🫠🫠🫠

i think it should be illegal for landlords to have anything to do with home networking, nothing between tenants and their ISP. i had one landlord who, when we got fibre installed, added a network cable through the walls so we could plug our router in upstairs instead of in the downstairs entryway where the fibre connection came in. great! except he found some network cable that capped out at about 50Mbit/s over 15-20m or so. so about 5% of the gigabit plan we had.

i think it should be illegal for landlords. full stop. period.

all my utilities are included in rent (part of why i was able to afford this place back when i moved in), so it's my landlord's name on the internet bill. also i don't think we have any legal say in what type of smoke alarms are used (as long as the landlord ensures they meet regulations on the amount and placement), which means even if i did choose my ISP and set the router up myself i could still be forced to use all the smart home stuff if the landlord put nest smart alarms in the property. which they have. but they also sorted the networking. and the flat is rented as individual flats w/ communal areas (kitchen, bathrooms etc.) rather than a big flat w/ multiple bedrooms if that make sense and since the router is in the communal area (and would affect other tenants) i'm pretty sure touching it would be a breach of contract. so like there's multiple ways in which it's all fucked and you're so right. but it's not a situation that can be avoided or changed until i can move elsewhere :c

also that's fucked like obviously they picked the cheapest cable that had the right connectors on it and ignored the rated speed bc hey it's not their problem (though if you were paying for gigabit separate to your rent and an action on your landlord's part caused you to not get that full speed, there may have been recourse to challenge them about it ? depends on what was in your contract).

another thing our landlord did is whenever there's an issue that we report and they (eventually) fix, they then like to micromanage us as tenants for the next couple weeks. we got told one of the kitchen table was too messy (it had clean pots and pans on it bc of a lack of suitable storage space), given a week to move stuff off or it would all get chucked. they actually came in and took everything off that table. which i'm pretty sure is illegal. and then promised us new cupboards or something to help w/ the storage issue. and it's been months. no new cupboards. this shit only happens whenever they have to come fix a door hinge or the boiler etc. like some sort of punishment for telling them the flat we pay them to live in is falling apart. for having to do the one job they actually have. that they don't even have to do bc they call in contractors to do it.

anyway, yeah fuck landlord and fuck them controlling stuff in the property you're paying to live in. also i had no idea about all the smart home stuff until i moved in. it's not really pointed out during the viewing. and nest are especially bad bc those devices recently had some sort of voice command feature unlock, meaning they were built w/ microphones this whole time which was never disclosed until the voice command feature dropped.

rant over lmao i'm hoping to move in a year, maybe two years depending on what's available and for how much

*Whispers* God, this guy is trying to talk shit about Hitoshi like if it wasn't his lazy ass changing places with his wife being the only reason he got in the Main Course

Just as well, I suppose. What would someone like you even know about construction anyway?

...

Dad, you don’t have to-

Ayato-kun, tell me something: you ever heard of the Sampoong Department Store?

What?

Simple question: have you heard of it?

No, but what’s that have to do with-

Sampoong Department Store was built in Seoul from 1987-89. Just like us, they were in the middle of an economic boom, but they actually banned international contractors. Only South Korean construction companies were allowed to take part in the city’s rapid urbanization.

And they stretched those companies to the breaking point to take advantage of the boom and the coming 1988 Olympics.

The original plan was to make a four-story apartment block, but the head of the Sampoong Group decided to change the plans and make it a department store. In the process, they made a ton of adjustments to the blueprints, and thus a lot of horrible errors.

The building didn’t have a steel skeleton. Instead, the pillars directly supported the concrete floors in what’s called flat slab construction. It’s cheaper, easier and faster, but it relies on the strength of the supports.

What they originally planned to use were pillars that were 80cm diameter concrete pillars, each with sixteen 22mm steel support rods. But to make room for the new escalators for the department store, eight of the pillars were reduced to 60cm and only had eight support rods.

The contractor they hired complained about this, and so Sampoong group fired them and finished it themselves. After that, they added a fifth floor with a food court and heavy underfloor heating pipes, which strained the building 50% beyond the support pillars’ capacity.

The supports which, by the way, were unevenly distributed. To make matters worse, they added a 45-ton load on the roof with a set of three massive air conditioning units. Ones that generated vibrations that rattled the pillars even more, and all this was only made worse when someone decided to move them across the roof by literally dragging them.

Alright, but what does that have to do with-

June 29th, 1995. People were complaining about it all day, warning the managers and owner, but they kept it open and refused to evacuate. Because of that, 502 people were killed and 937 were injured when the overstressed fifth floor collapsed under the air conditioning units, and the whole thing pancaked in on itself.

There were people buried under the rubble for days. One of them was a 16-year-old girl, Park Sung Hyon, who was buried down there for sixteen days. The fact that she survived is a miracle.

So you read about this?

Read about it? Who do you think they called on for the investigation?

What...?

I mean, I can’t take all the credit. It was mostly the on-site personnel who did the work, and I gave them my opinions, studied the blueprints and compared the changes made during its construction.

I even got to talk to Professor Lan Chung, the head of the investigation. Smart guy, definitely the kind of person you should hire for this sort of thing.

And you wanna know what happened there? Greed. Every sensible person told them this thing was a deathtrap, but the Sampoong Group kept it going and kept it open.

And guess what? On December 27th, Sampoong’s Chairman, Lee Joon, and his son and the CEO, Lan Han-sang, were both tried, convicted and sentenced to several years in prison for the whole thing.

That investigation also found widespread fraud and corruption, and they even indicted 12 city officials. In the aftermath, rigorous inspections took place across the country, and they found that 1 in 7 high-rises needed rebuilding, and 4 out of 5 needed major repairs.

So yeah, maybe I was a small part, but I like to think I played a role in helping make a whole country safer.

After all, they trusted me enough to ask for some insight after I graduated.

Maybe if you’d actually come to class with us, you would’ve seen that. Or were you also too busy making money to pay attention to the obvious?

*Hitoshi grabs a glass off the table, chugs the whole thing and slams it back upside-down*

Either way, nice chatting.

*With that, Hitoshi rolls himself off*

...

...

Good man.

More SV

I’m back! Yes, I am. And today – after installing that Diesel stuff pack that I found for cheap over on Amazon – I opened my game. I actually did a lot, even though I didn’t take pictures of everything. Because well, I’m lazy. No lie! But before I get to that, I’d like to thank all those who have - and continue - to serve in our military. Without your sacrifice, we could not enjoy the liberties we take for granted. So thank you all, very much.

Now, back to SV.

Down on the beachfront, I bulldozed that corner house at 1 Sun Song and plonked down a pale gray version of the house I used for the Koffi family. I plan on using variations of this house along this entire section of road, because 1) I’m lazy and it’s a quick fix. And 2) I’m lazy and in my town history, all of these houses along this stretch of road were built by the same contractor, years ago. And he was cheap, so he used the same basic floorplan for all of them. Then charged a bunch of simoleons for “personalization” of the different properties – ie: different exterior paint. Btw, if you’re wondering about the weird parking, it’s because the parking space takes up too damn much room. Motorcycles don’t need as much space as cars. No lie, EA! 

Anyway, while I did that house, I also took the family into CAS – which you all know I HATE!!! – and gave them make-overs. Hank – thanks to the awesome Master Controller – is now the brother of Justine Keaton, and BFF with her husband. Pauline will also be getting a sibling – that Asian Sim from the Working Friends household. But unlike Hank, Pauline doesn’t know that Tori Kimura is her sister, since they were adopted into different families as toddlers. And right now, they don’t really like one another, since Pauline thinks Tori is a snob – mostly because Tori went to Uni, while Pauline didn’t.

Anyway, once I got done with them, I hopped over to the empty spa lot and placed Tedhi’s remake of Hogan’s Diner. And for those of you who are interested, EVERYONE seems to go to this lot! It is always packed! The only thing I did to it, was trade out the tissue boxes for actual napkin holders – the ones that came with that 50’s diner set. Tedhi has been limiting herself to just base-game crap, but not me! I’ve got tons of CC and I’m not afraid to use it. Mostly because I don’t have to deal with whiney players who download her lots and complain about CC. Oh! The other thing I did, was trade out the bike stand out front for the ones made by Mspoodle – thank you! I’ve been using them on a lot of my community lots, since the city council is currently promoting the new “green” agenda, and since the bike rentals all belong to the city, they can charge exorbitant prices for rentals. As the city fathers like to remind voters, it’s “Progress as Promised.” Even though it’s really not.

Then I hopped down to that lot where Koffi originally lived and bulldozed his old house, then rezoned the lot to a fusion lounge. Then I put that store bistro lot there. I did make a few changes to it. Outside, I added a small fence around that outdoor eating area, because in real life, there would be one, because of potential lawsuits. I believe it’s a Sims 1 fence that Grande Llama put up for download. (I really like his stuff!) I also changed all the tables to be the same. And used Ani’s menus – since I use her Mod. Then I gave the place a sign – from Around the Sims 3. Don’t know what it says, but it looks good at night.

Inside, I made the kitchen a tad smaller, so that I could add that hallway next to the stairs. It goes back to a bathroom. In the main area, I didn’t add a lot of junk, since I hate getting those routing issues when Sims can’t figure out how to walk around stuff. I just changed out the tables for the ones I used outside.

Anyway, upstairs, I expanded the area a tad. Got rid of the bathrooms and added a bit over what was a flat roof area - that’s where all those windows come in. Then I used one of those Late Night bars and some furniture from Around the Sims 3. That open area by the DJ thingie is actually a small “invisible” dance floor from Mod the Sims. And viola! Another lot done! Go me!

Because this post is already so long, I’ll show you some more in the next one.

bandit king - s.mingi

hello!!! literally nobody wanted this but i’ve written it anyway and actually?? i quite enjoyed writing a character like this. i hope you enjoy! if you do, please like or any other way of letting me know!

// Apocalypse!AU  Borderlands x Ateez AU Bandit King!Mingi x Vault Hunter!Reader I guess this is kind of??? angst // I’ve tried my best to write a gender neutral reader, but if i’ve slipped up anywhere please tell me and i’ll change it ASAP. Warnings; mentions of blood, death (murder), guns, graphic descriptions of violence and explicit language. if i’ve missed anything that may potentially be triggering, please message me and i will add it to this list. wc;4642

// 

“Strip the flesh! Salt the wound!” 

You aim your radiated Maliwan shotgun at the psycho who was hurtling towards you, screeching nonsense at the top of his lungs. Without blinking an eye, you pull the trigger and watch the shell plunge into his chest, knocking him to the floor in an instant. You lower your gun, and stand frozen in your position.

Wait for it…

His skinny frame is launched thirty meters into the air with an explosion that leaves your ears ringing. A toxic, mustard-coloured cloud trails after him as he flies upwards, then rolls over his corpse when he lands with a dull thump.

You had always favoured Maliwan’s range of elemental shotguns. 

With a sigh, you sling the gun into its holster on your back, and step over the dead psycho with a small smirk.

One down, plenty more to go.

-----

Tracking the Bandit King had proven much more of a challenge than your contractor had initially let on. Bringing you from your home planet to the run-down, wasteland named Pandora, you’d travelled far and wide looking for them. Rife with rival gun manufacturers, various bandit clans and ‘ordinary’ civilians just trying to survive, your particular maniac could be anywhere. You didn’t know much about him except for his name; Inferno. It was a stupid name, for an equally stupid leader of a stupid bandit gang, but you were promised a substantial amount of pay for his murder, so he could call himself whatever he wanted; he would be dead soon.

However, the night was quickly approaching, and you’d been driving through the dusty Pandoran plains for far too long, so you pull up to the next bar you come across. You park your sandy brown Outrunner to the left of the tavern and walk towards the entrance.

‘The Blood Bucket’ flickers in a blinding, neon purple above the crimson stained double doors. A fine establishment for some fine patronage, you presume. 

With a kick of your steel-toed boot, the doors swing open and a hush falls over the customers almost immediately; it’s not everyday they witness a vault hunter so out in the open.

“Ain’t no vault here, you scumbag!” a hoarse voice calls out from the crowd of drunks, and the rest of them break out into laughter.

You reach down and slightly withdraw your Vladof pistol from your hip, the crowd falling silent once more as you inch it out of it’s holster and clutch it in your hand. All eyes are on you as you approach the bar, and although you’re used to the staring and scowling from random people, it’ll always make you nervous. Not that you would ever show weakness, as a vault hunter, you’d sooner die than let anyone believe they had an advantage over you. 

“A bed for the night?” You ask the bartender, although it comes out more as a demand than a question.

You can see by the way his lip curls up in disgust that he isn’t best pleased about having you, a murderer, thief and all-round terrible person who galivants across the galaxy facading as a hero, standing before him in his bar. But he knows how ruthless vault hunters are, how cold-hearted they can be and he’s aware that you can put a bullet between his eyes quicker than he can say “skin pizza”. 

So he reluctantly points to his right, indicating to a set of rickety looking stairs, to which you assume the rooms are. You nod in thanks and make your way over to the steps, ignoring the glares from everyone else in the bar. Hurrying up them, you let out a breath you didn’t know you were holding, and unclench your fists from their stiff positions by your side. The tensest parts of these contracts were never committing the murder itself, it was always the journey getting there that made you anxious to your core.

Admittedly, you’d grown accustomed to your lifestyle, even if you had no choice. It was a dog-eat-dog universe, and you’d built yourself into a powerful lone wolf. Yet there were always bigger beasts out there, no matter how hard you trained or how many people you killed. It would probably never be enough, but for the time being, you had no other choice; you had to slaughter, or run the risk of being slaughtered yourself.

-----

The next morning, you wake early and wash the dried blood out of your hair from the day before. You sit on the (surprisingly comfortable) bed and pull out the contractor’s instructions from your bag. Skimming over the pages for the millionth time, you study Inferno’s face one more time. 

You’d been hired to take out countless enemies for countless rich idiots, but there was something different about him, and you hated to admit it; but he was ridiculously handsome. One of the documents given to you was an old, faded ‘wanted’ poster, featuring a photograph of the bandit king himself. Judging by the photo’s setup, you guessed it was a mugshot of sorts, as Inferno is standing, facing the camera and holding a sign. Typically, there would be a name written on the board that the criminals hold, but this one has been scratched out, presumably to hide his identity. Whoever crossed that name out, wants Inferno’s real name kept quiet. You can relate though; you don’t go by your real name either. Nicknames are so much safer to use, especially on this wasteland of a planet. 

You stare down into his hooded eyes in the photograph, responding to his stagnant smirk with a frown of your own. The height markers behind him indicate a healthy six feet and you wonder how somebody so good-looking managed to become the crazed ruler of a bunch of lunatics. You imagine his wildly curly hair is an obnoxious red, the blood spatters on your documents covering the sepia tones of the photo and giving him quite a nice hair colour. 

The longer you inspect his face, the more and more you start to feel for him. It’s a foreign feeling, sympathy. You don’t like it. You hate that you think he could’ve become more, become something better than a murderous clan leader. Because this mugshot is clearly old, from a time before he was totally corrupted by blood-lust and greed. From before he could solve anything and everything with the pull of a trigger. And you realise it’s because this young, up-and-coming bandit king in the photograph reminds you of yourself. Before you were forced into fending for yourself and transforming into somebody deep down you were ashamed of, but realistically you had no choice. And it was likely that your next victim had no choice either. Nobody did. Not on Pandora. Not anywhere.

Abruptly, you stuff the documents deep inside your backpack and then haul it over your shoulders. Grabbing your shotgun and pistol and hiding them inside their holsters, you feel that same rush flood over you as it does everytime you pick up a gun. It’s similar to an unwavering calmness, a complete opposite to how any other ordinary person would be if they were to clutch a huge Maliwan shotgun to their chest.  You pick up the new, DAHL SMG that’s leaning by the door and twist it around in your hands. Aptly named ‘Night Hawkin’, it switches from shooting pyro bullets to cryo (ice) bullets depending on the time of day, and you figure that Inferno is the perfect test-subject for your new toy.

Once you’ve gathered your few belongings, you march downstairs to pay the innkeeper. 

“Five Eridium bars?!” you snap. “You didn’t say anything about Eridium fees.”

The innkeeper raises his smug little face at you and you resist all urges to pistol whip him across the room. 

“I figured a vault hunter like you would have no trouble paying up,” he spits. “After all, you like to gloat about how much you rob from those vaults, right?”

“Two bars.” you bargain. He’s right, truthfully. You do have the money, more than enough actually, to pay him the full five, but you don’t want to give him the satisfaction.

“Four bars,” he pauses for a second and eyes you from his side of the bar. “Four, and I’ll tell you where your bandit lover-boy is.”

You freeze. How did he know-

“You don’t think I check on the people who stay here?” his smirk grows and you realise he’s got you in the palm of his hand. He has information that, providing he was telling you the truth, could be extremely helpful. You’re also pretty bewildered that he went through your things while you were sleeping too, but now is not the time to unravel all of that.

“Fine.” you grumble. “But information first, payment second.”

The barkeep fixes his gaze on you for a few moments before crossing his arms and leaning forwards. He lowers his voice, despite the bar being relatively empty.

“You’ll find him at The Devil’s Footstool,” he mumbles. “Just north of The Salt Flats.”

“I thought that was Hyperion territory?” you question. Hyperion, one of the most influential weapon manufacturers and businesses this side of the galaxy had reign over the majority of Pandora. Naturally, you despised Hyperion and everything they stood for; a corrupt, power-driven company who stopped at nothing to get what they wanted. Butchering thousands of innocent lives for their own benefit. You loathed Hyperion.

