method allows the design connected with bridal party that sit with the Raven blockchain. These kinds of tokens may be created and then sent to people today as a reward regarding doing something or in an effort to raise funds. The money raised can then possibly be used to deliver any kind of currency on the raven blockchain to another bash. Phase 4?�?Unique Possessions After created, assets can possibly be produced unique for a new cost of 5 RVN. Only non-divisible investments can easily be made one of a kind. That moves an advantage with a UTXO and associates an original identifier with the txid. From this level the tool could be moved from one particular address to another together with can be tracked back again to their foundation. Just the issuer of the authentic asset can make an asset exclusive. The costs for you to make special assets is going to be sent to a good burn address. Some cases of unique assets: Imagine that an art dealer difficulties the resource named SKILL. Ravencoin Core Wallet can then make unique ART WORK property by attaching a identify or a serialized range to each piece associated with art. These unique tokens can be transferred for you to the fresh owner down together with the art as a proof of uniqueness. Often the tokens ART: MonaLisa and ART: VenusDeMilo are not really agotable and represent different fecal material art. A program developer can easily issue often the asset while using name associated with their software ABCGAME, plus then assign each ABCGAME token a unique username or perhaps license key. The game tokens could come to be transmitted as the certificate transfers. Each token ABCGAME: 398222 and ABCGAME: happen to be special tokens. In video game property. A game ZYX_GAME created unique limited version in-game assets that are usually owned in addition to used simply by the game gamer. Case in point: ZYX_GAME: Sword005 and ZYX_GAME: Purse RVN based unique assets can be stuck just using real world possessions. Generate an asset referred to as GOLDVAULT. Each coin or gold pub inside a vault can end up being serialized and audited. Connected unique assets GOLDVAULT: 444322 and GOLDVAULT: 555994 may be created to signify the specific assets inside of the physical gold burial container. The public mother nature of the chain allows to get complete transparency. Phase 5?�?Messaging Messages to token holders by means of authorized senders will certainly be layered on top rated of the Phase 3 unique assets. See KAAAWWW Protocol for additional data. Level 6?�?Voting Voting will definitely be achieved by building together with distributing parallel tokens to help token slots. These tokens can be shipped to RVN addresses to record a vote on it. Team + Experts Dubbed a good community gold coin. Everyone can contribute and add for you to the project. The range of builders involved is uncertain, having said that there have been 430 Bitcoin developers who also made above 14, 1000 commits in accordance with Github. Tron Black?�?Core Builder Tron provides been in Blockchain plus cryptocurrencies as a good Program Developer for 5+ years. Currently a Principal Program Developer for Medici a new VC investing in often the blockchain space. His career mission is to boost technology to be able to eliminate normal world problems. He / she was first the President/CEO at Azure Squirrel for 17+ several years. Blue Squirrel is a software development company their own primary product was SQURL, it was the google connected with the net at typically the time. Made Paten?�?System to be able to Verify Id and Status for the Cryptocurrency Pocket book Address: Patent dateFiled 06 6, 2013 Patent company and numberus 61831802. Particular descriptionMethod and system with regard to voluntary identification of a company or individual personality to public crypto-currency address(es), and even the single number popularity rating system available through API. Bruce Fenton?�?Advisor Generic is a Blockchain Economic Counselor. He provides had 23+ numerous expertise in the Finance market and combined with 3+ many years experience in the particular blockchain and cryptocurrency area. He features placed about $5 million in opportunities in investing finances through his career. Recommended the particular Bill & Melinda Entrance Foundation?�?arranged, attended and well staffed very senior level meetings among Bill Gates plus enterprise and government commanders in Saudi Arabia, worked well with the Head of Midsection East to the foundation (please note, opinions on electronic digital money together with financial troubles are not those of often the foundation). Organised this Satoshi Roundtable private getaway, the gathering of seventy five involving the top leaders throughout blockchain technological innovation. Angel Individual in SpeechWorks (now public Tonalit� with $5bn market place cap). Angel Investor around Bitcoin companies such because ShapeShift. Advisor to Factom, BTCS and other companies. Presently store 3 functions: Board Person in The Bitcoin Foundation (2+ years), which will is the largest plus oldest industry group with regard to Bitcoin Technology. Founder from Satoshi Roundtable Private Blockchain Retreat (3+ years), that is a invite only VIP total annual event. Controlling Director. CIO for atlantic Financial Incorporation. (23+)

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Revolutionizing the Cement Industry through cemX

Today, we have with us Ashutosh Kumar Jha and Sourav Chakraborty, from cemX, an online platform for cement sales. CemX is founded by Ashutosh, CEO, and Sourav Chakraborty, CBO.

“Whenever I used to have a conversation with anyone, they would say, ‘Start-up in the cement industry, that’s bizarre!’ But this is something which we always wanted to do; starting something in a different industry. A bit different from what crowds are doing,” told Ashutosh, talking about his start-up cemX, in an exclusive interview with Insellers.

Read ahead to know more about how cemX is transforming the orthodox cement industry, providing an open price market.

Insellers:

Who all were there in the founding team of cemX? And what was your idea behind getting into this business?

Ashutosh Kumar Jha:

This idea first initiated in my mind when I came back from the United States to India; it was March 2019. I am actually from Bihar. In another district where my father had a new apartment, there was an inauguration ceremony going on; meanwhile, I talked to my dad regarding the industry about how exactly it works because he has the business in this industry for the last 25 years. I found certain loopholes that I felt I would like to work on.

I thought of doing market research, and I did that in my hometown. I thought, why don’t we make something in an orthodox industry where we can use the digital transformations and newer technologies to enhance this industry and have more flexibility to an open price market. Based on that, we registered our company name and launched our first prototype version of the company in June 2019. Right after the launching day, the second or third day, we got our first order of cheques which was around Rs. 20,000 – 30,000, as far as I remember.

After one month, in July, I was scheduled to meet the one who turned out as a co-founder later on. We were actually about to discuss our research topic and a research paper in Kolkata. He was in Kolkata at that time. I was in Bihar, and then I traveled to Kolkata in the later weeks of July, I guess. Then, he had actually come back from London at that time because he was doing his Master’s from Imperial College of London. Before that, he graduated from Boston University in the US and has some work experience in Italy. He liked the idea. He discussed it with his family members also. Then we collaborated as the co-founders.

From then onwards, we started building the team. We got a CFO on board. He is a CA and having company secretary experience as well. We welcomed him on board, and gradually the team-building process got started, and we formed a board in October. Right now, we have four board members, and all are having great profiles like they are from Harvard Business School and Imperial College of London. This is how things were going on till October or November last year. Till December, we were living only in Sitamarhi in Bihar. Maybe, I will be answering more of your questions in this go itself.

In January, we started our operations in Kolkata, and then till March, we have been doing these things parallelly in two cities. After that, the lockdowns happened. We were at high risk, and then for two months, we kept our operations on hold, and we started again in June or May. Then it was like a sudden upsurge in the revenues. We had more orders. Since the constructions were on hold and then suddenly when the lockdowns got lifted, we realised that people started ordering back to back. We started with 50 bags of cement last June, and last month, we closed with 3,000 bags. It was more than a 5,000% growth rate in the revenues.

Insellers:

That already covers some of our questions. Next, we would like to get an idea about how you segment your market and how you approach them?

Sourav Chakraborty :

The building materials market is huge. It’s not only limited to cement itself. You need to buy cement, bricks, stone chips, sand, iron rods, etc. You need to buy a lot of things to build a house like tiles, marbles, sanitary products. We chose cement specifically because the other markets like sands or stone chips are like a really dirty market. Even the cement industry is led by the cartel, to be more specific. The problem in other building material products is that there are some syndicates and local level mafias involved. When it comes to cement, it’s easy to synchronize.

Let’s say you have placed an order of thirty bags, so it’s just a mathematical count when we will be delivering your order, we just have to count 1, 2, 3, …, 30, order delivered successfully. The discrepancy of miscalculation is really low as compared to other building material products. So, that’s why we have chosen cement specifically as compared to other building materials. And that’s why we have only segmented to cement. Probably in the future, we may expand our operations in the other domains as well but not anytime soon.

Insellers:

What is your Go-to-Market strategy? And what is your break-up of sales through direct, indirect, or mediators and the online vs. offline sales you would be doing?

