#was meant to be getting notebooks printed but the new company I found is also complicating things 🥴👍 hate it here

[southfarthing]

do you have any art ideas or projects planned for the future?

I'm gonna be honest with you chief i started employment at the beginning of this year and I've been tired sleepy ever since 😔

i drew a lotr-style map of Jane Austen houses/locations (got these printed on flower paper 🥹) and some little watercolour studies but nothing big atm! but thank you for asking! 💛

[fanficwritersinterviewed]

MCM, furiosophie

<<This post is a part of a longer conversation about fanfic writers, how they view fanfic, and their writing process. All views are the fanfic writers’ own, and whatever fanfic they choose to write is entirely their own decision. No judgement value will be placed on fic content. These conversations are meant to provide insight for other fanfic writers in whatever stage they are at in their writing life>>

Meet-Cute Monday (with furiosophie, @furiosophie)

AO3 Stats:

Pseud: furiosophie Pronouns: she/her (currently) Current fandoms: Star Wars Current pairings: Dinluke (Din/Luke), Dopeyluke (Din/Poe/Luke) How many total fic: 6 How many fandoms: 1 Total word count: 202,988 Longest fic word count: 103,615 Shortest: 2,148 Highest kudo count: 2,928 Lowest: 107

What's the story behind your pseud? It's a dumb pun I have with myself - my name is Sophie, I easily get furious about fandom shit and I'm dyslexic thus "furios sophie" with one s and no u.

You get furious? I am actually really surprised, I don't think I’ve ever noticed you getting furious before. Hahaha well I'm working on it. It's less furious, more very, very passionate. Like talking a mile a minute, forgetting to regulate my tone of voice, gesturing wildly, the whole deal.

How long have you been reading and writing fanfic? I'm not fully sure how long it's actually been but I remember asking my mom to print out fanfic at work that I copy and pasted into a doc so I could read it up in my room because we only had one pc at home, so I'd say probably 17 years or so? And I wrote my first fanfic at nine, I remember that very vividly because I wrote it in a notebook with some company logo on it and spent more time drawing the Star Wars logo on top than actually writing. Plus I had my mom proofread it so it would count as me doing my spelling homework.

It was set just before the beginning of Empire Strikes Back on the rebel base on Hoth and it was basically just a conversation between Leia, Han, Luke and the OC (original character) I created who used to be Vader's apprentice but had a change of heart and came to warn them about the imminent attack. Which I am aware is not super exciting but apparently my nine-year-old self really needed to write a fix-it.

No no! That's actually surprisingly involved for a nine-year-old kid, I'm impressed. Well my OC also rode a space skateboard and wore turquoise overalls so I feel that balances it out.

Ha!! Spectacular! Okay, so this furiosophie incarnation is your newest writing self, though you've been a few other people before this, right? I've had two other pseuds before this, yes. Kind of one for every phase of my writing: one for back when I was still writing in German during high school and one for when I first switched to writing in English during uni.

What was the inciting incident that led to the creation of this pseud?Honestly? I saw the Mandalorian season 2 finale, absolutely lost my mind when Luke showed up, went on tumblr to soak up any crumb I could get, got hit with a dinluke meme and thought "hahaha what a fucking dumb idea" and then three days later I found out that my note program apparently has a character limit because I had typed out the first 7k of “oh the things we left behind” on my phone. So I just resigned myself to my fate and created the new pseud. I had no idea what it would end up being. “ottwlb” was supposed to be three chapters, max maybe 30k. To put that into perspective - it had been roughly ten years since I had written anything at that point and the most I had written in one go was around 22k.

And it ended up being nearly 104k words. So what happened, exactly? What was it about this story that needed to come out of you and why? It started with the simple line of "Din thinks of the Jedi often. More specifically, he thinks of Grogu." That was the first thing I wrote down, and for a long while it was very much just an exploration of that thought I had since I first watched the movies which was something along the lines of "the Force and post-Return of the Jedi Luke must seem terrifying to others" until that turned into "if the Force and post-ROTJ Luke seems terrifying to others, how terrifying must that feel for him?" and I think that is where it clicked for me suddenly that I was processing a lot of my own complicated emotions around mental illness with some of this fic, that simple truth of "part of your mind is no longer your own.”

It’s funny to think, looking back, that I wasn't really aware I was processing anything with the story until I was in the thick of it. Like I knew I needed to process some shit-- I was one and a half years into recovery from severe burnout when I started writing-- but I didn't set out to do any of that processing through writing, it just happened. So this fic kind of became about accepting that sometimes the darkest parts of yourself just won't go away, that there is no absolution and no easy fix and that the only way through that is choosing to move forward. Or it's simply about two idiots taking 80k to kiss, you decide, haha!

If it’s not too invasive, do you mind talking a bit about what “severe burnout” means? Because before I met you I’d heard of burnout but it was always just a term tossed around when people got tired. I didn’t realize what it actually meant from a mental health perspective. Oh yeah sure! Though I'd like to preface this with simply saying that everyone's journey is different and this is just my personal experience. In retrospect it is not that surprising that I burned out eventually–  I had been struggling for a while in my twenties because I had a very intensive job, moved countries multiple times, tried to maintain relationships with friends, etc., but burnout is something that creeps up on you slowly and is often very hard to catch in time. It started with insomnia, then came the constant health issues, then the irritability, then I lost all interest in things I used to love, was unable to write at first, then draw, then hang out with friends, then watch TV, eventually I stopped making dinner because it was too much of an effort to make and then, right in the thick of it, I was unable to take care of myself at all.

But that whole process happened over the span of nearly two years, and in my case really probably my whole life because my specific type of burnout was brought on by the fact that I grew up undiagnosed autistic. So it wasn't one big thing, it was me continuously over-exerting myself from a very young age. There is this concept of disabled/neurodivergent kids being "twice exceptional"  which basically means that to excel you have to work twice as hard as your peers, once to bridge the gap of the base requirement of function and then once to actually thrive at school, or university, etc. and that ultimately led to me burning out. I actually had several unrelated burnouts throughout my life, the most severe ones after high school and university which, since I was seemingly functioning, were all treated as "you're just a little tired".

When you had that “a ha!” moment that your first fic was really about you processing what you’d just gone through, how did that inform your writing? I think the biggest plot point that was informed by that "a ha" moment was the choice to write chapter seven from Luke's perspective. Once I knew what I was doing it seemed impossible not to tell the story from his POV. I also kind of doubled down on the "being force-sensitive is a metaphor for being neurodivergent" thing because that analogy was just very comforting to me.

And “go and get your hands dirty”? Lmao. Very, very different vibe. I think dinluke kink week was going on back then and myomikan was drawing something for it so my idiot brain thought "you are incapable of writing smut why don't you also participate?" Which ended with me writing the first scene of that fic and then it just...I honestly don't know what happened, it was supposed to be max 10k. I had it all planned out, but apparently I am not only incapable of writing smut but also incapable of writing anything other than a slow burn. There really are no deep thoughts in that fic, which is probably why it was fighting me in the beginning, but it did end up being very helpful as a kind of sandbox where I could try out different pacing and character conflict that I struggle writing. I am still very on the fence about that fic, I know it had somewhat good reception but it is the one fic where I honestly can't tell if it works or not.

What's something in that one that you were intentionally trying out all the while knowing it wasn't your strong suit? The physical elements of it mostly. I am not joking when I say I am very bad at that, as well as the conflict based on miscommunication/a secret rather than outside factors, and the tension that comes with that. In “ottwlb” there is conflict but they are always a unit, while in “gagyhd” their turmoil is to some degree self-inflicted. Also parts of their relationship are genuinely unhealthy but in a sort of helpless way that stems from their trauma and upbringing which I really enjoyed exploring because trauma does not absolve you from being an asshole so my challenge was kind of to walk that line of "they are very dysfunctional but aware of it and trying to work towards being better."

Dysfunctional but aware. I think there’s a lot of us that can relate to that, lol!

[daniellesmithtv]

The Most Unique Gifts for Father’s Day: Think The Grommet

Gift giving is my love language.

There is just something so magical about taking the time to find the ‘perfect’ gift for someone you love and seeing them light up with the recognition of your effort and pride in finding something JUST for them.

I do it for birthdays. And for Christmas.

I do it just because.

And I do it on those special days meant to honor a role in your life – like Father’s Day.

The older my kids get, the more I want them involved in the process.

I admit – my husband is notoriously hard to gift because he is committed to the idea that he has everything and will only ask for something he NEEDS – like socks. But the fun comes when I DO find the right gift.

For me, that means seeking the different, the unique, the personalized…. I’m always looking for the ‘wow’ gift – the, ‘where did you FIND this?’ moment.

Good news (for me AND you!) I’ve found just the place you need to go – and I promise, you won’t have to worry about giving a gift they already have.

I’ve partnered with my friends at The Grommet to share gift ideas you will love to give.

How to Find the Perfect, Unique Gift for Father’s Day

Start here:

What do they love? This special dad in your world – what does he love? I’m not asking what he does because he must (for example – travel for work), but what makes him smile? Is he an avid golfer? Does he tinker with the bbq in his free time? Is he planning his next traveling adventure?

Then head to The Grommet – a site dedicated to highlighting and offering innovative products from local makers and small businesses. As you explore so many of the items, you will find dedicated YouTube videos that showcase the gifts AND give you a sneak peek in to the process and creators.

The Grommet has a Father’ Day section that covers just about every interest Dad could have – from wine and beer to fishing, from unique technology to home improvement.

Personalize it. In our home, I combined the practical (sure to make my husband happy) with the thing he loves most – aside from our kids – BASEBALL.

Since we just finished our basement and it is, absolutely, an hommage to his love of the game and his desire to be on the diamond (coaching, watching and playing), I decided to spoil him with a few items that will make him smile AND one that he can use game after game.

I started here: with the history of the game.

These themed historical prints are ideal for anyone who has a love of both history and a specific field – aviation, military, the police force. Clearly baseball was the right choice for Cooper and Delaney’s Dad. The prints bring the past to life and show the evolution of the uniforms in exquisite detail. The prints can come framed or unframed.

I then jumped to a gift that is even more personal:

His love of the St. Louis Cardinals. When my husband was only 5 years old, he was required to memorize and recite the inscription on Stan Musial’s statue before entering Busch Stadium. Though Busch Stadium has been re-done since he was a child, it is his mecca. So, it is only fitting to have a replica in our baseball basement. And this 3-D Laser Cut Stadium Map is the perfect fit. It is handcrafted laser cut aerial imagery made of Baltic Birch Plywood and an authentic rendition of both the stadium and downtown St. Louis. You could also do a similar print with the stadium set, not in the city, but on a cut out of your state.

And finally, get creative.

As a coach, he is always taking note, creating lineups and calling plays. I thought this Reusable Whiteboard Notebook was just the thing to keep him company in the dugout. It never runs out of pages, he can sketch, draw or make notes and it is easily portable.

What about you? Have a One-of-a-Kind dad in your world you are looking to spoil with a one-of-a-kind gift? I have you covered. You can shop by interest or hobby – or by who you are gifting (dad, son, grandfather.)

And be sure to come back and tell me what you found.

This is a sponsored conversation written by me on behalf of The Grommet. The opinions and text are all mine.

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[thirstyfortom]

How would do the RFA +V + Unknown react to MC being an journal keeper, she's been writing down her thoughts and the day's happenings in her journal. This happened since she was very young so there a huge stack of journals in her room. And her new journal entries is almost most of the time about her feelings for them, their sweet moments together and how much she loves and treasures them. Plus MC writes like a true novelist.

Such an interesting request! I hope I did justice to it! ^^

RFA + Saeran and V react to MC being a journalkeeper

TW: Mentions of LGBTQphobia and depression

Zen

When you moved in together, you brought this huge box filled with notebooks

Noticing his curiosity, you tell him these are your old journals, you have one for each year of your life since you’re 10.

He thinks it’s adorable, and he’s so curious! How were you like during your teenage years?

You’re so embarrassed to show him, so you pick the ones you consider slightly decent, when you were 18 and the hormones weren’t taking control of your mind anymore

When he starts reading, he’s shocked: did an 18 years old girl really write this? It sounds like those really good monologues he’s only seen on cult theatre pieces.

Seriously, just say the word and he’ll introduce you to producers and make all your thoughts turn into a musical, a TV show, maybe a movie! Easy there, Zen…

And if he wasn’t impressed enough, he sees the most recent journal, and it’s filled with sweet things about him, like, not even himself could think of this kind of sweet things to tell you.

The way you describe him, not only his looks, but all of his features, even the ones that aren’t that good… it’s so passionate, yet so honest.  Not even a narcissist like him sees himself as highly as you do.

He doesn’t understand why you would keep these sweet words only to yourself, but won’t pressure you, he knows you are really good at showing your affection, as it is vividly described on that page you tell about the first time you two made love.

Yoosung

He tried keeping journals, but they all ended forgotten somewhere

So he really admires your care for your journals, he wish he could be like that

He’s a little curious about your high school crushes, he would love to see the way you describe them, he would feel a little jealous, but he really wants to meet you as a teenager in love.

But when you show him… he feels… futile? Because it’s all so deep and meaningful, and it’s filled with intricate thoughts about your relationship with your parents, things he could never think by himself…

There’s a brief mention about a guy you dated, but he feels how meaningless it was and how he was clearly not that into you by the way you describe it, and now he hates this guy so much!

When it comes to him, he’s legitimately crying for the way you write him. He thought he was in despair when he hurt his eye? Now he knows your agony, and it’s so… painful.

And when he reads about your first date, he’s giggling so much, as if he is reading some comic book about another person, like he wasn’t even there.

Also, he feels a little stupid for not understanding some passages, like this one you wrote a couple of weeks ago. He shyly asks and shyly he stays when you explain you’re describing an orgasm. “Seriously…? I… I… did all this to your body? Whoa…”

Jaehee

She thought about having journals, she had so much to express! However, so little time to actually do it…

So she’s impressed about your diligence, since, generally, you’re not that organized about things (and that’s just one of the things you hate in yourself, but she freaking loves it!)