The innkeeper shrugs.

“Inferno and his bandit followers waltzed in not so long ago like they owned the place,” he explained. “Not Hyperion anymore.”

You nodded, opting not to say anything else. Reaching into your bag, you pull out the four violet bars and hand them over to the innkeeper, unimpressed at having to fork out such a ridiculous amount.

It didn’t matter though, because the information he had just given you could save you days, even weeks in completing the contract. Even if it turned out he was lying out of his ass, you might still be able to find something at The Devil’s Footstool regardless. If not, you knew where he lived, and there was a brand-new shotgun with his name on it that you were just itching to try out.

You sling the backpack over your shoulder again, mumble a ‘thank you’ to the barkeep and make your exit. Jumping into the driver’s seat of your vehicle, and heaving the bag into the passenger seat, you prepare yourself for the endless journey through the boiling heat and dust. You hated it here.

-----

Five hours later, you finally arrive at your destination; The Salt Flats. Stocking up before embarking on tracking Inferno down for the final time was a very good idea, so you pulled into a small town just on the outskirts of The Salt Flats. You’d be in luck if the inhabitants (if there were any) weren’t hostile, but you weren’t planning on staying long. Luckily, you manage to find a nearby ammunitions vending machine, so you spend a good fifteen minutes buying shells, bullets, grenades, anything you think you might need to send Inferno’s cult of weirdos sprawling. 

 Also, what kind of dumbass name was Inferno?

There were so many crazy individuals spread across the planet but you’d never get over some of the stupid names they chose for themselves. One of the most absurd characters being King Wee Wee, a bandit lord in New Haven. You’d yet to find anyone dumber than him. But on Pandora, you’d probably find them soon enough.

Shaking your head and double-checking your bag is tightly secured, you throw it into the back of the Outrunner. But before you can jump into the driver’s seat, you freeze.

You squint into the distance, almost as if blinding yourself momentarily will make your hearing clearer. And somehow it works, the faint sound of rushing footsteps nearing closer and closer. The grunting and wheezy breaths immediately signal out to you; there’s a psycho nearby. And he’s not happy that you’re here. 

The slim, weirdly ripped frame whips around the corner, bolting out from behind an abandoned car. His mask covers his entire face, and you’ve dealt with psychos millions of times before, but the blank, expressionless masks always chilled you to the bone.

“You’re gonna be my new meat bicycle!” he screeches at you, before hurling himself over the hood of the car and sprinting full-speed towards you, waving some sort of nailed bat above his head. 

Instinctively, you withdraw your pistol and before you can even blink, there’s a deafening bang! and the hideous screaming stops, leaving the psycho as nothing more than a bloody, crumpled heap on the dirty ground. Catchihg your breath, you watch the pool of crimson seep across the earth below your feet, and put the pistol back by your hip. No matter how quick your reflexes were, psychos would always manage to scare the living shit out of you. It was their odd, unsettling catchphrases more than anything. They stuck to wild, close-range combat, so anybody with a gun would easily defeat one. But when they threaten to turn your face into pepperoni? That’s when you’re caught off guard.

You hop into your car, turning the engine and pressing on the gas as hard as you can. Eager to get out of this town in fear of what else might come barreling around corners and out of alleyways.

Yet it’s in your haste that you fail to see the tattoo inked onto the psycho’s body. You overlook the dark outline of the bursting flames on his torso, something you’ll end up wishing you hadn’t  missed.

-----

Crouching behind a semi-blown up road-block, you’re just outside of Inferno’s compound. After scouting the area, you were certain that nobody was patrolling the areas outside. You wondered how Inferno had managed to seize The Devil’s Footstool from Hyperion. The central focus of the area was a massive arena, where you assumed Hyperion personnel would train. What did Inferno want with a fighting arena?

It was suspicious too, how there was not another living soul out here with you. You supposed that maybe there was a meeting going on inside the building attached to the stadium, one where literally everybody had to present for? Although psychos could barely tell apart their own limbs from hotdogs, so if there was an important gathering, it’s unlikely they’d be invited.

Still, you keep your guard up, head down and make your way towards the building. As you gain on the entrance, you hear the roaring of engines rise up into the air; there must be a race in the arena. But the track is behind the main building, and you can’t see or access it from here. So the only option is to go through the building. 

With one hand clutching your pistol, you slope around the left of the building, deciding that going through the front doors would be stupidly reckless, instead looking for a side door. Alternatively, you locate a window, which conveniently is already open. You peer inside, scanning what appears to be a study or an office, with nothing but a wooden desk and a chair in the middle. 

You should’ve sensed that something was off because of how empty the room was; offices should have shelves, plants, bits of paper everywhere, right? 

However, you think nothing of it, continuing to hoist the window up and combat roll into the room. You stand up immediately, about to reach behind you and grab the shotgun slung across your back but suddenly, an arm flies in front of you, wrapping around your throat with your chin buried in the crevice of their elbow. You dig your nails into their forearm, your vision firmly planted onto the tattoo shaped like a burst of flames on his arm. Caught off guard, you don’t make the connection in your head between the tattoo and the obvious.

“Hello,” a deep voice purrs into your ear, causing goosebumps across your entire body. “I’ve been expecting you.”

-----

The barrel of his assault rifle presses painfully against your spine, and his bicep is squeezing against your jugular so hard you think you might pass out. You bite your bottom lip harshly to stay quiet, and to ground yourself. Panicking now is the last thing you want.

“It’s not everyday a vault hunter comes tumbling through my office window.” you feel him smirk against your ear and you curse yourself for not checking the room properly.

“Where’s Inferno?” you demand. “I have business with him.”

“Business?” he echoes, easing his grip on your neck a little, but still restricting almost all of your movement. “Are you sure? I don’t recall him having any business to attend to today.”

You attempt to twist your head around to look at him, but he catches your chin in his hand which thankfully, removes the pressure from your neck. But now he’s tightly gripping your face and you can feel his fingers press against your teeth through your cheek.

“Tsk tsk,” he reprimands you, tutting into your hair. “Face forward. If you agree to behave, I’ll take you to Inferno and you can handle this so-called ‘business’”. 

Nodding, (or at least, as best as you can with his vice-grip on your jaw), you agree. The gun is still prodding into your spine, and with the way he’s towering over you, there’s no way you could possibly escape from this. 

So you allow him to march you through the building, reverting back to having his forearm basically crush your windpipe, causing you both to shuffle awkwardly through the hallways. He leads you up three flights of stairs, multiple twists and turns, (the building definitely didn’t look this big from the outside), until he bustles you into a random room at the end of another, identical hallway. 

Only when you’re inside and he’s checked the door is locked, does he retract his grip and move away.

You swivel around the second he lets go, retrieving the pistol and aiming it out in front of you. The sight before you shocks you to your stomach, and you almost drop the small firearm.

Inferno himself is standing right there, the smuggest grin on his stupid face. His eyes are hooded, yet still sparkling mischievously with his gaze fixed directly on you. Taller than you thought he was too, you have to look up a fair amount to meet his stare. He has a sharp, narrow nose that suits the rest of his face and a few, prominent freckles splattered over his cheeks like blood. What strikes you the most is his hair. Curly, wild, and obnoxiously red. So the blood on the paper was right.

“Hi, darling.” he drawls. “Expecting somebody else?”

He’s rolling the Night Hawkin submachine gun in his hands, inspecting it from the stock to the magazine with an impressed pout. He flicks the manual switch between pyro ammunition and cryo, and chuckles shortly at the icy bullets.

“Nice weapon,” he compliments you. “Let me guess, DAHL? Those bastards love to make guns that make my life difficult.”

His playful tone irks you, and you scowl angrily at him. Not only has he stolen your brand-new weapon, he’s playing mind games with you. It’s just a shame that you’re  playing yourself right into his hands. Inferno raises an eyebrow at your silence.

“Cat got your tongue?” he teases. “That’s okay, I’ll do the talking.”

Making no reply, you keep your pistol aimed at him, thanking the gods that your arms aren’t trembling the same way your breath is. 

He paces around the room, slowly making a circle around you and you’re forced to spin on the spot to keep your gun aimed at his head. He’s still smirking, even as he begins to speak.

“You’re here to kill me, correct?” he nods in acknowledgment as you confirm that yes, you are in fact here to murder him. “I thought so.”

“You see, I have a slight problem with that,” he continues, strolling over to the window and glancing at the blazing sun outside. “It’s beautiful weather outside today, and I’d really prefer not to die and miss out on topping up my tan.”

What?

You don’t even know how to reply to that, but he doesn’t give you the opportunity to do so.

“Not only would you be murdering me on a wonderfully hot afternoon, you’d be committing yet another crime against me. And what have I done to you, vault hunter?” he fake pouts, and you catch yourself before you feel sympathy creep back in.

But what did he mean ‘another’ crime? You haven’t met him before now. Murder contracts are nothing personal; you’re simply the messenger.

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten already?” he’s in front of you before you can even register his fingers curled underneath your chin, tilting your head up to glare dead into his eyes. The tip of your pistol is pressing into his chest, just right of his heart. Yet he doesn’t appear fazed at all. 

“Let me jog your memory.” he murmurs, fanning hot air all over your face. 

In an instant, he’s seized your pistol, wrenching it from your hold and spun you around so your back is leaning against his chest. You can feel his jaw resting on the top of your head, and the way he moves round to your right, his lips ghosting the shell of your ear like before.

“Not so long ago, I believe you had an encounter with a very good friend of mine.” husky voice eerily calm, you hate to admit that you’re terrified.

You’re used to dealing with the most insane individuals the planet has to offer, but there’s something human in him. Something so raw that it’s thrown you completely off balance. There was absolutely nothing in the universe that could have prepared you for a bandit king who wasn’t completely crazy. For someone who reminded you of yourself, somebody who was trying to survive in this barren, apocalyptic wasteland, albeit through entirely immoral means. 

“My friend is dead now, thanks to you.” there’s no bitterness or even anger lacing his words, and you’re conflicted on whether he’s furious or grateful.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” you exhale, finding your voice eventually. 

“Oh? The vault hunter speaks!” he feigns surprise, but the arm you hadn’t even noticed wrapped around your waist squeezes you closer into him.

You truly had no idea what he was on about though. You’d killed a lot of people, although you’d spent the majority of the day driving, so unless you’d accidentally fallen asleep at the wheel and taken part of an unconscious hit and run, you were clueless.

“The town just outside of The Salt Flats,” he snaps, losing his temper with you. You feel his chest rise and fall as he recollects himself, and you wonder how short his fuse must be. “Steve only wanted to show you his new bicycle.”

Bicycle?

“That psycho was your friend?” you blurt out.

“Steve was my second-in-command,” Inferno mumbles into your ear. “And you put a bullet in his head. I don’t appreciate that one little bit, vault hunter.” as he finishes his sentence, he raises his free arm and plants the barrel of your pistol to your forehead, the cold metal a cool change to your burning skin. 

“I don’t like it when people mess with my things.” he growls lowly. “I also don’t like having to find new second-in-commands.”

“You’ve got plenty of lunatics to choose from.” you whisper.

“No. I don’t think any of them are fit for the job, you see.” he retorts immediately, barely waiting for you to finish your own sentence. 

“Yet how convenient it is,” he carries on. “That there is a new vacancy, just as you break into my office.”

“No, I don’t thi-”

“You don’t think anything, vault hunter,” he interrupts you, his tone getting aggressive and rougher. “I regret to inform you, but you don’t have a fucking choice.” You can tell from the pistol digging into your skin that he isn’t sorry at all, and that he might be right; do you really have much of a choice?

“What do you want from me?” you ask, voice just above a whisper. 

His clutches weaken ever so slightly, finally allowing oxygen properly into your lungs. It was looking more likely for you to die from lack of breath rather than a bullet to the brain.

“I just told you,” he says. “I want you to be my second-in-command, seeing as you killed my previous one. Think of it as an exchange.”

“An exchange? For what?”

He leans over your shoulder, his cheek pressing against your own as you try to look him in the face.

“Put it this way, you join us, or you die. Does that make sense, Y/N?” he examines your reaction with an ecstatic grin, watching as your face drops and your breach catches in your throat.

How did he know your name?

The panic that shoots through you is immeasurable; nobody is supposed to know your real name. Nobody should know your real name. So how the fuck does this stupid, mind-game playing bandit king who you’ve never met before, know?

Satisfied with your response and knowing you’re putty in his hands, he completely lets go of you, even removing the pistol from between your eyes. You sense him moving away, the space around you turning empty and cold. Part of you wishes, hopes that he’ll put his arms back around you and make you warm again, and the other half of you wants to yank the small ice pick out from your sock and jab it into his eye socket over and over and over again.

You stand in the center of the room, motionless for what seems like an eternity, just thinking. Inferno waits behind you patiently, and you secretly commend him for being the sanest psycho you’ve ever met.

But clearly his patience begins to wear thin, as he comes round to stand in front of you. He bends down to match your height and uses his fingertip to lift your chin up a little, the same way he did previously. His touch is uncharacteristically gentle, a polar opposite to the way he was choking you and harshly grasping you not even five minutes ago. 

“So?” he hums. “What do you say?”

Inferno searches your eyes as you mull over your answer. Although, there isn’t much thinking left for you to do; he’s metaphorically backed you into a corner and realistically, you have no escape.

“Fine, I’ll join you,” you rasp, the pressure of his gaze weighing down heavily on you and making you tenfold more nervous.

“Excellent!” he beams, standing up straight and clapping his hands together. “You’ll make a much better second-in-command than a vault hunter-”

“On one condition, I’ll join you.” you interrupt him, and his excited demeanour drops.

His dark eyes bore in yours, and he raises an eyebrow, indicating for you to name the stipulation. 

“Tell me your name.” you request. “Your real one.”

“I don’t think you quite understand the power dynamic here, darling.” he scoffs.

“No, I understand perfectly,” you quip. “I just don’t think it’s fair that you know mine, but I don’t know yours.”

You hold your palm out in a mock handshake pose.

“Say the name, and I’m yours.”

“Say my name?” he snorts, poking the inside of his cheek with his tongue and turning his head away from you.

Suddenly, his large palm slaps into yours, his long fingers curling around your hand and he performs a strong, steady handshake.

“Mingi.” he says quietly. “You can call me Mingi.”

You smirk, reciprocating the formal shake.

“Pleasure doing business with you, Mingi.”

// if people like this then i already have ideas for a part two... hehe

A Dog by Any Other Name

Rating: T for swearing

Length: 3.2k

Summary:  After her boyfriend finds himself arrested, Emma Swan is left with a broken heart, a trashed apartment... and her ex's dog. While she agrees to keep the dog, she draws the line at calling him such a ridiculous name. Killian Jones, her hot British neighbor, wholeheartedly agrees.

On AO3

Notes: Here is my contribution to @cspupstravaganza​! Thank you to @profdanglaisstuff​ and @kmomof4​ for organizing this event, and thank you to the lovely ladies on the discord for making this event so much fun! 

Thank you as always to @shireness-says​ for her amazing beta skills, even though her lack of faith in my puns is disturbing. That John Oliver quote is for you, even though I wholeheartedly disagree with it. 

Disclaimer: I do think the dog’s name is terrible, and I designed it this way. I in no way think this is a good pun, or even that you should pun when naming a pet.

Enjoy!

Emma sits on her couch, contemplating the mess that her apartment has become.

(Her life also has gone down the drain, but it’s easier to think about her living room.)

She says “her” living room, but yesterday it had been “their” living room – as in hers and Walsh’s, her now former boyfriend. Turns out she’s got a knack for dating losers, because just this morning as she was brushing her hair and Walsh was putting the coffee on, the police had banged on their door to arrest him and search the apartment. 

Walsh was accused of smuggling stolen goods and embezzling. Now she understands why he’d insisted on putting the lease in her name only; bastard wanted to cover his tracks.

Emma looks at the plaster and wooden frame scattered over the floor, all that remained of her ornamental mantle; she’d told Walsh that she’d always wanted a chimney when she was a child to hang Christmas stockings from and to spend cold days in front of. He’d surprised her when she had come back from a three-day stakeout with a new addition to their living room. She’d thought it sweet at the time, even if not what she had meant at all, but she now realizes that he’d had it built to hide money inside. Tens of thousands of dollars. That he’d stolen. Sleazy fucking asshole.

Not only does she have to piece her life back together, but she also has to get her living room wall fixed. She won’t rebuild the chimney; it was gaudy and useless. Who builds a chimney with no hearth, anyway? It was a lie, just like her relationship.

Her second biggest problem yips next to her on the couch. Oh, right. She’d forgotten for a moment that her ex had left her with his dog. His dog, not theirs. He’d had it before they met, and Emma had warned Walsh when they’d moved in together that she wouldn’t take over his dog duties.

Plus that dog has the stupidest name she’s ever heard.

Frantic knocking on the door announces the arrival of Mary Margaret, the dog’s barking picking up in volume. David must have told her – did she mention that it was her brother’s squad who had searched her apartment? Bringing in her next perp is going to be all kinds of awkward, now that Lieutenant Fa knows what’s hidden in the back of her underwear drawer. 

“Emma!” her sister-in-law and best friend says as she bustles in, gasping when she sees the state of the living room. “Are you alright?”

Emma snorts. Of course she isn’t alright, but for the moment she’s letting her anger overshadow her pain. Much easier this way. “My apartment is in shambles, my brother’s coworkers snooped through my whole life, and I learnt this morning that my boyfriend was a criminal. How do you think I feel?”

“Oh honey, I’m so sorry,” Mary Margaret says, hugging her. “Do you need anything?”

