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tarotwithlove · 2 years

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pick a card: pick a scene from a film i love

.｡*♡ for singles; are you ready for love? what if ... you pursued the connection with your crush?

group 1: fallen angels, dir. wong kar wai / group 2: kamikaze girls, dir. tetsuya nakashima / group 3: syndromes and a century, dir. apichatpong weerasethakul

reminder that this is a general reading and messages found here may not apply to everyone. take what resonates, leave what doesn't, and don't force anything if it does not fit.

personal readings are open! feel free to dm for more information or to discuss a reading that is not listed there ♡

feedback, constructive criticism, requests and tips are appreciated! ppal cupidfemme

credit to theonlinemedium.com via @sororkaf for the "ready for love" spread used!

structure:

i will first be using the "ready for love" spread to answer the following six questions:

what you want in love? what you have learned from love? what is holding you back from love? readiness of your heart? readiness of your mind? readiness of your spirit?

this will then be followed by a reading on the connection between you and your crush.

feel free to read whichever section in your selected pile calls and applies to you and disregard that which does not. furthermore, if you are called to one group for your "ready for love" messages and another for messages on your connection you are more than welcome to mix-and-match at will ♡

1. FALLEN ANGELS, dir. wong kar wai

“as time progresses, you realize that a lot of the coolness and comedy held in the wordlessness of these characters is actually a façade to cover up just how desperately lonely everyone is. [...] the only way you know about their dreams, their aspirations, their full personhood is the disembodied thoughts they express through the narration. [...] no one is open enough for a real dialogue and connection, so instead they find other ways to force people to stay. maybe it’s sex, or violence, or a sales pitch. sometimes it works for an hour, for a night, or even a week, but it can’t last. even in the end, where the killer’s agent and he zhiwu find each other in silence and ride off into the sunset on a motorbike, the connection doesn’t feel permanent or guaranteed. a spark can only go so far. without real and open dialogue, the vice-grip will loosen and someone will leave. then we’re back in the beautifully lit dive bar, leaned against the jukebox as a mournful song plays, thinking of what could have been.” – with “fallen angels,” less words are more, oluwatayo adewole

channeled songs: spider by hoshi (“i want to stay here with you here, tangled up and trapped together”) · elevator (127f) by nct 127 (“let's just keep it simple”) · in the aeroplane over the sea by neutral milk hotel (“but for now we are young, let us lay in the sun, and count every beautiful thing we can see”) · call me maybe by carly rae jepsen (“before you came into my life, i missed you so bad”)

cards pulled: ace of wands, the devil, three of swords (rx), four of swords (rx), ace of swords (rx), the chariot (rx) and the ten of swords ; five of cups (rx), page of swords, king of cups (rx)

ARE YOU READY FOR LOVE?

hey there, pile one ♡ to begin this reading, i am seeing that what you want from love is to be understood on both an intelligence and sensual level, where you might have previously only been seen through the sensual lens; desired for your body and not for who you are in your entirety. you want to feel as if you have the full attention of your partner with regards to your wants and needs. you want to feel desired and attractive to your partner even after a long time of being together. you may be wondering if your standards for love are too high and if you should be lowering them in case they leave you “single for life”.

what you want from love and what you have received from love are at odds. the relationships you have had in the past may have been driven by the physical; hook-ups where the partners did not communicate with each other what they really want leading to confusion and heartbreak, sometimes this could have been your partner who did not communicate that all they wanted was a purely physical relationship while at other times it could have been you. there is a history of codependency in your previous relationships that often saw you losing yourself in your partner, and losing your identity in what your partner wishes for it to be. yes, your previous relationships have caused you a lot of pain, but they have also taught you so much about yourself, about the truths of your desires and standing independently in who you are, as well as about being a better communicator. or have at least pushed you towards doing the difficult work of understanding yourself in all these ways.

while you have this idea of what you want in love and your past experiences have taught you so much, there is still a lot that is holding you back from love. past heartbreak most of all. you are so hung up on the pain of your past relationships and connections that it is causing you not to progress on your journey towards love. there is a call for you to heal, and this can only be done if you confront your wounds instead of ignoring them and pretending it's all okay when it is not. you may not be able to forgive those who have hurt you, and you honestly do not have to, but if you do not address the pain they have caused you in some way it will only make the pain worse, will only hurt you more, and will hold you back from love.

now to delve into the readiness of your heart, mind, and spirit. i see in the four of wands reversed that your heart is ready or is very near to being ready. you have gone through a lot of change and have had to face a lot of darkness, but you are also fighting for your own healing. you are in a way, after all these challenges, becoming yourself. as your heart strengthens, you may feel as if you are strong enough to handle everyone else's burdens on top of your own but do not go down this route of being so caught up in the opinions of others, especially of any new romantic interests, that you risk your sense of self and identity. your heart wants you to know that while you may be looking for love, you may be apprehensive because of past hurt, but both the challenges and the work you are doing in healing has made it strong enough to handle any heartbreak or challenges that may arise in the future. and challenge is inevitable. hiding from it does not serve you.

for the readiness of your mind, i started hearing “let's just keep it simple” (from elevator (127f) by nct 127) when i got to this point, so what i am seeing is that your mind and heart are quite at odds. while your heart is prepared for love your mind wants to take it slow and thinks it would be best to shy away from commitment for the time being. your love life may be lacking in fun, either always too serious or fun for the other party and not necessarily for you, and right now that's what your mind is yearning for, or what your mind believes to be the safest route. it may also be, in line with this, that you are overthinking love and, thus, are scared of committment. your past relationships and connections have caused so much pain and damage that your mind is not strong enough to potentially deal with that again. so keep it simple, keep it cute, buy me a drink and leave it at that, is basically what your mind wants at this moment. it is important to listen to your mind, if you don't you may risk ending up in a far worse state then when you started your healing journey. meditate, rest, nourish your mind and soul and truly introspect on the residual mental wounds from past relationships and connections by which you continue to be plagued.

as for the readiness of your spirit, here i pulled the chariot reversed and the ten of swords (the ten of swords slipped into my spread without me realising until the end), which is a good sign. it's interesting to me that your reading is associated with fallen angels when, like the movie, it is a tale of two different stories; half of you ready for love and half of you only wanting to pull back and not embrace it yet. with the chariot reversed, your spirit acknowledges these challenges and blockages that are keeping you from truly moving forward, however this is what it is ready for. moving forward. your spirit recognises the work you still need to do put but it is ready for the challenges that may, and will, arise, as we see in the ten of swords. your spirit asks you not to shy away from new opportunities out of fear. do the healing work necessary and trust that your spirit (and heart and mind) will be rested and strong enough. trust that you are strong enough and that you are fully capable of facing these risks for the chance at a high reward.

WHAT IF ... YOU PURSUED THE CONNECTION WITH YOUR CRUSH?

this might be difficult to hear, but you must know that what spirit asks of you is to move on from this connection. yes, there is love in your future, but it is not here in this connection and in order to find it you need to move on. this crush may not be going anywhere, and from what i am seeing, you do not want it to. it will hurt to let go of this crush, as it always hurts to let go of something you have poured your heart into, but as important as it is to let go it it as important to actually feel your pain so that you may re-enter the dating pool in due time.

now to go into depth about why spirit urges you to not pursue anything more with your crush, at least not in a romantic sense. the page of swords and king of cups reversed suggest a warning. this person may be important to you as a friend, or as an “activator” of sorts to give you an opportunity to prove to yourself that the work you have put into healing has been sufficient. in a relationship, however, i do not see you two complementing each other, rather i see you as a couple that is argumentative and conflicting in various areas of life and relationships. this crush is highly emotionally immature as a lover where you are more mature and stable, and are doing the work into growing. as a result of this, you may be in a mindset and time of your life where you may be wanting to start a family, but this person is just not ready for that. at least–and i'm sorry,–but not ready to start this family with you. if this person is capable of maturing, they are not ready to do it for you or for your possible relationship. now, if this is person is married and making you all these promises, know that that is all this is: empty promises made to keep you within a reachable distance without any intent to actually step up and do the mature thing. a relationship with this person may not at all be happy. spider by hoshi was in my head from the moment i started your reading and i realise now that this is where it becomes most relevant. you may be intoxicated by this person's dark energy; excited by the toxicity and danger of the situation, and not realising or refusing to realise how much it could hurt you.