She knows how personal these things can be, and it’s totally okay if you don’t want her to read. When you say you don’t really mind, she can hold back her enthusiasm…  yes, she really wanted this, she just wouldn’t admit it.

The one with your last year of high school draws her attention immediately, since it looks like is the one with most written pages.

And she quickly understands why when she starts reading it. So much worries about the future, not even her was so concerned about her own future like you sounded there.

Thoughts that almost every young person has, but the way you describe it makes it feel like it’s something so different, as if your doubts and insecurities were so unique…

She cries when she gets to the part you tell how you were dragged out of the closet as bisexual when a girl you trusted told the whole neighborhood about it.

And then it comes to when you met, the way you describe every chat you had on the app, every thought you had beneath every word you send… she knew how much it meant for both of you, but this was on a whole another level now.

She blushes reading the way you describe her and touches you, but what really makes her heart flutter is the description about the first time you tasted a cup of coffee made by her… seriously, it’s just… too much!

She feels so inspired after that. Maybe now she has a lot more of free time, she could start writing her own journal? There’s a lot about you she needs to learn how to put in words…

Jumin

Well, a journal could be a great help for him during all those years, now he knows that.

So he’s glad at least you didn’t have to struggle so much like he did

He won’t say it loud, but he’s curious! Soooooo curious! You can see it on his eyes, so you allow him to take a look, his soft smile giving away how much he wanted you to allow it…

He loves it, he wants to take all the journals out of the box and put them on his personal library.

He also wants to introduce you to publishers and editors, he’ll do whatever it takes for you to be a best-seller. Jumin, please chill

If he had tangled knots inside his heart, you were apparently trapped on thick ropes of problems. The way you describe your parent’s divorce and how it affected most of your teenage years make him ache deep inside. You’ve come a long way…

He’s afraid of reading about himself, especially those long and confusing three days he locked you up in his penthouse…

And yes, you’re very honest about how scared you were, but only because you knew that confused and anxious guy wasn’t the man you’ve fallen in love with, and the way you describe your love for him… he had no idea it was this overwhelming.

He loves the way you write your interactions with Elizabeth the 3rd, and can’t hold back a grin when he reads your description about the first time you had sex.

Now everytime you two start getting heated, he tells you he’ll give you enough material for your journal…

Saeyoung

He dug all he could during your background check, except for that private blog (which wasn’t private for him if he didn’t want to)

He knew how personal it was, so he wouldn’t dare to dig on that. No… if he knows something, is about letting some thoughts only to yourself.

But when you tell him he can read if he wants, he quickly changes his mind. This is the closest he ever gonna get to hack into you.

He wants to print everything and turns into books he can hang at his personal library, “The Expert Playboy” would gain such a more refined and delicate company in that shelf.

Or make this public and monetize it somehow, because you deserve earning money on this, it’s… all… so… good!

The funny parts are HILARIOUS, your writing is so on point about embarrassing situations, he feels as if it happened to him. You should write scripts for sitcoms, you have this amazing ability to turn trivial situations into witty jokes, the type of jokes he would never be able to think of it.

And the sad things, your mother’s death… he never could care about his mother the way you did for yours, but somehow… he feels extremely sympathetic.

When it comes to him… he’s blushing. Your description about his hair and eyes… god, it’s basically a thesis on why it’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen.

And he feels guilty all over again reading about the way he pushed you away, but then again… you turned this into a bittersweet kind of thing, mixing comedy and tragedy in a way only someone like you could do it.

He cries when you describe the moment he found Saeran, he wasn’t this thrilled not even when the actual thing happened back then.

He’s blushing so much when you compare the first orgasm he gave you to the mixture of salty and sweet taste of Honey Budha Chips and Dr. Pepper… because he feels exactly the same way.

Saeran

He actually is keeping one because of therapy, so he asks you for help.

But he had no idea how in love you are for this, you’re more excited than him about his own journal.

He’s not sure if he really wants to read your teenage girl whining about boys and prom, but he really wants to know how to do this!

When he starts reading it… he’s addicted to it. You catch him binge reading all of them all the time.

You’re so sarcastic! Everything in your life seemed so bittersweet, he’s rooting for you to ditch the asshole you were dating and find happiness on yourself, because you’re so great! And he celebrates when finds you actually did!

He’s reading this and imagining as if it was a TV show… a very cliché one, but still, the kind of cliché you can’t take your eyes off!

He wishes he could deal with his problems the way you did, you were so screwed when your found about your father’s second family, yet… here you are, this amazingly sweet and bright person dealing with struggle with so much fierceness and kindness

When you told him that you were never scared of him, he didn’t believe it. Reading on the journal, he starts to believe.

He’s embarrassed when he reads about himself, you portray him as this adorable anti-hero, and he doesn’t think he deserves it, your description about his eyes makes him shiver…

Feels really good about the way you describe sex with him, and when you wrote it’s like all the flavors of ice cream combined, he’s gone!

V

I guess he has sight for this one

He used to have a dream journal, and stopped when most of the dreams were about Rika

He admires your commitment to write every day, even when apparently nothing special happened.

But when he gets to read it, he understands: your writing make every day sound special and amazing.

He gets more and more mesmerized at every page, he pictures the scenes on his mind, putting himself at your place. It takes a lot of talent to transport people to your own universe with just some words well put together, and you have this talent!

Personally, your descriptions about first times are the most impressive ones, the first time you saw snow, your first date with your first boyfriend, the first time you touched yourself…  he almost can feel what you felt.

And the struggles and self-loathing, dealing with depression with a family who doesn’t seem to understand you were sick… he feels your pain on his own skin and mind.

He’s so flattered about the way you see him. Is his voice that soothing? His eyes that beautiful? He wishes he could see the world through your eyes, his photos would be even better with such a unique and sweet vision like yours.

He was impressed about the first time you touched yourself, just imagine when he got to the part about sex with him. Your words seem like little magic spells, hypnotizing more and more.

[ilyseok]

More than just a diary

Fandom: BTS Pairings: Rap Monster | Kim NamjoonxReader Genres: Fluff, college AU Rating: PG Words: 3877

Summary: Springtime at the university was your favorite time of the year, and the giant library in the middle of campus your favorite hangout. Thanks to the busy students studying during midterms, you were forced to vacate your usual spot and end up in the company of a mysterious purple haired boy - a writer, much like yourself.

AO3 Link

A/N: It took me long enough to write, but finally I’ve finished it. I’ll work on the Jimin x Reader fic after this. And now for your healthy dose of fluff before I start posting the heavy angst

Springtime.

Just thinking of the word brought a smile to your face. Though the beginning of spring was always cold and snowy, it was time for the transition into clear skies, sunny days, and the blossoming of the trees that lined the sidewalks all through the campus. Spring had finally made its way to the university, and you couldn’t be any happier. You loved taking long walks from one end of the campus to the other, just to walk through the forest of blooming pink magnolia trees – especially at night to see the stars light up the sky behind the bell tower of the university’s administration building. Spring was finally in full bloom, and that meant one thing above all: midterms.

An unfortunate part of being a university student – the most beautiful days were still filled with the dread of exams and research papers. Luckily for you, all of the classes you signed up for that semester were general education requirements and typically made for easy A’s. Your midterms were looking pretty lax compared to the rest of your fellow third year students, but still you visited the library on a regular basis as always.

As you rounded the corner toward your usual spot, winded from climbing six flights of stairs, you noticed a group of two or three students gathered at the table, probably discussing a plan for a forced group project due soon. You decided to just look around the floor a bit for another place to sit, but every table on the floor was either full of chatty college kids or a person with their belongings sprawled over the entire table. You debated going back to the dorm to work on your notecards, but just before you were about to give up, you found an open spot in the corner behind the historical document collection. There was only one person sitting there - a twenty something year old boy sitting at the table, a notebook in front of him and a copy of Fahrenheit 451 in his hand.

You set your heavy backpack down on the table with a thunk and peered at the boy from the corner of your eyes. He seemed to not notice your presence as he never once looked up from the book he was so engaged in. His white, thick-rimmed glasses nicely framed the shape of his face and complimented the color of his pastel purple hair, which he wore combed to the side. When you took a closer look at him, you noticed the pair of earbuds mostly concealed by the black zip-up hoodie he wore. The reason he hadn’t noticed you was probably because his earbuds were so loud – typical of most students who flocked to the library to study for midterms.

You waved a hand in front of him to catch his attention, and he pulled one earbud out and looked up at you.

“Is it okay if I sit here?” You motioned toward the chair on the opposite end of the table as you asked him.

“Yeah, go for it.” He automatically put the earbud back in and resumed being oblivious to the world outside of the book and the music. You could faintly hear some of the beats and words of the music, but mostly it was only the clicking of the hi-hat roll in the backtrack that you could hear. Nothing you recognized stood out.

Three hours and five thousand note cards later, you decided to look over to the tall boy with the music out of curiosity. He still sat at the other end of the table, apparently finished with his book since he was writing in a black leather journal. It was similar to the journal of your own that you kept on hand at all times. Seeing his journal reminded you of an idea you had earlier in the day, while you were in the middle of a chemistry lecture. Before you could forget the feeling of the idea itself, you dug your journal out of your bag and opened it to the next fresh page to start an outline for a new story, immediately forgetting about the English notecards you’d spent all afternoon studying. Thankfully the caffeine in your hot drink assisted your ability to remember the idea, which was surprising since the urge to write it came to you more than fifteen hours ago.

Pausing to give your poor hand a break, you looked at the time 11:37PM. The library was open late for midterms for the next two weeks, but still you jumped out of your seat and grabbed everything in your hands and bolted for the elevator. Unfortunately for the both of you, you and the mysterious boy were thinking along the same lines of wanting to leave. You collided when you rounded the corner of one of the bookshelves and dropped everything, as did he.

“I’m so sorry,” you apologized, quickly gathering your journal and messy stack of notecards and stuffing them in the front pocket of your bag. “I just remembered the last bus is about to arrive.”

“No worries. I understand,” he said with a sweet smile and a gentle look in his eyes. You found yourself unable to look away from him as you handed his book back to him. Your eyes traveled from to his purple hair and blue eyes, to the dimples framing his charming smile, and then to the sharp edge of his jawline. Suddenly realizing how long you’d been awkwardly staring at him, you smiled awkwardly and ran off to the bus stop to catch the last campus carousel to your dormitory.

Finally, after a long day of studying, the rest of the night was yours to spend however you wanted. Of course this meant opening your favorite writing network chat on kakaotalk to tell your friends about your new fic idea.

Y/N: I hate how every idea comes to me at the most inconvenient times! >:[

Cap’n Kookie: Me, every day

Y/N: Luckily I remembered it when I was going through my English flashcards at the library earlier

Cap’n Kookie: So what you’re saying is you went to the library to study and wrote a novel instead?

Y/N: ...maybe.

Cap’n Kookie: atta girl

Able Seawoman Yoonji: kids these days smh... I bet you’re one of those shippers my mother warned me about, too -_-

Y/N: Give me a sec and I’ll type it up for you

You pulled the journal out of the front pocket of your purple and black messenger bag and opened it to the last used page, excited to properly outline the idea for your friends. Before you went any further you noticed the strange handwriting scribbled on the page. So as to make sure you’re not going insane, you checked the interior of the cover of the spiral bound book for the customized galaxy print you’d decorated the inside with. You’d spent at least six hours working on that interior, and you specifically remember that it was not designed to be ripped out, so there was only one possibility remaining: this was not your journal.

Panic spread through your mind like wildfire. Did you accidentally switch with the mysterious boy from the library? What if he read it?

Y/N: Mayday MAYDAY

Cap’n Kookie: Requesting the status of the situation, first mate Y/N?

Y/N: BAD

Able Seawoman Yoonji: ???

Y/N: VERY BAD

You described the boy you’d met at the library to the chat and waited for Yoonji and Kookie’s advice.

Cap’n Kookie: What exactly is in the journal?

Y/N: I can’t just look at someone’s journal! I would hate it if he did that to mine.

Cap’n Kookie: Fair.

Able Seawoman Yoonji: This is your best chance to find out if the cutie from the library is a psychopath or not

Y/N: I do like people who aren’t psychopaths…

You opened the journal to another page in spite of your inner voice telling you not to invade another’s privacy. The writing on the page was small and messy, but still legible. You skimmed through the page.

I know every life’s a movie We got different starts and stories We got different nights and mornings Our scenarios ain’t just boring

Either this man was a poet or a lyricist. You weren’t sure which, so you skimmed the page some more.

Hey you, who’s looking over the Han River If we bump into each other while passing, would it be fate? Or maybe we bumped into each other in our past life Maybe we bumped into each other countless times

Cap’n Kookie: So? What does it say

Y/N: It looks like lyrics? Maybe a poem? idk

Able Seawoman Yoonji: Like angsty teenage boy lyrics or what?

Y/N: No. They’re sad but also really deep.

Able Seawoman Yoonji: show us, Y/N-sshi ~

Y/N: No way! It’s already bad enough that I invaded his privacy. I can’t show you guys too.

Able Seawoman Yoonji: He doesn’t have to know anyone saw anything ;)

Cap'n Kookie: You’re a bad influence and I hope you know that

After reading the short passage of the journal, you resolved to get it back to the boy as quickly as possible. Unfortunately that would have to wait until the next day, so hopefully you would be able to find him in the library again. You felt a swirl of both relief and dread at the thought of getting your journal back due to the possibility that he might have read it by the next time you saw him. But if you were lucky enough to see him, there was always the positive of getting to see that gorgeous face again, even if he read your journal and judged you harshly.