While an extraordinary amount of alcohol is Emma’s first answer, she swallows it back, not wanting to incur her friend’s disapproval. A bark and a little head bumping her leg give the blonde a more appropriate answer. “Yeah, do you have the number of a good shelter? I have to take care of this guy.”

Mary Margaret gasps as if she had just disclosed her plans to kill puppies in front of babies. “What? Why would you do that to your dog? Poor little Nacy, you can’t get rid of him!”

Emma groans at the mention of the dog’s name. Walsh had wanted to be clever when naming his dog and had called him Nacious in the most terrible pun to ever be uttered. Because his dog was a pug, so he was the pug Nacious. Pugnacious. “A ferocious little guy!” Walsh used to say, elbowing Emma as if she were in on the joke. 

 Turns out Emma had been the butt of the joke all along. Ha. Ha.

“He’s not my dog,” Emma snaps, “he’s Walsh’s, and right now? I want to get rid of every single trace of that idiot from my life. Including his stupid dog.”

“Emma!” This time she’s being scolded. “I know you’re hurting, but you can’t talk this way about Nacious, he is not stupid.”

She knows he’s not stupid. His name is, though.

Mary Margaret’s wheedling as they clean up manages to overcome Emma’s resolve to get rid of Nacious. Her attempts to get Emma to change her mind culminate in Mary Margaret holding the dog up to Emma’s face and looking at her with big round eyes. She will not call them puppy eyes; she has already had enough dog-related puns to last her a lifetime. 

Emma draws the line at the name, though. It has to go.

 ----

Emma had started looking for a contractor as soon as the apartment had been cleared of debris and everything either put back in its place, or in a trashbag if it belonged to Walsh. 

(Except the engagement ring. That had been quite the surprise – one that had made her sob for a whole night as Nacious licked her face, whining in worry. The ring she had kept, planning on pawning it off. It would pay for the repairs to her living room, at least.)

She finds one quickly, right in front of her mailbox while coming back from walking Nacious on the following Saturday morning. She’s on the phone with a building company, arguing with them about the price that they want her to pay for an expert to come assess the work that needs to be done. They seem to be under the impression that she isn’t aware making her pay $200 for a simple estimate is way too much. As she ends the call rather angrily, someone clears their throat behind her, making her turn around to come face to face with one of her neighbors. She’s seen him a couple of times in the lift, but apart from noticing how handsome he was, his striking blue eyes and the fact he was British, she didn’t know anything about him, not even his name.

“I’m sorry to have eavesdropped, lass, but I understand you seem to be in need of a contractor?” he asks her, smiling tentatively.

“Why, are you one?” Emma answers quite shortly, annoyed by her phone call and nosy neighbors.

“I’m not, but my brother is,” he says, rummaging in his satchel and fishing out a business card. “He does very good work, and he provides free assessments too,” he finishes mischievously.

Emma takes the card, still wary, even as Nacious tugs on his leash, trying to get closer to the man. Jones Contracting is written in a no-nonsense black on the card, along with a website and contact info. She could give them a try, she guesses. At least if anything goes pear-shaped, she’ll know where his brother lives.

“Thanks,” she tells him, slightly mollified, “I’ll – Nacious!”

The dog had managed to pull enough on his leash to reach the man’s – Jones, she guesses – legs and had started to play with his shoelaces, pulling on them and slobbering over Jones’ shoes. Ferocious little guy, my ass , Emma thinks disdainfully. The only way it would hurt a fly is if it drooled on it too much.

Jones looks down before squatting, reaching to scratch behind the dog’s ears. “Hello little lad! In a playful mood, are we?” Then, blinking, he looks up at Emma, “Wait, did you say his name is Nacious? Pugnacious? Really ?”

“Oh, believe me, not my idea. Blame my ex for that, he had the worst sense of humor ever.”

“Clearly, if he called his dog that . What that’s quote again? ‘Wit is the lowest form of humor, and puns are the lowest form of wit’?”. 

“And also the ‘worst form of human behavior.’ I watch John Oliver too,” Emma says, smiling slightly. “Although I have to disagree with him, as Walsh sank even lower than bad puns.”

“Ah, yes, and got himself arrested for it,” her neighbor nods as he straightens up. Emma winces. So everyone in the building knows about it. Great, as if she needed to be the subject of gossip on top of everything else.

“Sorry, love, shouldn’t have said it like that. Probably shouldn’t have said it at all, to be honest,” Jones apologizes, scratching behind his ear in embarrassment. 

“Nah, it’s fine. It’s not like his arrest was very discreet, was it?”

“No, it wasn’t. But still, thinking Nacious is a good name for a dog is criminal in and of itself.”

“Which is why I’m going to change it. Just need to find something appropriate.”

“Oh, as long as it isn’t Ilist, you should be good. Can’t sink any lower.”

Emma snorts despite herself. Who knew the gorgeous Brit had a sense of humor?

 ----

And so Emma calls Jones Contractors and talks to a bubbly woman on the phone, then a tall Brit in her apartment who comes to assess (for free) what needs to be done. He introduces himself as Liam Jones, and is very professional, despite a twinkle in his eye that is quite reminiscent of the one in his brother’s gaze. The quote is reasonable and in her budget, so Emma meets Belle, Liam’s wife and co-owner to draft and sign the contract.

Work on her living room starts the next week and advances quickly. Liam is a quick worker, and works cleanly. That is, until he accidentally hits a pipe while tearing out the ruined section of wall. He ends up completely drenched before he manages to stop the leak.

“Sorry lass, do you mind if I call my brother? I can’t continue like this and I’ve got a change of clothes at his flat, it would only take a few minutes.”

“Sure,” Emma agrees, shrugging. “I’ll start mopping while you do that.”

The brother – her neighbor – arrives five minutes later, his arms full and his eyebrow raised.

“Hello lass, heard my brother was making a mess?”

Before Emma can answer, excited yips grow closer as Nacious (or Spencer, as she’s started calling him, but she’s not a fan) bounds to the door, running between Emma and Jones excitedly. 

“Good morning to you too Nacious, has your mistress found a new name for you yet?”

“Nacious? I thought his name was Spencer?” Liam says as he comes dripping to the door.

“I’m… trying out new names,” Emma explains, taking Nacious in her arms.

“Good idea, Nacious is really weird for a dog.”

“You don’t understand, brother. What kind of dog is it?”

“A pug – oh you gotta be kidding me. A pun, really?” Liam exclaims, scrunching his nose in distaste.

“It was not my idea,” Emma insists. “It was my ex’s own brand of humor.”

“There’s no humor in that, lass, merely mediocrity. That arse deserves every day of jail he’s gonna get, even if only for that pun.”

Emma agrees, even if she can’t believe that even her contractor knows about her terrible taste in men. Then again, his brother probably had filled him in as to why she needed work done in her apartment. Still.

Liam takes the clothes from Killian and turns without another word towards the bathroom, muttering under his breath about arseholes and punsters and bloody crimes against humanity , leaving Emma and her neighbor standing a little awkwardly in her entryway.

“Well, that’s Liam,” Killian says, shaking his head slightly. “My brother has never managed to master social graces, I’m afraid.”

Emma snorts, before looking behind her and sighing. “Better get back to mopping, I guess.”

Killian curiously looks over her shoulder at the living room, and his eyes widen when he sees the mess of water and soaked towels on the floor. 

“That’s quite the mess you’ve got there, Swan,” he grimaces. “Would you like some help?”

“Oh no, don’t worry about it,” Emma says, putting Spencer down to grab the mop. “I’ve got it cov– Na– Spencer, no !”

Her stupid ex’s dog has run through the puddle and is now zipping across the whole apartment, leaving tracks everywhere and – oh no, he’s jumped onto the couch.

A light chuckle sounds behind her. “Are you sure you don’t need help, love?”

Without a word, Emma shoves the mop in Killian’s hands and goes to get her wet dog off the couch, wiping his feet with the last dry towel in her apartment before locking him in her bedroom. When she comes back to her living room, Liam has exited the bathroom and is working on fixing the burst pipe and bantering with Killian, who’s wringing the wet towels on the floor into a bucket before dropping them back on the hardwood. It feels… nice, her living room lively again after weeks of being an empty shell for her memories. 

Emma joins them after a few seconds to finish taking care of the puddle and clean the dirty tracks crisscrossing her living space. It seriously looks like a whole football team (and their probably less stupidly-named dog) have traipsed through her apartment after practice. Once it’s done, Killian doesn’t leave. They spend the afternoon trying to teach Spencer his new name as Liam pretends to work, though it seems the dog’s not a fan; Even his favorite treats don’t convince him to respond to their call, though they do prompt Liam’s laughter every time.

The next days pass in the same manner, with Killian and Emma trying to find a name that Nacious will answer to, Nacious spending his time either ignoring them or slobbering between them, and Liam alternating between repairing Emma’s wall and bantering with his brother and Emma. It’s nice, it’s comfortable, it’s warm . Emma also learns new things about Killian: he’s a professor of British history at Boston College and is on break right now, he loves Twain, despises Melville, and lost the fight to name his and his brother’s sailboat the Jolly Roger. It turns out, he is a huge nerd.

Emma is disappointed when Liam finishes at the end of the week, already missing her afternoons with the two Jones brothers – okay, one in particular, and it’s not the one covered in paint. Which is why she’s surprised to hear knocking on her door on Saturday morning, though Nacious’ excitement (or Windham, as they tried to christen him yesterday – Nacious isn’t a fan of British Conservatives, apparently) gives her a clue as to who might be behind the door. Seriously, it had been love at first sight for her dog; she’d be jealous of the attention Killian is getting, if she weren’t so vindictively satisfied that Nacious had never reacted this way to Walsh. There’s justice in the world, apparently.

Opening the door does reveal Killian, who smiles at Emma before greeting her dog, scratching behind his ears until Nacious’ tongue lolls out in bliss. Strangely enough, Killian keeps a hand behind his back.

“Killian! Can I help you?”

“Er, no,” her neighbor says, straightening up. “I just wondered if you’d allow me to give a small gift to Winston?”

Emma blinks, nonplussed. Of all the things she had expected, this was definitely not one of them. She watches as Killian gets a squeaky chicken toy dressed like a pirate from behind his back and holds it out to her. Emma takes it and can’t help but squeeze. Windham/Nacious turns towards the noise immediately, his eyes locking on the source of the noise and his little paws shuffling excitedly on the floor. Emma looks at the chicken, completely blown away. She had mentioned a couple of days ago wanting to replace Nacious’ squeaky toy as a throwaway remark, and they’d been joking about trying pirate names next. The guy had listened to her, and bought a pirate chicken for her dog. He was funny, clever, and handsome to boot. 

Also, there was no way tens of thousands of dollars were hidden in that toy. 

“Would you like to get coffee sometime?” she blurts out, raising her eyes just in time to see a blush steal across Killian’s face.

“Shouldn’t I be the one doing the asking?” he quips, raising an eyebrow teasingly.

“Well, I did it first,” Emma shoots back, smiling slightly. “So?”

“I’d love to, love,” comes Killian’s answer, as he smiles widely at her.

Emma smiles back, feeling giddy. So giddy, in fact, she doesn’t notice Nacious snapping the squeaky toy out of her limp hand and running back into the apartment, squeaks and yips sounding alternately. 

----

4 years later

Emma sits on her couch, contemplating the mess that her living room has become. Toys, both for kids and dogs, litter the floor as screams and splashes sound from the bathroom. From the noise alone, Emma guesses she’ll have to take the mop out… again. Her cheeks hurt from smiling.

Just as she’s about to get up to start tidying up, someone knocks on the door. She wonders who would come at this hour on a Sunday night. She hopes it isn’t Mrs Johnson from down the hall again; the last time she had lent her neighbor her toaster, it had come back smelling like cabbage, of all things. 

It’s not Mrs Johnson, though – it’s Walsh, of all people.

“Hey Em,” he says, smiling so widely it looks more like a grimace. “Long time no see, eh?”

“Yeah, weird how being locked up kills your social life, doesn’t it?” Emma snaps back, already tired with his shit. 

“Look, I’m not here to argue, I’m just here to get my things,” Walsh says, finally dropping the smile.

“Your things? Dude, they were either donated to Goodwill or thrown out years ago, did you really think I would keep them for you?”

“I… what?” The asshole actually has the gall to look outraged for a second before he rallies, frowning. “Half of what’s in this apartment is mine, Emma, you know it. I want my share.”

“Actually, no. According to the lease, this apartment is mine, and mine only. Anything else?”

Even after all these years, Emma is deeply satisfied to see Walsh flounder as he stands in the hallway. She can hear a tell-tale squeak and yip coming from behind her. Walsh hears it too.

“Nacious? Is that Nacious? You still have my dog?” He sounds actually hopeful. As if.

“Not your dog anymore, dude.”

“Damn right it is!” Walsh exclaims, raising his voice in anger. “Give me my dog back right now, I paid more than a thousand for him, he’s mine !” he goes on, thumping on the door. “Nacious! Come here, boy!”

And oh, does her dog come. He comes right at Walsh’s ankle, biting it as his former owner yowls in pain, hopping in place and looking at him with a mix of anger and incredulity.

“Westley!” Emma calls, before Walsh can get it into his mind to kick her dog. Westley jiggles to Emma smugly, visibly proud of himself for saving his mistress. Emma picks him up, and look at Walsh, who’s still jumping and swearing in the corridor. The opportunity is too beautiful to pass.

“Quite the ferocious little guy, isn’t he?” she chirps, before saying in a much sterner tone. “Never show your face here, ever again. Next time, I’ll be the one to take care of you.” 

And then she slams the door.

“Love, is something the matter?” Killian asks, exiting the bathroom with their giggling daughter in his arms. 

Emma smiles, looking at the sight of her husband completely soaked, with suds slowly dissolving in his hair as Westley and their baby girl yammer at each other.

“No babe, everything is absolutely perfect.”

The Factory Window

Agent:  Andrew Swan

Interview record: Pinetree-443 incident. Witness #2. January 3rd, 2021. Interview #1 of /. Location: Regional office, Lance Barrow Memorial Federal Building. Investigator Remarks: None.

It happened when I was really young, still a teenager, late teens, 18, 19. I have never told anybody about it before now. It is only known by one other person, he was with me, a friend of mine. I lost track of him after high school and searching his name on the internet yields nothing, even though he has an uncommon name. No one from school that I am still in touch with has spoken with him for decades.

I remember that day really clearly, even though it was almost [REDACTED] years ago at this point. It takes [REDACTED] hours to drive to the town. There were, and are still people there, gravitating to the kind of things that remain after a factory closes: Elementary schools, grocery stores, and hospitals. But everything and everybody is falling apart. Driving mostly old cars. The streets are stuck in [REDACTED] years ago. Everybody looks dead behind the eyes. Talks to you like you’re an invader into their daydream.

The factory is on the water. It closed in the [REDACTED], so when we went there it had been closed for about [REDACTED] years or so. It was a… real weird building. Designed by some famous midwestern architect, in the years they built up this town, they didn’t spare any expense. It’s built solid, so its still standing today, and will still be standing in 20 more years.

But, my point is, the building is big. It’s four interconnected corners, each like 10 stories high, and then a center that goes up 25 stories. Blocks. Windows are cut into the stone, but they are narrow- all around, about as wide and tall as a man. You can see out from them, but no way can you see in, except, at night, you can see if somebody is standing in one because the glow of the slit is different, warped kinda, just enough to know it doesn’t look like the others.

Sneaking in isn’t hard. Nobody’s patrolling it, I mean, I guess the cops drive by every day but there’s never anybody here so it’s the kind of thing very few of the cops would actually ever do. Despite this, you park your car in the trees that are overgrowing the parking lot, so nobody can see. The parking lot itself is cracked and weeds and bushes and even a few trees are growing up from under it.

There are entrances to the building all around it, but they are boarded up so the only way to get in is to go between two of the big blocks. These were meant to be the main entry ways, so back when the factory was open, you’d walk down one of these to get to work. There were probably a ton of people here all the time. Men, women, white, black, Mexicans, Asians- all Union members too.

I should mention two points here of interest. First, its very hard to find anybody who worked here. Nobody has done too deep of a dive on it, there’s a few youtubes and that’s it. Here’s what I know about that.

This section of the interview has been redacted.

And when you do, they’re… well, they’re all the same type of person, they all just kind of stare off into the distance. They are often very intelligent, quizzical kind of people. Not the first thing that jumps to mind when you think of factory workers. But its impossible to get them to answer anything directly. They acknowledge that you said something, but then they go off on a different tangent about something really esoteric and weird, but never the factory.

Which leads us to the next point of interest, which is that nobody actually knows what this factory made. Most people theorize that they are some kind of component to something very large and complicated so naturally one thinks that they were a defense contractor. However, defense stuff is usually air stuff and this stuff is way too heavy to fly in anything normal.

So, most people theorize that its some kind of hardware for power generation, nuclear or hydro power generation. Perhaps during the [REDACTED], in seeking energy independence, they anticipated some massive swell of interest in nuclear or hydro power generation and then the oil industry fired back. But that is also a stretch, because a factory this size producing that much hardware would have to have it go somewhere and honestly, again you tubers did the work and figured out that they made enough shit for 1000 nuclear plants when there only were ever 57 in the united states. Kinda the same story for hydro. Similar numbers.

Anyway, trees and bushes and tall weeds choke down each of these entrance paths. Here and there you see a drinking fountain, garbage can, bench- poking up through the foliage. It was around 1PM when we arrived so the sun was breaking through the clouds. We were in rain gear, we knew it could rain that day.