2. KAMIKAZE GIRLS, dir. tetsuya nakashima

“like enid and rebecca in "ghost world," these two lonely girls travel through a world of their own creation, manufactured from the detritus of pop culture and pronounced alienation. [...] ichiko punctures momoko's isolation, taking a pin to the bubble the other girl calls self, which may be a metaphor about japan (or not). what the film does say, with infectious exuberance, is that in a world in which shopping is a cartesian truism -- in the immortal words of barbara kruger, "i shop therefore i am" -- it's so much nicer to go with a friend.” – two girls with one goal: they just want to have fun, manohla dargis

channeled songs: round&round by nct u (“everything is useless, i revolve around you, without being able to move closer”) · applause by lady gaga (“give me that thing that I love (i'll turn the lights out)”) · overcome by sparky · talk by hozier (“imagine being loved by me!”)

cards pulled: the magician (rx), the star (rx), eight of pentacles, six of pentacles, five of wands, four of cups (rx) ; two of pentacles, queen of pentacles, the lovers

ARE YOU READY FOR LOVE?

hey there, group 2 ♡ to begin your reading i see a certain lack of confidence that stops you from having relationships. what you want from love is to feel known by your partner; to be loved even for those things of which you are insecure as well as to love someone through those things of which they are insecure. especially those insecurities that they have not shared with others. in love, you desire rawness, trust, equal give and take.

your past experiences with love, however, have caused you to lose faith in love and the universe's promise to bring love to you. you wonder why you can't be as happy as others are, you wonder when it's going to be your turn... your faith has been tested by your past romantic experiences, and current romantic situation, but if you must take any lesson from this it is that the Divine and spirit are there for you. if you must learn anything from your past experiences it is to trust in the universe as it prepares you for the gentle love you deserve, and as it shapes your self-confidence and feelings of worth to be ready for a well-rounded relationship. do not fall into cynicism, or into thinking that all love has for you is pain because this is absolutely not the case.

as for what is holding you back from love, besides the lack of self-confidence i see that you are focusing too much on education or work. and while this is important, of course, you are throwing too much of yourself and your time into these endeavour and not paying attention to the opportunities at love that are coming your way or being offered to you. or, you are throwing yourself into work and school as a distraction. because if you can just focus on this next presentation this assignment this meeting you don't have to focus on addressing and healing your relationship-related pain.

now to get into the readiness of your heart, mind, and spirit. for this part we have the six of pentacles, five of wands and the four of cups (reversed).

your heart wants so badly to share love and good fortune with another. it has taken then pain that past relationships and connections have caused it and has become only even more capable of loving.

your mind and spirit are at odds with this, however, with neither having fully healed from these past experiences. your mind is still sensitive to heartbreak and in any upcoming relationship you may be prone to overthinking, to looking out for every sign that means they will leave you or will otherwise hurt you. you heart mind desires yes–something new, someone who will will challenge it and you–but it is so unsure of what lies ahead it does not feel ready to pursue anything yet. similarly, your spirit is wounded. it is as reluctant to open up to someone new as your mind. both your mind and spirit require nurturing and for you to go through a period of withdraw in order to help them heal. right now, even if you have someone in mind, it may be best not to pursue anything romantically. surround yourself with those you love, meditate and journal, and treat yourself with love as you would a partner. if you are feeling discontent and unhappy with the state of your love life at the moment, allow yourself to truly feel those emotions instead of burying your feelings in distractions.

remember that it is a very limited amount of healing that we can do by ourselves; no healing at all if you choose to distract and ignore and pretend. it is a painful journey, but it is needed. like our main characters in kamikaze girls, what you may need now, far more than the relationship you're seeking, is to open yourself up to friendship and the love found within friendship. it could be friendship that you are not allowing yourself from experiencing by throwing yourself so much into school or work, but there is someone offering it out to you. an olive branch you just need to accept, even if it is awkward at first.

WHAT IF ... YOU PURSUED THE CONNECTION WITH YOUR CRUSH?

pulling these cards genuinely made me so happy... this connection, if pursued, would be such a prosperous one. even when obstacles arise, as they do in all relationships, you will find a way to work through it together. there is balance here. yet, in the beginning things with this connection may be far more tricky. you will be in a situation where you have to make a decision; it might be this crush is in your workplace or is a close friend and you have to figure out what would be best for both parties moving forward in this relationship.

in fact as we have both the two of pentacles and the lovers, you may often need to make difficult decisions, address priorities and, if needed, re-prioritise. such as in a situation where you may find yourself questioning if you are ready to juggle that which a relationship asks of you with what your job or school also asks of you, or, in the relationship where you may have to choose between staying in one country with your partner or moving away (i'm seeing to another country, in particular) in order to pursue academic or professional goals.

however, as i already mentioned, this relationship will be harmonious. as a partner your crush is stable and level-headed, thus creating an equally as stable relationship environment. they will meet your standards–shockingly, to you, if your standards are particularly high–and will not only have money but will want to share their wealth with you and look after you. you two form a balanced union in which you empower each other, encourage each other and boost each other's confidence. there is a long-term quality to this relationship and, if committed to, may result in marriage. of course if marriage is not for you or not accessible to you i definitely see some kind of life commitment or life commitment ceremony taking place.

3. SYNDROMES AND A CENTURY, dir. apichatpong weerasethakul

“what is it all about? like weerasethakul's previous features - tropical malady (2004) and blissfully yours (2001) - it takes as its starting point a tale of tangled human relationships, in this case the faltering love life of a demure young female doctor at a remote, upcountry thai hospital. then it takes off into alternative worlds, alternative realities, unrealities, surrealities. the same scenes are played again, in different settings, with different people. the buddhist idea of reincarnation is being sported with. or is the film simply questioning the 19th-century train-tracks of traditional narrative?” – syndromes and a century | film review, peter bradshaw

channeled songs: replay (pm 01:27) by nct 127 (“i just wanna be loved”) · make me cry by pip millet (“im numb, lonely, thought i was the only one, it's hard to find the right words, knowing that they'll all hurt, in sync with the sunset, down and I am out for the night, surrounded by the darkness, trying to find the light”) · at seventeen by janis ian (“i learned the truth at seventeen, that love was meant for beauty queens”) · bungee by nct dream (“come here, babe, there's nothing to fear”)

cards pulled: eight of pentacles (rx), six of wands (rx), ace of wands (rx), the magician, the chariot (rx), four of pentacles ; temperance, queen of pentacles, ace of pentacles

ARE YOU READY FOR LOVE?

hey there, group 3 ♡ in love i see that you want something careful, something thoughtful. you want a relationship where you hold each other accountable and work together to love each other as the other needs. you want a relationship where no one wants for the love they desire, and where you can feel safe, protected and assured.

as for what you have learned from love, the six of wands (reversed) tells me what you have learned most of all is doubt and lack of confidence. you see the love and attention your peers and friends receive and you have come to doubt your own worth and attractiveness. you feel unloved and neglected, and as if you'll never have a real, meaningful love. as a result of this inattention your confidence has been greatly shaken. this is what love has taught you: you are unworthy of it. but you are not. i cannot emphasize enough how worthy of love you are.

you are being held back from love by your inability to define what you really want from it. it is an inability which leads you to direct your energy into too many places and which drains your energy, such as having a lot of “crushes” that go nowhere, going on dates that don't fulfil you, going on dating apps even when they exhaust you. you don't have a proper vision of love, which, for a lot of you, i see can be chalked down to simple lack of experience in relationships and love.

now to look at your readiness of your heart, mind and spirit. for your heart we have the magician, which is a clear message that your heart is ready for excitement, love, and experimentation with love. you are able to create opportunities, especially outside of your comfort zone, to meet someone with whom you'll be in a relationship, even if fleeting. as well as this, you are in an ample position to manifest the love you desire. this is what your heart wants, and it is okay to embrace that if it feels right for you.

as for your mind... you are so intent on reaching the goal of love you have in mind that your mind spurs you to act too forcefully. your mind must come to terms that it, and you, will not always have control in life. it is ready for life, yes, but it must recognise that love is in the hands of the divine.

while for your spirit, again i feel a lot of inexperience in this group, as well as a lot of pain. this pain can come either from past relationships or from never being considered for romantic relationships. your inexperience and pain is deep-set into your spirit and, as a result, entering a relationship will lead to a sense of possession, bordering on the unhealthy if you are not careful. your spirit is greedy for love and reassurance. it won't be ready unless you properly resolve the trauma of your past and let it go.