\\

The next day you went to the library around the same time to catch him, and sure enough he was there reading a new book today. After seeing his purple hair and the dimples on his cheek when he laughed at parts of the book he read, you abandoned your original plan of working on your botany paper - plants are overrated anyway. Instead, you took out your books and spread them out on the table and played awkwardly with your phone for a moment while you tried to work up the nerve to break the ice. Just as you were contemplating it, he said something first.

“Hey, you’re the girl from yesterday, aren’t you?” he said. You quickly forgot about the game of candy crush on the screen and looked up at him.

“Y-yeah, I decided I kind of like this area of the library more,” you said. As soon as the words left your mouth, you realized that it sounded like you were planning on permanently invading what seemed like his territory in the library. You stuttered as you tried to explain yourself. “I- I mean I like this section. I didn’t mean to take up your table or anything. It’s just that the other tables are-” He cut you off.

“No, it’s fine. You’re not bothering me at all,” he said. Your heart skipped a beat when he smiled at you. “I’m glad you’re here actually. I think I have something that belongs to you.” He dug through his bag again to pull out a black, spiral-bound leather journal – your journal.

“Oh thank god,” you said, grateful that he was the first to approach the topic. “I wanted to give this to you as well.” You shuffled around the front pocket of your messenger bag for his and exchanged journals.

“Thanks,” he said. “Sorry about the confusion.”

“A-ah, it’s no problem,” you said and looked down and away from him, not wanting to speak the worries on your mind.

“I didn’t read anything, if that’s what you’re worried about,” he said, as if he knew exactly what you wanted to ask. “I saw a few sentences at the end, but as soon as I saw the handwriting, I stopped immediately.” You sighed in relief, feeling like you’d been holding your breath for the past twenty-four hours.

“Thank you, I appreciate it.” You looked into his eyes and smiled shyly. “Likewise, I didn’t read yours either.” A pang of guilt pierced your chest when you lied to him, but soon the weight was lifted off of your shoulders when he brushed it off.

“I wouldn’t mind even if you did. That’s very courteous of you, though,” he laughed. “That journal must be pretty important to you, given your reaction when I gave it back to you.”

You hugged your journal close and nodded. “It's more than just a diary. I keep my entire life in this journal.”

“You mean like a horcrux?” He laughed again. Oh god, his smile. You internally begged him to stop looking at you with that gorgeous smile, yet secretly enjoyed it at the same time. A small smile crossed your lips in return.

“Not quite that literally,” you said. “I keep track of my assignments in the calendar in the back and I have a section for contacts. I have a few other sections in there too. One of them I use for venting about my botany professor.”

“And the others?”

“Ah…” you hesitated for a moment, even though he silently encouraged you to talk about it. His aura was very relaxed and non-judgmental so you wanted to talk about your writing - after all, it would be nice to have friends nearby that you can talk story ideas with. But your past reactions from your friends in high school kept you from saying much.

“I won't pressure you to talk about it if you're not comfortable. But unless it's about your plan to take over world with an army of bloodthirsty penguins, I won't judge you.”

“That's oddly specific,” you said.

“Look, a guy has to think about his future. Wouldn't want the competition getting ahead, you know?” He spoke with an easiness that made you feel like you'd known him for years. It was relieving to not have to struggle with the tortuous small talk that normally occurred between two strangers.

“Remind me not to get on your bad side,” you said with a laugh. “It's nothing quite that ridiculous. I like to write, so I keep that with me for outlining and writing down my story ideas.”

“That's actually really cool,” he said. The softness in his eyes reflected how genuine he was. “I have a lot of respect for that kind of thing. I like to write, myself. Well, not stories, but lyrics.” He patted the cover of his identical journal.

So they were lyrics.

“You must have quite a lot to study for,” he said, gesturing at the stack of notecards poking out of your bag. You winced at your then-abandoned English notecards and took a deep breath, trying to fend off any negative energy about your upcoming English midterms.

“Yeah, English midterms. It’s an oral exam, actually.” He nodded intently, encouraging you to go on, but you didn’t press the topic any further.

“I know most people don’t like to take help from someone they’ve barely spoken to for more than 15 minutes, but if you seriously need the help on it, I’d be more than willing to help you with your English. I’m actually pretty fluent,” he said. It’s not that you were shocked that he was fluent in English – actually, half of the lines you’d read the night before weren’t in Korean so you knew that there had to be some truth to him knowing more languages than it might first appear. You grabbed your stack of notecards and began to leaf through them, picking out the ones with orange and red post it note tabs on them and handing them to him.

“These are the ones I’m having trouble with the most,” you said sheepishly. He took them from you and you noticed that his large hands were surprisingly soft and extremely warm. He shuffled through the index cards for a few moments, taking note of any commonalities between them in order to pinpoint your problems.

“Are you having trouble remembering how to say them?”

“Yes. Why are there at least 30 different words with ‘ough’ in them, but only 35% of them sound similar?”

He read through some of the notecards aloud, “Tough, thought, though… You know, I actually prefer to draw on my flashcards to help me remember. Do you mind if I tried it?” You shook your head because he was being so kind just by helping you, and you certainly wouldn’t mind a doodle or two on your notecards to keep you interested in them. He began to draw on the side of one of your notecards and then handed it back to you a few moments after he was done with it. Off to the side of the word “tough” was a small line drawing of a puppy with a wild mane of hair on the top of his head between his two fluffy ears. He had a hairstyle much like the mysterious boy in front of you, and it made you giggle.

“Puppy?”

“Does he not look tough enough for you?” he asked, half jokingly.

“Well yes, but why a puppy?” you asked, your thumb absentmindedly tracing over the small drawing on the card.

“So the puppy says ‘ruff’, right? I like to think of the puppy because tough rhymes with ruff,” he said as he went through some of your other notecards, picking out the ones with the easiest associations and working his way up.

Apparently you needed more help than you realized because before you knew it, the two of you had been working on your note cards for more than three hours. The muscles in your lower back and neck ached, so you stood up and stretched for a bit, and that’s when you suddenly felt the familiar weight of sleep tug at your eyelids. You should probably get back to your room soon, but you were having a hard time resisting the pull of gravity into your chair. You were immediately pulled out of your state of drowsiness when the smooth voice of the library night staff rang out over the PA system.

“Attention BTSU students and faculty, the library will be closing in fifteen minutes. We will reopen at 7:00 AM tomorrow, with extended hours continuing through next Friday.”

You smacked your the palm of your hand to your forehead and groaned. You looked at the time on your phone, and sure enough, it read 11:45 PM.

“Something wrong?”

“The buses stopped running six minutes ago,” you whined.

“You live in the dorms? I can walk you back if you’re worried about being alone,” he offered.

You weren’t afraid to walk alone, but you were tired and not in the mood to walk all the way from the library back to your room with 50 pounds of books. If anything, having company on the way back would make the walk go quicker. You had zero reason to turn him down, to be honest.

“Sure. I’d like that,” you said softly, your cheeks turning a light shade of pink and butterflies welling up inside your chest. As you gathered up your things, you opened up the journal in your hands to make sure you had your own before tucking it safely in its place in the front pocket of your bag.

The moment you stepped out the side door of the library, the chill of the night made you shiver. A sign of early spring - the weather unpredictably wavered between warm and sunny with clear skies, and dreary and overcast with a chance of blizzards.

“Do you want my jacket? We’ve got a long walk back,” he said.

“No, I don’t want you to be cold because of me,” you said.

“I’ll be fine, but if you don’t want to that’s okay,” he said. Truth be told, you would have been more than happy to have the jet-black bomber jacket he wore around your shoulders. The cold radiated through your bones, but you suppressed your shivers the best you could. Your reaction was purely habitual, but you didn’t want to take it from him immediately after saying no.

The two of you walked down the main pathways in the center of campus to your dormitory building, a good distance apart, but still close enough for a small sense of intimacy. You looked up at the night sky between the trees every once in awhile to admire the stars. A harsh wind whirled past you so you could no longer suppress the chattering of your teeth and the shivering of your shoulders. As you were mentally kicking yourself for not thinking any better by wearing only a short sleeved shirt that evening, a heavy warmth enveloped you. You gladly welcomed the heat of the smooth satin lining and pulled it closer around you, slipping your arms through the long sleeves of the bomber jacket.

“You could have said something if you were cold,” he laughed.

“Thanks,” you said sheepishly. The tall outline of your 18-story residence hall suddenly came into view, with the lights from each room twinkling in the distance, and he paused.

“Ah, if you don’t mind I actually have to part ways with you here,” he said, gesturing toward the sidewalk where the path split into two: one path toward the dormitory and another toward the street where most off campus students lived.

“Oh, that’s fine,” you said. Suddenly you remembered you had his jacket, but as soon as you moved to give it back to him, he stopped you.

“You’re fine. You can just give it back to me at the library,” he said with a smile that melted your heart.

“A-ah, thanks.”

“See you next time, Y/N,” he said as he walked the other way and waved at you.

“Y-yeah, next time,” you stuttered, your heart jumping in glee.

When you got back to your room that night, you flopped onto your bed and whipped out your phone, replaying his words in your head as you recounted the day’s events to Yoonji and Kookie. You thought about his last words several times before a thought occurred to you.

How did he know your name?

You quickly pulled out your journal and searched through the contacts section toward the back, unable to remember whether or not you’d bothered to put in your own contact information “just in case.” As it turns out, your suspicions were correct. It was then that you noticed a small red sticky note poking out from the edge of another page in the very same section. When you opened it up to inspect the new addition to your journal, you noticed a new entry at the back of the section written in handwriting similar to that of the purple haired boy.

Name: Kim Namjoon

Phone: XXX-XXX-XXXX

Email: rapmon.knj@bighit.com

Hit me up anytime if you wanna talk about your stories ☺ -Namjoon

Next to his name, he left a small cartoon drawing of himself, complete with wild hair colored in with a purple sharpie.

Next time, huh?

[vsplusonline]

Imran Amed: Fashion’s insider

New Post has been published on https://apzweb.com/imran-amed-fashions-insider/

Imran Amed: Fashion’s insider

In the high-wattage fashion industry, one man stands apart. Imran Amed is someone whose dinners are attended by the Kardashians, who quickly puts together a panel with Deepika Padukone and Sabyasachi Mukherjee while on a whirlwind trip to India, and whose persuasive powers can get Tom Ford to pose for the cover of the first edition of his company’s print magazine.

Amed’s The Business of Fashion (BoF) — a personal blog he started in 2007 for friends and family — has today morphed into a virtual bible for the fashion industry. Each morning, a BoF email hits the inboxes of 7,00,000 registered users, with a mix of original stories and links to news and features about the fashion industry. A recent sample: how UK consumer spending is down, how to launch an influencer brand in 2020, and what fashion brands need to know about the coronavirus. The emails are a must-read not just for the industry’s most influential folks (from designers Tory Burch to Anya Hindmarch), but also for anyone with even a cursory interest in fashion. With BoF, of which he is CEO and editor in chief, Amed, 44, has cemented his reputation as the oracle of style. It is no wonder that in 2018 The Guardian called him ‘fashion’s most influential man’.

Amed and Christopher Wylie (right) during #BoFVOICES   | Photo Credit: Getty Images

Front row fixture

Last month, I spent time with him in Davos, where he had come to attend the World Economic Forum. It was his first visit — WEF’s dates overlap with the Paris haute couture shows — but this year he made it a point to attend because of an issue especially close to his heart: fashion and sustainability. BoF recently reported that in 2019, 114 billion clothes were sold globally (amounting to 15 new pieces per person on Earth).

There are other daunting stats, too: according to the UK-based Ellen MacArthur Foundation, global clothing production has doubled in the past 15 years, and a projection by the Pulse of Fashion Industry report states that by 2030, the apparel and footwear industry is set to grow 81%, while textile waste is set to increase 60%.

Influencer with a twist

In an era where Instagram influencers, and digital and traditional media outlets jockey for mind space, BoF brings clarity and sharp analysis to the cluttered world of fashion news. With a team of 100 scattered across New York, London, Paris and Shanghai, Amed describes BoF as a “resource for the global fashion industry”. Its revenue model includes events, online courses and a career database.

In 2016, the company started BoF Professional, charging $240 a year for premium content; it now has 40,000 paid subscribers in 125 countries. Seven years ago, it launched BoF 500, a fashion power list. It was an instant sensation, and to be named one of the 500 is a much-coveted thing today. Then there’s Voices, the annual, by-invitation-only conference attended by fashion’s movers and shakers and innovators. Musician will.i.am describes it as “a hybrid of TED but with the coolest people at TED”. Such is its influence that, last year, the Financial Times inked an investment partnership with BoF.

It is no wonder that sustainability is the topic du jour. Take, for example, this year’s Oscars, what with Margot Robbie and Lily Aldridge wearing vintage and Jane Fonda re-wearing a gown she wore to Cannes in 2013. “It has come up in every conversation I’ve had in Davos, and it is why I am here, because the fashion industry is really trying to take its role in this wider sustainability challenge more seriously,” Amed tells me.

We meet at the sprawling WIPRO lounge on the main Davos Promenade. The former McKinsey consultant and Harvard MBA graduate is nothing if not global. He lives in London, but was born in Canada to East African parents of Indian descent (you can hear traces of a Canadian accent). He comes across as curious, measured and very bright, and he travels incessantly — in early February he has criss-crossed through Brazil, New York, and San Francisco. When we meet he’s wearing many hues of blue: navy striped woollen Pero trousers, a Loewe turtleneck and a printed sweater by the chic Japanese brand, Sacai. He also carries around a small black notebook in which he takes copious notes. For someone at the forefront of a digital media empire, it is oddly quaint.

Designer Karl Lagerfeld with Amed   | Photo Credit: Erin Baiano

Voice of reason

“One of the things we’ve been challenging the industry to think about is a new narrative around consumption,” he says. But isn’t fashion all about desiring the new? “There’s this apparent contradiction between sustainability and growth,” he agrees, adding, “When I went to business school, we were taught that healthy companies grow margins, profits and revenues. But this kind of model — focussed on accountability to shareholders alone — may not be entirely compatible with addressing the climate emergency.”