Ashutosh Kumar Jha & Sourav Chakraborty :

We kept both the options open. We have an online store where it’s really easy. Let’s say if you have your hometown in Bihar, and you are right now in Rohtak. If you want to order from Rohtak, you can do it immediately. Back then, it was not possible; in a typical old orthodox style, you have to visit a nearby brick and mortar shop and then negotiate the price. We kept that price transparency. It’s really an open market. You can order from Rohtak to your hometown in Bihar. It’s really easy.

But let’s consider your parents or your grandparents or whoever the person. They are not digitally that much tech-savvy or advanced when ordering something online, specifically cement it’s hard. So that’s why we have an offline extension retail store in the local cities as well. Right now, we are full-fledged live in four cities. Considering Sitamarhi, which is my hometown in Bihar, we have almost ten different offline extension stores. You can locate these stores on our website and reach them out. They will place an order on your behalf so that you have local support. It’s a mediator, kind of an agent; we have them. So, we have kept all the options open: offline as well as online.

Insellers:

You already discussed a bit about the revenue part. Could you give a brief idea about what portion of it is spent on sales and marketing at cemX?

Ashutosh Kumar Jha & Sourav Chakraborty :

Since we have not raised any funds from an outside source, we are still bootstrapping. There are certain investors with whom our negotiations are going on. So, we spend a small amount on the marketing part. Most of it is from the word-of-mouth and cheap labour marketing strategies like cross-business promotions, mutual recommendations, or something like that. So yes, not much amount to be more specific.

Insellers:

You already told us that there is already a challenge in the cement market that people usually don’t buy cement online. So, what are some of the other challenges that you faced in making sales at cemX?

Ashutosh Kumar Jha & Sourav Chakraborty :

The one major challenge is that when you see an online advertisement of cement, people wonder that if cement is sold online; maybe there is some discrepancy, the cement would be duplicate or something like that; I would better visit a shop and buy cement. That’s why we are not running any advertisements. We are outsourcing in tie-up with the companies and local warehouses. There is a possibility when you buy it from the local shop because you never know where they are procuring, but we are procuring the cement from manufacturers directly. Directly doing it from the local level warehouse of that particular company leaves no possibility of duplicity and all. That’s why we are trying to gain the trust of the customer here. So, the major challenge is the duplicity of the cement, which we have to maintain in the future. By gaining trust, it would be easy to get along with.

Insellers:

Are there any major competitors right now in this industry?

Ashutosh Kumar Jha & Sourav Chakraborty :

There are few indirect competitors of ours, but they are dealing with all the building materials and not only cement. I would say that there is no direct competition in the market so far, but we are competing with the local level dealers and all. Technically we are killing their business, the way Uber did. We are considering them as a competitor as compared to the big e-commerce platforms. They are our indirect competition when it comes to comparing ourselves with other e-commerce platforms.

Insellers:

Do you feel that there are any other substitutes as well for your products/ services?

Ashutosh Kumar Jha & Sourav Chakraborty :

What we are providing is the best price. Let’s say you will go to your nearby shop there in Rohtak, and then you come to know that a particular X cement cost you around Rs. 340. When you check on cemX in the Rohtak region, you will get to see that the cement costs Rs. 330 here. And for one house you have to buy at least 1,000 bags of cement, for instance. You are saving Rs. 10 per bag. You are typically saving Rs. 10,000, and in Indian society, it’s much. Everyone is looking for the best price. We are competing with the price.

This apart, this industry is led on credit specifically like you buy cement, and you will ask your seller to allow you some time to pay them back. There, we are playing really well because we recently did a tie-up with one of the best NBFCs called Zest Money. They have tie-ups with all the big brands like Amazon, Flipkart. We partnered with them to provide loans of up to Rs. 2 lacs. Now, you can buy cement with the flexibility of paying us in the next 12 months. You can take Rs. 2 lacs of cement, and then you can pay us on a monthly EMI basis in 12 months. It’s like 1 month – 12 months, from Rs. 5,000 – 2 lacs, you can take advantage. So, we are playing with the cost advantage specifically.

Insellers:

Do you feel that any technological change has helped cemX in any way?

Ashutosh Kumar Jha & Sourav Chakraborty :

We have recently settled down our research and development team. They are working on some patented technologies. I think this is not the ideal time to reveal what we are working on, but we will use this buzzword ‘Technologies’ like AI and all to analyse the patterns in the future. We are already doing it. Our research team and marketing team are analysing what the parameters are, how customers are rating.

In India, we are so diverse with multiple regions, multiple festivals. Something is going on every day, whether it’s on the Hinduism side or the Islamic side or whatever it is. We have realised certain patterns. When it comes to Hindu’s regions, let’s say there is one-month when people do not buy or do not start any new construction work because of certain hypotheses, which I say. We are also analysing those patterns. It’s interesting to analyse them. Let’s see; maybe once we have a certain amount of data, we will probably let you know how exactly it is that customers are reacting.

Insellers:

What are your future plans for growth? Where do you think the industry is headed in the future?

Ashutosh Kumar Jha & Sourav Chakraborty :

India stands for around 250 million productions, and last year India was the second largest producer of cement. By 2025 India would be somewhere around 550 million tons per year. The Indian government is now focusing on building smart cities and all. So, the construction industry is something that is never going to be out of the plan. Demand will always be there. Probably the growth root is there. Let’s see where exactly we will fit in.

Insellers:

Have you ever outsourced any verticals like sales, marketing, finance anytime at cemX?

Ashutosh Kumar Jha & Sourav Chakraborty :

Not yet, exactly! We did the technological part, but now everything is in-house. Even we had a problem with the delivery system, so we even bought our in-house vehicle in Sitamarhi for faster and reliable delivery. So, we have our in-house transportation system to gain our customer’s trust in the end. We are doing the end to end procurement.

It’s interesting to mention here that usually you have seen that Zomato’s boy delivering with the full attire, it’s nothing new now. Still, when it comes to cement, your driver will deliver your product with a kind of dress code, and then your entire transportation has your cement’s advertisements. It’s new, specifically in the tier-3 and tier-4 towns, where people have never seen these things yet. That’s why we have got our in-house transportation system. So, nothing is outsourced.

Insellers:

Do you have any plans to outsource in the future?

Ashutosh Kumar Jha & Sourav Chakraborty :

We will see. There is probably something fundamental to consider; if you try to do everything in-house, you have to spend a lot of money. Maybe we will consider something to outsource but not sure what exactly would be that stuff.

Insellers’ View on cemX

CemX is a start-up working in the orthodox cement industry, providing a platform for online sales of cement. It has seen good growth in its revenues since its inception in June 2019. It has a tie-up with an NBFC, Zest Money through which it provides a credit facility to its users with an option to avail up to Rs. 2 lacs on credit for a maximum of 12 months. It also plans to use Artificial Intelligence for cement sales in the future. The major challenge in front of cemX is that the online sale of cement being an entirely new concept; consumers are skeptical that it might not be authentic and therefore do not trust its quality. CemX is trying to gain the trust of its target customers.

Our advice for growth opportunities would be the following

New market Opportunity – As, There is no cartelization in Southern India therefore cemX could also expand to other South Indian locations like Hyderabad, Telangana, and other metro-cities where it could focus on the non-retail consumers while working on better margins with a cost leadership model. So, cemX could focus on price competitiveness and higher quality products there as the number of competitors is more in the South.

Channel Partnership – As word-of-mouth plays a significant role in the cement industry. CemX could do a B2B collaboration with architects, contractors, interior designers, and consultants as they can help in influencing the target customer to opt for our services.

Technological Innovation – They can integrate Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in their business. For instance, they may provide an option to their customers to put the built up area with predesigned templates provided by cemX, and then the ML & AI algorithms would estimate the number of bags of cement required in the construction of the building.

With time, they can integrate an option for the submission of construction designs as well. which can also be used to refer the contacts of architects, builders, and other professionals associated with cemX, to its customers thus positioning cemX as a one-stop solution for house construction with all the contacts details and raw materials availability on the same platform.

Digital marketing and advertising could also help in building the trust of its target customers on cemX while positioning itself as a trusted brand in the market. In the beginning, they should not focus on lead generation but rather on branding so as to focus on brand image elements of marketing.

Diversification – As cement cannot be used as a standalone product so cemX can diversify into 3rd party services of architect, contractors etc and related product categories such as iron rods, stone chips, bricks etc particularly in the segment where quality of the product can be standardized and controlled.