And boy it sure did- rain started up about when we got inside. After the entrance chambers, the first thing you go through is the offices. They were built into the 10 and 20 story walls that made up the structure. Furniture is still in them. Great stuff- but heavy as hell.

Anyway, the entrance chambers have these high 40-foot vaulted ceilings and stairs that take you to the first 4 floors. We crunched through the weeds that followed us in, and the crackles of dead foliage and the clatter of a kicked stone echoed. We heard the rain start falling outside. You can imagine how this place would have sounded any day of the week- just a bunch of people coming and going, starting and ending their days. We entered the first floor offices, which start just past the stairs.

So back to the offices, with the vintage furniture- they are rusted and warped a little bit, but I think with some effort they could be refurbished into what would be considered high-end pieces today. Millions of dollars worth by my reckoning. Remember, the place closed in the [REDACTED], and by that time, most companies as large as this one, if in fact it was even a business, had already gone computer based in some form or other. But there’s no computers, they never switched to any substantially digital document or process management infrastructure. There’s not a computer more complicated than a basic calculator in there.

Oh yeah, glad you asked. Another weird thing about this place- is that there’s no record of them ever having filed articles of incorporation or partnership in any state let alone ever issuing any kind of stocks or bonds. The size of the factory alone, estimated to have costed over a billion dollars in 2020 dollars, and they never borrowed any money or sold any equity stakes, at least not to anybody in the united states and not through legal channels. So we’re not even sure this was a business. At least, again, in the opinion of youtubers, since there’s no professional investigative interest on this place, until now.

So one of the things to do in this place is take a look through some of the paperwork in these offices. I feel like I don’t need to tell you that none of it makes any sense. At first, all of it looks completely normal. Memos, letters, ledgers, blotters, and they look pretty much like what you’d find in any corporate office this old. But at least somewhere in a normal business’ records, you find at least some mention of customers. Zero zip, in this factory. Products are mentioned, but they are always by cryptic item numbers that can be endlessly cross referenced but never defined.

That was not what we were here to investigate, however. And I think that’s why you called me in, maybe, but what we were there to investigate, I don’t know if you know this or not but I am about to become your star witness. #1.

If you go through the offices enough, keep moving perpendicular to the halls, through the doorways, you eventually get to the factory floor. On all sides, the walls are filled with offices that look out onto the factory floor. Above, a bunch of industrial track lighting underneath mostly broken glass skylights.

No walkways- those are all interior. This made the only possible avenue for suicide to be to jump through your office window out onto the factory, which would have been very tough, since the windows both didn’t open and also the glass was filled with chicken wire. I obviously have no idea if anybody ever did it since at least from the standpoint of personnel this would not have been discussed and if it was documented we haven’t ever found anything.

So, depending on which of the quads you are in, there’s significant differences between the factory segments. This one is mostly flat, but some of them go really vertical with these processing machines that go both up and down in addition to left and right. Here, this one, there’s conveyors that move across work stations, if you unwrapped these, they’d probably be over 20 miles long. Whatever they assembled here was small. The other quads definitely handled much larger products.

This segment probably had the most workers, also. We don’t know much about the unions that worked here but we do know that most of the shop stewards worked in this quad. Their workstations, you can see, have a lot of extra seating, space and document capacity. Here is something a little strange, nobody except youtubers and urban explorers visits here, and they are usually pretty good about not taking a ton of shit, but the union leader’s shop areas have been absolutely gutted of anything resembling a paper record or document. Somebody came for that shit.

As you can imagine, we have theories on this. We think that the shop steward’s records are probably the best place to get a list of names and addresses and any info by which we could track these people down and somebody already got it. The other quads had union leader’s workstations as well and also those are devoid of any actual recordkeeping paperwork. In one quad, several of them were burned.

We didn’t dally long in the quads, we went right for the center building, which is only accessible through the corner of the quads. Through a layer of offices, then just doors. The rain was falling outside of this one- we put up our hoods and made sure our camera bags were covered and went outside.

The courtyard is actually in the middle of the central building. 20 story high walls up around us, with the slit-like windows looking out. We’re looking out from a corner: the corners are where you enter from the outside, and then large entranceways on the edges of the square are the entrances to the central building. The water is falling down trees that have overgrown, tall, tall weeds. Broken up here and there by obstinate patches of concrete that form paths. We travel along one of these to roughly the middle of the whole complex. Look up see this is why were here. We look up.

One of the slits, up half way about from the north wall, it’s lit up. You could see a golden glow coming out of it because of how dark the rainclouded sky was. And it ain’t a normal window-slit. Its warped because something is in the window. We don’t think it’s anything moving, because it always stays the same.

So the last group to explore that we know of, they had pointed out that this light was there. Other explorers that went before them didn’t see it, so the earliest this light could have turned on was, if you believe them, [REDACTED]. [REDACTED] months.

Anyway, we counted what floor it was as best as we could and walked for that entrance and walked in, took off our hoods. The central building entrances are more conventional with elevator banks and security desks. We walked past the elevator banks for the stairs.

The stairs are eerie because of all places here, this is the one where, if you could time travel back to [REDACTED], it would look exactly the same. Light comes in through windows at each landing and there’s very little clutter. Actually people so infrequently come up these stairs that there’s very little dirt.

We got to the 18th floor- this was where we believed the light was on. It was also facing in towards the courtyard, so that meant the office was somewhere on the south side of the hallway. We checked our compasses and saw that was to the right if we turned right, and to the left if we turned left. We also figured it was to the right of the stairs. We went in.

The hallway was dark enough that if we could have seen straight down it, we would have been able to tell which office had a light on, except that most of the office doors were closed. As we walked down the hall, we looked in those offices that were open. Furniture still there in most of them, which made the offices that were completely empty really stand out. It would be weird if these offices seemed like no one had ever worked in them but what was weirder was that it seemed like all of the stuff had been removed from them. Shadows on the wall indicating where a chair might have scuffed against, parts of the carpet that seemed less worn than others.

We got to where we had to start opening the doors on the left. We did it quickly. One of us opened while the other covered with, yeah a firearm, you don’t go urban exploring in [REDACTED] without one. I was the puller when we got to it. The door handles were all were pretty much ice cold to the touch so when we got to it, I knew. This one was warm. I looked back to make sure he was still there, he gave me a nod. I pulled on the handle and the door came open.

This section of the interview has been redacted.

Long Distance (Chap One)(Stuckony)

Welcome to the Story! Non-powered AU here, just a love story between our three favorites!

COMPLETED MASTERLIST HERE

******************

Tony Stark was having a bad day.

Really, just the worst.

It started with ripping the sleeve of his favorite shirt as he turned a corner, because apparently it was too much to ask for no nails to be sticking out of a door jam.

How was there a nail? Why was his shirt ripped? Why had he paid out the ass for some high end contractor to leave nails sticking out?

Then a business meeting, which should have been barely more than a meet and greet with a quick signing of a new contract, disintegrated into chaos when the representatives of the German tech company took offense to… something.

Or they were annoyed about… something… or whatever.

Tony already had a headache and was barely listening, and jumped in surprise when all the shouting started.

Pepper dove right into full reconciliation mode to try and salvage it, but even her best efforts weren't enough to save it and almost a year’s worth of negotiations went right down the drain.

The Germans tore up the contract and left in a huff, muttering angrily under their breaths while Tony just stared in disbelief.

He was furious, and rightly so.

His job was to design all the tech, not sell it to the other companies, not to barter contracts, not to deal with this bullshit. That's why he had a team-- and today his team had let him down.

But it wasn't like it was Peppers fault, and really, his team had tried their hardest, so Tony just loosened his tie and opened the bar in the conference room, handing out drinks for everyone before moving on.

A speeding ticket from a motorcycle cop as he raced down the freeway trying to get home before dinner with Rhodey.

Lovely.

Traffic cops were...were… well, they were hard working civil servants who deserved his respect (as Pepper had reminded him so many times) but still the biggest pain in his ass. And expensive ones too.

A phone call from a reporter came in round four in the afternoon when he was still on the road, the brash woman on the other line asking if he cared to comment on the stories his ex girlfriend was sharing about him.

“Ex?” Tony asked with a confused frown. “What do you mean ex?”

The reporter went on to tell him that his ex- girlfriend Shawna had called them with a story about him. Something about his habits in bed and weird beauty rituals. That he demanded certain things from her, and was a selfish lover. That he had an AI that controlled his life and that he was building weapons in his lab.

Did Tony have any comment about any of it? Was there any truth to the rumours?

Tony hung up the phone without answering, and then called Pepper in a panic, but she was already on damage control, already making sure that everyone knew that Shawna was simply angry that she had been a fling and that Tony hadn't kept her around for very long.

Pepper was also making sure to tell anyone who asked that Tony hadn't even let Shawna stay overnight in their rather short relationship, so there was no way she would know anything of importance about him.

She told them that everything being built in Tony's lab was the sole property of Stark Industries, usually patent pending to the United States military and if they printed anything that even resembled information about his projects, they would be taken to court and sued for copyright infringement and anything else she could nail them with.

Pepper was the best, always putting out fires, and Tony promised her a new present-- something that involved diamonds and a day at her favorite spa for taking care of him.

Then he hung up the phone and pounded at his steering wheel.

He had really liked Shawna. She was sweet and funny and matched him snark for snark, and he was just thinking it was time to ask her to spend the night, maybe even the weekend with him.

He had been sure she would see past the money, and the Stark name and stick around for the long haul, but apparently that wasn't the case.

Tony had thought they were taking everything at a reasonable pace, and since she hadn't complained about it, that she was fine with waiting to move forward.

Apparently that hadn't been the case either, and here he was single again, on the front of a tabloid again, frustrated over the emptiness in his life again.

Thank god for dinner with Rhodey.

Except no, there was another disappointment.

“Real sorry, Tones.” Rhodey said over the voice mail. “My baby niece has a recital tonight and I missed the last one so I gotta be there tonight. Can we reschedule for next week?”

Tony was just dialing his phone to call Rhodey back and give him hell about missing dinner before asking where the recital was so he could send flowers to his favorite little niece, but then he stepped out of the elevator--

--and tripped over the edge of the carpet and fell flat on his face.

It shouldn’t have been a big deal, but after such a long day it was just the one final thing that broke it all, and Tony flung his phone at the wall, smiling in a grim sort of satisfaction as it broke into about a thousand pieces.

And then he cursed a blue streak because why had he destroyed his phone?

Tony rubbed at his eyes, groaning in frustration, and trekked back into the elevator to head down to the basements of the Towers, to the company stock rooms.

There was at least a thousand phones in stock down there, extra inventory for the employees of the Tower, and Tony rifled through the boxes until he found one in the bright red he preferred.

Back up in the penthouse, Tony punched in Rhodey's number from memory and started shit-texting his best friend while he poured a glass of scotch.

-- Honey bear. This whole day has been bullshit. I actually tore my shirt on a nail this morning. A nail. In my house. It's like living in a third world country.

--Thanks but no thanks to any of your smart ass comments about how i know nothing of the third world. Tearing my shirt is my equivalent of a third world and you know it.

--Rhodey seriously your niece's recital isn't a valid reason for skipping out on our dinner together. Date nights are to be taken seriously and you skipping this one is completely unforgivable.

--But still, I'll send her some flowers because I'm sure she did wonderful.

--Hey do you remember that time in MIT where I stole everyone’s towels on our floor? Why don't we pull pranks like that any more?

--Oh no I remember. Because you’re boring and I'm thirty.

-- You need to text me back, I know you hear your obnoxious ring tone. I know you’re a Lieutenant Colonel and all that, but no one actually needs Born in the USA for a ring tone. Nobody is that patriotic

--Are you ever gonna ask Pepper out? Think our favorite redhead needs a date. She is wound TIGHT lately, if you know what I mean.

--Rhodey I swear to god if you don't start texting me back right now….

--I'm gonna drink this whole bottle of scotch and drunk text you the entire time. Text me back now and take preventative measures. Not too late for you to swing by for dinner. Is it going to be a whole month before I see you again? I feel like you only come by for work reasons Rhodey, is that anyway to treat your wife?

--really? Nothing to the wife comment? Tough crowd.

*******************

“Stevie, who the hell is texting you at two am?” Bucky complained and shoved at his boyfriends shoulder. “Wake up and turn your phone off.”

“Sorry.” Steve sat up in bed and rubbed at his eyes, squinting at the screen of his phone as it lit up repeatedly, the shrill ring tone destroying the usual quiet of their bedroom. “It's a number I don't recognize. Manhattan, I think.”

“Tell them to fuck off.” Bucky grumbled and rolled over, burying his face in his pillow. “We have to be awake in like three hours for a run.”

“I know babe. Let me just check and--- damn it. It's just a wrong number drunk texting.” Steve dragged his hand through his blond hair. “Some guy trying to get a hold of someone named Rhodey. Talking about missing their date night, and how Rhodey only comes around for work stuff anymore?”

“Oh, that's kind of sad.” Bucky sat up a little and frowned. “Poor guy. Missed date nights are rough.”

“Yeah, he keeps asking Rhodey to text him back. Which isn’t going to happen, because he’s actually texting me.” Steve laughed a little. “I guess I should let him know it's a wrong number.”

“Yeah, tell him it sucks to get ditched, then tell him to shut the hell up so I can sleep.”

“Easy, big guy.” Steve chuckled. “I'll let him know.”

--Hey man. Just thought I'd let you know that this is a wrong number. All 37 of your texts meant for “Rhodey” went to my number instead. Sorry to let you down, but I don't think your boyfriend knows you are mad at him.

*************

Tony blinked at his phone a few times when he received a text back from an unknown number.

“Oh damn.” he doubled checked the number. “I have definitely not been texting Rhodey all night.”

--Well this is embarrassing as hell. But you know, the polite thing to do would have been to reply at like, text four instead of letting me ramble on like I'm drunk or something.

--You did mention something about a bottle of scotch. And I just woke up because my phone wouldn't quit ringing.

--Do you have a better ring tone than Born in the USA?

--It's Big Blond and Beautiful

-- You’re kidding. From Hairspray? With Queen Latifah?

--I can't believe you knew that right away

--I can't believe you admitted it. Still better than Born in the USA. Sorry I woke you, but if you were really mad you would stop texting me instead of encouraging my rude behavior

--I guess that's fair. Sorry your boyfriend stood you up

--Not my boyfriend.

-- You said date night so I just assumed he was a boyfriend. Too bad he stood you up anyway. Maybe stop drinking and call it a night though, try texting him in the morning when you’re sober

--Thanks dad

--It's actually professor.

--Oh my.

-- So tell me professor. Is the big blond and beautiful a description as well as a ringtone?

--Well, no ones complained when they see me, at least. What about you? Blonde and beautiful?

--Brown eyed and brunette and mysterious. Not mysterious. Obnoxious. Brown eyed and brunette and obnoxious. So what do you do? Model?

--Yeah right. I teach Art History and several art classes at the university.

--Oh so you are ACTUALLY a professor. I thought that was like a weird role play thing.

--Little early in the game to be talking about that sort of thing isnt it?

-- You tell me. You're the one texting a drunk guy at 2 am

*******************

Steve laughed out loud and Bucky rolled over with a huff. “Babe, it's been half an hour, are you still talking to him?”

“Look.” Steve turned his phone so Bucky could see. “He’s funny.”

“Yeah, babe, I'm sure he's a damn comedian.” Bucky yawned and stretched, dropping a big arm around Steve's shoulders and tugging him down against his chest. “But you’re in bed with me so call it a night. Tell him you’ll talk to him tomorrow.”

“Yeah?” Steve raised an eyebrow. “I can talk to him tomorrow?”

“You know I don't care.” Bucky yawned again and held him tighter. “But I will care if you keep me awake any longer.”

“Sorry, baby.” Steve kissed him sweetly and shot off a quick text to the mysterious texter.

--I've got a class at eight am so I need to get some sleep, but can I talk to you tomorrow?

-- You want to talk to me more? What, like after class?

--Sure, my last class of the day is over at 3:45

--I was joking, professor. But alright. Let’s talk tomorrow.

--Looking forward to it. Do I get a name to go with this wrong number?

--Tony.

--Nice to meet you. I'm Steve.

-I'm putting you in my phone as Big and Blonde

-- I'm putting you in my phone as Mysterious

--Not obnoxious? You’re nicer than me for sure

--Well you know what they say, opposites attract. Blond and brunette, nice and obnoxious…

--Touche, teacher man

--Will you text me back in the morning?

--Try and stop me. are we in the same time zone?

--I'm in Boston

--Manhattan

--So no long distance charges then, right?

--Long distance charges for texting? I thought I was the drunk one

--I was trying to be funny

--Stick with being blonde

--Tomorrow, Tony

--Can't wait

Tony smiled down at his phone, and tossed it back onto the couch with a sigh.

Steve. Big and Blond. Could be fun.

***************

“You like him?” Bucky asked, rubbing his nose into Steve's hair as they curled back into the pillows together.

“Can't really tell over a text.” Steve returned, wrapping both his arms around his love. “But I mean, he's funny. And brunette.”

“And we both know funny and brunette is all it takes to get in your pants.” Bucky cracked a tired grin when Steve jabbed him in the ribs. “Easy as hell, ain't ya, Stevie?”

“You say that like you're complaining.”

“Sugar, you know damn well I'm not complaining.”

The Olivetti Underwood Factory was designed by acclaimed architect Louis Kahn in 1966 and completed in 1970. Olivetti, an Italian company, commissioned the building for the manufacture of their Underwood line of typewriters and related products.