WHAT IF ... YOU PURSUED THE CONNECTION WITH YOUR CRUSH?

after the heartache and neglect you have been put through it will ease your heart to hear that a love worthy of you awaits.

temperance, the queen of pentacles and the ace of pentacles showing up signifies a prosperous relationship. in temperance we see that this love will be patient and understanding, even if it does come at the hands of a lot of effort. is that anything to worry about though, for isn't effort one of the greatest signs of love? one of the greatest signs of care? there is compassion in this relationship, more on the part of your partner as you will be faced with having to work on your own negative traits. are you selfish when situations call for selflessness? quick-to-anger when the situation calls for your understanding? rude when you should be patient, clingy when you should leave your partner with room to breathe? this relationship will provide you with a safe space within which to address and work on all of this.

in the queen and ace of pentacles we see that this relationship will take “hard work”, but not in the miserable sense, rather in the sense that these two people are so commited to making something beautiful last for a long time.

in this relationship, you will prosper as individuals and as a couple; flourishing in how much you want to see each other live their best lives possible.

i keep getting drawn to making comparisons between how a farmer tends to his farm or a gardener tends to his plants or a florist tends to his flowers. so this person may be in one of those professions or may be perfectly capable of looking after the gentle and fragile which–and no shame in this at all–you currently are. this person might have a very rough exterior which is scaring you away from making any move towards them, but they are honestly such a kind, gentle soul.

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fivedayshakespeare · 4 months

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1/31/2024-2/4/204: Troilus and Cressida

People don't like Troilus and Cressida. Criticisms of it tend to just be about the genre of the play so critics don't have to talk about it. Hazlitt's Characters of Shakespear's Plays (1817) just talks about Shakespeare vs. Chaucer. Personally, I think it's interesting that this play sees William Shakespeare adapting Geoffrey Chaucer and Homer at the same time.

So, okay. About genre. Troilus and Cressida is called a "Problem Play" because it doesn't conform to either the standard templates of Comedy or Tragedy. I think it is a mistake to care too deeply about the genres assigned in the First Folio. Julius Caesar is exactly as much a History play as Henry V, you know? But when they prepared the Folio, they decided that British History was the only kind that counted.

Since the First Folio was printed, people have spent a lot of time and effort coming up with rules for what counts as a Comedy and what counts as a Tragedy. "The hero dies at the end of a Tragedy" -- except for Julius Caesar. "Comedies end in marriage" -- except for Love's Labour's Lost.

So I don't really care that Troilus and Cressida doesn't follow the rules of Tragedy or Comedy. Because those rules don't exist. In my opinion, the guiding principle appears to be that Tragedies have the names of characters in their titles, but Comedies don't:

Right? If As You Like It were a Tragedy, it would be called Beatrice and Benedick.

The language is pretty elevated. Even for Shakespeare, I mean. Here's a bit from the Prologue:

And the deep-drawing barks do there disgorge Their warlike fraughtage. Now on Dardan plains The fresh and yet unbruisèd Greeks do pitch Their brave pavilions. Priam’s six-gated city— Dardan and Timbria, Helias, Chetas, Troien, And Antenorides—with massy staples And corresponsive and fulfilling bolts, Spar up the sons of Troy.

I mean. Warlike fraughtage? And that run of Greek names is a little challenging if you're not ready for it.

Because no one likes this play, there wasn't a convenient movie version for me to watch. I've been trying to watch productions around the time I read Act IV or V. This time, I went on YouTube for a sampling of various amateur Shakespearean companies, which was a ton of fun. These people are in a field! These people are in an adorable teeny black-box theatre!

Unfortunately, this feels like a challenging play, even for professionals. Most of the productions I found had, like, two to five actors who could handle it, and then everyone else failed to various degrees.

I did like the play, and it might be because I was reading it instead of watching it. The same thing happened with Love's Labour's Lost, where I was happily reading sassy clapbacks, then I found out that nobody likes it. Thersites is a huge jerk to everybody, and I love him.

Next up: Hamlet (probably gonna watch that Branagh five-hour version!)

#troilus and cressida #shakespeare

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careeralley · 4 months

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9 Reasons Why I Won't Hire You

In today's competitive job market, making a strong impression during the hiring process is more crucial than ever. But sometimes, despite seemingly good interviews and qualifications, you might find yourself not getting that coveted job offer. While there are many factors at play, some consistent patterns can cause hiring managers to say 'no.' In this article, we'll delve into the key reasons why you might not be making the cut—some of which you may not even be aware of. Whether it's unexplained gaps in your resume, lack of enthusiasm, or even something as subtle as body language, knowing these pitfalls can help you avoid them in your next job search. Read on to discover the reasons why I won't hire you and how to turn those no's into future yeses. Interview Preparation Hiring managers face a challenging task. They must sift through a plethora of resumes, identify the most promising candidates, make a final selection, and then hope their decision proves to be the right one. According to statistics, even the best hiring managers succeed in this complex process only 60% of the time. Naturally, you'll need to not only secure an interview but also perform well during it to be considered for the role. As a seasoned hiring manager, I can attest that selecting the final candidate is never a straightforward task. However, many applicants inadvertently make it easier to remove them from the running. If you've been fortunate enough to secure an interview, it's crucial to come well-prepared and avoid common, potentially career-ending errors. So, what are the primary reasons I might choose not to extend a job offer? Keep reading to uncover them. Your Resume Needs Lots of Work I've received countless resumes over the years, and, I say this with all due respect, many of them fall short. Your resume stands as the most critical document in your career. It serves as the key to opening doors, capturing the attention of hiring managers and securing that all-important interview. Spelling and grammatical errors are unequivocally unacceptable on a resume. Neglecting to showcase your skills and experience is, frankly, unwise. However, it's essential to acknowledge that not everyone is an expert in resume writing, and seeking assistance or advice can be intimidating. You have valuable resources in your network, including friends, family, and recruiters, who can review your resume and provide valuable insights. Here are some key points to contemplate: A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing Your Resume: - Gathering Your Information - Picking a Format that works for you - Organization your information in a meaningful way - Content is key, ensure you get this right - Resume Versions (yes, you need more than one). You Don't Know How to Interview Interviewing is a two-way exchange, and your success hinges on your capability to both provide precise responses to questions and pose relevant queries. It's imperative to attentively heed the interviewer's words and craft responses that persuade them of your suitability for the position. During the interview, non-verbal cues such as facial expressions, maintaining eye contact, and aligning your responses with the job description's keywords hold significant importance. - Read background material on interview techniques - Review common questions and ensure you have the right answers - Use your social network to find people who work at the company where you are interviewing and get as much background information as possible - Use LinkedIn to review the profiles of the interviewer(s) - Don't be late (and don't be too early) - Have extra copies of your resume - Plan to be there longer than suggested - Make sure you have your sales pitch / 30-second elevator speech (Job Search Marketing Toolkit – Your Elevator Speech) You Don't Know How to Dress You know the old saying - "you only get one chance to make a good first impression". For most companies, business formal is the way to go for interviews (which means a suit and tie for men and a conservative suit with a coordinated blouse for women). Even if the company has a smart casual or dress-down policy dressing up is better than being under-dressed. Some pointers: - Dresses should not be too short - Don't wear too much jewelry - Cover those tattoos (if you can) - Groomed nails (and no wild colors or designs for polished nails). - Shine those shoes (and yes, shoes. no flip-flops or sneakers) - Comb your hair - Iron those shirts, suits, and dresses (no wrinkles) "Regardless of the work environment, it's important to dress professionally for a job interview because how you dress can either make or break the job interview. In general, the candidate dressed in a suit and tie, or dress and heels, will make a much better impression than the candidate dressed in jeans and sneakers - Alison Doyle". You Don't Have the Right Experience It's a waste of time to submit your resume for a position where you are not qualified. There will be many qualified resumes that are submitted and yours will get tossed very quickly if you don't have relevant experience or skills. If, however, you have the skills and experience but they are not specifically highlighted on your resume, this is a perfect example as to why you should have multiple versions of your resume (see 6 Resources for Creating Multiple Resumes). You Did Not Read the Job Description You get to the interview, but you have no idea about the job, have not read the job description, and cannot discuss why you are the right person for this role (because you did not read the job descriptions). This leads the hiring manager to think that you do not care, are not focused, and are just blindly applying for jobs. Take a look at The Top 5 Things You Must Remember for Your Interview Uncover the 9 red flags that could cost you a job offer! From resume blunders to interview missteps, make sure you're not making these mistakes. #JobSearch #CareerAdviceClick To Tweet - Read the job description - Fully understand the role and responsibilities - Prepare questions that are specific to the job description - Be prepared to speak to specifics of the role You Can't Answer My Questions You know the old saying - “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” (Benjamin Franklin). If you cannot answer the questions raised at the interview, then why are you there? Make sure you read as much as possible: - Know the facts about the company and the division where you are interviewing - All "common" interview questions should already be part of your general preparation - Take a look at - Company and role-specific questions should be reviewed prior to the interview - Take a look at 30 Common Interview Questions You Need to Ace You Didn't Ask Any Questions If you don't ask any questions, the hiring manager will think you are not interested in the role (or worse, are not prepared). Have a long list of questions you want to ask. Some of these questions will probably be answered before you ask them (therefore, the long list). You should have a standard set of questions that you ask at every interview, plus questions that are specific to the company and the role. Take a look at 51 Interview Questions You Should Be Asking. You Don't Know Anything About my Company If you haven't done your homework, and you don't know anything about the company where you are interviewing, then you shouldn't be interviewing. You should have a list of companies where you would like to work. If the company where you are currently interviewing is not on the list, then you should do lots of research on the company. This information is not limited to public information. You should also try to find out some inside information regarding the company culture and what it's like to work there. See also 15 Tips for Improving Your Job Search. You Have a Poor Attitude Regardless of how you feel about your current company and role, you should not express a negative view. There are plenty of ways to explain why you want to leave your current company without being negative. Additionally, you need to have a positive attitude during your interview and show interest in the role. Do not go into the interview thinking (and acting) like they would be lucky to have you as an employee (even if that is true). Some of the following examples are included above, but they are indicative of a poor attitude: - Being late - Lack of eye contact - Appearance - Looking at your watch Suggested Reading: How to Shorten Your Job Search Summary In conclusion, understanding the reasons why a hiring manager might decide not to hire you is a crucial step in improving your chances in the job market. By addressing these common pitfalls, from resume errors to interview missteps, you can set yourself on the path to success in your career search. Remember, self-awareness and continuous improvement are the keys to securing your dream job and building a successful career. So, take these insights to heart, learn from them, and watch your job search outcomes improve. Good luck on your journey to a fulfilling and prosperous career! ZipRecruiter - Get Hired Never miss an opportunity. On ZipRecruiter, top companies reach out to you.There's no need to look anywhere else. With over 9 Million jobs, ZipRecruiter is the only site you'll ever need to find your next job. Get Matched to Jobs We earn a commission if you click this link and make a purchase at no additional cost to you. Read the full article