Implementing a mix of the above strategies could help cemX become a one-stop solution for all customer needs related to construction. It could tell everything right from how much cement to purchase, which one to purchase, how much it would cost, to suggesting the contacts of architects, builders, and other professionals essential in the construction of a building.

We wish Ashutosh Kumar Jha and Sourav Chakraborty good luck for the future and hope that they reach the targets they have set for themselves!

Now the market is overflowing with the business people who are in race to become famous in the game. hence, there is a huge load of rival rout there you better need yourself to be in front of others. We at insellers have just done all the examination and going around for you. We disclose to you the not all that regularly discussed moving dream to reality accounts of SMEs and new companies, to move the Entrepreneur in you. And we insellers are read to share your stories and experiences just Contact Us and be first.

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[milkshaq]

Distributing with Task Scheduler

Hi everyone thanks for coming out today. My name is David and today we're talking about distributed task, scheduling at Pedro Duty. So, first a little bit about me, I'm a software engineer on the core team at Pedro Judy and it's composed of these fine people on the right here. The team is mostly in Toronto, but the company has offices in San Francisco and Seattle as well and on the core team. We support many different engineering teams at Pedro Duty, so this is mostly by building shared libraries and infrastructure and researching best practices. One thing I want to emphasize is all the ideas I'm talking about. 

Today we worked on together, they're, not my own ideas, I'm just a guy lucky or you know, maybe unlucky enough to be standing right up here in particular Alexi who's on the left. There did much of the design work for this project so kudos to him. So do we have any Pedro Duty customers in the room? Let'S see some hands? Ok awesome! So you know what we are, but for those of you who are not familiar, we are a software as a service company and we do IT incident management. 

So what that means is that we aggregate data from monitoring systems like New, Relic or Splunk or data dog, and we create incidents when something bad happens, based on rules that you set up. So an incident might be something like the database server crashed. So when an incident is created, we alert people who need to know about it through push notifications or phone calls or SMS, and these notifications usually go to someone who's on call. So there's actually on-call scheduling built into the system so long story short. Our customers rely on us to let them know when something is wrong with their systems, and this is a really big responsibility and one that we take very seriously so because we take this responsibility so seriously. We think a lot about reliability and uptime, and the most important piece of this is the notification pipeline. 

So if something is wrong in your system, you need to know about it and there's no excuses so to achieve high availability in the face of catastrophic failure. Our infrastructure runs in three different data centers and everything that we build is expected to survive. The failure of one of those data centers so keep this requirement in mind as we go through the talk when I talk about a data center failing. This is a very real thing and our business requirements dictate that we handle it well. So why are we here today I'll introduce our problem, which is a distributed task scheduler for use that page or duty I'll talk briefly about what the old solution was then I'll describe our new solution, and this is the one built with akka Kafka and Cassandra after That we'll spend a good portion of our time talking about how the team used those three technologies to solve some interestinga distributed systems problems. 

Finally, we'll talk about the results of our project. Okay, so the problem in terms of the product here are some use cases that we're trying to solve. So our system supports many types of notifications. If you're going on call, you might want more nning about that, and maybe you want it two days ahead of time. So you remember, you know, don't party too hard and then, when you're actually doing your on call shift, you need to be notified that an incident happened. So we have very customizable rules for this. Maybe you want a phone call immediately, but you want to push notification. 

One minute later to make sure that you're, actually you know awake and out of bed. Another use case we have is retrying notification delivery. So we have redundant SMS providers, but what, if they're all down? For some reason, we need to write read: we need to schedule a retry in that case, so those are specific examples, but actually what we have is a very generic problem. We have these arbitrary chunks of Scala code, which we'll call tasks, and they need to run at an arbitrary time, and this code might do anything. It might be synchronous, it might be a synchronous might to a database. In might start your car, it's included in many different micro services at the company and when I say arbitrary time, that means it could be scheduled for one second from now, or it could be a scheduled one year from now. 

At the same time, it has to be tolerant, a very dynamic infrastructure. So, like I said, we currently run in three data centers, but it could be for next year or we might have to add or subtract ten machines for one of our services and some of those machines or data centers might be down when a task is get Old to run - or you know, all of the machines in micro service might be entirely different, VMs from when a task was scheduled, but spidel this we need our tasks to run in order. 

So ordering is a complex thing: let's define it a bit more exactly for the purposes of the system, so we're gon na say that task 1 is only guaranteed to execute before test 2. If these three things are true number one, they have the same ordering ID. That is a developer said. These things are linked and I want their ordering to be defined. Number two task, 1, scheduled time is before the scheduled time of task 2. That makes sense. Lastly, the call to schedule task 1 was completed before the call to schedule task 2 and that last bit is important and a bit tricky. So, let's have an example here: let's say that the we have two tasks and their scheduled very close together and they're scheduled for a second from now so tasks to my execute first, if the scheduling call completes before it does for task 1, but we have some Room to make things easier as well so tasks only need to be executed within second filler scheduled time now talking about millisecond precision, we can also delay to task execution arbitrarily to preserve our ordering. 

Also, the tasks are idempotent, and this is a very important point. If you run them a second time, nothing bad is going to happen. Lastly, our tasks really fail, but they do sometimes so we have to be prepared for that occasional instance. Ok, maybe this is just a simple matter of programming. You can just knock it out in an afternoon. Well, let's find him so Pedro Doody has an existing solution to this problem and it's been around for a few years. It works, but there's some room for improvement. The old solution was called work queue. This is a very simple version of how it worked, so the components are shown in green on this slide. Now some of my co-workers in the audience are probably you know shaking their heads right now, because I have this all wrong and you know, but sorry I just joined the company in January, so don't really know how it works anyway. We have this Scala service.

It'S you know, scheduling a task through an API and the work Hugh writes that tasks to a wide grow in Cassandra. Now a wide row means that the queue is a row in Cassandra and a tasks. Time is actually the column. We have another component, that's pulling Cassandra for new tasks and executing them using a thread fool. This is pretty simple and it works. But what about when you have many service instances trying to flow from the same queue? In other words, how you distribute the tasks to the available instances without duplicating work, so to solve the problem of having multiple service instances? We introduce custom partitioning logic into work, queue and the partitioning logic puts tasks into different wide row, queues and cassandra, and each service instance works a partition which is basically hard-coded. It'S not, but we won't get into it. I know there's some logic to handle service instance. 

Going down so each partition actually has a primary, a secondary and a tertiary partition or an instance that would work the queue and these instances would be peeking at the queues to make sure that a progress was being made, and they would also do health checks on Each other and if a service instance fails, the system would would handle it. But it's kind of a big deal like people would be paged in the middle of the night, because the system is now a entity in a degraded State. So, what's changed from our previous diagram, we introduced some pretty complex custom, partitioning logic and now our work hue library needs to be aware of how many service instances there are and how many queue partitions there are and what happens when you need to add another one Things get kind of hairy, so the old solution works, but it has some problems that we wanted to address so, like I was talking about adding or removing a service instance was quite a complicated dance. 

Due to this custom. Partitioning logic, there's actually like seven different steps. Usually, like converge chef and like restart a service and do some deployments - and I don't even know it's not something you want to do at 3:00 a.m. when Amazon decides to kick when your boxes, the old solution was also quite slow. So the only way a task was executed was by pulling it from Cassandra, so we're actually hammering our Cassandra clusters with these very slow reads, and this frequent slow, IO actually influence decisions on where to place our data centers physically, so they're all currently on the west Coast of the US, so that latency between our Cassandra nodes is minimized. 

This is in large part due to work.you. We also have a huge reliance on this complex partitioning code. That was really maybe only understood by the handful of people who wrote it or have to deal with it. Often it's not a good position to be in okay enter the new hotness, it's the same as the old hotness, but it's on fire early early in this year, the core team built a new solution to the same problem and very originally we named it scheduler. It'S not actually on fire, it's working quite well and we're gon na find out how so the new scheduler library is built in Scala same as the old work queue, and it uses three different technologies to tackle various challenges. Now, I'm assuming most of you have some ideas with these things. Some idea of what these things are, but, in short, Kafka, is a distributed, connect log and if you saw David McNeil's talk yesterday that yesterday about Amazon Kinesis, a lot of that is gon na apply to Kafka as well. Even if the terminology is slightly different cassandra is it distributed. No sequel, column-oriented database based on ideas from Google's famous BigTable paper or also Amazon's, dynamo and akka, is an actor system library for Scala or Java. So if you're not familiar with actors, they are computational entities that run in parallel and communicate by sending each other messages. Okay, definitions out of the way, so this is a very high-level diagram of the new scheduler and how it integrates into our services. So again we have some service, that's written in Scala, it's shown in red here. It includes scheduler, as a library shown in green. 