Olivetti Underwood Factory Technical Information

Architects: Louis Kahn

Collaborators: Renzo Piano

Location: 2800 Valley Road, Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, USA

Client: Olivetti-Underwood Corporation

Material: Concrete

Typology: Industrial Architecture / Factory

Project Year: 1966 – 1970

Structural Engineer: Keast and Hood; Dr. August E. Komendant (consulting engineer)

Mechanical/Electrical Engineer: Paul H. Yeomans, Inc.

Landscape Architect: George E. Patton

Contractor: Barclay White

Drawings: © Louis Kahn Architects

I use the square to begin my solutions because the square is a non-choice, really. In the course of development, I search for the forces that would disprove the square….

– Louis Kahn

Olivetti Underwood Factory Photographs

In 1966 Italian typewriters and related products company Olivetti asked architect Louis Kahn to design their factory in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.  Joseph Rykwert, an architectural historian and critic, said that corporations don’t usually hire famous architects to design their factory buildings, and those architects probably wouldn’t be interested anyway because of the limited creative possibilities. Olivetti, however, “was then the most discerning patrons of industrial buildings – anywhere,” according to Rykwert, and Kahn was happy to work for a client as sophisticated as Olivetti.

The key design limitation was that the factory floor needed to be as open as possible to enable rapid reconfiguration of equipment to meet changing market requirements. The easy way to meet this limitation would have been to build the factory as a steel frame structure, but Kahn didn’t build any structures of that type after 1950, preferring the more monumental appearance he could achieve with materials like concrete and brick. Kahn, relying on the expertise of August Komendant, a structural engineer and Kahn’s preferred collaborator, instead designed the building as a concrete structure. Komendant was an authority on techniques for greatly increasing the strength of concrete by prestressing it, making it possible to build structures that are more graceful than would be possible with ordinary concrete.

The Olivetti-Underwood Factory consists of 72 prestressed concrete units locked together in an 8×9 grid that is clearly visible in this aerial image on Google Maps. Each unit looks like a square dish with clipped corners perched on top of a relatively thin concrete column. More precisely, the dish is a prismatic concrete shell 6 inches (15 cm) thick, 30 feet (9 m) above the factory floor and 60 feet (18 m) across, covering 3600 square feet (334 m²) of the roof. Rain water drains from the roof down a pipe in the center of the column. Because the outer four corners of each unit are clipped, a void is left at the place where four units meet that allows natural light to reach the factory floor through a translucent skylight.

Kahn had been interested in structures of this type for some time, having designed a prototype Parasol House in 1944 for use as prefabricated housing in the post-war years. Never built, it featured a flat roof supported by a slender column and was designed to be used either as a stand-alone housing unit or in combination with other units to form a linear structure. A precedent was the “Great Workroom” in the Johnson Wax Headquarters, which was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and completed in 1939.

Renzo Piano´s contribution to the Olivetti-Underwood Factory

The detail drawings of the skylights have the official stamp of Louis Kahn Architects with the words “in collaboration with Renzo Piano Architect” at the end. These are unique in the whole production of Kahn’s office.

Louis Kahn discussed with the French engineer Le Ricolais the problem he was having designing the skylights of the factory and he suggested showing the plans to young Italian architect Renzo Piano who used his connections with the Olivetti company to gain the equivalent of an internship with Kahn for several months while the factory was being designed, working primarily on the roofing system.

Years before, in collaboration with Marco Zanuso, Renzo Piano had designed the skylights in reinforced polyester of the Olivetti factories in Scarmagno (1967) and Crema (1968). The Italian architect designed a structure similar to those he had already built: a square skylight 6,4 meters on each side, made of 16 pyramidal elements in reinforced polyester (1,60 by 1,60 meters) and assembled using steel rods and bolts. The pyramidal elements were connected in such a way that the skylight presented a slight incline towards the four edges to ensure rainwater would drain away.

Piano went on to become a noted architect himself and in 2007 was chosen to design an additional building for the Kimbell Art Museum, one of Louis Kahn’s masterpieces

Olivetti Underwood Factory Construction Photographs

Olivetti Underwood Factory Floor Plan

Floor Plan | Credit: Louis Kahn Architects

Detail Section | Credit: Louis Kahn Architects

Skylight details by Renzo Piano

    Olivetti Underwood Factory Image Gallery

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Skylight details by Renzo Piano

Other works from Louis Kahn  

Olivetti Underwood Factory in Pennsylvania / Louis Kahn The Olivetti Underwood Factory was designed by acclaimed architect Louis Kahn in 1966 and completed in 1970.

Hashtag stillonfire

I went on twitter for the first time in a month and had people who I genuinely thought were pretty in touch with the world saying things like; Oh, there’s still fires down there? And, ‘Didn’t the rain sort it all out?’ We’ve had 8mm of rain in the whole month. We need about 200mm to begin to extinguish the fires. 

Yes, southern New South Wales, and some of Victoria, is still burning, even after the hashtag has stopped trending. 

This is testament to the ongoing grinding nature of the fires. Today is our fifth “fire day” - I think it is anyway, I’ve kind of lost count. People can’t easily distinguish between one fire day and another one, or if they do, it’s very much based on their location. People around Moruya are talking about the big fire day in Moruya with ‘that strong Norwester that nearly took the hospital’.

For people from the Bay to Broulee, there was one fire day - NYE, and then it was more or less over for them for fire, because they are now living in a charred black landscape. For them, however, it’s taken weeks to get the services back on, especially power. So for those people, who live in the most suburban, built-up (and expensive) part of the shire, the aftermath of the fires was learning to deal with the fairly rapid decline in living standards. No power, limited water, no communication at all……and for many, they could not easily get in and out of the area - the roads in and out were manned and people had to show a rates notice or licence to get through the road block. The short version is, these communities became quite isolated, and it was interesting talking to people during that time - those who I did see - were clearly very much living in a small community, just talking to one another, unaware of what was happening in the rest of the shire. It reminded me of a large campsite at Christmas. 

Some people quickly installed standalone power systems. I spoke to a person from Simmark in Batemans Bay, the contractor that sells and installs Tesla powerwalls - they had been flat out installing stand alone solar systems. It surprised me how much people’s freezers were part of their every lives. We have virtually nothing in our freezer except ice-blocks and pastry. I realised that people ’stock up their freezers’ and commonly have a lot of food in there. I think this is generational - the population of the northern part of the shire is strongly ‘boomer skewed’.

I think this is another thing about these fires - the shire is diverse, there are farmers, hippies living ‘in the hills’ and self funded retirees on the coastal fringes. There is a strong working class coastie culture around Batemans Bay, and a strong rural/country culture around Moruya. In between there is a rapidly gentrifying middle class area, and a few areas where the average house price is about a million dollors. Ridge road, one of the most expensive areas in the shire, lost almost all of its houses. The fires have been quite indiscriminate, and people have found themselves at evacuation centres with people they otherwise would not have had much contact with at all. 

Moruya-town has a lot of older retired people who’ve lived in the area all their lives, often on properties, whereas the elderly population of Broulee to the Bay is more skewed towards people who’ve retired to the coast from Sydney and Canberra (especially the latter). This makes a difference, because many of the people in the south of the shire had more family connections in the area to rely on, whereas those whose families (children and grandchildren) live in the cities, were more easily isolated, and had to rely on services more. The irony of this, of course, is that this latter group are generally more wealthy, yet this did not translate to social capital. These factors are important when I talk about who is leaving the area - outward migration - something I’m getting to soon.

What did we do on our ‘fire day’ today? We spent a lot of time checking the wind forecast. We’ve realised that this is the most important factor. We tried to ignore some of the more panicky messages coming from authorities and the doomsayers on Instagram; “Here it comes! Stay safe everyone!”

Which brings me to my next point - the one and only way to distinguish people who’re living through the fires and those who haven’t aren’t is the phrase, ‘stay safe’. People who’re actively confronting the reality of potentially fatal fires every week don’t tell one another to ‘stay safe’ - it feels somewhat insulting, the throwaway line of 2020, the new, ‘Thoughts and Prayers’. People are actually trying to ‘stay safe’, in fact, they’re completely consumed with thinking about it. 

Every fire day everybody has to make their own judgements about whether they stay and defend or leave, and if they leave, when they leave. And if they stay, how bad is it? Do you stay for ember attack today but leave for a fire front? How confident are you about the wind direction and speed over the course of the day, compared to the relative humidity and dryness factor? At what point do you get the ‘go bag’ out and frighten the kids? When do you find the dog collar and put it on the dog? Fill the gutters? Put on your jeans and boots? Find the safety goggles? Every single fire day we go through the same thing - fill up water bottles, place big containers around the house, fill the gutters, clean everything up, put everything away, get the ladder out, screw the iron over the vulnerable windows….all these jobs must be done in the heat of the day, with urgency but not panic.

I wondered many times how many people had hurt themselves falling off the roof. I bet it’s heaps - older Australians with swollen ankles from congestive heart failure or diabetes, staggering around on the scorching hot metal roof in their new Blundstones that don’t quite fit because they’d run out of your size at the Produce store and you just have to take what you can get. 

Well I’m in the working world again. I’ve found myself a well-paying gig in the engineering industry, and life finally feels like it’s returning to normal after my nine months of traveling.

Because I had been living quite a different lifestyle while I was away, this sudden transition to 9-to-5 existence has exposed something about it that I overlooked before.

Since the moment I was offered the job, I’ve been markedly more careless with my money. Not stupid, just a little quick to pull out my wallet. As a small example, I’m buying expensive coffees again, even though they aren’t nearly as good as New Zealand’s exceptional flat whites, and I don’t get to savor the experience of drinking them on a sunny café patio. When I was away these purchases were less off-handed, and I enjoyed them more.

I’m not talking about big, extravagant purchases. I’m talking about small-scale, casual, promiscuous spending on stuff that doesn’t really add a whole lot to my life. And I won’t actually get paid for another two weeks.

In hindsight I think I’ve always done this when I’ve been well-employed — spending happily during the “flush times.” Having spent nine months living a no-income backpacking lifestyle, I can’t help but be a little more aware of this phenomenon as it happens.

I suppose I do it because I feel I’ve regained a certain stature, now that I am again an amply-paid professional, which seems to entitle me to a certain level of wastefulness. There is a curious feeling of power you get when you drop a couple of twenties without a trace of critical thinking. It feels good to exercise that power of the dollar when you know it will “grow back” pretty quickly anyway.

What I’m doing isn’t unusual at all. Everyone else seems to do this. In fact, I think I’ve only returned to the normal consumer mentality after having spent some time away from it.

One of the most surprising discoveries I made during my trip was that I spent much less per month traveling foreign counties (including countries more expensive than Canada) than I did as a regular working joe back home. I had much more free time, I was visiting some of the most beautiful places in the world, I was meeting new people left and right, I was calm and peaceful and otherwise having an unforgettable time, and somehow it cost me much less than my humble 9-5 lifestyle here in one of Canada’s least expensive cities.

It seems I got much more for my dollar when I was traveling. Why?

A Culture of Unnecessaries

Here in the West, a lifestyle of unnecessary spending has been deliberately cultivated and nurtured in the public by big business. Companies in all kinds of industries have a huge stake in the public’s penchant to be careless with their money. They will seek to encourage the public’s habit of casual or non-essential spending whenever they can.

In the documentary The Corporation, a marketing psychologist discussed one of the methods she used to increase sales. Her staff carried out a study on what effect the nagging of children had on their parents’ likelihood of buying a toy for them. They found out that 20% to 40% of the purchases of their toys would not have occurred if the child didn’t nag its parents. One in four visits to theme parks would not have taken place. They used these studies to market their products directly to children, encouraging them to nag their parents to buy.

This marketing campaign alone represents many millions of dollars that were spent because of demand that was completely manufactured.

“You can manipulate consumers into wanting, and therefore buying, your products. It’s a game.” ~ Lucy Hughes, co-creator of “The Nag Factor”

This is only one small example of something that has been going on for a very long time. Big companies didn’t make their millions by earnestly promoting the virtues of their products, they made it by creating a culture of hundreds of millions of people that buy way more than they need and try to chase away dissatisfaction with money.

We buy stuff to cheer ourselves up, to keep up with the Joneses, to fulfill our childhood vision of what our adulthood would be like, to broadcast our status to the world, and for a lot of other psychological reasons that have very little to do with how useful the product really is. How much stuff is in your basement or garage that you haven’t used in the past year?

The real reason for the forty-hour workweek

The ultimate tool for corporations to sustain a culture of this sort is to develop the 40-hour workweek as the normal lifestyle. Under these working conditions people have to build a life in the evenings and on weekends. This arrangement makes us naturally more inclined to spend heavily on entertainment and conveniences because our free time is so scarce.

I’ve only been back at work for a few days, but already I’m noticing that the more wholesome activities are quickly dropping out of my life: walking, exercising, reading, meditating, and extra writing.

The one conspicuous similarity between these activities is that they cost little or no money, but they take time.

Suddenly I have a lot more money and a lot less time, which means I have a lot more in common with the typical working North American than I did a few months ago. While I was abroad I wouldn’t have thought twice about spending the day wandering through a national park or reading my book on the beach for a few hours. Now that kind of stuff feels like it’s out of the question. Doing either one would take most of one of my precious weekend days!

The last thing I want to do when I get home from work is exercise. It’s also the last thing I want to do after dinner or before bed or as soon as I wake, and that’s really all the time I have on a weekday.

This seems like a problem with a simple answer: work less so I’d have more free time. I’ve already proven to myself that I can live a fulfilling lifestyle with less than I make right now. Unfortunately, this is close to impossible in my industry, and most others. You work 40-plus hours or you work zero. My clients and contractors are all firmly entrenched in the standard-workday culture, so it isn’t practical to ask them not to ask anything of me after 1pm, even if I could convince my employer not to.

The eight-hour workday developed during the industrial revolution in Britain in the 19th century, as a respite for factory workers who were being exploited with 14- or 16-hour workdays.

As technologies and methods advanced, workers in all industries became able to produce much more value in a shorter amount of time. You’d think this would lead to shorter workdays.

But the 8-hour workday is too profitable for big business, not because of the amount of work people get done in eight hours (the average office worker gets less than three hours of actual work done in 8 hours) but because it makes for such a purchase-happy public. Keeping free time scarce means people pay a lot more for convenience, gratification, and any other relief they can buy. It keeps them watching television, and its commercials. It keeps them unambitious outside of work.

We’ve been led into a culture that has been engineered to leave us tired, hungry for indulgence, willing to pay a lot for convenience and entertainment, and most importantly, vaguely dissatisfied with our lives so that we continue wanting things we don’t have. We buy so much because it always seems like something is still missing.

Western economies, particularly that of the United States, have been built in a very calculated manner on gratification, addiction, and unnecessary spending. We spend to cheer ourselves up, to reward ourselves, to celebrate, to fix problems, to elevate our status, and to alleviate boredom.

Can you imagine what would happen if all of America stopped buying so much unnecessary fluff that doesn’t add a lot of lasting value to our lives?

The economy would collapse and never recover.

All of America’s well-publicized problems, including obesity, depression, pollution and corruption are what it costs to create and sustain a trillion-dollar economy. For the economy to be “healthy”, America has to remain unhealthy. Healthy, happy people don’t feel like they need much they don’t already have, and that means they don’t buy a lot of junk, don’t need to be entertained as much, and they don’t end up watching a lot of commercials.

The culture of the eight-hour workday is big business’ most powerful tool for keeping people in this same dissatisfied state where the answer to every problem is to buy something.

You may have heard of Parkinson’s Law. It is often used in reference to time usage: the more time you’ve been given to do something, the more time it will take you to do it. It’s amazing how much you can get done in twenty minutes if twenty minutes is all you have. But if you have all afternoon, it would probably take way longer.

Most of us treat our money this way. The more we make, the more we spend. It’s not that we suddenly need to buy more just because we make more, only that we can, so we do. In fact, it’s quite difficult for us to avoid increasing our standard of living (or at least our rate of spending) every time we get a raise.

I don’t think it’s necessary to shun the whole ugly system and go live in the woods, pretending to be a deaf-mute, as Holden Caulfield often fantasized. But we could certainly do well to understand what big commerce really wants us to be. They’ve been working for decades to create millions of ideal consumers, and they have succeeded. Unless you’re a real anomaly, your lifestyle has already been designed.

The perfect customer is dissatisfied but hopeful, uninterested in serious personal development, highly habituated to the television, working full-time, earning a fair amount, indulging during their free time, and somehow just getting by.

Is this you?

Two weeks ago I would have said hell no, that’s not me, but if all my weeks were like this one has been, that might be wishful thinking.

This Was The Decade State Surveillance Became Our New Normal

Giulia Marchi/Bloomberg via Getty Images

A police officer walks past surveillance cameras mounted on posts at Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

We live in a world where school cameras monitor children’s emotions, countries collect people’s DNA en masse, and no digital communication seems truly private.

In response, we use encrypted chat apps on our phones, wear masks during protests to combat facial recognition technology, and try vainly to hide our most personal information from advertisers.

Welcome to the new reality of mass surveillance. How did we get here?

Wael Eskandar, an Egyptian journalist and technologist, remembers documenting his country’s revolution at Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2011. It was known then, he remembers, that people’s phone calls were being monitored, and that workers like parking lot attendants and security guards were feeding information back to the police. But few suspected emails or posts on Twitter and Facebook would ever be monitored in the same way — at least not at scale.

The revolution toppled the brutal regime of longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak, but by 2014 the country was under the sway of the equally repressive President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. Now, Egyptians are being arrested for political posts they made on Facebook, and some have reported having their texts read back to them by police during detention. Demonstrations all but stopped.