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thelittlemermage · 2 years

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So many wild takes on that post 😭 How do you see a book about Pacific Rim-style mechs with a poly love triangle set in fantasy ancient China and not immediately slam the like button? What else do you need??

#multiple people were like - this is written like a YA novel #it is literally a YA novel 😭#like obviously not everyone is going to like the same book #but a lot of the criticism is from people who have read the elevator pitch summery and that's it #or people who have....interesting takes about the author #and it's like my dudes #I think coming for a book with queer POC characters written by a queer POC is not where it's at #this is...in fact the media you should consider supporting if you want more of that type of thing

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felassan · 3 years

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Highlights and insights from the MELE launch cast & crew reunion panel

[rewatch link] [highlights & insights from the N7 Day 2020 reunion]

In case a text format is better for anyone (in terms of accessibility for example). Cut for length.

Some paraphrasing.

If anyone’s interested in just the line-reading session, it starts at timestamp ~1:04:45.

In addition to the cast and crew from the N7 Day reunion, at this reunion also in attendance were:

Mac Walters (Project Director for MELE, Lead Writer of the og MET)

Melanie Faulknor (Lead Producer for MELE)

Crystal McCord (Producer for MELE)

Fred Tatasciore (Saren)

Seth Green (Joker)

Kimberly Brooks (Ash)

Ash Sroka (Tali)

This was the biggest reunion / meetup of the cast so far, and some of the cast and crew were meeting for the first time here.

It’s been so long since the og MET that PW & KW are getting to watch their kids experience playing it for the first time

JHale doesn’t play but since MELE she’s been sneaking around Twitch jumping into peoples’ MELE livestreams to lurk, watch and comment a bit

What drew Seth to the character of Joker? The whole concept of the game. He likes games and MET’s mechanics (different trees of adventure, stacking reputation, choices carrying between games) at the time were the most sophisticated that he’d ever heard pitched. He thought this was new and exciting and wanted to be a part of it. For the character they cast him based on his personality traits (i.e. he sounds quite similar to Joker personality-wise)

Would Seth ever want to play Joker again if the opportunity presented itself? Sure, he loves the character, and if the writers ever had more things to explore/expand with Joker he’d be down for it.

Seth said that it’s a different kind of fan that approach him about this project. The fans have spent many many hours in an intimate exchange with “him” that he hasn’t been a part of, but they experienced it nonetheless. “I’ve hugged a lot of strangers, you know what I’m saying? It’s great, you get an interaction with fans that you never get as a performer in any other experience”

Seth has been a space guy since he was little, it inspires him

With the state of the world the way it is now [covid, masks etc], does Ash think Tali’s story will be more impactful now than it was before? Ash hopes so, and that anything they do here will have a positive impact on a bigger level. Ultimately that’s why most of them do what they do, they want to reach people in deep ways. She hopes Tali is an inspiration in courage, bravery, standing up for what’s right and thinking about the greater good

The [MELE I think] dev team had a last team meeting with Greg Zeschuk, one of the founders of BioWare, who they had invited to it. He was regaling them with stories of the inception of Mass Effect. “You would imagine this sort of well-laid out, drawing boards everywhere... [but] it was basically just a napkin sketch in a Greek taverna with him and Casey going ‘We wanna do a space opera’, and then it took off”

The process of creating lore through development is very organic. A lot of it comes from character and story development. It builds up over the course of the game’s development. They did the codex entries at the end, the idea being that if they saved them for as late as they could, then they could pull from the story, characters and meaningful moments, and build them from there

PW wrote a bunch of the codex entries, elevator banter & lots of little bits of lore. They describe their time on the og MET as being a “baby writer”. They originally came in after Mac had back surgery and a junior writer was needed to fill in. “It was really fun, it was us sitting in a room together going ‘What do you think a hanar or a krogan thinks about this or that’?” For a first project for them this was an amazing experience - the world building itself creatively with all these awesome people

They tried to add multiplayer in every game but only got it to work in ME3

They had a lot of plots laid out in ME1 that they called “global plots”. These were outside the core critical path and would take players from planet to planet, and were sprawling stories. They pulled out a lot of really interesting concepts and ideas from these that did make it into the game, but all of the global plots ended up getting cut due to time. Mac still has old diagrams and spreadsheets which detailed how all of these would have come together

Q. If you all had to take a long-distance road-trip with two squadmates, who would you take and why? PW: “Jack and Mordin. Mordin because the drive would never lack for things to talk about at length quickly, Jack because you know you wouldn’t pay for the room. You wouldn’t know how you’d get the room, but you wouldn’t be paying for it.” Courtenay: “I’d take Mordin because there’d be singing, and FemShep just to have this thing - happen. In the room that I get for free.” JHale at this point fistpumped while saying “Yeess” [then I think what she said was “steaming hot”]

Seeing as asari are long-lived, how open is Ali to one day reprising her role as Liara? “She’s a character very close to my heart, it was such a great opportunity. In some games that we work on the character has already been created or voiced by someone else, but this was really a group effort. When I first went into the booth, the only thing I’d seen of her was a sort of like, rendering, and we slowly kind of came to her voice and presence. I would love to bring Liara back any time... hey, she can live a really long time guys. :D”