It'S actually two separate libraries, one for the client and one for the implementation. The service, the services logic schedules a task by passing it into a scheduled task method and the library intern C realises the task and accuse it to Kafka. Now it's important to note here we're just serializing tasks and metadata we're not actually serializing any sort of task. Logic, on the other end of the queue you have scheduler itself, which consumes tasks as they are sent now. It'S always gon na persist the task to Cassandra, but if a task is scheduled before a certain time in the future is also going to remain in memory. At the same time, scheduler is also fetching tasks of Cassandra on a regular basis, similar to the old work queue. 

Then this combination of in memory, tasks from Kafka and fetch tasks from Cassandra is executed by calling a task executor defined by the encompassing service. So you, as the library user, need to define how the tasks are executed and that's how we get away with not serializing any task logic. Now this looks somewhat similar to the old version, but a major change here is having Kafka in the mix as well as Cassandra. So the purpose of this talk is not to explain exactly how every part of scheduler works. Instead, I would like to talk about some of the challenges typically faced when building this type of system and how we use those three technologies to help us solve those challenges. Everybody knows distributed. Systems are hard, they have many challenges. I'M gon na focus on some three main areas during this talk, so dynamic load, which is really a problem for anyone, datacenter, outages and task ordering we'll start with dynamic load. So what happens on Black Friday when everything is happening all at once, and everyone systems are going down and that pager duty we're sending out much higher number of notifications than normal. Specifically, what happens when you start scheduling more and more tasks? So, there's a number of components: I'll need to keep up with the increased load. Well, let's start with Kafka since its first in the pipeline. So generally speaking, Kafka will scale horizontally. 

That is, we can keep adding brokers to our cluster to deal with the increased number of tasks, and this works because for a queue which is call a topic in Kafka lingo, there are n, possibly replicated partitions. So these topic partitions are spread evenly across the available brokers, such that each broker gets an even share of the traffic and therefore an even share of a disk, i/o and etc. And what's quite nice is that if you add or subtract a broker from the cluster, Kafka can rebalance it for the partition the partitions to ensure the load is still even so. Let'S take a look at how this works. We'Ll start with two brokers, and we have one topic that topic is divided into six partitions: each partition is replicated once from a leader to a follower. All the reads and writes are going to the partition leader. So, in the case of a write, the leader forwards, the write on to its followers and this leader, follower stuff, is important. We'Re going to see it again in the presentation. So in this example, each broker is a leader for three partitions and a follower for three. 

Okay, let's say we start exhausting disk i/o in our two brokers, so we got a third to the cluster. Four partitions are redistributed by Kafka. This is something you have to manually initiate, but the process itself is fully automatic. So now each broker is a leader for two partitions and a follower for two. Each broker only needs to deal with four partitions instead of six okay, again we're gon na scale out now to six brokers. Each broker is now only a leader for one partition and a follower for one, and, as you can see for this to continue scaling, we should have significantly more partitions in our topic than expected brokers. This example is not going to scale further than twelve brokers. At that point you have, each broker is either a leader or a follower for a single partition. Adding more brokers to the cluster is not going to help, but there is also a cost to having a very large number of partitions per topic. It can affect availability and end end latency. So this is not something you want to increase beyond reason, and you can do some googling to learn more about that, so that takes care of skill and Kafka. 

What about the service itself? Well again, we can scale horizontally and this is actually enabled by kafka. So the consumers of a given topic, which in this case our service instances, are grouped together, and this is called a consumer group. The group's healthy consumers are tracked by kafka through a heartbeat mechanism. The tapas partitions are distributed evenly to the healthy consumers and this is a dynamic process. So if consumers die or consumers are added, the partitions are reassigned. So here's an example with a topic that has five partitions with two service instances. In the same consumer group, one service gets three partitions and the other gets two okay. Now, let's say our two service instances can't keep up with the workload. So we had a third CAF guys off gon na automatically reassign those partitions such that they are evenly distributed across the three instances. Each instance is now responsible for two partitions that maximum instead of the previous three, this is called a consumer rebalance and Kafka. Kafka can do this very quickly, but typically you're, actually limited by how fast your application can react to that consumer rebalance. So in our particular case for scheduler, it's actually about 30 seconds again note here that the scaling is non effective. 

Once your number of instances equals your number of partitions, your instances for them to be useful, have to be working at least one partition. So this is another thing to keep in mind when choosing when choosing the number of partitions for a topic. So our service instances are receiving the tasks from Kafka, but now we have to persist them somewhere. So we're using Cassandra for our task, persistence and like Kafka. It will scale horizontally now, I'm kind of assuming that many of you know about how Cassandra scales I'm gon na, go through this pretty quickly. It'S not terribly interesting. The key for a Cassandra row is gon na be hashed into a token in a known, very large range and the nodes in the cluster are each assigned a range of those tokens. So, therefore, a given row will go on to a known node in the cluster that needs to add nodes. The original nose become responsible for a smaller range of tokens. So in this example, we have four cassandra nodes and to make the math easy. 

We'Re gon na say that the range of tokens is 0 to 99. In reality, this range is going to be much much larger, so that range is evenly divided into 4, with each node being responsible for the previous 25 tokens. So, for example, node 1 is responsible for 76 to 0. No 2 is responsible for 1 to 25. So when we insert a new row into the cluster, cassandra is gon na hash that row key to get a token and the token dictates which node the row will go on in this example, that token was calculated to be 80, so it lives on node 1. Now it doesn't take into account replication, a row is usually replicated, which means it's going to live on multiple nodes in the cluster. It also doesn't take into account Cassandra V nodes, which is a more complicated feature which I won't get into right now. Okay, so our 4 nodes are having trouble, keeping up we'll, add a fifth node to the cluster. We actually have to shift the tokens around so that they are you still evenly distributed. Each node is now responsible for 20 tokens instead 25, and this is an oversimplification that you probably wouldn't do in production, but I think it helps understand the concept. 

I also learned that it was very difficult difficult to draw us and Google drawings, so I didn't want to make it any more complicated. Ok, so our setup can handle changing load. We can add machines to our various clusters to scale horizontally. What happens when an entire data center goes away? You know what happens when someone at Amazon trips over the internet, cable? Well, we'll start with Kafka. Again. Our setup is to have 6 brokers evenly split across three different data center. So you have two brokers in each data center. Now each partition has three replicas one per data center. Again we want to be very sure that we're not going to lose any data in Kafka 0.10. You can actually ensure one replica of our data center through configuration, but we are still running Kafka 0.9. So we actually do this through some custom scripts. So when we do it right, we ensure that it's replicated to at least two data centers before the write return. Success now, normally, if all three replicas are in sync, the write will actually go to three data centers. 

But if one replicas falls out of sync, we will write to two brokers and still succeed and that's what those configuration settings mean on the slide. So if a data center fails, a third of our partitions will lose their leader. The Kafka will automatically change the leader to one of the in sync followers and all the reason the writes are going to go to that new leader. So here's an illustration of how this works - this is a very similar example to our actual setup. The only changes, then, is the number of partitions, which makes the diagram a little clearer. So we have three data centers, two brokers in each one, and there is a single topic which has six partitions. So originally, each broker is a leader for a single partition and a follower for two others: okay and we just lost datacenter 3. So Kafka is going to shift our partition leadership. Partitions 3

[think32blog]

Paul Gosling @ MacGill Summer School 23 July 19

A few days ago I discussed Northern Ireland and the prospects for Irish reunification on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. In it, I described Northern Ireland as a failed state. This upset a few people – so I’m happy to instead describe it as a dysfunctional society. That seems uncontentious to me.

Let’s look at the evidence. Mostly that’s the S’s.

Stormont. We haven’t had a government for two and a half years. When we did, they didn’t have the courage to do what needed to be done, or the willingness to enter into effective partnership.

Segregation. We educate most of our kids in a segregated system, failing to teach them how to live together. Public service duplication costs £1bn, maybe £1.5bn a year.