Indeed, BoF has been vocal in unveiling these issues, spotlighting innovators, sustainability pioneers, and activists. “Imran’s commitment towards consistent coverage of issues on sustainability [as demonstrated in BoF] is nothing short of exemplary, and needs to be emulated,” says Bandana Tewari, sustainability activist, former editor-at-large of Vogue India, and a BoF contributor.

Role models and inspirations

Karl Lagerfeld: “Karl Lagerfeld was always kind and supportive, even in the early days of BoF. He told me that what I was doing was different. He always took time to meet with me and our editor-at-large after every Chanel show, just to chat, and I learned a lot from him.

Yohji Yamamoto: “One of my favorite interviews was with Japanese design legend, Yohji Yamamoto. He said that to find your own purpose in life, you can copy someone whom you like very much, and copy and copy, until at the end, you find yourself. What I think he meant was that you should find what you really love and study it, immerse yourself in it, and eventually you will find yourself. There’s so much out there to inspire, but you have to know yourself to seek it out. That’s what I did. It was really powerful advice.”

As a media platform, Amed believes his role is to spark conversations and create awareness. “We try to be an agent of change.” A case in point: at BoF’s Voices conference in 2018, fashion’s biggest heavyweights listened as sustainability strategist Rachel Lincoln Sarnoff spoke about the need to tackle microplastics found in fabrics that wind up in the ocean. She told the audience that in 10 years, 70% of fabric fibres will come from plastic, and urged them to reconsider the materials they employ.

Amed notes that fast fashion and luxury brands are equally responsible for this grave environmental toll. The two have learned much from each other: while the former has embraced the marketing and aspiration of luxury, the latter has paid attention to speed and supply chain management to produce more collections. The result? “Every year we are creating and selling more and more stuff,” he says.

Vintage for the win

But there are slivers of hope. Thanks to millennials and Gen-Z, the global resale (second-hand) market is set to double to $54 billion by 2024. Amed recalls being an early fan of vintage. As a kid, he would buy vintage Levi’s jeans, much to his parents’ dismay — they couldn’t understand why he was buying old clothes!

These days a growing number of companies are upcyling, attempting to be zero waste, and sourcing locally to minimise their carbon footprint. He points to brands like Patagonia, Eileen Fischer, and Stella McCartney that have integrated sustainable materials into their supply chain and taken positive steps towards minimising their environmental impact. He also cites Kering, the fashion conglomerate, for the environmental profit-and-loss statement it publishes on its performance.

Companies are hiring chief sustainability officers, too. Amed welcomes this, but is cautious. “It is not just a chief sustainability officer issue, this is a C-level executive issue. Because throughout the fashion supply chain, where 90% of waste carbon is created, everyone in the C-suite has a role to play in managing that. Whether it is the fibres used in production or the vendors used to manufacture or the way retail stores are run, each of those touch points has an impact. There’s work to be done throughout the value chain”.

Yet, till consumer behaviour doesn’t change, little else will. When Kate Middleton, Duchess of Cambridge, re-wore a 2012 gown to this year’s BAFTA awards, she was applauded. Actor Joaquin Phoenix has been wearing the same Stella McCartney tuxedo to every awards show. Can this save the planet? Unlikely, but Amed says it sends a message, given that celebrities are so important in shaping mindsets and behaviours. “At the end of the day, people are not going to buy fashion because it is sustainable. They are going to purchase products because they are beautiful and well-made. Sustainability has to be a ‘hygiene factor’ in how we create, and buy. It is a step, a journey of a thousand steps.”

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Hey - Pat from StarterStory.com here with another interview.Today's interview is with Tom and Alex of Saint Belford, a brand that sells lifestyle planner.Some stats:Product: Lifestyle planner.Revenue/mo: $9,100Started: October 1991Location: MelbourneFounders: 2Employees: 0Hello! Who are you and what business did you start?Hey, we’re Tom and Alex—Co Founders of Saint Belford.Our mission is to empower others to keep self-care on top of their to-do list so that they can design, build and live a life that genuinely fulfills them, without compromising their wellbeing in the process.We create physical diaries (called Curation) that focus on self-care and personal growth for people who want to prioritise their wellbeing and live life on their terms. We’ve incorporated over a dozen lifestyle tools into one A5 sized planner—things like goal-setting worksheets, habit intention worksheets, habit tracking tools, weekly meal planner, annual bucket list, weekly challenges, pre-week planner to properly map out your week, daily self-care planner… the list goes on—and that’s what sets us apart.imageOur customers are predominantly women like Alex who have either experienced some level of burnout or they recognise the need to slow down and recharge amid the chaos of modern society. These women are searching for more than a diary or planner. They are searching for something to keep them grounded, to help them prioritise their wellbeing and create space for the things that light them up.Much to everyone’s surprise, we turned a profit in our first year achieving a revenue of 43k. In our second year, we almost quadrupled this amount, turning over 160k in less than six months.imageWhat's your backstory and how did you come up with the idea?There were 3 reasons that lead us down the path of running our own business.In short, it was a happy accident.1 - Experiencing burnoutMy experience with burnout and mental health issues was probably the primary catalyst for starting Saint Belford. I was taking on far too much, hustling far too aggressively and everything eventually caught up with me.I knew this was a widespread issue and I wanted to provide an alternative to the hustle hard mentality that most of us naturally learn towards. I wanted to truly empower others to put themselves first, prioritise their wellbeing and create time and space for the things were truly important to them.2 - There was nothing like it out thereI’ve always been a fan of putting pen to paper, but I couldn’t find a planner that would help me stay organised and grounded with self-care as the primary focus. We saw this as an opportunity to not only create the perfect planner for me, but also spread the message of self-care. It was Tom’s idea to launch this business.Before burning out, I had ZERO desire to start a business. Having seen the ugly side of owning your own business (my parents were small business owners), I always craved the security of a full time job.Tom: It was actually Alex’s idea. She just wasn’t serious about it and said it as a joke that she should create the perfect planner since she couldn’t find one that suited her. At the time, I was listening to loads of business podcasts and became very interested in business and marketing, but didn’t know what I wanted to do with what I had learned. After a week or so, that idea popped into my head again and that’s when I said “we should do this.”3 - We were at a career crossroadsWe were both at a crossroads in our careers. Neither of our jobs were fulfilling us. Tom was working as an Apple technician and I was an Account Manager at a digital marketing agency. We felt that at the age of 26, with no mortgage or major commitments, we had nothing much to lose. If it didn’t pan out, it would still be worth the adventure and lessons learned.Fortunately, I had a background in marketing and Tom is a fast learner, so we didn’t have to outsource a large chunk of our startup fund. We didn’t do much testing to validate the idea. The most we did was send out a survey to our network to gauge what they liked and didn’t like about their current planners, what features they wanted and what type of goals they typically pursued.Take us through the process of designing, prototyping, and manufacturing your first product.Finding a printerThe first step was finding a local printer in Australia. We reached out to 36 printers and received 6 replies. Finding a printer was A LOT harder than we anticipated because we didn’t know anything about book specs and therefore could only request a quote based on layman knowledge of notebooks. Our first quote request was something like this:1000 x A5 high end hardcover PU leather diaries ft. gold foil on the front, back and spine.I also included several photos to illustrate my vision and used the feedback from printers to refine my brief.We eventually found a local printer who could meet our requirements. Even though our print job was outsourced to Taiwan (they were quite transparent about this), choosing a local printer meant we didn’t have to deal with freight, customs and language barriers in an industry we knew nothing about.Getting schooled on book makingWe didn’t have a clue how books were made, let alone how to choose the right type of binding, grade of paper, ribbons and hardcover material. Our printer was a big help in this department because he was able to educate us on the process and guide us every step of the way.There were definitely more pros than cons to having a middle man in the first year. The only con was that our printing-related requests were filtered, which meant that our requests were passed on to the manufacturer at the discretion of our printer.In our first year, we made our decisions based on high-res photos, which is such a contrast to the way we do things now. Because we’re dealing directly with our manufacturer now, we can request physical samples of PU leather and make the decision based on touch and feel.imageBrainstorming diary featuresThe search for a printer took weeks. During that time, we brainstormed exactly what we wanted to include in our planner. We looked at what was available online and in stores. We looked at apps we used. We asked ourselves what we wanted in a diary. We surveyed our network and asked them what they wanted.At this stage, we knew we wanted to create more than a diary—something truly unique* that was centred around health and wellness. We came up with dozens of ideas. It was just a matter of figuring out the *best, most practical features to include in what we called “Curation” because it was exactly that—a curation of lifestyle planning tools.imageimageTurning our vision into a digital realityWe put together a brief detailing what we envisioned for each feature and we worked closely with our designer to bring our first edition of Curation to life.We were really blessed in the design department because when we pitched our idea to our friend (who happens to be a designer) she was 100% on board and excited to bring our vision to life (at mates rates). Even though we were living miles apart and the time difference posed a few challenges (she was in France and we were in Australia), the design process was an absolute dream, thanks to the wonders of Skype, Facebook Messenger, Google Docs and Email.imageSorting out packaging problemsOur diaries were shipped to customers in 100% recyclable cardboard book wraps (unbranded). We still use the same packaging today. In our first year, we didn’t want to use unnecessary plastic, so we didn’t bother investing in individual opp/poly bags UNTIL we learned that a few of our diaries arrived with water damage. Eager to avoid another soggy diary experience, we quickly changed our minds about the need for plastic protective material.Describe the process of launching the business.From inception to launchWe came up with the idea of Curation in late February 2017 which meant we had a deadline to meet if we wanted to launch a 2018 edition. We had about 8 months to design, produce and market the first edition before launching in October. This timeline worked in our favour because it didn’t leave room for procrastination or perfectionism.We had to “move fast and break things” and foster an attitude of “done is better than perfect.”We later learned that most diary companies launch around late August, early September, so we were actually late to the party. That was the first lesson we learned.imageCreating our websiteWe picked a theme that was roughly $100 and did everything ourselves, right down to the photos. It makes us cringe a little when we look back at them now because the photos were so amateur, but you’ve got to start somewhere!imageKeeping the costs downOur goal was to be profitable in the first year, so we were very careful about where we allocated our funds.In our first year, we relied heavily on micro influencers and SEO to put us on the map. We sent over a dozen copies to lifestyle bloggers and health coaches in the wellness space with a few thousand followers behind them. The idea was for them to share it on their story if they liked our product and/or write a review on their blog. It was a cost effective way for us to reach a larger audience, increase visibility and build brand credibility, since we were the new kids on the block.This worked quite well. The best, most profitable “shares” were from fatmumslim.com.au, afternoonpickmeup.com.au and rachaelkable.com because they included us in their “best diaries for 2018” roundup.imageWe used my background and knowledge in SEO to our advantage. Tom’s interest in marketing and his desire to self-educate also kept our marketing costs down. In total, we invested 15k of our life savings into launching this business. We didn’t want to take out any loans or get ourselves into debt because we were simply testing an idea.Launching to the publicWe didn’t build hype or a brand following before we launched, so it wasn’t some big, epic launch. We posted on our personal Facebook accounts and that got the ball rolling. Our friends and family were instrumental in spreading the word about our brand. Our first few customers were friends/family but by the 5th or 6th day, we were selling to random people, and that was when it finally felt real.imageLessons from our experienceBuild a following before you launch.Leverage your connections and don’t be afraid to ask for help. “Mates rates” can really help keep costs down in the first year. You’ll be surprised by how generous people are with their time and advice when you’re a startup.Don’t be afraid to share your product with family and friends. They will be your biggest supporters in the beginning.Have a deadline and stick to it. Having a deadline worked in our favour because it didn’t leave room for procrastination or perfectionism.Join entrepreneurial/ecommerce Facebook groups. They can be a great resource and place to ask questions.Be prepared to pivot. In our first year, SEO worked a charm. In our second year, it didn’t work as well as we’d hoped, so we had to adapt our marketing strategy and learn how to market our products on Instagram and Facebook.Since launch, what has worked to attract and retain customers?We’ve tried so many different types of marketing in a bid to attract and retain customers. These are our biggest takeaways.Instagram and Facebook ads for the winThis worked a treat for attracting new customers and increasing traffic/sales. We used professional imagery and targeted people just like Alex. We know that the majority of our customers don’t convert immediately because it’s something they’ll research for weeks.The goal of the ad is to generate awareness and either get them to sign up to our VIP list (email list) or follow us on Instagram where we can nurture them until they are ready to purchase. Once they land on our website, we can also retarget them at a later date.We also use Instagram for social proof. When customers share our products on their story or message us telling us how much they love what we’ve created, we will always repost it.imageShow that you’re humanDon’t just be a brand. Show that you’re human so that customers have someone they can connect with. We do this via Instagram stories. Customers love seeing what goes on behind the scenes. They want to put a face and a voice to the brand.imageClarify and communicate your brand message clearlyDonald Miller’s Storybrand Framework has transformed the way we communicate our brand message and market our products. I highly recommend listening to his audiobook “Building a StoryBrand” and implementing his principles. The audiobook will teach you how to write incredible website/marketing copy and nurture your email subscribers. Our YoY conversion rate increased from 3% to 3.8% thanks to these principles.Incentivise email sign upsWe decided to give away a free copy of our planner every month to someone on our email list. Once we implemented an email opt-in with “Sign up for your chance to win a FREE copy of Curation 2019”, we went from having 600 email subscribers to nearly 5000 in just a few months, and they were quality subscribers. Our email conversion rate was 7.64% last year.Collaborate with like-minded brandsWe did giveaways with brands in the health and wellness space to reach new customers. One particular giveaway with Pana Chocolate (raw organic chocolate) helped us build our Instagram following by the thousands, just in time for Black Friday/Cyber Monday. We didn’t strategically plan for this to happen, but it certainly taught us that timing the giveaway is important.Produce valuable contentThis has been a huge part of our retention strategy. We seek out people in the health and wellness space to guest post on our blog. We produce FREE eBooks in the off-season. We just spent 3 months writing our last eBook which is all about building new habits that stick.We’re not just in the business of selling planners—we’re constantly searching for new ways to empower our audience and add value.How are you doing today and what does the future look like?imageWe saw phenomenal revenue growth in our second year of business—47k to over 160k in revenue through our Shopify store.We’ve been travelling around Asia working on the 2020 diary collection which will be released in September. We’re so grateful we get to do this.In terms of the future, we’re still trying to figure out what direction we want to take the business in. There are pros and cons to having a seasonal business. The pro being that we’ve been able to travel and work remotely in the off-season. The con being that we’re only generating revenue in September-February.Tom and I have finally settled into our roles. Being life and business partners is tricky but having roles in the business has helped us navigate this territory. Tom is in charge of business/marketing strategy and the techy side of things. I’m in charge of supplier and customer relationships, product development and content creation.We do have plans to expand our range next year. There are a few ideas in the pipeline, but we want to keep it a surprise for our audience.Ultimately, our goal is to continue creating lifestyle tools that focus on self-care and personal growth, whether that’s in the form of eBooks or adding to our physical collection.We are also really passionate about mental health which is why we donate a percentage of our profits to Beyond Blue and R U OK? every year. This will always be a core part of our business.Through starting the business, have you learned anything particularly helpful or advantageous?The biggest challenge was finding a supplier who understood our needs and could deliver on their promises. We actually flew to China to meet with our supplier this year. Sitting down face to face, explaining our concerns and visiting the factory where our diaries are currently being produced has filled us with a lot more confidence.Before manufacturing your product, figure out what a defective product looks like. For us, it’s scratches, missing pages, unseared ribbons, etc. Once you know what a defect looks like, communicate this to your supplier and agree on an accepted defect rate. Every factory will have a defect rate, so don’t be fooled by a company telling you that they don’t have one.It’s impossible to produce 100% perfect products on a mass scale. It’s good practice to establish a written agreement of the product specs and criteria. We use Alibaba to process all transactions because it protects us in the off chance the supplier doesn’t meet the agreed criteria.What platform/tools do you use for your business?We try to keep it as simple as possible. It’s easy to get bogged down with the latest apps, but one thing we’ve noticed is keeping it simple helps with our website speed and overall sanity. Sumo and Kaviyo are definitely our favourites, and when I say we, I mean Tom because he’s the tech nerd in this duo!Shopify: affordable and super easy to use.Sumo: collecting emails is a breeze with Sumo. The pop-ups are incredibly easy to design and customer support is amazing.Klaviyo: we just recently switched from MailChimp to Klaviyo and it has allowed us to step up our email marketing game. The built-in flows and email automation possibilities are truly next level.What have been the most influential books, podcasts, or other resources?The Slight Edge by Jeff OlsonThis taught us the power of small habits, when compounded over time. It also helped us build the discipline we needed to create a sustainable business.Tim Ferriss podcastTom has listened to almost every episode. Tim manages to extract amazing insights from his guests which can be distilled down into principles anyone can use.Noah Kagan podcast/YouTube channelThese are all bite sized, completely actionable tips and advice for small businesses.Advice for other entrepreneurs who want to get started or are just starting out?Make sure your preparation doesn’t turn into procrastination.Done is better than perfect. Our first year was a test. Did we produce the perfect product? Not at all. BUT we used our customer feedback and everything we had learned in our first year to create something we were genuinely proud of in the second year.Don’t be afraid to “move fast and break things.”Learn from your mistakes. When you view your mistakes as an opportunity to learn and improve, you can recover faster. Don’t dwell on it. Own it and use it to your advantage.Ask for help!!People are more than happy to help you. You’ve just got to ask.Have a strong WHY.Make sure you’re genuinely passionate about your product/service. People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.Don’t forget to look after yourself.Starting a business is exciting but it’s also overwhelming and exhausting. It’s also easy to neglect your mind and body in favour of getting that important thing done. Just remember this quote by Joyce Sunada “If you don’t take time for your wellness, you’ll be forced to make time for your illness.”Where can we go to learn more?www.saintbelford.com.auwww.instagram.com/saintbelfordwww.facebook.com/saintbelfordIf you have any questions or comments, drop a comment below!Liked this text interview? Check out the full interview with photos, tools, books, and other data.For more interviews, check out r/starter_story - I post new stories there daily.Interested in sharing your own story? Send me a PM