Caroline and people who do what she does (Creative Performance Director) are so critical to the quality of games. Caroline: “This group of people are extraordinary. We were lucky to have such an extraordinary cast. Every [recording] session was new and challenging. It was a labor of love. I’m tearing up right now thinking about it. I’m remembering my last session with Jen, she was the last session, just sobbing and sobbing”. When JHale was trying to say the lines of Shepard’s goodbye with Garrus, a line hit her like a tonne of bricks and she was in tears and was like “Shepard does not cry”. “It took me a second, I got it out and took another run at it, it was in there but stuffed down as it should have been, and I finished the line [and there was silence in the booth when usually Caroline would have been talking to give direction or instruction] Did we lose her? Did Skype crash?” and it transpired that what had happened was that Caroline was in floods of tears

ME was the first time Keythe had ever come across branching dialogue. “Normally when we work on a script and it’s from page 1 to 100. In this it was get to page 5, then go back to page 2 and play it a little differently. The skill and the fun and joy of it was to be able to go back and play a scene in a different way, with different writing, with different outcomes. This was not only a challenge but a real treat. So to all the writers who dreamed up how this build-your-own-adventure plays out, you have my undying respect. It was a real pleasure”

VEDA is a proprietary system that BW use to record the dialogue, which is the closest way of having it feel like having people in the booth together (it’s all digital and VAs get to hear the line someone else has done in that scene). Caroline really pushed for this because of the amount of time etc that was wasted due to lack of this sort of thing on ME1. William: “It was a god send for me, thank you, getting to hear a cue from Jen or Mark.” Ali: “Us being able to bounce off each other helps make it more real. This for me was the most real acting experience on a game I had ever had - the writing being so good, Caroline helping us through, being able to hear each other.” JHale was always early coming in to record relative to the others so only got to use VEDA a few times - a bit of Liara content and the scene with Anderson towards the end. “Those two times, oh my god it was amazing”. VEDA being a thing also helps from a scheduling standpoint

Seth and Tricia Helfer (EDI) only got to be in the booth actually together 1 time, to record/shoot a piece of promotional video. “We actually got to record a scene together and we were like ‘oh my god this is the best thing ever’. It was great, even though I had to stand on a stool. She’s the best”

Seth: “As an actor, the kind of opportunity to do this kind of material in games just didn’t exist.” Fred: “Oh, never! I had never had a villain part that was complicated like that. In a game? Never before, it was really interesting”

Raphael always goes back to the fact that ME brought more women into gaming than any other game before it. “The writing and the complexity of the relationships gave us so much ballast”. “This set this apart from running, shooting, gunning, looting”

JHale: “What I noticed in the times before when I got to be around fans, there was a huge hunger among women in the gaming world for something they could really jump into. They were starving for something which fed them what they deserved and needed”

Mac: “[praising Caroline] Caroline would often come to us as writers and challenge us and say, as an example, ‘Do we really need another male character to do this? Why are we writing another male character for this?’ She pushed that very early and to the betterment of everything we created”

PW: “Karin and Cookie and all of the editors across the trilogy, [were critical in] making sure that Shepard sounded consistent - [especially since] we had a large writing team, writers came and went, Mac is the only one with a significant writing contribution on each of the games”

PW: “[on game dev] It’s a process of getting hundreds of people pointed in the same direction, all believing that this is something worth doing”

Ash: “Having all the different possibilities and avenues, going back to play them all out in the different ways [really helped to round the character of Tali out and make her feel like a natural person]”.

VAs only get paid for the original recording sessions, not again (as in they don’t any royalties or anything from something like the remaster)

In MELE, they left all the original credits at the end of each game in

Fred: “It’s creating in five dimensions [because of all the outcomes and relationships etc]”. Seth: “The cool thing is that the audience feels that. They’re immediately struck by how dense, thought-out, prepared and planned the entire universe is”

How was it for the new MELE devs coming onto this? Crystal: “I knew it [the series and fans’ love for it] was big, but I didn’t know it was BIG! Working on MELE there was this infectious excitement. Being part of it was so exciting.” Melanie: “I came on at ME3, I had a 3 or 4 year honeymoon period with BioWare. Coming onto MELE, I’m getting really emotional. One of my first meetings originally was going into a cinematic review for an epic Tali scene in ME3”. Crystal: “On MELE, we had an hour or 2 every day where the team came together to play the game. In those reviews, a lot of the devs who worked on the original would tell all these stories. It was really fun to hear all the inside stories on ME’s creation and be a part of that”

DC: “Should this unit get vaccinated?” Ash: “Of course”

How do they think ME will be viewed in the next 10-20 years, what do they think its legacy will be? A piece of history, ground-breaking. It broke down some barriers and opened doors for people. It’s a powerful, powerful community. It’ll continue to age quite well and be enjoyed by a new generation, it’s original and evergreen and there’s a lot in it that people go back to. There’s a lot of universal things in it (personal experiences, like there will always be love, people fighting to belong, trying to make sense of their pasts etc)

JHale and Alix did the “I love you Shepard, now go save the world again” Shep-Sam exchange and both got teary. It was then Seth’s turn to line-read: “Jesus Christ, now that I’m good and choked up, fucking mess”. Ali was also actually crying from it

Seth: “It can’t be overstated, this community is so large and global, it is one of the most powerful fandoms that I’ve ever been greeted with. Thank you”. Ash: “It’s the most amazing group of fans ever. We’re all so grateful”

Some funny anecdotes/stories:

PW didn’t realize that Alix could do different accents. They remember a time when they were listening in the booth and an Alliance soldier was complaining about the gear had been given. They said “Wow that’s really good, who is that?” and the VO producer said “That’s Alix, Patrick”, “because she wasn’t doing her [normal British accent but was doing a Californian accent instead]. Alix roasted me later for not recognizing her voice and never let me heard the end of it”

Alix: “[on Sam’s toothbrush] Caroline’s like, ‘So then she pulls her toothbrush’ and I’m like ‘What? Sorry? A toothbrush?’ and obviously it’s funny now as everyone knows that Sam’s thing is her toothbrush. Caroline’s like ‘Yeah, you’ve gotta like, flirt, over the toothbrush’ and I’m like ‘Who wrote this - a frickin toothbrush, are you kidding me? Really guys?’ ANYWAY. I was wrong and it worked. :D”

Fred: “I remember a 12 year old kid coming up to me and being like [flat tone] ‘Oh yeah. I killed you’.”

Keythe: “The other assasin I play is Kellogg in Fallout 4. People come up to me like ‘Omg. I love you so much. And then I fucking KILLED you!’”

Courtenay once went out to dinner in NZ with a few prominent people from the Game of Thrones cast. “Everyone around was making a big deal out of it like ‘Omg, it’s so-and-so from GoT’. I was feeling a bit like ‘Hi, I’m here, just nobody’. And I looked around in the restaurant and there's one guy in the corner and he’s got an N7 shirt on and he’s just looking at me like [knowing look, does a peace sign]. And I’m like ‘I got one! I love you guys!’”

PW: “I have a question for the cast members, because I don’t know if JHale has done this to all of you or if she just does it to the devs. Show of hands if Jen has ever made you do push-ups.” JHale: “It’s just you guys”

Karin: “One of my favorite editing files that I ever had was a ME file. It was before Seth was coming in for a session. I opened it up and it was just 20, 25 lines with the word ‘Shit’, over and over again, and I was like, ‘This file is perfect, I don’t need to do anything to it, have fun!’”