Subvention. That service duplication and segregated structure feeds into a financially wasteful system. According to the UK Treasury, the annual subsidy from UK taxpayers is around £10bn a year – more than the UK’s cost of being in the EU. Tell that to the English nationalists who voted for Brexit and you can see the political tensions that are awaiting. If you strip out the contributions to debt interest, the armed forces and some other non-NI costs the subvention is probably around £5bn, which is still a lot of money.

Security – in other words, paramilitary crime. Lyra McKee was killed a five minute walk from my house, which has made this feel very personal.

Schools. I keep hearing that Northern Ireland has the best schooling system. But the people who say that are middle class parents, mostly in Belfast and County Down, whose kids go to elite grammar schools. But it’s not what parents say in Creggan or loyalist East Belfast. We have a crisis of boys leaving school without basic life skills or minimum qualifications. It is another sign of division at the heart of Northern Ireland society. That is a division of class, through school selection.

Skills. We need to improve vocational training to promote aspiration across society. The lack of graduate qualifications is another real problem. A few years ago I did some research and it seemed that Derry had the lowest proportion of graduates in its labour market of any city in the EU. Northern Ireland has the UK’s smallest HE sector: a third of our undergraduates study elsewhere and most don’t return. This is understood by Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane, who a few days ago called for the expansion of Northern Ireland’s university sector to strengthen skills and productivity. He understands: Northern Ireland’s own politicians apparently don’t.

Infrastructure. Our infrastructure is dodgy and much of it barely works. It can take two and a half hours to travel the 70 miles between Derry and Belfast. It can take five hours to travel from Derry to Dublin, which is 123 miles as the crow flies. When I lived in Leicester I could travel the hundred miles to London in an hour by train.

Productivity. Northern Ireland has the UK’s joint lowest productivity. Derry has Northern Ireland’s lowest productivity: the result of insufficient skills, too few graduates, weak infrastructure and the resulting lack of inward investment, both private and public.

The NHS is great, but it is struggling in Northern Ireland because reform is taking too long without ministers in place. We have long waiting lists, long waiting times, even to see a GP.

This is a dysfunctional society. And this is without discussing how we deal collectively with the trauma and injuries from the past.

Another topic makes matters even worse – Brexit. The UK Treasury believes that over a 15 year period a no deal Brexit would leave Northern Ireland’s economy 12% smaller than without leaving the EU. People in the agri-food sector with its cross-border production processes are terrified of a no deal Brexit – some of those businesses would close. More than 40,000 jobs in Northern Ireland are at risk from Brexit.

Let us remember a couple of points here. Firstly, a Brexit referendum slogan was to take back control of our borders – the challenge is how that demand can be reconciled with having an open border in Ireland, an open border between the UK and the EU.

Secondly, there are four possible approaches to the Irish border – I won’t say solutions, but different approaches.

One is that the UK stays within the Customs Union and Single Market, accepting EU regulations and abandoning the idea of its own free trade deals. The next is that Northern Ireland is a half way house, staying within the UK (at least for now), but within the EU in terms of the Customs Union and Single Market. That would create a border in the Irish Sea, but would still allow trade between Northern Ireland and GB. The third is a controlled border in Ireland, for goods rather than people. The fourth relies on a technological solution which does not yet exist, may never exist, and is unlikely to ever be entirely effective.

A fifth option exists in the imagination of some Brexiteers – Irexit, that Ireland leaves the Customs Union and Single Market, or that it accepts borders between Ireland and the rest of the EU. I won’t give that suggestion any credibility.

All these options have difficulties. But the key point for the economy of Northern Ireland is that it needs continued open trading with both GB and the Republic. Otherwise the economy will be damaged, income will go down, jobs lost. As this happens, if it happens, more attitudes in Northern Ireland will change, with less satisfaction about being in the UK. And at the same time, the English nationalism that stoked up Brexit will become ever more restless about the subsidies from England to the devolved nations. The pressures on the UK will grow, as Theresa May and others have warned.

Meanwhile, we also have demographic changes within Northern Ireland. Unionists are no longer in a majority politically, in employment, or in the population. Another segment of the population has emerged, who do not identify with either tradition. Perhaps people like me and my family. And we can guess that younger people will be less identifying with one tradition, more drawn to the socially liberal attitudes that have emerged in the Republic. Things, socially, are changing in Northern Ireland, but without a government and Assembly to reflect this.

Occasionally I’m told I don’t have the right to discuss these things. Despite having living in Northern Ireland for 20 years and bringing up three kids in Northern Ireland. Not that any republican or Irish nationalist has ever said that to me.

But how about another ‘S’ – a solution.

The Irish Republic is economically successful and socially liberal. My kind of country. It is increasingly attractive to some of the liberal unionists I talk with, such as those who run their own businesses that depend on cross-border relationships.

But calling for a border poll today, in my opinion, is politically, strategically, not intelligent. Ireland has its own challenges – housing, health, and not least the debt it is carrying from bailing out the banks. Reunification is, though, the most sensible approach as far as I am concerned over the medium term. The question is how we get there. I suggest, we have to start by making Northern Ireland work better. Both unionists and republicans need to recognise that they have a common cause – to make Northern Ireland a better and more successful place. They actually both have selfish and strategic interests to do so.

I don’t believe the Republic is in a position today to cover the fiscal deficit of Northern Ireland. Nor do I believe that unionists should be relaxed about the continuing willingness of English nationalists to cover the subvention. Political representatives of both the main traditions need to recognise that the future of their positions requires them to make Northern Ireland work. We need a government in Northern Ireland committed to reform of our health service and schools system, investing in skills and infrastructure. A government that is determined to tackle social deprivation, inequality, poverty, creating jobs, expanding the economy.

In the short term, there is an obvious approach to be taken – which is to copy the measures the Republic has taken to turnaround its economy. This is not just about tax rates, but more importantly by investing in skills and infrastructure. It is also about even greater integration of the all-island economy – despite the challenges presented to this by Brexit.

As it happens, I believe the UK government has a moral duty to Northern Ireland which it has ducked. People expected the Good Friday Agreement to provide a peace dividend, yet it hasn’t. The gap between the employment rate in Britain and Northern Ireland hasn’t closed. There remains serious poverty and economic inactivity in many working class areas of Northern Ireland. The suicide rate has actually increased. I believe the UK government should recognise both its responsibility and its failure by investing directly into Northern Ireland infrastructure, above and beyond the city deals it has agreed with Belfast and Derry.

The Republic also needs to change. This is not just because we need to persuade unionists to consider the future – Northern Ireland cannot be simply ‘bolted on’ to the Republic. There is widespread resistance in Northern Ireland, including in nationalist and republican communities, to the idea of joining an insurance-based healthcare system. Ireland’s move to reform healthcare, Sláintecare, backed by increased all-island health provision is important to win support for unification. But this, too, cannot happen quickly. Sláintecare is a ten year programme that is behind schedule.

So my proposal is to learn from Brexit and not try to do such an immense project too quickly. A ten year timeframe might be realistic for the transition. But first we need to prepare for the border poll – though we might want to change the words. Many unionists are very sensitive and will resist any terminology that they feel is closely associated with Sinn Fein. Let’s not lose the objective because of the words we use. And if that means talking of ‘dysfunctional society’ rather than ‘failed state’ I will buy into that. And if it also means discussion of ‘A New Union of Ireland’ then fine, but let’s also discuss what that means.

It requires a conversation led by civil society, in which civic nationalism and civic unionism – and civic neutrals – come together and discuss and prove they can do so rationally and objectively. Irish unity cannot be achieved if the cause is associated, or claimed, by just one party.

A timeframe of not less than two years to prepare for a referendum, in which we put together what the new nation would be called and the detail of what it looks like, seems sensible to me. Colin Harvey has suggested 22nd May, 2023. I wouldn’t argue against that.

But I don’t think that we should pretend that changing the constitutional status of Northern Ireland is like an on/off switch, or replacing a piece of furniture.

Northern Ireland is dysfunctional and we need to make it functional. That is not simple or quick. We need a programme for economic and social recovery, along with reconciliation. We need reform. And realistically we need the financial subsidy from the UK government to be tapered off, rather than simply switched off. That would create a long term saving for UK taxpayers, while also continuing to support the very many people in Northern Ireland who regard themselves as British nationals. (And who will continue to be British nationals, if they so wish.)