[theconservativebrief]

Chip Wilson, the founder and former CEO of the yoga apparel brand Lululemon, has written a tell-all book about his life and the business he built — and it is one wild read.

Little Black Stretchy Pants, which comes out on November 27, is being marketed as “the unauthorized story of Lululemon” — fitting given that the infamously controversial Wilson stepped down as CEO in 2013, and hasn’t been on the company’s board since 2015. (Lululemon has also distanced itself from its rogue founder; Wilson’s name isn’t even on its “our story” page. Vox reached out to Lululemon for comment on the book and will update if we get a response.)

Wilson’s Lululemon kick-started the athleisure market boom. Its $100 “Wunder Under” spandex leggings became ubiquitous in the fitness world, and the company convinced wealthy women they needed its luxury gear for working out. In the 20 years since its inception, Lululemon has developed a cult following; women and men alike swear by its products, to the point where there are underground markets dedicated to buying used Lululemon goods.

Under Wilson’s stewardship, the company has also been dogged by controversy and media blunders, and developed a reputation for being insular, pretentious, and eerie at times, due to the company’s obsession with developing employees under the self-help movement Landmark Forum.

Chip Wilson’s “unauthorized” book, Little Black Stretchy Pants.

I have covered Lululemon for almost five years, writing about the company’s products, fan groups, marketing efforts, and workplace culture. I read Wilson’s book in part to learn if the media’s depiction of him as being “socially inept,” unfiltered, and arrogant was unfair.

I found little to convince me he has been mischaracterized. This is, after all, a man who said in a videotaped interview that Lululemon pants weren’t made to be worn by all women; scolded a reporter for being late and invoked the phrase “Jewish Standard Time”; and checked out a woman’s butt while being interviewed by another reporter. (His book’s front cover, it’s worth noting, is an illustration of a woman’s butt, in Lululemon leggings.)

In the book, he’s similarly tactless, and it’s often cringeworthy to read; there are whole sections devoted to taking down specific Lululemon executives he disagreed with, and he claims to have singlehandedly invented the concepts of stretchy pants, minimalist marketing, and reusable shopping bags. He also refuses to take any responsibility for calamities he caused along the way, and instead paints himself as a victim of clueless CEOs, salacious media reporters, and disloyal board members.

Here are a few major takeaways about the world of Lululemon from Wilson’s account.

Wilson sold his former snowboarding apparel business Westbeach Snowboard in 1997 and was living in Vancouver when he took his first yoga class. He’d been having back issues due to participating in triathlons, and he took a class at a local gym. Wilson noticed the instructor was wearing clothes from a dance apparel company, which was thin and sheer.

He says that made him think about starting a yoga apparel company and “believed that if I could solve the transparency problem, address camel-toe, and thicken the fabric to mask any imperfections, I could create a perfect athletic garment for women.” At the time, brands like Adidas and Nike were using the “shrink it and pink it” philosophy to turn men’s athletic clothing into gear that could be sold to women. His idea was to create clothing designed specifically to emphasize women’s figures.

Wilson goes on:

Accentuating what made people feel confident — wider shoulders, smaller waists, slimmer hips — meant Guests would feel and look good in our clothing. I realized that the shape of our logo provided a perfect contour to enhance the natural shape of a woman’s body… There was a huge debate about where to set the seam lines on pants. Women told me they preferred side seams because when they looked in the mirror, side seams slimmed their hips. I wanted to move the side seams to the back to frame the bum and make the bum appear smaller. I persisted because I believed that eventually, men would tell women the pants looked great without really understanding why.

In executing the design of Lululemon stores, Wilson also writes that “the lighting would be perfect, and each room had to have a three-way mirror so a woman could be self-critical of her back side.”

Throughout the book, Wilson oscillates on whom Lululemon was created for. Initially, he talks about the opportunity to dress people who practice yoga regularly but also mocks that world, calling Yoga Journal a “mediocre publication wallowing in the depths of the granola world.” He also says Lululemon was propelled by “wealthy women” who could “‘buy’ time in their lives and were consequently often in great shape and very healthy.”

What he does make clear, though is that the brand was meant for a very specific type of customer: a demographic he calls “Super Girls.” This shopping segment were the daughters of “Power Women,” a group Wilson defines as a “female market segment in the 1970s and 1980s” who were divorced — which he claims was a result of the rise of birth control.

Men “had no idea how to relate to this newly independent woman” who “suddenly had significant control over conception,” and “thus came the era of divorce.” These daughters, he claimed, had single dads who got them involved in sports, and wanted to be like the male characters they saw in Saturday morning cartoons, “wearing capes and stretch fabric outfits.”

This demographic, Wilson writes, was “the best of the best.” For a 22-year-old college graduate, he believes “utopia was to be a fit, 32-year-old with an amazing career and spectacular health. She was traveling for business and pleasure, owned her own condo, and had a cat. She was fashionable and could afford quality.”

There’s long been a rumor that Wilson invented the name Lululemon because he thought it would be funny to listen to Japanese people pronounce it, and this comes up in the book.

Wilson writes how he came up with 20 names and logo possibilities, with one of them being Athletically Hip (the stylized A of the Lululemon logo comes from this original business name). He then recalls how he sold the name of a skateboard brand, Homeless Skateboards, to Japanese buyers for a large amount of money because, he believed, “Homeless” was a desirable brand name: “it seemed the Japanese liked the name Homeless because it had the letter L in it, and the Japanese language doesn’t have that sound. Brand names with Ls in them sounded even more authentically North American/Western to Japanese consumers, especially the 22-year-olds.”

He goes on to write how he “played with alliterative names with Ls in them, la la la, jotting down variations in my notebook” until he came up with Lululemon. Wilson doesn’t explicitly say he created this name as a way to exploit Japanese shoppers or make them stumble, but elsewhere in the book, he makes fun of Japanese tourists for traveling to Canada and buying Roots clothes. Lululemon’s first ad was a photo of three girls wearing glasses and a Roots sweatshirt, with the tagline, “Trendy Clothing for Rich Japanese Tourists,” which Wilson said was message for his “Super Girls,” that they’d “understand the nuances and subconsciously want to be a part of the Lululemon ‘tribe.’”

One thing Wilson makes clear in his book is that Lululemon is not meant for soda drinkers. In the original set of brand values that were printed in stores and on Lululemon’s ubiquitous red shopping bags — the company “manifesto,” which he admits comprised “random statements about how I lived my life” — he initially stated that “Coke, Pepsi, and other pops will be known as the cigarettes of the future. Colas are NOT a substitute for water. Colas are just another cheap drug made to look great by advertising.”

Wilson writes that “Coke and Pepsi threatened to drown Lululemon in lawsuits,” but agreed to cut the line from the manifesto only after a Lululemon employee pointed out that the line made the company look dated, since soda wasn’t aligned with health anyway (though he writes that he “wanted our Super Girl market to know the Lululemon brand was not for soda drinkers”).

He goes on to say that in 2012, he was upset to find soda cans popping up in the office, because being anti-soda “was fundamental to our health culture.”

Wilson also refuses to refer to Lululemon as an “athleisure” brand because he is personally not a fan of the term, as he believes it connotes “a non-athletic, smoking, Diet Coke-drinking woman in a New Jersey shopping mall wearing an unflattering pink velour jumpsuit.”

As a workplace, Wilson writes, Lululemon “screened for people who wanted families.” He writes how the company wanted to thrive off of family values, but he also doesn’t see a problem with forcing his narrow idea of relationships and family.

He writes how “we wanted our people to meet the perfect mate, we wanted people to have children, and we wanted the family nucleus to be an energy generator.”

In his original manifesto, Wilson also included this line: “Just like you did not know what an orgasm was before you had one, nature does not let you know how great children are until you have them. Children are the orgasm of life.”

Wilson goes on to write about how Lululemon initially hired a type of employee he calls “Balance Girls,” who were “type-A Wall Street personalities,” but the company had to get rid of them because “they had been working 14-hour days in finance, were not dating, and could see no prospects for marriage or children.”

Throughout the book, Wilson’s account of how he developed the business illustrates some autocratic tendencies, with specific rules for how employees should approach goal-setting and lifestyle. The most striking example is his 6/13 rule, which was an exact formula of how and when store associates, or “Educators,” as they are called, could talk to customers.

The rule was that “if a Guest was looking at a product for six seconds, an Educator had a thirteen-second window to educate them about the item. Barring any follow up questions, the Educator would then leave them alone until they looked at another item for around six seconds.” Wilson writes that this method would work because “our Educators [would] impress customers with their sheer knowledge of and enthusiasm for the item.” While it might sound like a shopping nightmare for some, it also might explain how Lululemon’s sales per square foot were in line with Apple and Tiffany & Co.

Inside a Lululemon class at a store in London on March 28, 2014. Tim P. Whitby/Getty Images

In his account of the Bloomberg interview in which he said Lululemon pants weren’t right for women whose thighs rub together, Wilson says the publication edited his words and presented them out of context. (For the record, Bloomberg did not isolate that portion of the interview, and Wilson did say that “it’s really about the rubbing of the thighs.”)

He also insists that Luon, the proprietary fabric used for Lululemon leggings, which many people complain pills after many wears, didn’t pill because of poor quality but because women were squeezing into sizes that were too small for them.

Wilson takes no responsibility for offending women; instead, he insists the media is rooted in sensational reporting. He points to another time in 2007 when the New York Times challenged him on a clothing line called VitaSea, which he claimed was made with “seaweed-based technology … that would make the shirts anti-stink, as well as moisturizing for the skin of the person wearing it.”