In 2019, rare protests did take place in Egypt over government corruption. Demonstrators avoided posting about them on social media, wary of ending up in detention, but ultimately it didn’t matter — dozens of people were rounded up anyway.

“It’s like there’s no space left for us to speak anymore,” one woman who had participated in the demonstrations told me earlier this year.

Egypt and dozens of other authoritarian states have increasingly employed mass surveillance technology over the past decade. Where human monitors once had to listen in to phone calls, now increasingly sophisticated voice recognition software can do that at scale, and algorithms scour social media messages for signs of dissent. Biometric surveillance systems like facial and behavioral recognition also make it easier for security services to target large swathes of their population.

Khaled Desouki / Getty Images

Egyptian security forces block the road leading to Cairo’s Tahrir Square, Sept. 27.

But mass surveillance is not just the domain of repressive regimes. Companies are using their own forms of surveillance — data collection to target consumers with ads, and biometric screenings to watch their moods and behaviors. In 2012, the New York Times reported Target had figured out a teenager’s pregnancy before her father; now it’s using Bluetooth to track your movements as you wander its store aisles. Five years ago, the US Federal Trade Commission called on Congress to regulate data brokers, saying consumers had a right to know what information they had on them. In 2019, these companies remain largely unregulated and hold reams of information about individuals, almost none of which is known to the public.

Powering these surveillance systems is an increasingly complex web of personal data. In 2009, that data might have included your neighborhood and purchasing history. Now it’s likely that your most personal qualities — from your facial features to your search results — will be slurped up too. Cross-referencing seemingly inconsequential data from different sources helps companies build detailed and powerful profiles of individuals.

Surveillance systems are being built by some of the world’s biggest technology companies, including US tech giants Amazon, Palantir, and Microsoft. In China, companies like SenseTime, Alibaba, and Hikvision — the world’s largest maker of surveillance cameras — are moving quickly to corner foreign markets from the Middle East to Latin America. And other players like Israel’s NSO Group are making it easy for governments all over the world to break into the devices of journalists and dissidents.

This all-seeing surveillance seems straight out of the dystopian fiction of George Orwell’s 1984 or Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. But centuries earlier, novelists had imagined surveillance as a cornerstone of utopian societies. As far back as 1771, the French novelist Louis Sébastien Mercier depicted a futuristic society exemplifying the rational values of the Enlightenment in a hit novel called L’an 2440. This imagined social order was enforced by a cadre of secret police.

For most of modern history, mass surveillance, when it has been implemented, has been laborious and expensive. The Stasi, infamous for spying on the most mundane aspects of East Germans’ lives, relied on massive networks of informers and on bureaucrats picking through letters and listening in on phone calls. A friend who grew up in Dresden before the fall of the Berlin Wall once told me she remembered being asked by her kindergarten teacher whether her parents were watching West German TV.

Without this level of human participation, these systems would simply not work. They might function well enough for governments who wanted to monitor individual troublemakers, but when it came to quashing dissent altogether, it was a lot tougher.

In less developed parts of the world, such as Nicaragua and North Korea, state surveillance still works this way. But in richer countries — ranging from democratic societies like the US and the UK to authoritarian ones like China — the burden of conducting surveillance has shifted from humans to algorithms.

It’s made surveillance in these places far more efficient for both governments and companies, and as the technology improves and becomes more widespread, it’s only a matter of time before the rest of the world adopts similar techniques.

Maynor Valenzuela / Getty Images

Anti-government protesters demonstrate at the Metropolitan Cathedral during a protest in Managua, Nicaragua, May 26.

In 2012, I wrote an op-ed with the author and journalist Peter Maass arguing that we should think of cellphones as “trackers” instead of devices to make calls with. That idea now seems quaint — of course cellphones and the apps we download to them are monitoring our activities. We published the article not knowing that less than a year later, a 29-year-old former NSA contractor named Edward Snowden would leak an unprecedented cache of documents showing some of the true scope of the mass surveillance programs in the US.

Snowden’s leaked documents revealed, among many other things, that the NSA was collecting phone records from millions of Verizon customers, and that it had accessed data from Google and Facebook through back doors. In Germany, the intelligence service was also listening in on millions of phone calls and reading emails and text messages in a surveillance program often compared to that of the Stasi.

By the time Snowden vaulted to fame, hiding out in a hotel in Hong Kong, I had left the US too. I arrived in Beijing to begin work as a journalist for Reuters in late 2012, and fully expected to be the object of some government snooping. After all, there are only a few hundred foreign journalists based in China — a country of more than a billion people — and the things they write are closely scrutinized because of their ability to shape the world’s view of China.

At the time, a constant subject of debate among junior reporters over kebabs and beer was whether the government was really keeping an eye on our communications, or if we were too small potatoes to matter. I often joked with an old boyfriend, an American who worked in foreign policy, that somewhere an unlucky state security intern was monitoring our cutesy volley of GIFs and emojis. We imagined our eavesdroppers as disheveled bureaucrats, not as lines of code.

One year, a Chinese police official pointedly commented that my apartment looked cheap and untidy — it was a way to let me know he’d seen the inside of it. On other occasions, police arrived at my door supposedly to check if my water heater was up to standard, but spent more time eyeing the contents of my bookshelf and asking about my work. My colleagues, like the Financial Times’ Yuan Yang, have had private messages on WeChat — the ubiquitous Chinese social app made by tech giant Tencent — quoted back to them by government officials.

At my annual China visa renewal:

Police officer: I saw you posted on social media about organising an event for journalists on the 8th

Me: I don’t think I did…

Me: *thinks, does he realise he saw that by surveilling my private messages and not on my public feed*

04:36 PM – 09 Feb 2018

But by and large, none of us ever found out definitively whether our flats were bugged, our emails read, our phones monitored. We just acted as if they were.

Snowden was all over the state-run news in China — the story of an American dissident outing the US surveillance system was far too juicy to pass up. To this day, Chinese officials sometimes bring up Snowden and what he revealed about America’s surveillance program in response to questions about the Chinese nanny state.

At that time, surveillance seemed like an invisible web — something everyone knew was a problem, but was tough to actually see.

What I never predicted was the expansion of surveillance technology into a form so visible and widespread that it became as much a part of the atmosphere of China as Beijing’s infamous smog. Facial recognition cameras, for instance, are now ubiquitous in the country after first appearing in the western region of Xinjiang, where more than a million Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim ethnic minorities are now in internment camps. The region has become the global epicenter for high-tech surveillance, which the Chinese government has combined with heavy-handed human policing including officers asking dozens of highly personal questions to individuals and plugging their responses into a database. There, police collect data at people’s homes, police stations and roadside interrogations to feed into a centralized system called the Integrated Joint Operations Platform, which spits out determinations for whether Muslim citizens should be interned or not.

It is the first example of a government using 21st-century surveillance technology to target people based on race and religion in order to send them to internment camps, where they face torture and other horrific abuses. According to some estimates, it is the largest internment of ethnic minorities since World War 2.

The collection of such data for security purposes is often called “predictive policing,” a technique used in many countries, including the US, to spot the potential for individual criminal behavior in data.

When I visited Kashgar, a city in southern Xinjiang, in the fall of 2017, it felt like catching an uncanny glimpse of a suffocating future — one where DNA collection was mandatory and even filling your car with gas required a scan of your iris.

Bloomberg / Getty Images

A demonstrator wears a face mask featuring Chinese President Xi Jinping while shining a light from a smartphone during a protest on Queensway in the Admiralty district of Hong Kong in December.

Since then, much of the technology being used in Xinjiang has been sold to other parts of the world. Companies and the governments that contract with them point to the many benign uses of some surveillance tech — security, public health, and more. But there are few places in the world where people have been asked to consent to surveillance tech being used on them. In the US, facial recognition technology is already widely used, and only a handful of cities have moved to ban it — and then, only its use by government authorities. Campaigners against mass surveillance systems say it’s tough to convince people these technologies are genuinely harmful — especially in places where public security or terrorism are serious problems. After all, digital monitoring is usually invisible and security cameras seem harmless.

“I don’t think people are happy about tech or positive about tech for the sake of it, but they don’t know the extent to which that can go wrong,” said Leandro Ucciferri, a lawyer specializing in technology and human rights at the Association for Civil Rights in Argentina. “People don’t usually have the whole picture.”

When, in the course of reporting, I peered at the back ends of surveillance systems that claimed to track individuals by their clothing, their faces, their walks, and their behavior, I wondered how I could continue to do my work in the same way. Could I go out to meet a source for coffee without immediately outing her in front of a camera whose video streams were being parsed by an algorithm?

“The tech developments themselves have enabled the Chinese government to implement its vision,” said Maya Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch and one of the leading authorities on mass surveillance in Xinjiang. “That’s why we see the rise of the total surveillance state — because it’s now possible to automate much of the surveillance and be able to spot irregularities in streams of data about human life like never before.”

What happens to the myriad facets of our private lives — going to a therapy appointment, buying birth control, meeting a date — when it’s so easy to monitor us?

What happens when it’s our faces, not our phones, that are our trackers?

Str / Getty Images

Surveillance cameras are seen above tourists as they visit Tiananmen Square in Beijing.

Eritrea, a small nation in the horn of Africa, is one place where the government’s approach to monitoring people remains decidedly 20th century. Only 2% of people have access to the internet, largely consisting of the urban elite. There’s little evidence the government is investing in the sophisticated surveillance systems of the kind China uses.

My friend Vanessa Tsehaye, an Eritrean-Swedish journalist and activist, believes deeply in grassroots campaigns for human rights in the country. A recent college grad, she spent her teenage years campaigning for the Eritrean government to free her uncle, the journalist Seyoum Tsehaye, from prison.

Tsehaye is the most relentlessly positive campaigner I know — but even she feels bleak thinking about the rise of the surveillance systems of the future.

“Their main methods of censorship are limiting access to the internet,” Tsehaye said. “Eritrea is the most censored country in the world, and despite that, people are slowly but surely mobilizing.”

“But if you add sophisticated surveillance tech,” she said, “the government could do whatever they wanted. It would destroy everything.”

Early this year, I met a Nicaraguan scholar at a conference and asked him about protests critical of President Daniel Ortega that had gripped the country. I was curious whether protesters there were concerned about facial recognition.

He told me to search “Nicaragua protests” on Google images. Sure enough, every photo showed demonstrators covering their faces with handkerchiefs and sunglasses.

Sopa Images / SOPA Images/LightRocket via Gett

A protester destroys a surveillance camera at Wan Chai MTR Station during a pro-democracy march in Hong Kong.

There are many reasons besides facial recognition that protesters might like to cover their faces — tear gas being one of them — but regardless, masks have begun to show up in demonstrations all over the world. In Hong Kong this year, the government has even banned their use. It’s one way that people are coping with surveillance in the modern world.

Most demonstrators I’ve met in my time as a reporter are not activists who are willing to risk imprisonment for the causes they fight for. Rather, they are ordinary people with jobs, families, and responsibilities. I have wondered how the protest movements of the future would be possible in the presence of newly sophisticated surveillance tech. Would anyone be willing to complain about their leaders online, swap political texts with a friend, or go out and join a street protest if they knew they’d be immediately outed by an algorithm?

“I worry tremendously over whether human beings will have freedom in the future anymore,” said Human Rights Watch’s Wang. “We used to worry about the age of AI as robots annihilating humans like in science fiction. I think what’s happening instead is that humans are being turned into robots, with the sensory systems placed around cities that are enabling governments and corporations to monitor us continuously and shape our behavior.”

In some parts of the world, anti-surveillance campaigns have picked up steam as the technology has become more ubiquitous. Facial recognition bans are being discussed by politicians across the US, for instance, and the EU passed the GDPR in 2016, a sweeping set of rules aimed at the protection of personal data.

Citizens of authoritarian states, however, have fewer options. What many pro-privacy groups fear is a bifurcated world where citizens of democratic systems have privacy rights that far outpace those of people who live in authoritarian countries.

Eskandar, the Egyptian technologist, believes there is still room for optimism.

“Nonconformity was the fuel of the revolution,” he told me by phone. “I’ve seen it happen. A few people with very few resources have outmaneuvered a state apparatus — it’s happened time and time again. I really believe that people who are proponents of freedom rather than fascism can think freely. So there is hope.”●

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Revit Will Make You a Better Architect

THE PROBLEM

The last place I worked at was at one time a thriving design / build firm. On a few occasions the brain trust from the Architecture department and the Construction department would gather their donuts and coffee and meet in the conference room to discuss the quality of our construction drawings and how to improve them.

Our drawings had the normal problems due to the usual pressures of a busy architectural work environment; missing information, conflicts, coordination issues, CAD anomalies, etc.

Remember the days when firms had drawing checkers? It seems that nobody checks drawings anymore; there is just no time in the schedule or budget. Now we call that process bidding. It sure makes the construction guys angry. We get sensitive about our design work, but they get sensitive when money is involved. Some people are just so materialistic.

As the CAD manager, I would sit and take notes in these meetings, while trying to balance a coffee, diet coke and two donuts in my lap. After about an hour and a half, everybody had their say. Although I had a ton of notes, they were just details pointing to the issue. The problem was surprisingly simple, the drawings were not coordinated.

ARCHITECTURAL DESKTOP

As the CAD manager, I was greatly grieved by this. We were using Architectural Desktop for all of our work. We were using it as a BIM tool, building a 3D model and extracting all the 2D drawings. Very cool but it was hard to do, required years of training on my part, years of setup and the breaking in and training of new people. Some of the new people were very resistant to working in 3D and with tools they were not familiar with. Some were actually subversive. I called these people flat-landers because they wanted to experience architecture in 2D. I suppose it was better than calling them what I really wanted to.

As difficult as it was, we were getting good results. We could create live renderings on the fly, we knew what the building was really going to look like and we knew where the design problems were developing. We even made money on our architectural fees occasionally. So how did this problem occur?

As the project got closer to finishing and the resolution of the detail became finer, Architectural Desktop became more difficult and finicky. When crunch time came, the subversive flat-landers would explode the project. Once exploded into lines, the less experienced would deconstruct the coordination in an effort to create the illusion that the project was actually finished. When the inevitable changes came along, the project CAD data degenerated even further.

REVIT ARCHITECTURE

Then along came Revit. This program fulfilled the promise of what Architectural Desktop was supposed to be. Don’t get me wrong, it was a big pain to implement but I knew that if I could make Architectural Desktop work for us, then I could implement Revit. Management was certainly not always supportive, providing no training and no setup time to make it work, but they did provide doubt and criticism. At least they paid for the required hardware and software.

In Architectural Desktop you had to invent complex systems to manage a project. In Revit this was already taken care of. In Architectural Desktop you had to invent complex CAD standards and program them in to your system, and then train users and enforce the standards. With Revit, the standards out of the box worked for us. This was absolutely amazing. I can walk into any office with Revit on a computer and just start working. Imagine that? I can’t even begin to tell you how much CAD customization I have done in the last 20 years. I don’t do anything to Revit except to create families, (their term for parametric block styles) shared parameters and project templates.

Architectural desktop is rough, Revit is smooth. Architectural Desktop is fragile and breaks, Revit is strong and solid. Upgrading Architectural Desktop is a multi-week process involving breaking all the tons of current customization and rebuilding it after you purchase a few books, email some gurus, and find the hidden cache of secret inside information on what is really going on inside the stupid program. It takes not one but at least three programming languages to make this thing work right. Then of course you have to retrain the users.

Upgrading Revit can be done over lunch, with no training. I don’t even look at the readme file.

BUILDING INFORMATION MODELING (BIM)

BIM? I really didn’t like that acronym. I liked SBM (Single Building Model). It didn’t seem to suit Autodesk’s marketing plan though. Nobody asked me anyway. Actually I believe that the mounds of information in every magazine today and on every web site about BIM are mostly crap. All these experts who don’t use Revit are saying you can do this, that and the other thing. I don’t do any of those. I’m not even sure what they are. Perhaps we’ll see sometime in the future.

But here is where BIM and Revit Architecture rocks. You cannot explode the Revit model. This means that the geometry will always be coordinated. The reference tags and sheet numbers cannot be edited independently of the model. These tags are not fragile; they are rock solid, linked to the model and the schedules. I’m not sure that you can put a Revit project out of coordination even with great effort. So just like that, the majority of our drawing problems are gone. This is also proof of how intelligent software can make you a better architect. Yes I said it; Revit will make you a better architect.

At our firm, Revit ceased to be the office joke as our efficiency improved. When we had to hire someone for our architecture department, Revit experience was our top priority. It was starting to become a focus of our marketing at the time I left. The first thing that won people’s hearts about our Revit results was that we were solving design problems that we may not have seen in the past. Our solutions were valid right from the beginning. In a design / build office where construction guys are looking over your shoulder, this is critical.

RENDERING

Throughout the design process, you can place a camera and snap an almost perfect rendering. The rendering capabilities are amazing and also material and link compatible with 3DS Max if you choose to use it. The very simple Mental Ray rendering dialog box created amazing results fast with little effort. Any Revit user can now make excellent renderings with a few minutes of training. Not only could you have high quality renderings fast, but now you could also have lots of rendered images in a project to clearly articulate your design to your client. Revit will make you a better architect.

When I printed out the help system for Viz Render, the rendering tool in Architectural Desktop, it filled two volumes and was over a thousand pages, as well as taking a great amount of time to master.

DESIGN PARADIGM SHIFT

Between working in a smooth 3D interface and rendering stacks of views, architects now have a new first. They have the ability to easily see every exposed surface in a building design – walls, floors, ceilings and roofs – Inside and out. For the first time we can see everything before it’s built. Wow, can you see the implications?