Perhaps this is simply too big a task and we should abandon it as impossible. But I don’t think so.

In my life we have had the collapse of the Soviet Union, the collapse of Yugoslavia, reunification of Germany, the evolution of the Coal and Steel Community into the European Union, Brexit, the return of Hong Kong to China. These are big changes. Some have involved terrible events – giving us a warning about the need to plan and manage change.

For us, surely the starting point is for the Irish government to have a plan. Enda Kenny’s government deserves enormous credit for planning for the eventuality of a Brexit leave vote, when the government of David Cameron failed to do so. Let us call on the government of Leo Varadkar and Simon Coveney to show equal foresight by planning for what A New Union of Ireland might look like and how we arrive there.

This plan needs to consider whether there must be a new constitution, a new name, a bonding around a new sense of shared identity. We clearly need a better sub-regional economic framework for the new union of Ireland, along with an integrated, free at point of delivery health service and a housing system that works for the entire population.

Among the constitutional questions is the role of Stormont – whether it should continue and if so, whether the other provinces should have their own regional government, despite having shown no signs of wanting one. And we need a careful examination of the fiscal implications of reunification.

Not all events are foreseeable. But those events that can be foreseen should be planned for, to enable them to be managed. It starts with a conversation about the future – and that conversation has begun.

Paul Gosling

• This is the text of a speech given to the MacGill Summer School at Glenties on 23rd July 2019.

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How to Build Your Network Marketing Business Online in Three Strategic Steps

If you’re tired of prospecting friends and family, doing home meetings, cold calling, chasing after everyone you meet, or being accused of peddling some “pyramid thing”… Then you’re probably ready to build your network marketing business online. Nine months into my network marketing business, I had recruited 17 people into my business and ALL of them had quit! I had held home meetings at my mom’s house, friend’s houses, stranger’s houses, attended company events, regional events and after literally tens of thousands of miles driven and $10,000 in the hole, I was about ready to quit. It was pretty embarrassing and I absolutely DID NOT want to face the “I told you so” from anyone, so I took a leap of faith and started searching the internet for answers! By the grace of God and maybe a little luck, I found the website of someone who had built his network marketing empire almost completely online and thus began my journey into Online Network Marketing. I was saved! Long story short, after 10 years and millions of dollars in income later, I thank God for the online mentors I’ve grown with because they literally saved my life! And today, as my mentors did with me, I devote much of my time today showing others how they can take their network marketing business online and let go of everything you currently don’t like about building the old school way. Now, if you want to build your network marketing business online, here’s what you need to know… First of all, the benefits are YYYYUUUGE! You can generate fresh, qualified leads from wherever (and whenever) you, please You can end rejection forever by only talking to people who are highly interested in your offer You don’t need to drive long hours, your startup costs are low, and your business works for you 24/7—without you ever having to pick up the phone! The best part is that you don’t need to be “techie” or particularly good with computers to get started. There are three steps required to take your business online, starting with…

Now, I know people have different attitudes as far as personal development and mindset goes. But my advice is pretty practical. First, you must get comfortable with the unknown. Basically, you need to be present and respect the journey. Know that you’re not going to learn everything you need all at once, in one fell swoop. When you go online, you’re learning a whole new skill set. Almost a new profession. Think of it…

When you learn a new profession, what do you usually do?

Well, you go to school for four years. We’re not going to have you do that, and it probably shouldn’t take four years, anyway. However, if there was a school of building a business online, it probably would take a few months to get through all the coursework, so be prepared for a learning curve. Don’t try to learn everything at once. Just focus on what’s in front of you. Master that, implement it, and then move on. You have to get comfortable with not knowing what’s ahead. There’s always going to be a new technology that you don’t know about, and new skills that you have to acquire. Keep that in mind and expect the unknown. But the other issue is a biggie and comes up often: It’s the ability to overcome adversity and not give up. By going online…

Do certain parts of building your business become a easier?

Yes! That’s the purpose of going online—to create more efficiency, so you’re not doing things that either waste time or you simply don’t like doing. So no more driving around town to get from point A to point B. No more meeting people one-on-one. Or following up over and over after they’ve seen “the plan.” However, you are still going to face adversity. You’re still going to hit roadblocks and get stuck. If you’re somebody that easily gives up when you encounter those types of things, then don’t even try to build your network marketing business.

You have to respect the new skills you’re learning

And be willing to face tough times. Respect means when you actually get stuck, you don’t easily give up. You push through and become resourceful. An important part of the equation is knowing where to go to find answers or knowing who to ask to find answers (more on this later). This is vital to your success. The last thing is…

You’ve got to overcome peer-pressure

There are people that are not going to approve of you doing something that’s different from what they recommend within the company. Maybe someone in your upline doesn’t want you to explore other methods. That’s normal. It’s normal for people who have not built their business this way tend to have a negative attitude. Human beings fear the unknown, which is why the first thing I told you was: master the unknown.

It’s natural for people to fear what they don’t know

Not only is it natural to fear the unknown, but it’s also natural to attack it too. Know that your upline—even if they have a massive downline—if they haven’t built a business online, then they’re talking about something they don’t truly understand. Building a business online is completely different than building it offline. It requires different methods and an entirely different skill set. Building offline is something you can admire and appreciate—and I certainly do—and respect anyone that’s done it. But if a leader hasn’t done anything online, and they’re talking ‘smack’ about it, then they have no credibility in my book. Respect them, but don’t give in to their doubt and fear. But in today’s day and age, more and more leaders in the network marketing space are starting to accept that you can actually build on social media and using Internet marketing, and the proof is in the pudding. You see people everywhere who are successfully building online. The proof is all around you.

You don’t need the approval of anyone else

Move forward no matter what others say to you. Our community provides a lot of support as it relates to this, and we can offer you advice based on your personal situation. I’ll tell you how to receive more information at the end of this article. This sums up mindset: Master the unknown. Learn how to overcome adversity (and not be a weenie). Learn to overcome peer pressure. Those three things will come up, but now you can be prepared. The next thing you need is a…

You need an implementation blueprint. Something you can reference along the way. And there are primarily two different ways that you can build your network marketing business online. First, there’s the…

Active social media recruiting

…which you can actually implement right away. With social media recruiting, you honestly don’t have to learn much of anything. All you need is a personal account on Facebook (no website required), and some sort of process—maybe provided by your upline or somebody in your company—on how to present your opportunity and convert prospects into either buyers or new reps. You only need to know where to take them, and how to process them. You can start implementing social media recruiting strategies today to build your network marketing business. In fact, this strategy is basically equitable to what you’d do offline, except you’re transposing the process online. The challenge with social media is you’re always busy… You’re always posting. You’re always engaging. You’re always interacting with people. It produces results quickly (and it can produce massive results), and you can duplicate it quickly, but it’s time intensive. Most of the time… People will move beyond simple social media recruiting stuff, because they want to create more leverage in their business and to free up more of their time. And that’s what we’ve been teaching here at Elite Marketing Pro, for the past ten years. Speaking of which, if you’re ready to move forward now with building your business using “attraction marketing,” I’d like to invite you to sign up for my FREE 10-Day Online Recruiting Bootcamp, where you’ll gain the knowledge to create an automated selling and prospecting system to attract highly-interested prospects to your product or opportunity online. The next level of social media is…

Passive social media recruiting

…which is about posting valuable content or information that inspires people to reach out to you and ask you what you’re doing. In fact, a lot of our students are generating dozens of prospects reaching out to them, asking… “What are you doing? I want to learn more!” I prefer to start the conversation with somebody when they’re reaching out. They are coming to you—instead of the other way around. Then you’re able to create leverage and scale. All the things you normally would do with social media you’re now able to scale and accelerate your results. For this, you’re going to need a Facebook Business Page (aka a Fan Page) and a training and lead generation system like what we provide at Elite Marketing Pro. The idea is for people to reach out to you by going to your website and submitting their information, which can happen 24/7 (while you’re sleeping or at the beach). They’ll do this in exchange for valuable information you’re promised to give them. They are then automatically sent all the information they need to get familiar with your business and we provide all the tools to allow you to do this in no time!

By the time you get on the phone, they’re 90% sold!