The Times published test results that showed the clothing had no seaweed in its particles. Wilson calls this “mean-spirited” in the book but does not offer an explanation for the results; instead, he pivots to claim the story was probably planted by an investor who wanted to short the Lululemon stock, and that the reporter probably received “a backroom payoff.”

In one especially bizarre chapter, Wilson basically defends Nike, which in 2001 was accused of using child labor. He says he “felt bad for Nike,” and sides with the company over the reports.

“In North America, I noticed there were some kids not made for school, who dropped out with nowhere to go,” Wilson writes. In Asia, if a kid was not “school material, he or she learned a trade and contributed to their family. It was work or starve. I liked the alternative.”

Wilson boasts that to respond to the Nike story, he decided to make the whole thing into a joke. He appeared in an ad in Yoga Journal with a few Lululemon employees, “dressed in diapers and baby outfits at sewing machines in one of our factories.”

In the book, Wilson writes that “if we were ever accused of child labour, I would just agree.” He then goes on to joke that “my own children have worked in the business from the age of five with no pay; working young is excellent training for life” — a tone-deaf take on child labor, especially coming from a white, Western billionaire.

Elsewhere in the book, Wilson mentions that “stores created tongue-in-cheek windows with a controversial political or social point of view.” When the brand opened its first store in Vancouver, he took out an ad in the paper promising free clothes to anyone who showed up to the store naked — and plenty did. Wilson describes this type of publicity as “worth millions and so much more fun than a standard press release.”

In Wilson’s account of how Lululemon went on to sell yoga apparel outside of women’s leggings, he tries to paint a picture of resourcefulness. When searching for the best type of material that would later become Lululemon’s $68 yoga mats, he admits he scrounged in the trash of a supplier to find the address for a source of materials in Asia.

In another anecdote, Wilson writes how he saw bits of fabric being discarded inside factories and he was trying to think of ways to use them: “One of the seamstresses used to take the ends of the pants she cut off and wear it as a headband because her hair got in her eyes while sewing. We thought, ‘what a great idea! Let’s take these pant ends and sell them!’”

Headbands, Wilson goes on, ended up becoming one of the brand’s best-selling items, thanks to “young girls who used them to differentiate themselves amidst a sea of school uniform.”

Original Source -> Lululemon’s ex-CEO wrote an “unauthorized” history of the brand. Here’s what we learned.

via The Conservative Brief

[brisbanelife]

Docos about two creative Australian artists who denied convention premiere at MIFF

"In recent years the documentary form has changed and evolved. You can mix up the form a lot more now to get closer to the truth," notes Hosking, speaking from her home in the Sydney suburb of Enmore. Wright is an acclaimed playwright, theatre director, and stage and screen actor making his debut as a feature film director, while Hosking is a former print and television reporter who has been making documentaries since 2001. Both, however, distinctively point the way forward. Their narratives, and the methods they deploy to arrange them, don't filter a complex identity down into something simpler. Instead they add new layers and commentary, and they're willing to make that process part of the viewer's experience. When Wright first read an excerpt from Acute Misfortune: The Life and Death of Adam Cullen, journalist and editor Erik Jensen's 2014 biography of the artist, who died in 2012 from complications due to liver failure at the age of 46, he couldn't understand why someone would write about Cullen. Jensen, who spent four year in Cullen's erratic orbit as his biographer, defined with serrated precision his subject's work, lies, addictions, and self-serving philosophy. Wright, who had co-founded the innovative theatre company Black Lung at the age of 23 in 2006, had been intent on making feature films for several years. Jane Campion and Garth Davis, his directors on the former's 2013 television series Top of the Lake, where Wright starred opposite Elisabeth Moss, told him he would have to write something. When he fastened onto adapting Acute Misfortune, with Jensen as his co-writer, he placed the book under sharp scrutiny. Geoffrey Tozer and Paul Keating at the Australian Institute of Music. Photo: Peter Morris PMZ "I said to Erik in the first few days of adapting it that if we just repeat the conclusions then it has absolutely no reason to exist. We've got to interrogate it, we've got to pick it apart. You've got to be willing to be the bad guy," remembers Wright. "To Erik's credit he knew exactly what I meant and took it on, but there were times during the writing of the film that that was a more difficult proposition that it was as merely an idea." Jensen was just 19 years old "almost a child with a notebook," Wright says and working for the Sydney Morning Herald when he first wrote about Cullen. His book coolly recounts the tests flavoured with both affection and aggravation that Cullen subjected him to, including being shot in the leg with shotgun pellets. But Wright believed that if the book was Jensen's verdict on Cullen, then the film needed in turn to consider both men and the dynamic they shared. Acute Misfortune: Adam Cullen (Daniel Henshall) and Erik Jensen (Toby Wallace). Photo: Supplied "I say this is a provocation, but that book can be viewed as an act of revenge. I was fascinated by that, but I don't think that's what it is. It could also be seen as an act of dedication," Wright notes. "On the sleeve of Acute Misfortune it says it's a tale 'told at close quarters and without judgment', and I just thought that needed to be discussed. What culpability does Erik bring to it? Is he the equivalent of a conflict photographer?" "You meet Tom and you get a feeling for how passionate he is. He's very prepared, very driven, incredibly ambitious, and has a single-minded energy," says Daniel Henshall, the Australian actor whose chilling performance as a charismatic killer in 2011's Snowtown made him Wright's first choice to play Adam Cullen. Henshall would have three years to immerse himself in Cullen's life before he was joined by Toby Wallace (the Romper Stomper television reboot) in the role of Erik Jensen. "We talked about whose film it was. It's very much Erik's film it's through his eyes," adds Henshall, who lost 22 kilograms in the middle of the shoot to portray the ravaged, dying Cullen in his final days. "We meet Adam because Erik chose to meet and interview him. You see Adam through Erik's eyes and the edit makes that clear, which is a bold choice." One of Black Lung's guiding philosophies was to destabilise the narrative, and Wright brought that to Acute Misfortune. The film aggressively dispenses with the framing scenes that set up a conventional biopic, instead invoking the off-kilter world Cullen draws the ambitious, accepting Jensen into. Cullen's artworks, brushes and even clothes are used, yet information about the commercial art world is communicated through telling tableaus. The extensive and sometimes harrowing research isn't referenced in a linear timeline, it's distilled into the performances. It's all shot in the narrower than normal screen ratio of 1.37:1, the "Academy" standard used between the 1930s and the 1950s, which creates a sense of portraiture that references both the artist and the writer as they share what the director calls "the film's implication of inevitability". "Erik's experience with Adam reflects nearly everyone's experience with Adam," Wright says. "That is a profound closeness, great intellectual reciprocity turning into a painful exchange, and eventually becoming either violent or threatening to such an extent that the person had to leave. You're absorbing what it was to be in this position." Janine Hosking first brushed up against Geoffrey Tozer's life in 2011, two years after the former child prodigy's passing when a friend who worked in book publishing passed her a transcript of Keating's eulogy. "Geoffrey Tozer's death is a national tragedy," was the first line, and over 45 minutes it celebrated the pianist's rare gifts while delivering a broadside at the Australian arts establishment. It was a reminder of Keating as the parliamentarian who slayed his opponents in question time, but it was leavened with grief and affection. Hosking had wanted to make a documentary that involved music, and once she discovered the Tozer archive maintained (in a suburban shed) by his estate, the filmmaker knew that she had both the necessary material and, with Keating's help, the spine of the story. After a period of consideration he agreed. "He knew the power of what he was about to do, but he did it not knowing what other people were going to say about Geoffrey," Hosking says. "He was very insistent that the eulogy would be his final word on Geoffrey Tozer. I would have loved an interview, but he just wanted to do the eulogy and that was his only condition." Keating's voice is a compass in The Eulogy. He compares the pianist and composer to Nellie Melba, Percy Grainger and Joan Sutherland, but for all the herculean talents, which were obvious from an early age and gave him an international profile, Tozer and his first true believer, his mother Veronica, often struggled to survive financially and his legacy is near unknown in his homeland. But instead of simply justifying Tozer's greatness, the documentary with empathy asks whether Keating was right. One way of looking at The Eulogy is to consider it a trial, with Keating as the prosecutor. The role of the judge, impartial and probing, is played by Richard Gill, one of Australia's leading conductors and a pre-eminent music educator. Gill had met Geoffrey Tozer just once, and wasn't familiar with his music. There was a chance he would refute Tozer's supporters. "He could have. And Richard wouldn't have taken it on if he felt he was being used as a puppet. And that made it exciting there's this whatever's going to happen next quality," says Hosking, who shot Gill's initial reaction to a key recording Tozer made with the London Philharmonic Orchestra. "He was very sceptical up to that point. We'd said to him, 'Don't listen to any music until we're ready to play it to you', and now he's a Tozer fan. It needed someone to drill down and really look at Geoffrey Tozer's legacy." In one scene Gill holds a session with a group of teenage classical musicians, none of whom have heard of Tozer. They are, in a way, a jury ("his note clarity was so on point," one boy enthusiastically observes). There are also responses to Keating from those who held positions of power, and there are interviews, particularly with Tozer's one great love, that have a visceral emotional reach. But the film excludes recreations and an omnipotent narrator. "I don't like the voice of god disembodied narrator documentary. Once you take that out of the mix you have to look at different ways of emphasising the storyline you want people to follow through the characters," explains Hosking. "What I wanted to make sure happened was that this wasn't a hagiography. You don't have to believe the eulogy, you can check this out yourself by talking to Geoffrey's friends and listening to his music." Loading Both Hosking and Thomas M. Wright have taken real life events and made films that don't seek to merely represent or conveniently reduce their turbulent subjects, but see them through a clarifying perspective that goes beyond biography. Wright speaks of his attempt to, "pare the film back of all its noise and affectation", while via a sense of discovery Hosking brought her story "full circle". People often refer to what a life is owed, but perhaps this is what the lives of Adam Cullen and Geoffrey Tozer needed. The Melbourne International Film Festival runs from Thursday 2 to Sunday 19 August. For full details and tickets see miff.com.au. https://www.brisbanetimes.com.au/entertainment/movies/m28cover-20180723-h130nw.html?ref=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_source=rss_feed

[plannerdanielle-blog]

How i got into planners

Oh wow, i completely forgot about this place! I just read my previous post, i guess this was another thing i gave up pretty quickly! Although i have now found a new hobby that i have managed to keep! 

 One thing, has been the same about me for as long as I can remember is my ever so slightly weird obsession with stationary. I remember in primary school wanting to be the one that handed out the paper to the class just because it meant I could touch it. (That sounds proper weird), I loved having big wads of paper and notepads where I would write list after list after list, I remember my dad saying to me once “You’re the only person I know who writes lists of the lists you’re going to write” and that couldn’t be more true although now those lists have become more extreme and now I have notebooks with lists of notebooks I’m going to have lists in, and pages and pages of brain dumps! (Basically when the lists in my head have become spider diagrams which have become spider webs and everything just spills onto the page) And more majorly I now have PLANNER PLANS!!

It was about September last year when I first thought I had discovered the planner world, although in actual fact it was nearer to may last year when I truly first found planners! I somehow discovered a company called box clever press (previously organised mum); they had this amazing diary that I ordered almost as soon as I saw it. It was the called the family life book and was so much prettier and exciting than normal yearly diaries. It had so much more opportunity to personalise it and included things that no other diary I had seen. It was this time last year that I moved out of home and so this book with its, budget trackers, appointment stickers, Christmas and holiday schedule planners was perfect for me. I also discovered I could buy a beautiful faux leather binder to store it in that also had space for the extra stickers I ordered too. The actual diary didn’t start until September so I kept it safe until then. It was my most prized possession. In the mean time I found that box clever press also did what they call their busy day’s planner. It was a planner for the whole year but on a larger scale, with spaces to write memories, stick in photos and tickets. I decided I needed it! It went straight on my Christmas list!

Finally September comes around and I start using my family life book. Around this time for some reason I decide to research and see if there is such thing as a stationery loot box. First stop you tube! The first video I watched was by a lady called Rachel Blundell who was unboxing her Cocoa Daisy subscription. (At this time I had never heard of cocoa daisy so I assumed it was just a random box of stationery) Here is the link to that video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ATlI9OkWbrw. I then googled cocoa daisy and saw all the loveliness on their website and fell in love! This is when I finally understood planning! Unfortunately I decided that I couldn’t afford it. The postage alone was $20! But I decided to see what other planner subscription companies existed inside the UK. I found a few stationery ones but could not find anything as beautiful as Cocoa Daisy! I started to be tempted just to subscribe! I worked out it be about £35 a month which I didn’t think was too bad! The same as if I ever decide to join the gym. I umm’d and ahh’d for ages and thought about just printing off the free pintable’s each month, but then something happened the meant I just had to have it! October! I stumbled across the October kits, somehow I hadn’t seen it already, but I was blown away! To this day October 2017 is my favourite kit, even though sadly I didn’t subscribe in time to receive this kit L

My first kit was for November 2017 and the theme was succulents! At this point I realised I needed a binder to store the inserts and all the loveliness in. Turns out there was a cocoa daisy planner fans Facebook page where everyone shared their ideas and tips, this is where I was first given the advice to get a Webster’s Pages binder! I ordered an A5 pretty pink from amazon for my first kit! This turned out to be a rather expensive way of doing it! The planner itself cost about £35 and when it eventually came 3 weeks later I then had to pay £15 customs fee! Altogether the binder alone had cost me over £50 and along with my monthly cocoa daisy subscription fee of £35 this was beginning to turn out to be an expensive hobby! For December’s kit I bought a lemon Kikki k binder, which was a bit cheaper as I didn’t have the customs fee to pay. I still decided the westers pages was my favourite of the two although the Kikki k was still lovely.