Seth: “Didn’t we do a track that’s like 60 seconds of laughing? Escalating laughing? I don’t know about other actors but for me getting into a laughing fit is kind of like trying to get into a crying fit, it takes the same level of commitment, you start to follow a path until like you’re hysterically uncontrollably laughing. I remember looking through the glass, and I’m deep in it at this point, and I make eye contact, and I can see from the other side of the booth and they’re like [making ‘okay you can stop’ now gestures] - ‘Like that’s plenty, we got it’ and I was like ‘okay, okay [dying]’”

JHale: “The craziest thing Mark and I had to deal with was how many times we had to say ‘I should go’”. Mark: “We also, Caroline and I tended to use that as short hand when I needed to go to the bathroom”

The panel host: “The first time I interviewed Ali was a decade ago. She did the ‘I’ll flay you alive with my mind’ line halfway through, it was my first interview and I literally fell out of my seat [from being star-struck]”

Ash line-read Tali’s drunk omni-tattoo scene and in response DC said “I totally get why people wanna romanticize all these characters :D”. Karin: “We’ve had more than one person come up to us and show us actual tattoos that looked like that”

[source]

#bioware #mass effect #video games #covid mention #long post #longpost #garrus vakarian #best boy #feels #lul

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captainofthetidesbreath · 3 years

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my theory is that the emotions are meant to correspond to a mighty nein member, whether it's because fate brought them here to fight them or because the city picked one singular strong emotion out of each one of them to counteract them.

to add to that theory (sorry, forgot!) cognosa means to know or to recognize, so maybe that's what it did. recognized an emotion out of each mighty nein as they came in and made them real.

——

re: my theory post that the Somnovem are named after emotions bc their identities were whittled down to their primary state of mind at the time of the jump to the Astral Sea

I've seen this theory around, and personally, I think the theory doesn't hold any water.

Four of them—Luctus, Gaudius, Ira, Vigilan—are mentioned by Lucien in 121: Ice and Fire, before even Caleb and Beau read the book. So, these names and behavioral patterns existed for at least a year or two before the Nein were aware of the Somnovem in any manner. If they're mirroring the Nein, it doesn't make much sense for Lucien to know their names years ago.

The wards of Aeor are apparently named after the fixations of those leading the ward or the primary activity cultivated by that ward: the Praesidis Ward, from praesideo, to protect or to preside over; the Genesis Ward, as in English, creation; the Ars Wars, from ars, skill or technique or art. The Congouza Ward, led by people who hungered for knowledge at the cost of everything else, is named for that; it had this name before it became this telepathic creature, so it doesn't track to me that Cognouza suggests any tendency to reflect the emotional state of others.

After that, one of the biggest flaws in the theory is that the number simply does not really work out. There are 9 of the Somnovem; there are 7 player characters in the Nein, with 8 in the party with Essek. Does one include Molly to make 9, despite Molly being dead and therefore not present? Does one include Lucien to make 9 because he's present? But, they don't yet see him as having arrived so how are they mirroring him? And, if one is counting Lucien, on what grounds is one not counting Cree? There's 10 people involved in this struggle! Only 4 of those are connected to the Somnovem. Do you count Artagan because Sprinkle? That makes 11!

After that, how are these emotions chosen? Choosing a singular strong emotion of this moment out of each of the Nein doesn't feel to track to me because all of them are feeling fear and wariness. There's no joy or grief or pride being felt more than anything else in this moment in any of them.

If it's a strong emotion they feel in general. Mapping this set of emotions we have to each of the Nein needs a LOT of justification, and I simply cannot see how it can be done. Is Yasha rage or grief? Does not Caleb have just as much claim to grief or claim to rage? Would not also Fjord, so full of righteous fury but so tight-leashed with his anger, be seen by rage? Is not the joy Jester projects so often simply a mask or a facade? Does Veth actually have more claim to fear than Caleb or Beau or Fjord? Who is most full of wariness: Caleb, Veth, Beau, or Fjord? Or, is it vigilance in the sense of protectiveness, but is that not both Fjord and Yasha? Are not Caduceus and Fjord equally surprised by the turns of their lives? Don't Caleb, Beau, and Caduceus all equally suffer a flaw of haughtiness? All this, and we're still missing two names.

And, if they are indeed reflections, this doesn't track Timorei's and Ira's behavior. Veth was ignored outright when she tried to communicate. Caleb got a respond on account that he is marked, and Timorei only speaks of their own fears and terror. Ira seems to be looking because they realized someone was talking to someone in the area and spotted Fjord while investigating. But, while Ira is initially speaking to Fjord, the monologue is addressed collectively and scans as an elevator pitch, not calling to anything specific within him. If they correspond to the Nein, I would expect more specificity in how they are approach and addressed with conversation resonating much more pointedly with more specificity.

Generally, there simply hasn't been any connection drawn between the Nein and the Somnovem, other than a single incidental pun that's just as much about German Zemnian as it is about numbers. There has been no actual narrative link between this party and this council of wizards, only a link between the party and Lucien through Molly. There is no thematic link between at all.

On top of that, I'm not quite sure what is being gained. To what end—narrative, character, or thematic—are the Somnovem corresponding to each of the Nein? Especially looking at the set we have, what would those correspondences reveal about the characters? What would that association and parallel and reflection between that member of the Nein and that member of the Somnovem bring out or develop in that character? If, say, Ira corresponds to Yasha, what is she facing by looking at Ira's rage? Is that something she has not yet learned, but needs to learn, through her own character arc and growth so far? And, most critically, why must she learn it in this specific manner?

I don't quite personally see, at this moment, any connection between the Nein and the Somnovem, and I don't see what narrative or thematic value there is in these correspondences.

#Anonymous #CR spoilers #Critical Role #Critical Role things

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vanaera · 4 years

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The Heart Holiday | Act 1 | myg

Synopsis: Valentine’s Day is declared as an official holiday. However, private companies’ standards dictate it’s only for the people who are currently in a relationship. Unluckily for Y/N, she doesn’t have this year’s PRS’ (Proof of Relationship Status) “in a relationship” box ticked – the only ticket out she can have to enjoy one paid week of holiday leave away from her hellish job. And more unfortunately for Y/N, everyone around her is oh so conveniently currently committed in a relationship. Except for one person: Min Yoongi, Y/N’s biggest critic in every pitch meeting, the picky guy who always picks on her, and the most annoying jerk of the century. Desperate for that holiday leave, Y/N strikes Yoongi up with an offer: Fake date each other two weeks before February 14, just enough time for the Department of Relationship Management (DRM) to consider processing your PRSs. After Valentine’s Day, they will go back to their own ways and never speak about whatever that may happen during the plan. Good, plain, and simple. That is until, Yoongi uncharacteristically oh so enthusiastically agrees to Y/N’s offer, leaving her thinking that she may have bitten something too much more than she can chew.

Characters: Yoongi x Female Reader

AU/ Trope: Office AU (Creatives manager!yoongi x PA!reader), enemies to lovers, fake dating

Genre: fluff, angst, comedy (the triple t(h)reat)

Wordcount: 11, 798

Warnings: Lots of curses from two emotionally-constipated characters (PG-15 Rating)

A/N | This fic is in part with FWL’s Valentine’s project, The Luv Library: Romance. I had this premise about a Valentine’s holiday for a while and finally, I got to use it for this fic.

next | series masterlist

Ten seconds are enough to look at Min Yoongi. Two seconds to look at his unkempt, unprofessional, and stupid fringes that nonsensically cover his already small eyes. Three to look at his stupid, smug smile. Another two for his overly-confident stance—leaned forward in his chair, elbows on the table, hands clasping together—as if he’s better and of higher power than anyone else around the room when he’s just a measly representative of the day for the Creatives Team. And the last three seconds—they are enough to look at his mocking eyes, his jeering gaze, and the arrogant quirk of his brow.

This is the same look he gave to Y/N when he got promoted ahead of her. This is the same look he flashed to Y/N when he berated every word choice in her reports. And, this is the same look in his face when he ruined her presentation which could have been her ticket way out from this hellish job. Smug, arrogant, and proud, Min Yoongi is set to ruin Y/N’s life. And all Y/N could do now is glare at him and hope her eyes could set him on fire so it will be easy for hell to swallow him up and—

“Y/N?”

Y/N whips her head to her right, “S-sorry?”

Nancy Kim clicks her tongue, “Why are you just standing there, glaring at the windows? I told you to distribute the copies among the room.”

“R-right,” Y/N gulps and rushes forward. She hands the copies of last month’s Travel Loca issues among the representative of each department. Gracie from the Marketing Team sneaks her a small smile, which Y/N returns. However, that smile falls into a frown when she reaches the devil himself.

“Good morning, Y/N,” Min Yoongi greets, chin rested on his palm. When Y/N doesn’t greet back, Yoongi takes it upon himself to wink at her. With a huff, Y/N slams down the copy on the table in front of him, enough for the glossy, firm cover page to hit his pile of notes and cause some pages to fly off the table.