You only answer a few questions, and they’re ready to get started. It’s all automatic. That’s what a “funnel” does. This is how you can passively have prospects come into your business, every single day. In our business, we have between 500-to-600 prospects reaching out to us, requesting information daily. There’s no way we could personally talk to every single one of them, so we had to create funnels or process to be able to present offers to people en masse on auto pilot. This allows you to take people that are brand new and fresh, and walk them through a presentation, in an automated way. That’s essentially what we’re talking about with passive recruiting strategies (which is also referred to as “attraction marketing”). Now, for the final piece, which is…

It would be very difficult for you to do everything I just described without some personal one-on-one help. Think about it, when you started in network marketing offline, somebody showed you the next steps to take. The same is true with building your business online: You need someone to show you a step-by-step blueprint. Thus, when you become a customer or client of Elite Marketing Pro, you receive free, one-on-one coaching to ensure you get started right. We know it’s overwhelming when you’re brand new. So we take away the worry by having a mentor walk you through everything step-by-step (so you don’t waste time) and tell you if you’re doing things correctly or not. This immediate feedback means…

You’ll never feel insecure about not being sure what to do next

Or not sure if what you did is correct. And hey, I know how powerful this is from personal experience. When I first got started, I spent over $150,000 (mostly on credit cards) trying to build my business without mentorship. It was pretty costly, to say the least. However, once I got the mentorship I needed, it put me on the fast track to achieving results. Two years later, I quit my job. A couple of years after that, I became a seven-figure producer in my home business, and have done multiple millions of dollars ever since. I believe you can do it too, but…

You have to make the commitment and start with the first step

So if you’ve always wanted to not only have the right information, but to have somebody personally help you, then I highly recommend you learn more about Elite Marketing Pro by signing up for my FREE 10-Day Online Recruiting Bootcamp. It’s a video course where I walk you through taking your business online. Because while it is possible to build your network marketing business offline, the way I’m providing you is more efficient, allows you to create income quickly and you can run your business from your laptop. And just like this information changed my life ten years ago, it can change your life as well. In fact, I’ll share exactly how I passively generate 300–500 leads per day, 30–50 customers per day, and recruit 70–100 new serious business-builders into my business each month. You’ll have the tools to build your business automatically—where prospects come to you on a daily basis—ready to sign up and get busy. So if you’re ready to get started… And if you found this content helpful, I would love to read your comments below! Sincerely, Chigozie NWAMADI Chief Marketing Officer NeoLife Marketing Pro Read the full article

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What Does Natural Language Processing Mean for Writers, Content, and Digital Marketing? An Essay.

What Does Natural Language Processing Mean for Writers, Content, and Digital Marketing? An Essay.

Terrible Movie Pitch:

The battle for the voice of the internet has begun. In one corner, we have computer programs fortified by algorithms, Artificial Intelligence, Natural Language Processing, and other sexy STEM buzzwords. In the other corner, we have millions of copywriters armed with the only marketable skill a liberal arts education can provide: communication. Who will lol the last lol?

Spoiler:

Writers, your jobs are probably safe for a long time. And content teams stand to gain more than they stand to lose.

I remember the day someone told me a computer had written a best-selling novel in Russia. My first thought? “I need to get the hell out of content marketing.”

The book was called True Love—an ambitious topic for an algorithm. It was published in 2008 and “authored” by Alexander Prokopovich, chief editor of the Russian publishing house Astrel-SPb. It combines the story of Leo Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and the style of Japanese author Haruki Murakami, and draws influence from 17 other major works.

Frankly, that sounds like it’d make for a pretty good book. It also sounds a lot like how brands create their digital marketing strategies.

Today, every brand is a publisher. Whether you’re a multi-billion-dollar technology company or a family-run hot sauce manufacturer, content rules your digital presence. Maybe this means web guides, blog posts, or help centers. Maybe it means a robust social media presence or personalized chatbot dialogue. Maybe you feel the need to “publish or perish,” and provide value and engagement in a scalable way.

Brands require a constant influx of written language to engage with customers and maintain search authority. And in a way, all the content they require is based on 26 letters and a few rules of syntax. Why couldn’t a machine do it?

In the time since I first heard about True Love, I’ve moved from content writing to content strategy and UX, trying to stay one step ahead of the algorithms. But AI in general and Natural Language Processing in particular are only gaining momentum, and I find myself wondering more and more often what they’ll mean for digital marketing.

This essay will endeavor to answer that question through conversations with experts and my own composite research.

Portent’s Matthew Henry Talks Common Sense

“The Analytical Engine has no pretensions to originate anything. It can do whatever we know how to order it to perform.”

-Lady Ada Lovelace, 1842, as quoted by Alan Turing (her italics)

Lady Lovelace might have been the first person to contend that computers will only ever know as much as they’re told. But today’s white-hot field of machine learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI) hinges on computers making inferences and synthesizing data in combinations they were never “ordered to perform.”

One application of this Machine Learning and AI technology is Natural Language Processing (NLP), which involves the machine parsing of spoken or written human language. A division of NLP is Natural Language Generation (NLG), which involves producing human language. NLP is kind of like teaching computers to read; NLG is like teaching them to write.

I asked Portent’s Development Architect Matthew Henry what he thinks about the possibilities for NLP and content marketing. Matthew has spent over a decade developing Portent’s library of proprietary software and tools, including a crawler that mimics Google’s own. Google is one of the leading research laboratories for NLP and AI, so it makes sense that our resident search engine genius might know what the industry’s in for.

I half expected to hear that he’s already cooking up an NLP tool for us. Instead, I learned he’s pretty dubious that NLP will be replacing content writers any time soon.

“No computer can truly understand natural language like a human being can,” says Matthew. “Even a ten year old child can do better than a computer.”

“A computer can add a million numbers in a few seconds,” he continues, “which is a really hard job for a human being. But if a cash register computer sees that a packet of gum costs $13,000, it won’t even blink. A human being will instantly say Oh, that’s obviously wrong. And that’s the part that’s really hard to program.”

“Knowing that something is obviously wrong is something we do all the time without thinking about it, but it’s an extremely hard thing for a computer to do. Not impossible—to extend my analogy, you could program a computer to recognize when prices are implausible, but it would be a giant project, whereas for a human being, it’s trivial.”

It’s not news that there are things computers are really good at that humans are bad at, and some things humans are really good at that computers can’t seem to manage. That’s why Amazon’s Mechanical Turk exists. As they say,

“Amazon Mechanical Turk is based on the idea that there are still many things that human beings can do much more effectively than computers, such as identifying objects in a photo or video, performing data de-duplication, transcribing audio recordings, or researching data details.”

Amazon calls the work humans do through Mechanical Turk “Human Intelligence Tasks,” or HITs. Companies pay humans small sums of money to perform these HITs. (A made-up example might be identifying pictures where someone looks “sad” for 10 cents a pop.)

Matthew might instead call these HITs, “Common Sense Tasks,” like knowing a pack of gum shouldn’t cost $13,000.

“People underestimate the power of common sense,” Matthew says. “No one has ever made a computer program that truly has common sense, and I don’t think we’re even close to that.”

And here’s the real quantum leap for not only NLP but Artificial Intelligence: right now, computers only know what they’ve been told. Common sense is knowing something without being told.

It sounds cheesy to say that our imaginations are what separate us from the machines, but imagination isn’t just about being creative. Today, computers can write poetry and paint like Rembrandt. Google made a splash in 2015 when the neural networks they’d trained on millions of images were able to generate pictures from images of random noise, something they called neural net “dreams.” And in 2016, they announced Project Magenta, which uses Google Brain to “create compelling art and music.”

So it’s not “imagination” in any artistic terms. It’s imagination in the simplest, truest form: knowing something you haven’t been told. Whether it’s Shakespeare inventing 1,700 words for the English language, or realizing that kimchi would be really good in your quesadilla, that’s the basis of invention. That’s also the basis of common sense and of original thought, and it’s how we achieve understanding.

To explain what computers can’t do, let’s dig a little deeper into one of the original Common Sense Tasks: understanding language.

Defining “Understanding” for Natural Language

NLP wasn’t always called NLP. The field was originally known as ”Natural Language Understanding” (NLU) during the 1960s and ‘70s. Folks moved away from that term when they realized that what they were really trying to do was get a computer to process language, not understand it, which is more than just turning input into output.