I decided though that this was still going to be a tad too expensive and since A. I couldn’t cancel my subscription for another 5 months and B. even if I could I 100% did not want to! I decided to change my subscription type to the personal sized planner, and ask for personal westers pages planners for Christmas. This was a great decision and up until now that’s how I have been planning!

Planning is my hobby and I have not given it up! Not many people I know get it but I do and I LOVE IT

[vrheadsets]

Building For Collaboration: IrisVR On Adding New Features To Improve The VR Experience

Last year, we released a tool called Inspect Element for Prospect. This feature allows users to select an element in their project and view its properties, such as the layer the object belongs to or the material it is made of. The user can then flag it if it needs to be fixed later in the original 3D modeling tool.

A user can select, inspect and flag an element in Prospect,

The design, development, and testing of this feature involved all the teams at IrisVR in some capacity. This blog post will detail how we came up with the feature, how we developed it, and how we made sure that the tool would meet the needs and expectations of our users along the way.

The Opportunity

Most of our users belong to the Architecture, Engineering and Construction industry and and rely on 3D building models to get work done. The objects they create have data associated with them – sometimes, tons of it! This data creation is known as Building Information Modeling (BIM) and it helps designers and engineers make sure that the decisions made regarding the program distribution, structural typology, material finishes, or mechanical systems selected are the right ones.

At IrisVR, our goal is to help users catch issues early to save time and money and keep the project stakeholders on the same page, and this led us to conceptualize a new tool, called “Inspect Element” that exposes BIM data in VR and facilitates an easier review and QA/QC process. This tool allows multiple people to review a given element in the shared virtual environment that Prospect provides. We knew we also needed to output a document to help record the design review done while in VR,help fix the 3D model, and move the project forward.

BIM Properties (left pane) of a roof selected in Revit.

Conceptualizing the “Inspect Element” Tool

Selecting an object on a 2D screen is a straightforward interaction. To make this action intuitive in virtual reality, I took inspiration from the typical interaction in 3D modeling tools on a screen and how we interact with objects in the real world. I looked specifically at what we can touch when we are on a construction site. To communicate with the rest of the team and to show users what the new tool would do, I spent some time sketching ideas on a notebook and on a whiteboard.

The tool would have two parts: a VR component and a Library component. In VR, the requirements were:

Provide visual feedback to the user when they pointed at an object

Allow the user to select an object and display its BIM properties, starting with name, layer and material

Allow the user to paint it red and flag it for review

The Library requirements were:

Display a list of the objects that had been flagged in VR and when

Ability to share the list with colleagues easily

Use the list to find the elements in the original program

A sketch of the early design for the Inspect Element tool

Tests

To test with our users, I built a proof of concept using C# in Unity to showcase what the Inspect Element tool would do. The prototype was rough, but it helped in conversations with architects and with the developers on our team. The video below shows the expected UX flow while reviewing a Revit model in VR:

Design

I created mockups for our VR tool to get feedback from our users in terms of which information they wanted to see. It was clear that we needed to include the Element Name (also the Family Name in the case of Revit elements), the layer the object belonged to and the name of the material assigned to it.

Highlight and selection states

Flagging and removing flag states

Along with the images above, I provided our engineers with notes regarding which button activates the feature (the trigger), if other actions (such as teleportation or taking screenshots) are permitted while this tool is being used, and any edge cases that needed to be addressed.

As a group and every week, the interaction team reviews together design work done by each of us. In this discussion, the case for objects with textured materials was made: what would an object that has a texture look like when flagged? Another image was added:

Flagged elements – with no texture (left) and with texture (right)

As we were working on this feature, our users asked repeatedly that we add a toggle right in the Inspect Element tool so that the entire layer the object belonged to could be switched off. This new action added complexity that we needed to document. For instance, if the layer of an object is set to off in this tool, we needed to make sure to display the same state in the Layers tool list.

A user can turn off the layer an object belongs to using the Inspect Element tool

In the Library, I followed a similar process and mocked up a new panel for the settings drawer called Flagged Elements. The list had to include the Element IDs, the name of the object (also including the Family Name), and would group the objects by date, to let the user know when the review was made.

Flagged Elements as mocked up for the Prospect Library

A button reading Export Report at the bottom would let the user download a CSV file that would contain all of the necessary information. A user could print this spreadsheet or copy the Element IDs and use them to find the objects in their 3D model.

  Report of Flagged Elements as a CSV file

Development – Part 1 (infrastructure)

Along with interaction/design discussions, we meet as often as possible with the development team to get their early feedback on what will be needed to support a new feature and understand how long it will take to get it built. The Inspect Element tool was especially complex because it meant new work and some “rewiring” in different parts of our export and loading processes.

We needed to export and save the name of the objects, their Element IDs, and the name of the materials they use while opening the door to support BIM data in the future. This would have to happen for all the file formats we support. While we decided to support flagging elements for all of them, we settled for only providing the object name and the element ID data for Revit files based on our user insights.

Additionally, it required a major change in how Prospect was grouping objects in VR so that we could highlight and select individual elements as needed without seeing a performance reduction. We also needed a new graphics system to create an outline around the selected object, a new tool that would change the appearance of the objects temporarily while keeping track of their state, and a new setting per file (Flagged Elements) that would display in the Library next to Viewpoints.

 Creating an outline for an object selected was a very involved process, so we decided to settle for painting the entire object instead – in green when selected, and in red when flagged.

Inspect Element tool as released in Prospect 1.7

Development – Part 2 (Multiuser Meetings support)

As we released Prospect 1.7, we were gearing up for our Multiuser Beta release in 1.8. We needed to add support for the Inspect Element tool while in a Meeting.

The Inspect Element tool being used on the Scale Model

Activating this feature while in a project with other users meant:

Adding two extra fields in the VR menu to reflect who currently had selected the element (Selected by) and who flagged it (Flagged by). It is important to note that, while in a Meeting, we don’t currently share a user’s menu content with other users in the session, so for two users to review the properties of an object together, they must select it and interact with their own menus independently. Letting each other know that they were looking at the same element at the same time was a basic requirement.

The first design for the Inspect Element menu (left) was enlarged to support Participants’ information while in Meetings (right)

Adding an extra field in the exported report from the Library (the CSV file) to log the name of user who flagged a given element. This is relevant to keep track of issues and to document who found them.

If a user turned changed the visibility of the layer of an object, it needed to send that layer state to the server so that all users could see that change as well.

Design and Development Iteration

In Prospect 2.0, we were able to add blue outlines to an object when it gets selected. Finally, the tool could successfully represent the state of an object that is selected and flagged at the same time, while giving the user a better visual feedback of its extents.

Inspect Element tool outlines

As we continue to add support for this feature, we will be working on fully integrating with Rhino  and SketchUp to output the list of elements that were flagged, we will be displaying BIM data from Revit, and we will providing a list of flagged elements not only in the Library but also while in VR. All of this with the goal of supporting our users across platforms and make the connection between their design tools and Prospect as seamless as possible.

Takeaways for our team

We learned a few things from creating the Inspect Element tool for Prospect:

Sketches are useful but VR prototypes are key to communicate ideas within our company and with our users.

While the scope for this feature was huge, we were able to reduce it due to development constraints and we released a feature that worked really well. Improving features over time is something we embrace and releasing an early version gave us more time to test and get feedback.

Providing support in Multiuser Meetings for the features we design means an extra layer of work for the entire team. From now on we will consider from the very beginning the design and development implications of having multiple people interact with our tools while in a Meeting in VR.

Selecting and flagging elements while in a Multiuser Meeting

If you are interested in trying out the Inspect Element tool: 

You can download Prospect Pro Plus here.

Find out how to flag Revit Elements in Prospect and review them in Revit, Dynamo and Navisworks here.

from VRFocus https://ift.tt/2IxOmqV

[drewkatchen]

Chris on his back patio | June 2017 | Jersey City, NJ | Pentax 67

Because my interview with Chris Leo involved a nice bottle of wine on a pretty damn nice summer day, our discussion meandered and maybe went longer than we initially expected, a fact that led to a hasty conclusion and us speeding off on bikes -- him on his and me on his wife’s -- to his work at the last minute.

Also, Chris is as generous in conversation as he is in his lyrics, and he’s willing to let things drift to wherever they may go for as long as they go. 

What follows is the second portion of our talk, which is concerned mostly with his band The Van Pelt, a musical group that began performing initially in 1993 and disbanded in 1997 after releasing two full-length albums on an independent record label. Chris played guitar and sang, and Brian Maryansky, Neil O'Brien and Sean Greene performed with him. Also, this interview is very much in the spirit of the way interviews run long in fanzines, with very little editing and condensing so as to offer the reader an accurate, non-embellished portrait of either their favorite band or a band they wanted to know more about or a band they know absolutely nothing about. Those are the interviews I grew up reading, whether they were in Maximum Rocknroll, HeartattaCk or a million other zines. That transparency is also in the interest of letting the artist’s thoughts run in their full and proper context. So a majority of this discussion below is as we had it, with very light doctoring for cohesion. I hope you enjoy it.

The Van Pelt have had several reunions, which first began in 2009, and they will continue this month with a small string of live performances. Go see them.

You can read the first portion of our chat HERE.

Thanks for inviting me over again. How has your day been so far?

I’m a little overworked. There’s the coordinating with wineries, how to get my wine from Italy to here. Then there’s the distribution part. I only import from Italy. Then there’s all these companies that I distribute wine from, but I don’t import their wine. That’s during the day. And then I have to find new people to sell it to and then I have to get it to those people. So I’m also the delivery man.

When do you sleep?

I don’t sleep much because at night I go and I’m doing this wine bar in Downtown Jersey City. The problem with New Jersey is it’s not for outside thinkers. It’s a place to breed outside thinkers that then get the fuck out of here. It’s a great place to create expats.

Well, let’s flip the record a bit as it were, because this is also partially based on what you’re doing with music.

At this moment, Charlie the dog interrupts the proceedings for a few moments. But it’s cool because he’s stopped barking and now he’s being friendly.

Is he young, how old is he?

He’s actually almost seven. We’ve had him for three years. He was in the pound for three years and he was on the streets of Los Angeles for a year. That’s why he’s all tough guy.

Did you get him in Los Angeles?

Yeah, we got evicted because of him barking like crazy.

I believe it. So what year did The Van Pelt begin?

I think we began in the fall of 1993 or in the spring of 1994. It’s hard to say because there were many iterations of the band. I started out on bass.

Did you?

Yeah. And we made these two albums, and the second album -- which was our more popular album – we had issues with the mastering. So, not only did we want to get it back in print and we wanted it remastered for our own sake. And so we did.

Is it more fun for you talking about wine or the band?

There’s definitely more joy in wine. Music isn’t pure joy. Music is pain. But also amazing. I also like talking about music because it’s so hard for me to articulate.

You’ve remastered these records again because you want them to sound better. But you’re also doing what you don’t like to do, which is play shows. Why are you doing that?

Except that I feel like I’m in a cover band.

Oh, that makes sense. But does that fact make it any easier?

Yeah, because now I’m singing the songs of this pretty cool kid from twenty years ago. And I’m playing a part; I’m trying to get into his mindset. One common theme of the band is disillusionment with the left, this civil war amongst Democrats and progressives in America.

What left are you talking about?

I’m talking about an eighteen-year-old’s idea of the left. I’m talking about an eighteen-year-old who is coming from an all-boys Catholic high school who created his idea of the left and was dying to leave this and find my people in the Lower East Side. The huge mistake I made was that to me the left meant open dialogue and the right meant closed dialogue. Where I really wanted to go was where you could sit at a bar or table with anybody and you could throw out any topic. What I found was the left was not about open dialogue. It was ‘The right believes ABC; we believe XYZ.’ And I didn’t think that was the way it was going to be. I thought it was going to be ‘The right believes ABC, and we believe everything else.’

So, lyrically that is what the band represents to you now? When you look back on it that’s how you see what you were doing?

Partially. In the sense that it’s one of the themes I’m excited to revisit because I think it’s so relevant now with the Democratic Party not see what was really coming with the progressives and Bernie Sanders.

The other thing I like revisiting is Chris Leo apriori optimist versus Chris Leo the empirical optimist. These things have changed quite a bit, but I love playing the role of the apriori guy. For example, if I was kind of hip to Monsanto when I was nineteen or twenty, I would have thought it was way cooler than I think it is now. I would have thought this idea of fucking with nature down to the bare bones is the coolest idea ever. ‘That’s what we’re supposed to do. We’re part of nature. If we don’t admit we’re part of nature then we don’t really understand nature. We’re part of nature and us fucking with it is the coolest thing ever.’ That’s Chris Leo the apriori optimist in the nineties. Let’s take this to the extreme; let’s take on nature. Yes, so many times we’ve done this we’ve failed miserably but let’s keep doing it. Chris Leo the empirical optimist now, twenty years later…if Monsanto had this little lab in Nebraska where they did all the same things and they live streamed it to us and said ‘Hey, we’re going to make this crazy square tomato and we’re going to feed it to dogs for twenty years and see what happens and we’re going to do all these other experiments but inside this hyper-controlled environment. But that’s not what Monsanto does, so therefore now I will get on board with the left of the early nineties and the left now and march against Monsanto.

You did write a lot about food in your songs. Hang on, let’s see what did I write down in my notebook? Here are some examples: An unseasoned meal, before the meat turns toxic in our tubes, feed me bread, lychee pits, gathering bread for your plate, more apple pie than I’ve ever been.

I guess I’ve been heading down the food and beverage path forever. And with The Lapse I had ‘Buffet.’ [’Buffet’ is a song from the 2000 album ‘Heaven Ain’t Happen’ where Leo proclaims ‘We make meals out of condiments.’]

I’m assuming you like to eat even though you’re very thin. Damn you.

I do like to eat.

What else was on your mind then?

Sex. Love. Politics, yes. Mortality always.

Even at that age?

ALWAYS. I always think about it.

Do you see yourself as a musician, songwriter, arranger? What do you see yourself as?