There is now no excuse for bad design or design mistakes. Most people don’t know this but the majority of architects and designers really don’t know exactly what the built design will look like. Sure they have an idea and some are way better than others, but this is a fundamental problem especially where the design fees are low and everything is in black and white and 2D. Once while designing some ductwork, I created an MC Escher like sculpture. My boss was amused because he caught it, but that could have been a big problem.

Revit will make you a better architect simply because you are getting immediate feedback on your design. If you see the object as it will be, then you will correct and optimize it. It would be absurd not to. You won’t be able to sleep knowing that flaw is in your design. I think what flat-landers like is they can look at their 2D black and white drawing and can think perfect and well done because it matches their imagination. 3D and color is simply just too much information for them.

Architectural drawing without 3D is like typing a letter on a computer without a monitor. You probably got most of it right. You are probably not going to be able change it. You may redo it a few times. Wouldn’t the feedback from a monitor be good?

I find it interesting how large contractors are among those leading the move to BIM because of collision detection tools and the money they save in preventing construction errors and identifying design errors. Some contractors are having their in-house Revit guys model the 2D construction documents the architects issue to catch their design errors. Follow the money.

Shouldn’t the architects be leading this? I want to believe that the architects not using Revit just don’t know better. They don’t know about its coordination features, rendering capabilities, and its detailing tools. They don’t know it can completely replace AutoCAD. They may think that drawing in 3D wastes time, rather than saves time. I didn’t know all this when I started with Revit and I had to figure it out on my own.

Architects keep hearing about how BIM is going to benefit everybody except them. They might not know it will benefit them also, and consider it a burden.

Unfortunately we all know architects that use AutoCAD 14 and will say “if it was good enough for Frank Lloyd Wright to use when he designed the pyramids, then it’s good enough for me. ” These guys are usually really fast and do a very specific type of work. They are also very slowly losing market share, developing carpal tunnel syndrome and one day they will find society no longer has a need for their services. Seen any good ink on vellum hand drafting lately? How about press-on letters, pin registration mylar, leroy lettering sets, or ruling pens?

CAD really took off when Bob Villa showed an architect using a system on “This Old House”. The hardware was a Silicon Graphics workstation costing nearly $80, 000 and was not a realistic option at the time, but it created a perception that resonated with the public. Not embracing CAD was the end of a lot of design firms.

Frank Lloyd Wright worked in 3D and in color.

SKETCHUP

Sketchup has become quite popular recently among architects. These architects are smart enough to know the value of color and 3D. It is their work flow that I don’t like. Most firms using Sketchup are also using AutoCAD. So essentially one group works on the design with Sketchup, another group works on the construction documents with AutoCAD. (More on AutoCAD later. ) Very little or no data reuse between the two groups. It also seems like it would be very difficult to model the interior and exterior of a building in Sketchup. To get photo-realistic renderings in Sketchup, you need an add-on renderer. Still with Sketchup you are giving your clients drawings they can relate to, and that is an excellent step in the right direction. Can Sketchup do floor plans now?

REVIT WORKFLOW

In Revit you can start modeling with walls, doors and windows or you can use their awesome mass modeling tools, extract volume and area data, and then parametrically attach the walls, floors, roofs, etc. Everything Sketchup can do, Revit can do better.

In Revit, you have one database and all drawings and schedules come out of it. You do not have to draw an arbitrary line in the sand and say that is a design drawing and that is construction document. They both are one, progressing along together in perfect Zen. In reality, doesn’t the architect keep designing through the construction document phase? Most keep doing it into the construction phase. Revit makes it easy to do that. This is a huge opportunity for profit based on the efficiency of the Revit workflow vs the Sketchup / AutoCAD workflow.

FLEXIBILITY

One of the best features of Revit is not readily apparent. It is data flexibility. For example In AutoCAD someone will create a door schedule. Assuming he has an office standard, and some door knowledge, he blasts this out, done! That schedule has no connection to the project. Later if you erase a door from the plan, it is still in the schedule. It is also still on the wall elevation. With enough edits over time, the entire door schedule will have to be rechecked for coordination issues.

In Revit, the door object contains its data. If you erase a door, it comes off the schedule and the elevations, the sections, linked details, linked specifications, etc. All the data can be live. A change occurring in one place on the model is propagated automatically through-out the set of drawings. Not only do the drawings stay coordinated but this is a level of flexibility we have not had before.

Flexibility makes multiple changes not only possible, but easy and fast without breaking the model. Now when your client needs to reduce the budget significantly after the construction documents go out for bid, (common in Church work) you can accommodate them without throwing the project away and starting over. The drawings stay coordinated.

THEOLOGICAL IMPLICATIONS

In the typical modern Sunday school classroom, the expression WWJD (what would Jesus do?) is tossed around so that our kids have an excellent standard to base their actions on. (One of the consequences of this is that they have a standard to judge their parents behavior. )

So what would Jesus do? I don’t have a clue really, but as the creator of reality I believe that the God of the universe did not use 2D and black and white. I could speculate endlessly and create some bizarre heresy, but this much I do know. At the very least, reality has at least 3 physical dimensions, reality has movement (over time), reality has colors, and it has sound (perhaps even 5. 1 Dolby surround sound?). The more accurately you represent the design to your client and yourself, the more truthful you are, and truth is a great standard to seek. I’m pretty sure that Jesus would also tell a compelling and profound story about the building or its users.

To represent architecture most accurately to your clients at this time in history would be to use a Revit model based 3DS Max animation with the V-Ray 2. 0 plug-in for a photo-realistic high-definition Blu-Ray video with surround sound on a 55″ Samsung LED TV with James Earl Jones narrating the story as written by Tom Clancy. A 12″ 350 watt Klipsch powered subwoofer would also be useful.

CONSTRUCTION DOCUMENTS

The design of Churches moves quite slowly. It’s the fundraising between preliminary design and construction documents that can take years. Two and a half years after implementing Revit, we had our first set of construction documents completed.

I didn’t think that these drawings were all that special. We had a lot of non-Revit problems. There was some re-working and value engineering and the construction was too complicated. But in the end, the drawings were professional and adequate.

A few weeks went by and the Director of Construction told us that this was the best set of drawings he has worked from. I was quite surprised. The guys doing the Revit work were our best guys, but what I believe pleased the director about these drawings was they were perfectly coordinated. This is the contribution that Revit made to the project.

As the project went into construction, it all went very smoothly. The foundations were very complex so we added an isometric to the drawing set with elevation tags and dimensions that took its data directly from the model. Only took a few hours. The concrete guy was blown away. The only problems on this project came from a couple of subcontractors making errors unrelated to the drawings.

ARCHITECTURAL APATHY

I just don’t understand why the whole world isn’t in eager anticipation of the next release of Revit and the schools aren’t jam packed with people trying to learn it. Revit books should be best sellers. This should be discussed on CNBC and even the nightly news. This is the most exciting thing to ever happen to the professional practice of architecture. And it’s really just the beginning of the BIM revolution.

According to an article in Professional Builder, Warren Buffet has invested heavily in BIM because he thinks there is inefficiency and waste in the American home building industry and there is money to be made using BIM to make it efficient.

OUTSOURCING

I really don’t understand the resistance on the part of American architects not to jump at the opportunity to excel at, master and lead in this new technology. The rest of the world is adopting Revit and they are using the current version. Maybe we think they use DOS on a 80386 CPU with 5 year old software?

Do some Google searches and you will see some incredible work being done in South America, China and India. Since Revit makes you a better architect, it won’t be long before America is outsourcing its architecture to foreign countries where not only do they do it significantly cheaper, but they also do it better.

Like it or not, outsourcing is here. How are American Architects going to respond?

INVESTMENT

It takes ten years to become a real architect. To be able to design and then describe a building in detail drawings that are buildable using common construction that meets building codes and zoning ordinances and to do it efficiently enough to earn a living. This is quite an investment.

So explain to me why you don’t want to take a four day class to get going and a three day advanced class to begin to master a tool that will change your life, protect your career and make you a better architect, and bring you joy? Why can’t you lose some initial productivity as you transition to Revit when the productivity gains you will make will by the end of the first year, more than make up for all your hardware, software and training investment and give you a 25% productivity gain?

The people who are resisting BIM today and clinging to CAD are the exact same people who resisted CAD and clung to the pencil. When CAD took hold, it radically changed the architectural business world. Many of the old firms went out of business and new ones popped up to take advantage of the opportunity. Do you see the opportunity?

Did you know they teach Revit in most High Schools?

EXCUSES

I imagine there are two really great excuses for the resistance. The first one is “The economy is busted. I can’t afford to invest in anything. I don’t know if it will ever come back. Every building that society needs has been built. I will wait until the economy gets better. ” The second excuse will be “I have too much work I must get done. I don’t have time to learn this now. Maybe when I’m not so busy?” Both of these excuses work together perfectly so it will never happen. Consider the down time you have because of the economy to be a gift so you can train for the day when you will be busy.

In the meantime, the architects with a sense of vision and perspective realize that when the economy picks up, it will be too late. The clients are going to demand BIM / Revit and if you can’t provide it, you won’t get the job. Currently almost all government projects require BIM. The biggest architectural firms such as HOK and SOM are leaders in Revit. The construction world is demanding it because of the construction cost savings (often greater than the architect’s fee) and if the architects won’t implement it, they will.

AUTOCAD

I think I could write a book on why AutoCAD is just awful for architecture. But I’m trying to keep this positive and helpful.

So today I’m looking for work and I’m reading the few ads out there for architectural work and I see over and over “must know AutoCAD”. Why? Is anybody out there really drawing floor plans using lines to represent a wall?Blocks for doors? Really? I’m sorry but that is just ludicrous. I could never work there because I would not be able to stop calling people stupid. I would probably not get past the first phone interview. I’d demand to know why. A chisel and a stone tablet are almost as efficient.

I left AutoCAD in 2001 after using AutoCAD 14 to do a BIM project. It took a while. I kept repeating the line from the movie The Money Pit, “two more weeks” and 16 weeks later I had a nice 3D BIM project in AutoCAD 14. My boss was not amused.

In 2001 Architectural Desktop won my heart and not for a second did I regret leaving AutoCAD. Drawing buildings with lines is just stupid. I’m sorry but it is, and if you are doing it, somebody needed to tell you.

I have not manually drawn an elevation in over 10 years. I’m not sure I would even know how. Why would you want to do that? Let the computer do it for you. It’s like using a spreadsheet for accounting but doing the calculations on a calculator and entering the data into the cells. Yes, it’s that stupid. Stop it!

Sketchup only serves to enable architectural AutoCAD users.

AUTOCAD CULTURE

So AutoCAD comes out of the box with 500 or so variables set to the worst possible choices. (Or at least it did, I haven’t seen it in 10 years). Setting those variables is a month’s worth of work. In AutoCAD there are 15 different ways to do something. With great effort, you can find the best way and it will only be mediocre. Then you learn 3 programming languages (or more) and you can customize it to do that one thing well. If you are a geek, you can become a guru. Then you don’t have to draw anymore, you just run around pulling other people out of the mire.

I think I have 50 AutoCAD Books. They were really expensive. I learned AutoLisp. I have 4 books on it. I saw Lynn Allen give her famous AutoLisp in 45 minutes speech live. As a geek, I found it strangely erotic. I trained people in AutoCAD while working for an Autodesk reseller. I like it better than plastic lead on mylar with an electric eraser. But come on, it’s the new millennium, snap out of it.

In the AutoCAD world, gurus make good money, have control and job security, write books and don’t share their knowledge so quickly. My favorite is the undocumented commands, real geek stuff.

AutoCAD is really a misnomer as there is nothing automatic about AutoCAD. All this just to draw lines? I don’t think so.

AUTODESK

Autodesk gets part of the blame for this because they are competing against themselves with at least four different products for architecture; AutoCAD, AutoCAD LT, Architectural Desktop (Now called AutoCAD for Architecture, and Revit. That’s confusing. In the past, they have sent a lot of mixed messages. Which one is best for what I do? Which one is cheapest? Which one will help me meet women and drive a new sports car? And I didn’t even mention consulting engineers and the competing products they use.

One thing Autodesk has done right is to try to ever so subtly steer architects to Revit (like herding cats). At first this angered me as I was dedicated to Architectural Desktop. There are few things in life as frustrating as changing CAD systems. When Frank Heitzman established a BIM program at Triton College and Paul Aubin wrote a book on Revit, it was time for me to have a good look. At the first class Frank said Revit was a video game for architects. At the end of my first class I had drawn a sheet with plans, elevations, sections and a rendering of a small house. I was sold.

Autodesk has said that their future is with Revit. Every year they come out with a new version. It always has some awesome new features. It is the most exciting day of the year for me. The moment I can get my hands on it, I upgrade. I also like the subscription system, it works well for Revit. There is no reason not to stay on it and ride the sweet wave of new technology.

REVIT CULTURE

Oh my, what a world of difference. It is ready to use right out of the box. Autodesk has created many tutorials and white papers. The internet is full of blogs and web sites to share families and knowledge. The subscription site lets you see many of the past classes at Autodesk University. YouTube has hundreds of video tutorials. The whole world is posting their work and it’s magnificent.

In Revit, if it takes you more than 15 minutes to do a task the first time, you are using the wrong approach. Figure out the correct vocabulary word and Google it. The solution will be there.

In Revit you don’t model every single nut and bolt, there is a balance to the 3D/2D that you will learn as you see what others are doing.

My response to those who have told me “3D was a waste of time” and my other favorite “They will work it out in the field” I say this “If it is too hard to model in 3D in Revit, then it is too hard to build. Your fake 2D drawing is a lie and a disservice to your client. “

In my 21 years of drawing on the computer, I have struggled to come up with the correct approach to creating architecture digitally. I think Revit is it. It is also just the beginning of a rapid change to having the computer do more of the work. Vertical applications just make sense.

SIMULATION

Although photo-realistic rendering is awesome, the next level is simulation. If your interior rendering looks bad, you can adjust the rendering lighting in an artistic way to make it beautiful. If you are using Revit’s photometric lights and you rendering looks bad, don’t fix the rendering, fix the lighting design and be glad you caught it before they built it.

On one of our projects the interior designer gave me her material and color pallet. I went to the material suppliers web site and download the exact color samples and materials and re-rendered the interior rooms. The client and the interior designer saw the rooms exactly like they were going to be.

On another project, I used the landscape drawing as a background to put 3D plants in the model for the rendering. Instead of tossing random plants in a rendering in an artistic way, it was a simulation. If the design doesn’t look good, the solution is to fix the design not the artistic depiction.

The number of things that can be simulated is huge. Sun and shadow studies, lighting, energy usage, collision detection, optimum building rotation, all sorts of LEED stuff, construction logistics and staging. Use your imagination.

CONCLUSION

There is a lot of information on the benefits of BIM for the rest of the AEC industry, I am just addressing architects that are making design and construction drawings. Non-architects think that we have been using software like this all along. They have no idea that we fill out door schedules by hand and use lines for walls. You became an architect to design buildings and solve problems, not be a typist or laboriously sling lines as fast as you can in pointless repetition.

My favorite part of being an architectural designer is seeing my designs get built. This actually happens so rarely and can take years. Working in Revit, I get that satisfaction on a daily basis. Imagine the joy that would bring to your life. (If I can only find some work)

If you are an architect and you need to design buildings and make architectural drawings, you need to know that with proper training and experience, Revit is the best way to accomplish this. The drawing quality is superior, the renderings are amazing, the coordination is rock solid, it is so efficient, that in one year you will be 25% faster and have paid for the learning curve, the software and the hardware. You will have better, faster and cheaper and you will be a better architect.

Revit is a complete system. It is the only tool you need to create renderings, design drawings and construction documents. There are a few other BIM tools that are similar to Revit and are quite good, but from what I have seen Revit is superior, has a bigger market share, is the most compatible and has the greatest number of partners.

Architects, this is our moment in history, Let us seize it.

Source by Mark Palacios Revit Will Make You a Better Architect

Written by R. Ann Parris on The Prepper Journal.

Having a cache isn’t a bad idea for all sorts of reasons. Even if we don’t plan to bug out anywhere, we can easily be cut off from our homes and vehicles by everyday events: traffic accidents, evacuations due to spills and contamination’s, house fires, flooding dams and water mains, damaged bridges, vehicle malfunctions. Having a cache we don’t need a shovel to access – or a cache for the e-tools to get into our buried treasures – can be priceless.

Even Reader’s Digest has covered ways to hide valuables, and there are a million and one prepper and survivalist videos and articles for other ideas. Geocaching has some good ones, too.

Here I’m mostly going to focus on stuff I don’t see suggested often or ever. Many have some size restrictions, but many are also applicable for both permanent residences and “other” locations – unused residential areas, off-site storage units, back country wilds, backwoods dump sites, and undeveloped property. They’re also largely hiding in plain sight, which limits how much attention we draw erecting and accessing them.

Warnings-Disclaimers

One, Many good cache locations become good hidey holes for critters, too. Hornets and wasps are one level of bad. Rodents are bad enough when cornered, too.

I grew up in the Deep South, then served in Asia and the Southwest. It is second nature not to stick my paw into dark spaces, to tap before poking/lifting, and to use something that gives me at least 8-12” of extra reach when popping covers off anything, and to look really well before entering crawlspaces or areas where there’s conduit overhead.

See, snakes especially but sometimes spiders get really cranky about being intruded upon. It does not take a venomous bite to put you in the hospital – even the “safe” cuties have filthy mouths.