Semblances of NLU do exist today, perhaps most notably in Google search and the Hummingbird algorithm that enables semantic inferences. Google understands that when you ask, “How’s the weather?” you probably mean, “How is the weather in my current location today?” It can also correct your syntax intuitively:

And it can also anticipate searches based on previous searches. If you search “Seattle” and follow it with a search for, “what is the population,” the suggested search results are relevant to your last search:

This is semantic indexing, and it’s one of the closest things out there to true Natural Language Understanding because it knows things without being told. But you still need to tell it a lot.

“[Google’s algorithm] Hummingbird can find some patterns that can give it important clues as to what a text is about,” says Matthew, “but it can’t understand it the way a human can understand it. It can’t do that, because no one’s done that, because that would be huge news. That would basically be Skynet.”

In case you don’t know what Skynet is and you’re also too embarrassed to ask Matthew, too, here’s the Knowledge Graph.

Expert Opinion: NLP Scholar Dr. Yannis Constas on Why Language is So Freaking Hard to Synthesize

To find out what makes natural language so difficult to synthesize, I spoke with NLP expert Dr. Yannis Constas, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Washington, about the possibilities and limitations for the field. [1]

There are a lot. Of both. But especially limitations.

[Note: If you don’t want a deep dive into the difficulties of an NLP researcher, you might want to skip this section.]

“There are errors at every level,” says Yannis.

“It can be ungrammatical, you can have syntactic mistakes, you can get the semantics wrong, you can have referent problems, and you might even miss the pragmatics. What’s the discourse? How does one sentence entail from the previous sentence? How does one paragraph entail from the previous paragraph?”

One of the first difficulties Yannis tells me about is how much data it takes to train an effective NLP model. This “training” involves taking strings of natural language that have been labeled (by a human) according to their parts of speech and feeding those sentences into an algorithm, which learns to identify those parts of speech and their patterns.

Unfortunately, it takes an almost inconceivable amount of data to “train” a good algorithm, and sometimes there just isn’t enough input material in the world to make an accurate model.

“When we’re talking about a generic language model to train on, we’re talking about hundreds of millions of sentences,” he says. “That’s how many you might need to make a system speak good English with a wide vocabulary. However, you cannot go and get hundreds of millions of branded content sentences because they don’t exist out there.”

Yannis says he once tried to make an NLP model that could write technical troubleshooting guides, which might be a popular application for something like corporate support chatbots. He only had 120 documents to train it on. It didn’t work very well.

Right now, his research team is trying to figure out a way to combine corpuses of language to overcome the twin pitfalls of meager input:

Output that doesn’t make much linguistic sense

Output that all sounds pretty much the same

“We tried to take existing math book problems targeted at 4th graders and make them sound more interesting by using language from a comic book or Star Wars movie,” says Yannis. “That was specific to that domain, but you can imagine taking this to a marketing company and saying, ‘Look, we can generate your product descriptions using language from your own domain.’”

That’s the grail of NLP: language that is accurate to the domain yet diverse and engaging. Well, one of the grails. Another would be moving past the level of the sentence.

“80 to 90 percent of the focus of NLP has been on sentence processing,” says Yannis. “The state-of-the-art systems for doing semantic processes or syntactic processing are on a sentence level. If you go to the document level—for example, summarizing a document—there are just experimental little systems that haven’t been used very widely yet…The biggest challenge is figuring out how to put these phrases next to one another.”

It’s not that hard for an algorithm to compose a sentence that passes the Turing Test, or even hundreds of them. But language is greater than the sum of its parts, and that’s where NLP fails.

“When you break out of the sentence level, there is so much ambiguity,” says Yannis. “The models we have implemented now are still very rule-based, so they only cover a very small domain of what we think constitute referring expressions.”

“Referring expressions,” Yannis tells me, are those words that stand in for or reference another noun, like he, she, it, or these. He uses the example, “Cate is holding a book. She is holding it and it is black.” An NLP model would probably be at a loss for realizing that “she” is “Cate,” and “it” is “the book.”

“It’s something that sounds very simple to us,” says Yannis, “because we know how these things work because we’ve been exposed to these kinds of phenomena all our lives. But for a computer system in 2017, it’s still a significant problem.”

Models are also inherently biased by their input sources, Yannis tells me. For example, we’re discussing an AI researcher friend of his who combines neural networks and NLP to generate image descriptions. This seems like it would be an amazing way to generate alt tags for images, which is good for SEO but a very manual pain in the ass.

Yannis says that even this seemingly-generic image captioning model betrays bias. “Most images that show people cooking are of women,” he says. “People that use a saw to cut down a tree are mostly men. These kinds of biases occur even in the data sets that we think are unbiased. There’s 100,000 images—it should be unbiased. But somebody has taken these photos, so you’re actually annotating and collecting the biases.

“Similarly, if you were to generate something based on prior experience, the prior experience comes from text. Where do we get this text from? The text comes from things that humans have written…If you wanted to write an unbiased summary of the previous election cycle, if you were to use only one particular news domain, it would definitely be biased.”

(Oh yeah, and using neural networks for creating image captions isn’t just biased, it’s not always accurate. Here are a few examples from Stanford’s “Deep Visual-Semantic Alignments for Generating Image Descriptions:

Sometimes it’s right. Sometimes hilariously wrong.

Finally, perhaps one of the biggest hurdles for NLP is particular to machine learning. Interestingly, it sounds a lot like something Matthew said.

“One common source of error is lack of common sense knowledge,” says Yannis. “For example, ‘The earth rotates around the sun.’ Or even facts like, ‘a mug is a container for liquid.’ You’ve never seen that written anywhere, so if a model were to generate that it wouldn’t know how to do it. If it had knowledge of that kind of thing, it could make the inference that coffee is a liquid and so this mug could be a container of coffee. We are not there. Machines cannot do that unless you give them that specification.”

[1] Note: This interview was conducted in May of 2017. Quotes from Yannis only reflect his work, experience, and understanding at the point of this interview.

NLP is Hard. So is Programming. English is Harder.

Source

It’s kind of funny that we need common sense to navigate our language, because so much of it makes so little sense. Perhaps especially English.

There are synonyms, homonyms, homophones, homographs, exceptions to every rule, and loan words from just about every other language. There are phrases like, ”If time flies like an arrow then fruit flies like a banana.” If you need this point really driven home, read the poem “The Chaos,” by Gerard Nolst Trenité, which contains over 800 irregularities of English pronunciation. Irregularities are systemic—they’re in pronunciation, spelling, syntax, grammar, and meaning.

Code is actually simpler and less challenging than natural language, if you think about this deeply. People have this impression it’s a heavy, mathematical thing to do, and it’s a job skill, so maybe it’s harder. But I can spend six months at Javascript and I’m fairly good at Javascript; if I’ve spent six months with Spanish, I’m barely a beginner.

-Internet linguist Gretchen McCulloch to Vox

Code is the “language” of computers because it’s perfectly regular, and computers aren’t good at synthesizing information or filling in the blanks on their own. That requires imagination and common sense. A computer can only “read” a programming language that’s perfectly written—ask any programmer who’s spent hours pouring over her broken code looking for that one semicolon that’s out of place. If our minds processed language the way a computer does, you couldn’t understand this sentence:

Sure, computers can autocorrect those four misspelled words, and there’s a red line under them on my word processor. But that’s because there are rules for that, like how you can train a computer to recognize that a candy bar shouldn’t cost $13,000 because that’s 10,000 times the going rate.

Humans, however, are great at making inferences from spotty data. Our bodies do it all the time. Our eyes and brain are constantly inventing stuff to fill in the blind spot in our field of vision, and we can raed setcennes no mtaetr waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are in, as lnog as the frist and lsat ltteer are in the rghit pclae.

Inference is something we were built (or rather, evolved) to do, and we’re great at it. In fact, humans actually learn languages better when they try less hard. Language takes root best in our “procedural memory,” which is the unconscious memory bank of culturally learned behaviors, rather than in our “declarative memory,” which is where you keep the things you’ve deliberately worked to “memorize.” Children can pick up other languages more easily than adults because they’re tapping into their procedural memory.

Computers, however, were designed to excel where humans are deficient, not to just duplicate our greatest strengths.

Trying to teach a computer to process and generate natural language is kind of like trying to build a car that can dance.

It’s fallacious to assume that because a car is much better than a human at going in one direction really fast, they would also make much better dancers if we could only get the formulas right. Instead, it seems, we should focus on the ways machines’ strengths help us compensate for our deficiencies.

The Future of AI and NLP means Helping Us, Not Replacing Us

The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids,..

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