I’m not a performer. I’m terrible. I’d like to believe I’m a musician, but again, I feel like there’s this reciprocity that comes with being a musician, and I can’t say that I’m a musician. I don’t feel confident saying I’m a musician, but I like playing music.

What is your relationship with music like now?

It’s starting to find a real nice sweet spot, 43 years deep into my life. When I was making music with The Van Pelt and even The Lapse, sometimes I was just a little too close to it to appreciate it in its fullness, particularly with The Lapse. I almost became less of a fan boy than I was before I started playing music. I was just too deep in it. Too heady with it. Then, after the Vague Angels [Leo’s band from the aughts], I stopped playing music entirely. So, I haven’t written anything new for eight years or so. And the first year was amazing. I became more of a listener in every sense of the word, and not just with music, but with wine too. It was so helpful. I had this burst of interest in music, just as a listener. I was a super fanboy.

Of what?

I was just sucking everything up. At the time, I was living in Italy, and I was trying really hard to find good Italian music. I was really digging deep into Italian music. But then my music muscle atrophied. Not playing music, I realized that all these other things I was investing my interest in co-opted my brain. It was this really weak music muscle. Then I would go years picking up one or two bands a year.

What were the genres that you began liking as you got older?

I’ve always loved pop and dance. In the eighties, they used to call me a poseur because when I would write band names on my shoes, I would have like R.E.M., Erasure and Cover Girls. Kids would be like ‘You can’t put Cover Girls next to R.E.M.’

Who were the Cover Girls?

You don’t remember them?

I know the Weather Girls and Mary Jane Girls.

[Chris sings to me] Show me, show me you really love me. Actions speak louder than words.

Is it freestyle?

Yes, I love freestyle. We should do a freestyle night. [Chris frequently has friends and patrons play music on the bar’s sound system]

Oh, you know more than I do about freestyle.

We can get people to help us out. So, this is also during the glory years of 120 Minutes, so I was just discovering late-era Wire, but listening to Silent Morning. It’s always been a thread in my life, dance music and freestyle and pop.

I would get that listening to The Van Pelt.

Ha. Ok, remove yourself from the situation a bit. You gotta know what you do, and that’s not always what you listen to. I just don’t do certain things. There’s plenty of music I just don’t do. With The Van Pelt, I was hyper-restrained and I loved it. When we broke up I didn’t want to do anything restrained. I wasn’t feeling restrained. Now I’m stoked to do a lot of that. I wanted to explode because I was just so sick of the punk environment being so sterile. Music is supposed to make you abandon all inhibitions; music is supposed to take you from, if you walked in sad and watched a happy band then you leave happy or if you walk in happy and watch a sad band, then you leave sad. You’re supposed to lose it, and punk was so not about losing it.

Can you contextualize for me what The Van Pelt were? What world did you fit into?

So, we had two albums. The first album was a real fanboy album.

What does that mean?

Like young kids who are sucking up as much music as possible.

What were you sucking up?

Everything from Seam to Gastr Del Sol to Kraftwerk to whatever cassette was really cheap on tour at a gas station in Kansas, which might have been Procol Harum, and who knew they had other songs? So, absolutely everything. But we were all in agreement that we wanted to make anthems, we really wanted to kick out the jams. And this is a contextual thing because nineties New York were not about bands. That was for the rest of America. You had Jon Spencer and Sonic Youth and you had bands like that but they were in a whole mega league; they were not DIY. We would have aspired to their sales and notoriety but we were DIY [do-it-yourself or independent] through and through, to a fault. 

That’s one of the reasons sometimes people would call us emo. Your choices were to go indie and work the 21-and-up circuit playing all these bars and you have a booking agent and everything is pretty legit. Or continue with DIY and do the 18-and-up circuit or play anyone’s basement anywhere and also play bars but book it yourself and hop in the van, make everything happen the way you want it to happen and just because you’re doing it that way, they want to call you emo because that was the predominant DIY genre at the time.

So you don’t feel like you fit into that or you were that?

I don’t feel like we fit into that at all. What, you do?

I don’t know, maybe a little bit.

Maybe a little bit, sure. But not exclusively. We just wanted to make music. The second album was after a bunch of lineup changes; we’d just finished college. There was a huge blizzard in New York. We’d all just broken up with our girlfriends, so that was really pure. That one was like ‘This is what’s happening. No one is going to like it, but this is what’s happening. And it’s a bummer and this music sucks.’ Of course, that’s the record people like. So, who were we? We were just kids figuring out who we were.

Were you punk? Did you think of yourselves as punk then or no?

No. We thought of ourselves as DIY.

What’s the difference?

Punk has constraints.

So does DIY by its definition, no?

There’s no aesthetic or sonic restraints.

Oh, I see, I see. Where were you playing and who were you playing with? Who were your peers at the time?

We were playing at Brownies on Avenue A and 11th Street all the time.

RIP. [Brownies, an East Village rock/punk/indie club, closed in 2002].

I know, RIP. We never played Brooklyn. There was nothing there. Where else were we playing?

Did you ever play in New Jersey?

We played a Knights of Columbus in Wallington on the Passaic River, which was great. We would play colleges. We played The Cooler, all the time.

Who were you playing with? You were playing with emo bands, I’m guessing, even though you were not.

If we weren’t the booking agent. If it was a bill we booked, we would play with one of my brothers’ bands, Chisel or Radio Saturn. We’d play with Garden Variety. We played with Dahlia Seed. Their new band is playing with us in D.C.

Promise Ring? Texas is the Reason?

We didn’t play with Texas too much. We were all friends, but we didn’t cross with them much musically.

This isn’t the first time The Van Pelt has reunited. How do you feel about it now?

Great. This is basically the third time.

What made you reunite the first time in 2009?

Because an old friend of ours from Austin was like ‘Hey, I’m putting together a nineties bill for SXSW this year, please play.’

The Van Pelt perform in June 2009 at Coco 66 in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.

Had you entertained the idea before that?

It never really crossed my mind, honestly. No one even asked us, really. So, we all agreed to do it, and it was really cool. But it was a year after I stopped playing music.

Didn’t you write a novel in there somewhere, too?

I wrote five.

Didn’t you write five novels in there somewhere, too?

So, we did it. My relationship with music in general was weird. It was more about meeting these guys that I shared so much with back in the day. But when bands break up, it’s like breaking up with a girlfriend; it’s never perfect.

So you had no real misgivings about reforming?

I did. But for me on that tour, I had misgivings about playing music and playing Van Pelt music, but I wanted to play with those guys. I wanted to get back on track and bury every and any hatchet that could possibly be still hanging out there for no good reason. And we succeeded in that. Sonically the theme wasn’t clear to me in my head.

Does it fit sonically with who you are now or what you’re interested in?

That’s one of the things I love in revisiting these songs; some of it really does.

Would you listen to that now as a man your age?

The second album yes. The first album not so much, but I have fun playing those songs. And some of them we’ve kind of done adult contemporary style and we’ll be doing some of them that way for these shows. The point is, that was really cool in 2009, but it didn’t bring everything together in my mind that I was hoping it would. So then, we release what was supposed to be our third album, and in doing so we get offered to play this huge festival in England. It was one of the ATP festivals [Jabberwocky, 2014]. By that point everything is cool between The Van Pelt guys, thematically everything is settled in my head. We go and play these shows, and it was fucking amazing. We were really good.

The beauty of your vocal style is that your speaking voice doesn’t change that much.

It’s a little deeper now.

With the exception of maybe ‘We Are the Heathens’, you can kinda do most of it, right?

I can do most of it better.

I assume your upper register is gone though.

Yeah, it’s gone. I think sometimes it sounds better now though. So musically those shows were great and it was super fun. So then, the record label that releases that was like ‘Ok cool, that was a success. Let’s re-master and release your first two records. But you gotta play more shows.’ And we said, ‘Ok, cool.’ So, in the sense of like, do I need to keep revisiting old Van Pelt songs? No, I don’t. But, when we were rehearsing in 2012 and playing old songs, it was really hard to not write new songs.

So you’ve written new songs.

Yes, and we’re going to play some of those.

What do they sound like?

I dunno. We’ve only written three so far. We all have these little pieces we’re tinkering with.

So you have songs that are now five years old?

No, basically in 2012, in between playing old songs we would tinker with stuff and a song would come together and then we’d say ‘Oh fuck, we can’t do this right now. We gotta get back on track with relearning these old songs but my god it would be so much fun to flesh this out.’ So then, that’s the way we rationalize these new shows. So, now let’s spend some time fleshing these things out.

What percentage of the set will be new material?

Maybe we’ll throw in one or two for the shows. And hopefully we’ll have a new album in 2018.

You’re kind of like Linklater’s ‘Before’ trilogy. Every decade you do something.

Maybe. I love playing with those guys.

Do you find it bizarre the music you were doing then can live beyond its initial time?

No, because back in that time I was digging deep into the racks looking for stuff from twenty years earlier, and it fit the context of that time.

What were the primary sources? Sonic Youth, Velvets, Galaxie 500?

I didn’t listen to Sonic Youth much, only because that was such the sound of the time you almost didn’t need to listen to it. I didn’t listen to it a lot, but yes, I love Sonic Youth.

With the first record, we really wanted to make anthems because we were living in this time where the guitar players were no longer making anthems. And there weren’t many guitar players. They were all going the route of the deejay. So, it was like all the guitar players are getting weird as fuck, and we liked it. But we wanted to give a go at making an album of anthems.

I was listening to a lot of the Dustdevils. An interesting thing, we discovered a lot of bands by who people said they imagined we were listening to. People would say we must have listened to a lot of Bedhead, and we said no. And then we’d go listen to Bedhead. And even The Fall. I didn’t listen to The Fall until everyone said we sounded like The Fall. Which could bring us to Parquet Courts.

How do they relate to you?

You don’t think they sound like us?

Ooh, yes. I do.

So many people are like ‘Are you going to sue them or what?’

They seem very knowledgeable in what they’re doing. I think they’re very steeped in music history. [Full disclosure: I once saw Andrew Savage at a DS-13 show in Brooklyn wearing a Turning Point shirt. The Hi-Impact Turning Point shirt. That is fairly legit to me. I also like them a lot, probably because they remind me of The Van Pelt.]

Maybe that’s the case, and if it is, then they should give us a shout out. If it’s not the case, the world is so weird that I can believe it not being the case. Anyhow, I love it. I do love them.

You kind of got me inebriated. Who else were your influences?

Eric B. & Rakim were a huge influence, to the idea of speaking and saying intelligent things and putting it to a repeating riff.

Can you estimate how many shows you played when you were around?

It had to be over a hundred. We were just talking about this.

Did you enjoy being in a band?

Everything about it except the actual show. That part I wasn’t so into. Traveling, late-night drives, post-sound check hanging out at the bar during happy hour when no one’s there. A sticky, stinky bar. I loved that stuff. Meeting people from all around the world. I loved being in a band and touring.

When it comes to the music and the recording, was the intention to have the music serve your voice? To me, the music is behind you on the recordings.

I rarely write the lyrics with the music; I can’t do that. I’ll have a bank of lyrics. Even right now I have tons. That’s constant. When we start to tinker with a song, I’ll think about what lyrics will fit with the mood of the song.

Do you care what people take from your lyrics? Do people ask you what your lyrics mean?

I do get asked from time to time. I hope people take something from them. When people usually ask me, I like to say in the least snarky way possible, if I could articulate them in another way, then I wouldn’t have made lyrics out of them. This is the art form. It’s not a redundant art form. The reason poetry and lyrics exist is because it fills an articulation gap.

Did you put a lot of emphasis on them at the time or are they quick musings?

No, I sweat them out. To write lyrics for The Van Pelt, I would get on my bike, and I would have pen and paper, and I would loop Manhattan. I would go from Wall Street all the way up to Hell Gate Bridge [near Astoria, Queens]. And anytime something would come together, I would stop and write it down.

Do you recall ever having people really wanting to know exactly what you meant? Punk commonly demands black and white lyrical subject matter. How did you deal with it?

Yes. I probably dealt with it poorly, but I don’t remember. It can’t fit into a perfect dialogue; if it could, it wouldn’t be music or lyrics. It’s not regular dialogue, it’s an art. For example, when I go to a museum, I want to take the lengthy explanations off the wall and throw it in the trash. I hate the idea of a little placard telling me what a painting is supposed to resemble. I want to look at the painting and enjoy it, period.

Sultans of Sentiment…this is a Dire Straits thing?

No, it came from Twin Peaks. By the way, one of the things you asked before, I don’t think I answered it fully. What do I want from these shows? I really hope we can reach a few kids. That would make me so happy. Like if the version of us that was flipping through records at Kim’s in the early nineties, just finding obscure shit from 20 years earlier, if that kid finds us and we’re part of some thread.

Is The Van Pelt considered obscure now?

I think we’re super obscure, no? We don’t make any lists of bands of the early nineties.

Hmm. Did I not ask you anything? Oh, I know, are your lyrics about any real-lived events?

Yes. ‘Do the Lovers Still Meet at the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial?’ I was dating a girl who was half-Irish and half-Chinese and her Irish dad died, and her Chinese mother remarried a Chinese guy and they lived in Taiwan. And so I went to Taiwan a couple times during college, and I was not ready for the culture shock at all. It was really a lot for a kid in his twenties to take. Sometimes I would just need a break from the family and all the cultural things I just couldn’t accept, so we would meet at the Chiang Kai-Shek Memorial. It’s a huge giant white-and-blue pagoda, and old people would do ballroom dancing outside of it. And we would meet there, and we’d go out to clubs there and escape the madness of the culture clash that eventually proved to be too much for us. Eventually I left Taiwan with her prematurely on one visit, and I had a big argument with her family. I said ‘I’m done with this; I’m taking her out of the country. I’m done with this.’ It was just a huge battle. Pretty intense times.

Well, I’m glad I asked that. Ok, we’ve talked forever. Let’s end it. Thanks Chris.