Two, Surface caches are vulnerable to wind, water, and temperature fluctuations. That limits what we’ll want to store in them, although not significantly versus a buried cache that’s less than 3-5’ deep.

Three, Any physical location we do not personally own and maintain is vulnerable. Remote wilds to the few remaining lockers at a bus/train terminal, stuff changes. Residential and commercial properties evolve as well.

Trees get cut and fall, and waterways ebb and flow, consuming or exposing our stuff. New owners take over and renovate. The state entity that owns something decides to put in a path, allow hunting, or permits a clean-up group. Condemned buildings get demolished.

Power line cuts tend to be pretty standard, but sometimes the contracts/contractors get extra froggy, sometimes cuts go to buried lines, sometimes private-held lines get rerouted and cuts are abandoned to turn into tangles, and sometimes somebody pours a slab over our goodies while they’re building a substation or cell tower.

And, just like our houses, there’s a fire risk pretty much everywhere.

Other options for caches like storage buildings, parking space rentals for passenger vehicles or off-season boats and motorcycle trailers, public parks, off-season RV lots, half-built and then abandoned commercial and residential construction sites, empty houses both long-abandoned death traps or longtime empty for-sale lots, and empty strip malls, gas stations, restaurants, and car washes have some benefits for preppers looking for a cache spot, but they also have additional drawbacks.

Remember, I suggest cruising curbside pickups and dumping sites for goodies that can be re-purposed. I learned this from others, to include modern hobo types. Squatters and homeless may poke through locations, or various ages and threat levels of hoodlums make use of a spot.

All above-ground caches have some vulnerability since there’s less time and effort involved with getting to them. Getting creative can help reduce the risks.

Posts

Fence posts and posts for our backyard lights and birdhouses have girth restrictions, but sizable timbers can be used and hollowed out like tree stumps to hold long cylinders or daisy-chained small packages, much the way we’d bury PVC or erect fake conduit for some supplies. Short posts especially can serve as a cap for something we’ve recessed in the surface soil.

Sub-Irrigated Planters

Garden planters that involve nesting storage totes or buckets inside each other typically call for a sturdy spacer. That gives us a whole lot more room to play with than the typical potted-plant “safe”.

It’ll be heavy in planting season, but we can still be getting a good 6-10” of growing depth, keep decent reservoir capacity, and gain pretty easy access for a backyard stash, but one that’s heavier and messier than most would go through on the offhand chance of a score.

Backyard Birdhouses

This one is especially applicable to “other” properties as well as our own, and one of the most versatile options for sizes. We can either custom-build birdhouses so there are bare recesses instead of actual holes to deny critter access, or just fill standard birdhouses. If we’re using a post, that can become storage as well.

Standard bluebird houses can hold a peanut butter tub, pasta jar or in some cases even a coffee tub or ammo can, or we can get creative with arranging smaller and oddball-sized houses that would be appropriate for small, individual songbird nests or the many, many decorative birdhouses out there today.

Large and massive dovecotes allow us even more freedom, holding a handful of coffee tubs, several ammo cans, or suck-sealed and double-wrapped clothing items in small storage totes.

It’s slow and painful, but even if all we have are standard drill bits and a hand saw, we can hollow out small logs to make a variety of sizes and depths to cluster around porches, hang from fences, and stick up on posts without buying/salvaging lumber or other birdhouses. Or, use split smaller-yet limbs for construction with simple glues or nails.

We can easily distress those items and add them to the yards of empty houses or the dump sites that develop around back roads and abandoned commercial buildings. Don’t hang them – they’ll be less inviting if they’re lying on the ground like something that wasn’t worth keeping.

  Play Conservationist

Most areas have programs ranging from PETA types through Ducks Unlimited’s hunters to help provide safe nesting for ducks, pelicans, cormorants, and raptors. Many are encouraged for homeowners and uber-organic farmers, and putting up bat houses is even more popular for the backyard crowds.

That helps this one apply to even more locations, especially if we print and laminate small 2”x4”-3”x5” placards to label our creations “[fill-in-the-blank bird] Conservation – Visit [eco-freak/hunter/DNR website] to learn more about native wildlife”.

Those big ol’ birdhouses give us a lot of room to play with.

Raptor platforms and boxes can be filled with larger flat objects and have nests built up on them, leaving room for actual birds or not.

Same goes for the bucket-sized wood duck and merganser boxes – we can put in a barrier just below the hole so they pop in and pop right back out, or we can just stuff our ammo can, toolbox or lunchbox into the bottom, leaving room for the critters to use it until we need our glove-stuffed boots, rain gear, e-tool, or spade and knife set.

They also commonly need big ol’ sturdy supports, so we can make use of a stump or invest in larger-diameter pipe or 6×6-8×8” timbers (or build what looks like them out of 1 x what-evers) to give us more storage room yet.

If we hang flush to a tree instead, we can carve out a hollow behind the birdhouse or bat house to use as well or instead.

Fire Extinguisher Mounting Brackets/Boards

Along the same lines as using the space behind a fake or functional birdhouse, we can use the space behind safety equipment pretty much everybody should have on hand anyway.

I wouldn’t leave a fake extinguisher anywhere somebody might grab it, but the brackets are sometimes so obvious in what they are, it would work for inside abandoned properties or if we can distress a fake, pull the safety and bleed off the gauge, they, too, would add space, especially at dump sites and even inside foreclosure/abandoned buildings.

Faux Spouts, Stacks & Gutters

Sticking up a downspout that isn’t actually connected to a gutter is a fast, easy way to gain a bit of outdoor storage space. Adding a covered gutter is a bit pricier, but can also pay off due to the size and more importantly the length and ease of access for later.

I would 100% not climb the roof of a property I’m not sure about. However, at ours and if it’s accessible from a ladder I can slide in, studded rooftops are far from uncommon – and those are common sites for leaks, which calls for a repairman or inspector who won’t generate too much interest.

They let us custom-size relatively inexpensive and salvaged materials to hold anything we’d bury in an ammo box or PVC tube, although we have to be cognizant of just how hot rooftops can get and make sure it’s secure against winds and any ice/snow loads we face.

*DO NOT buy a real vent stack. Salvage or get crafty.

Built-In Hidey-Holes

Another that applies to pretty much anywhere, to include dump sites and really trashed abandoned yards and houses, as well as storage lockers and somewhere out of sight on our own properties, are old “junk” that has a fair bit of empty space inside.

We just want to make sure they are appropriately distressed with enough frayed electrical cords and cracked faces to avoid appealing to thieves and scrap salvagers.

I discovered just how roomy the rear interior of both a stove and washer are when a songbird flew in the house and repeatedly disappeared inside appliances. (No, I did not indulge my giggling father and turn them on – I did give some thought to buying a ferret.)

Once gutted, many window AC units and some RV rooftop units will rival a storage tote or bucket for storage space.

We don’t even need tools if we can lay our hands on an already-dinged-up bumper to semi-submerge in the earth (dissuading others from flipping it over and finding our machete, shovel, probe bar, hatchet, etc.). Printers also come ready-made with a frustrating array of pockets and access points.

The possibilities are pretty endless.

Remember…

There are a whole host of options for increasing our off-site squirrel hoards – or stashing tools we need to access buried caches – but we do have to give some thought to what we stash due to size and the chances of loss and damage, and to the possible risks we’ll face accessing them before, during and after disasters.

And, for-real, don’t forget to sniff, listen, and watch for snakes, especially in spaces and weather that leave them no choice but to strike if somebody gets too close. And, if you do like digging holes…..

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Buying a New Boiler

Buying a New Boiler David Lawrenson of LettingFocus.com looks at the things you should consider when buying a new gas boiler. So, it’s cold right now, very cold. And naturally enough, this is just the sort of time your boiler breaks down. (Machines tend to break when they are being used most intensively). As a landlord, in winter time especially, you really have to swing into action to ensure your tenants are not left in a freezing cold house. These days, tenants have the reasonable expectation that they shouldn’t be left to be cold for a long time. (We always have some electric fan heaters to give them tide them over for heating for a day or three whilst we get a boiler fixed or replaced. It’s also good if your heating system has an immersion heater and/ or if you have an electric shower so they can at least have a warm shower too.) If you have followed my advice in the past, you will have already developed a good relationship with a competent gas safe certified contractor, (who ideally can look after plumbing matters too). Someone you can trust to tell the truth when he or she tells you that maybe your old boiler has seen better times and it’s now time to get a new one. Over the years I have come to realise that when certain big things go wrong with boilers or when they need new parts more than once a year, that is probably the time to admit you need a new machine. Fixing it repeatedly is usually just not worth it, the time has come to get a new boiler. The good news is that in real terms, the cost of new boilers has gone down significantly in the 30 odd years I have been a landlord. And, (so we are told), the boilers are far more efficient in terms of how good they are at transferring fuel into heat than they were back in the old pre-condensing boiler days. That’s probably true, though many older experienced boiler fitters tell me that the models today simply do not last as long as the old ones did – a fact which they put down to the larger number of parts the newer machines have, which in turn means there is simply more things that can go wrong. (Some experts think the more efficient combi boilers of today have a shorter life expectancy, because the burners are always being fired on and off, as required to heat up water, on demand). Getting hard and fast information on boiler efficiency is difficult, not least because the industry as a whole has a vested interest in pushing the fact that the new boilers that they are marketing are so much better in terms of efficiency (and hence lower carbon footprint) than old ones. But some of my gas fitter guys and girls question just how much more efficient the new classes of boiler are and I often consider their comments in the light of the Volkswagen car emissions scandal, (where low emissions rates were being faked by the car firms own tests), and adopt a very skeptical view as to the manufacturers claims. Until some trustworthy and neutral organisation tests the claims of the boiler manufacturers, we will never know the real truth. I think they are undoubtedly more efficient than old boilers but I suspect the government is probably being hoodwinked by the boiler makers as to how efficient they really are. Boilers of The Old Days What I can say, from experience, is that the boilers we have in our properties that were installed from 15-20 years ago have not lasted as long as the ones that were fitted between 20 and 40 years ago. In our portfolio, we still have one boiler, (a non-combi), which is at least 25 years old and which is still running just fine and continues to neatly heat our sole one bedroom flat. I will say more about this particular boiler later, but it is worth commenting that it certainly appears to be extremely efficient if the heating bills of my tenants over the 20 odd years I have owned the property are anything to go by. (They seem to spend less than £50 a month for heating and lighting the one bed flat). There is no doubt that the larger the portfolio of properties you have and the more work you have given to the same heating (and plumbing) contractors, the nearer the front of the queue you will be to get the work done quickly (and at a reasonable cost). If you are just starting off as a landlord or if you have properties all over the country and not more than one in any location, it can be harder to get to the front of the queue. 90% of our properties are within 20 miles of each other, which helps and we give all our landlords gas certificate work and plumbing call outs to just one or two local tradesmen. They get a regular flow of call out maintenance work from us, (which can be as profitable as fitting new boilers for those fitters who are on call to many clients and can thus generate a lot of work covering the whole of their working days). You should note that I will only work with fitters who are prepared to look after ALL my plumbing and boiler needs – both the maintenance AND the fitting of new boilers. One reason for this is that I want to be able to give the tenants the tradesman’s phone number and email for them to contact the tradesman directly, so I’m not involved. I’m a landlord, not a plumber or gas fitter! Trust the Boiler Fitters So I trust to the experts to make the “right calls” on the works to be done. And because I give them a lot of work, I don’t expect them to rip me off with unnecessary work. In fact, the fitter only needs to call me to discuss the job, if there is a decision to be made – such as whether to spend £200 fixing an old boiler, or whether the time has come to get a new boiler. These are the types of things that are “my call” and they will need my authorization on. In summary, I try to set clear guideless and they follow them. It works for the tenants, it works for the fitter and, most of all it works for me. You will of course, be aware that the likes of British Gas, (advert tagline, “Looking After Your World), are very keen to get the business of landlords and to fit and maintain new boilers for them. They have a heavy advertising presence, marketing extensively on TV and other media. They, and a wide variety of other companies like them, sell a variety of service contracts to landlords and other homeowners in which they promise to maintain a variety of household appliances, look after plumbing and drainage etc., for an annual fee. But from what I have seen, it is simply not worth getting the likes of British Gas to come and fit your new boiler (nor to assess if your old one is possibly kaput – see more on this below!). Their fees are always higher than a local independent gas safe fitter would charge you. Sure, you have the reassurance that if anything goes really badly wrong, you could always write to the Chief Executive of British Gas and threaten to write to the Daily Telegraph etc., and things will get fixed. However, if you opt to use an experienced local independent local fitter, (and avoid the big corporation), you will find not only will you pay less, but that many fitters will be able to give you up to a ten year part and labour guarantee anyway on certain models. It’s not the fitter that is giving the guarantee, it is the manufacturers, who are also big companies with reputations to protect. Both Worcester Bosch and Vaillant, two of the biggest players, offer such long term guarantees, provided the machine qualifies, (many machines will come with at least a seven year guarantee), and provided also it has been fitted by selected tradespeople who have built up a track record with them and who are fitting a certain, minimum number of boilers each year. So, check with the fitter if they qualify with the manufacturer to give you the longer guarantees. And get all this in writing before you commission the work. Invoking Boiler Guarantees And if you have a really long guarantee, you won’t need a service contract either, because if the boiler fails, all you need to do is call Worcester Bosch or Vaillant (or whichever manufacturer it is) and they will come and fix the machine, no problem. When you have a good machine backed by a long term part and labour guarantee of this type, who needs a service contract from British Gas or Homeserve, or some other such service company? As far as we are aware, the big manufacturers are usually pretty prompt at coming out and fixing boilers that have broken but which are under guarantee, though it may take a few days in the middle of winter, when breakdowns tend to peak. (British Gas and other providers offer no hard and fast guarantees either, it should be noted) And, of course, there is no charge for the call out or the work to fix the machine if it is still under guarantee. To continue to qualify for the guarantee, you will need to boiler to be serviced annually by a qualified gas safe registered fitter, so don’t forget this and make sure to record the service in the log book that comes with the boiler. In practice, of course, the machines rarely breakdown within the guarantee period. We always buy the machines with the longest guarantee period, so we usually have ten years’ worry free on our boilers. It works for us. Just a comment on British Gas. Back in 2004, the same one bed flat where my old boiler of 25 years + happily chugs along to this day, was being let under a housing association lease scheme to a London-based housing association. The housing association took the property off my hands for four years, paying a guaranteed rent. Within their contract they looked after most repairs, and for the boiler they had entered into a service contract with British Gas. The contract with the housing association stated that their contract with British Gas covered most things but not major breakdowns that would require a new boiler. Boilers and British Gas I was then contacted by the housing association to say the boiler had broken down and that British Gas had told them it could not be fixed and a new boiler was needed – and it would cost in the region of £2,500. I said I would have my own fitter look at it. He came around and fixed it for a fee of £80. It is still working 14 years later! At around that time, many people had said that British Gas workmen were very keen to condemn old boilers in order, it was alleged, so they could get the profitable business / commission from installing a new boiler along with the usual service contract that they can often upsell along with it. This was a number of years ago and it is possible that British Gas have since improved their service. Do write and tell me of your experiences. For now, I am keen to give my business to my local small contractors. They do a good job for me. Unfortunately, one of my excellent plumbers says he finds the profit margins from fitting boilers is too small, so has since stopped doing it. (Generally, a fitter has to do a certain number of jobs a year to be able to maintain membership of the gas safe register, qualify for the manufacturers’ discounts and to be able to offer the manufacturer’s long term guarantees on the machines they fit). This does point out that one must pay a fair price for tradespeople’s work. Economy 7 Boilers One of our properties has Economy 7 boilers – in which storage heaters can be used to heat storage units overnight (on a lower night electricity tariff) and then pump heat out in the day. These are also very efficient, if my tenants’ bills are anything to go by. In the long years I have had this property, I have only had to once call out for a repair to the boiler. Plus, you do not need an annual gas safe check, thus saving around £60 a year, nor have to worry about carbon monoxide detectors. I’m a big fan and I wish more of my properties were Economy 7. I hope you have found this blog of interest. I would be very keen to hear what experiences you have had and will happily publish any useful tips. ABOUT LETTINGFOCUS Services for Private Landlords We help landlords and property investors by showing them how to make money in the private rented sector using ways which are fair to tenants and which involve minimal risk. Our advice is completely independent. We take don’t commission payments or fees from anyone, ever. Services to Businesses and the Public Sector We advise a range of organisations including banks, building societies, local authorities, social housing providers, institutional investors and insurers. We help them develop and improve their services and products for private landlords. 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Click Here to Buy It. BOOK FOR TENANTS: Kids going off and renting for the first time? My Book for Tenants is also Available TO JOIN OUR FREE NEWSLETTER MAILER which goes to over 3,950 people (as at Jan 2017) just send an email to [email protected] We do not send spam or sell our mailing list to advertisers, though we occasionally mail landlords about good products from third parties. Please put us on your “white list” to ensure you receive our emails. OFFERS ON PRODUCTS FOR LANDLORDS and TO ADVERTISE YOUR PRODUCTS to LANDLORDS: Landlords Resources PERUSE LAST TEN BLOGS BY GETTING THE RSS FEED: Click Here NEXT ANNUAL SEMINAR EVENT FOR LANDLORDS: Landlord and Property Letting Seminar TWITTER PAGE My thoughts on property, personal finance, plus a lot of other random things: Twitter  Copyright of Blog: David Lawrenson 2018. Please link to us here or quote us. We actively pursue copyright infringements. 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