“Thank you, Y/N,” Nancy calls out, sighing. She waves away at Y/N and the latter takes it as a cue to sit back on her chair. Nancy leans back in her huge black chair, “Okay, let’s get the ball rolling. Now tell me something I don’t know.”

Y/N seats herself on the chair by the corner of the room, behind Nancy’s chair, far from the round meeting table. Every team representative starts to report their progress last month and their suggestions for the next, next month’s issue. Meanwhile, Min Yoongi is still busy picking up his notes on the floor. When he’s gathered them back, now in a sloppy stack, he looks from his crouched position and flashes Y/N his middle finger. She flashes back a finger at him, grinning. Y/N looks down at her small pocket notebook.

“Y/N – 1. Yoongi – 0.”

So far, this morning is really good.

Y/N hates Min Yoongi, and this is beyond an understatement. She hates him so much that the word “hate” started to become insufficient to describe her tantamount distaste for that man. Y/N blames his last name for that. “Min” should not be how his last name spelled. It should be M-E-A-N because that man is beyond mean.

When Y/N first met Yoongi, she knew there’s something off with him. He stands so arrogantly, so prideful as if he deserved every bit of the floor space of Travel Loca’s Main Office when he just got hired because there’s no other job-seeker that has actually applied. Yoongi looks at other people as if he’s any much greater than them. Lazy eyes, far-off gaze, indifferent façade—he just looks at you as if he’s listening when he’s actually just hearing so he can make some witty comeback. And Yoongi talks like a dictator know-it-all. He corrects every word people say here and there, like “Y/N, are you sure it’s ‘demonstrate,’ not ‘visualize’? We can’t physically see something if there’s nothing to see,” or “Y/N, you shouldn’t say ‘Xerox.’ It should be ‘photocopy.’ Xerox is just a brand, our junior high teacher told us so,” as if every word anyone says but him, will always be wrong. Yoongi talks as if no one but him will always be right and that everything around him does not deserve a bit of his attention unless they prove their worth to him.

And it frustrates Y/N to no end that no one seems to see his real form but her. Because apparently, Yoongi is “amazing.” Yoongi knows a lot of foreign places, having traveled to Malta, New Zealand, Hawaii, and yaddah yaddah, making his first-hand knowledge essential to the Writing Department. Yoongi has a lot of expertise in various editing apps, and he’s willing to teach the tricks and nicks to it to anybody. Anybody but Y/N. Because behind closed doors, Y/N knows his true face: Min Yoongi is a thick-skinned, double-faced bitch. That even if his name is on the tip of the tongue of anyone around the office every single morning, his quick promotion as manager of the Creatives Team a never-ending topic starter, Y/N knew the real story. Because Min Yoongi started out as Nancy’s Personal Assistant…just like Y/N.

Nancy Kim is the best photojournalist in the history of travel magazines. God-tier even, because when Nancy is just an intern in The Traveler’s Foot, she wrote the best articles Y/N has ever read. It didn’t matter if they were about a cliché tourist spot that has been featured over and over again or something bizarre that could make anyone wonder someone in their right mind would actually go there. Nancy is the goddess of travel journaling and Y/N obsessively consumed every article she wrote during her entire senior high and college life. So, to be able to get accepted in a company Nancy built, as Nancy’s personal assistant, is a sweet as fuck dream come true. Y/N didn’t care if she has to go home by 12 A.M. or 1 A.M. as Nancy said PA’s always have to leave the office after their bosses left. Nancy just shows the dedication to work one must have. Y/N didn’t find it tiresome when Nancy has to send her back-and-forth for errands both for work and personal life. She’s learning how to be resourceful while being good at time-management all at the same time. She’s learned a lot from Nancy. So, seeing Min Yoongi be so lax at work after getting hired frayed Y/N’s nerves to no end.

Yoongi doesn’t keep a tab on Nancy’s schedules just like Y/N does. He says there’s no reason for such rush to keep every event on track because Nancy will just cancel or push forward them anyway. It’s true, Nancy does sometimes mess up the week calendar Y/N arranged for her, but still, not tabbing anything on your work diary is still an evident proof Yoongi slacks of. He even takes a nap in between work hours for God’s sake. Yoongi also likes to talk behind Nancy’s back: of how inconveniencing, overbearing, and unnecessarily over-the line abuser she is as a boss. He tells this to Y/N day in and day out. Yoongi even mocked Y/N’s work ethic as a “willing subservience to work slavery.” He mercilessly reduced her dedication to work as blind obedience to an authority for the sake of monthly paychecks instead of hard, honest efforts to learn the essential skills in travel journalism.

And, it’s not a miracle no one finds out about this. Because when Yoongi is indeed caught, he finds one loophole in his and Y/N’s dynamic as co-PA’s for Nancy and implicitly, oh so subtly, turns it around against Y/N. Y/N remembers one time when Nancy berated them two for not inserting her friend Rosa’s son’s first birthday party into the 6 PM slot of one Monday in March. After her long sermon, Yoongi apologized for not encoding it into Nancy’s Schedule Work Sheet. Y/N handles Nancy’s Schedule Work Sheet, not Yoongi. Nancy knows this. So, after her 9-12 shift that same Tuesday, Nancy reminded Y/N of her replaceability in Travel Loca during one of the most tension-filled elevator rides in her life. She went home to her flatmate, Mina, in tears which did not permit her to get an ounce of sleep. Y/N turns up the next day at work, red eyes and red nose close to make Rudolph the reindeer run for his title, only to know from the call logs that Yoongi did not receive Rosa’s call because he was sleeping when Y/N outright told him to take over the phone because she needed a bathroom break.

Min Yoongi is mean and Y/N has seen the last straw of her respectful tolerance to people ticked off by this insufferable man one cursed Thursday night of September.

Thursdays are horrible. It is always assured to be the worst day Y/N will have in a week. Either an investor will change their mind about a deal with Travel Loca, or Nancy will lash out at her because of stress from stupid shenanigans of her rebellious teenage daughter—Thursdays always have it out for Y/N. Y/N can already tell this so when Nancy called for her at 10:30 P.M. to give her a run-down of her schedule for the weekends and the upcoming week. It is already an established routine that Nancy will have Y/N over to her office to give a schedule report at any time of the day. It’s just happened this day that Yoongi took a leave and Y/N shouldered every task to be done, easily wearing her out in the afternoon.

Y/N is close to crying right now because of exhaustion and it does not help that Nancy is wearing a sour face. She does not even look up at Y/N from her laptop when she said, “Tell me this week’s schedule.”

Y/N pulls up her notebook and traces her pen over her notes, “Tomorrow you have an 11 AM meeting with investors from VanTae Apparels. At 1 PM you will have an online meeting with our overseas partners, JM Restaurant Group. We also have to submit the Kim Yuna special feature by 2 PM and at 3 we have the Travel with RM to interview. And–”

“Push the Travel with RM to 2. We’re holding the Yuna feature ‘til next week because Jennie is writing as if she’s still in college.” Nancy presses a hand over her forehead and huffs, “The Writing Department has been consecutively disappointing me with boring, generic articles. Are fresh pieces non-existent nowadays?!”

Y/N looks up, eyes wide, hands sweaty.

Nancy turns back to her laptop, “What else is on my sched?”

“Um, O-on Saturday 4 PM, you are invited to your friend’s, Rica’s baby shower, and for 5, you are invited to Jungsoo’s son’s 1st birthday party. Then Sunday 2 PM is Hana’s sister’s daughter’s 1st birthday party. You are also invited to Nick and Ken’s wedding on Friday and–”

Nancy clicks her tongue, “Cancel them all. I have no time for these parties and meaningless chit-chats that always have these housewives bragging how great their husbands are or their children’s stupid what-nots.”

Y/N nods and slashes through her notes, “Okay.”

“So send them my apologies and give them a $300 gift instead.

“Okay, ma’am.”

Nancy turns her swivel chair to face her, “Did you get my daughter the unpublished sequel of The Swallowing?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Y/N smiles, recalling her last week’s adventure and success. Maybe Nancy’s mood will lighten up if she knew how she accomplished such an impossible task. “I got to grab a copy after weeks of talking with R. Lewis’ manager. Luckily, R. Lewis caught wind that it’s for your daughter. So he agreed to give me the copy. I actually have it right now, let me go back to my table –”

“You don’t have to. Suzie changed her mind. She doesn’t like The Swallowing anymore. Return the copy and get her the unpublished sequel instead of Bird and Foe.”

Y/N’s jaw nearly falls as she stammers, “S-sure, no problem.” Deep inside, Y/N cannot help but think to herself, “Yes, Nancy may be fickle-minded and forgetful of differences in company protocols that intervene with such transactions, but she cannot just disregard my hard work! All the money in my train tickets and brain cells have gone all in the drain for nothing—Okay, calm down, Y/N, this is Nancy. Nancy can help you to write the best articles in no time. This is just training for the real deal—

“Y/N, did you hear me?”

“S-sorry, what?”

“I said, where’s the USB I told you to get from my laptop at our home? I need the files for the JM Restaurant Group.”

Oh shit. The USB. Y/N told Yoongi to get it since he lived nearer to Nancy’s residence in West Street than her. And since, Yoongi’s on leave, the USB is—!

“And first thing in the morning, I want you to go to the Writing Department to get some fresh stories. I do not want to personally see them or else I will be able to fire one whole department in a day.”

At this, Y/N fiddles with her fingers. “Umm, I think I have a story.”

Nancy quirks her brow.

Y/N wrings her hands behind her back. “I-it’s not yet polished and I still have more to cover on–”

“So, you’re already telling me it’s bad before you even pitch a formal proposal –”

Y/N’s eyes widen and she rushes to Nancy. “No! I-it’s about the Write and Backpack Trip Club. The-they’re a club of unpublished writers, usually late 30s, who met on Facebook and decide to travel together to the countries or places their stories are supposed to take place.” Nancy tilts her head and Y/N picks up her tone. Her hands start to quiver with her voice as she says, “People think—people think it’s hopeless. Like, like, they’re wasting their lives on something so trivial instead of focusing on their jobs. But this club gave them a purpose to still reach for their dreams even when people tell them it’s already too late. And I just,” Y/N wipes a stray tear on her cheek–which she doesn’t know if it’s because of her attachment to the club, Nancy’s new orders, or her frustration at Yoongi for leaving all their responsibilities on her–but she sucks them up and breathes out, “I find it really inspiring to have the courage to seek out your purpose when everything in the world is against you.”

Nancy stares at her, brows furrowed. Another drop of tear falls from Y/N’s eyes. Nancy fixes her eyes back on her laptop. “The USB, Y/N, I need it now. A.S.A.P., capiche.”

Wiping her cheeks again, Y/N nods, “Ye-yeah, capiche.”

Y/N could not remember any time she’s rushed out the office as fast as now. Yoongi’s cell is out of reach and nothing is present in Y/N’s mind but to just run out of the building. She needs to clear her mind. She has to think of a solution. She can’t go back to Nancy empty-handed. Nancy’s already unimpressed of her sloppy work for this day, much more at her uncalled emotional breakdown in her office. She will definitely get fired for sure this time.

The cold dry wind hits Y/N’s face the moment she pushes past the large glass doors of the Rockfort Building. The night sky has blackened into dark indigo and the establishments that dot the neighboring grounds of the building have blurred into monotonous dim shops. With just their solar lights left on, the rest of the complex looked like a washed-out commercial center. The only thing that stands out has to be the small mango tree just a meter away from her—the center-piece and quite the only humanizing element of the harsh Rockfort Complex.

Okay, this is great. Y/N always tend to get the best ideas and solutions when she’s standing near this tree. She proved this twice. First, when Nancy demanded her to re-do all their presentations for VanTae Apparel. Y/N managed to slay it by getting inspired by the mangoes and editing the templates to look like nature’s rendition of Van Gogh’s starry night, which happened to be the favorite painting of VanTae’s CEO. And second, when Yoongi messed up Y/N’s schedules for Nancy’s personal events by misnaming each invitation, this mango tree provided her peace to quickly fix everything up before Nancy gets to the office.

Put your thinking cap on, Y/N. What should you do? Should you rush to Nancy’s house now? Oh no, maybe Yoongi already got the USB. Should you go then to Yoongi’s house? Shit, I don’t know his house address—

“Here’s $25, sir. Thank you!”

Y/N freezes. It can’t be.

Y/N turns to her right only for her eyes to land on a man with a familiar jet black mop of hair, standing about two meters before her, talking with a blue-vested delivery man.

No. No. No. NO. Min Yoongi cannot just swoop out of nowhere and sound so chirpy like that while I have to stress over a problem that I DID NOT create. I cannot get fired in a company I’ve spent my life on for two years just because of this man’s unreasonable incompetence!

Fueled by the purest form of aggravation, Y/N stomps ahead and brushes Yoongi’s shoulder, making him turn back to her.

“Oh, hi, Y/N.”

“‘Hi?!’ ‘Hi,’ yourself, Min Yoongi!—"

“Oh my God,” Yoongi rolls his eyes, “she’s Adolf Hitler again.”

“Adolf Hitler?!” Y/N scoffs, “Say it for yourself, Min! You’re Hitler because you’re twisted enough to ruin my career because doing shit in yours is not enough. Where’s Nancy’s USB?!”

“If you’re going to talk about work again, I gotta leave. If you didn’t know, a ‘leave’ is a leave.” He emphasizes the last syllable as he starts to walk toward the street.

Letting common sense knock into her, Y/N momentarily disregards her pride and runs after him. When he rounds the corner of a clothing boutique, she slips by his side and places herself in the middle of the sidewalk, blocking him.

Unlike his usual work attire, Yoongi is clad in a black hoodie and denim ripped jeans, an ensemble that remarkably turned to look horrible in 0.5 seconds just because he’s wearing it. Y/N deduces it’s just Yoongi ruining fashion because he 24/7 looks like an asshole.

“What, are you just gonna stare at me?”

Yoongi’s voice brings Y/N back to her purpose. “No, I’m here to tell you, you forgot to do your job—Nancy wants her USB for JM Restaurant Group right now.”

“Well, I don’t have it, sweetheart. Work hours are already over so practically, I’m in no responsibility to do whatever the fuck Nancy wants,” the man quips back, smiling.

Y/N cannot help but snap. “Why are you even here in Rockfort, then? You didn’t turn up for work and now you’re just casually strolling in front of our building. You didn’t take home at least a quarter of our tasks and dumped everything on my shoulders like an irresponsible, signature free-loader high school groupmate. And now you think it’s okay to tell me ‘sorry, I don’t have the USB’ when I told you yesterday to bring it today?! I cannot believe what an asshole you can be, Yoongi.”

Yoongi raises a hand. “Okay, chill, tiger. To answer your question, I am here because my friends and I hung out at a bar near here. Not that you will understand, of course, considering your whole life revolves around work, work, and work. Ooh, and Nancy,” Yoongi grins. “How can I forget you idolize Nancy? Actually no, you worship her.”

Y/N’s face falls into an indignant scowl, “I do NOT worship Nancy! I respect her. Which you also should do because she employed you, not the other way around. Also, I have friends! Mina is my friend!”

“Correction, Mina is your only friend at work. And she happened to be your flatmate and college buddy first before you both had luck to also be co-workers. So no, your friendship with Mina is out of the equation.”

Y/N opens her mouth to tell him Mina cannot be out of the equation when Yoongi beats her, “And second, how could I be a free-loader? A leave is a leave. Our job description did not say we should also take work home. You are the only one who does that because you’re paranoid. So don’t impose your so-called work ethic, that is actually masked obsession, to me because I am a mentally healthy person. I don’t want to have a stick in my ass like you do.”

Y/N steps closer to Yoongi, making the latter cock a brow at her. “I’m not paranoid, Min. It’s you who is the problem. You don’t take this job seriously. You don’t take on responsibilities like a mature adult. You think you’re so great just because no one told you you suck at something when you were a kid. Well, let me tell you now. You suck at plain human decency, something that should be innate in every people. You’re so high up your ass you think you can just do anything and get away with it and you–”

“If you’re just going to insult me, can you do that tomorrow? My food is getting cold.”

Oh no. Nancy’s USB. Y/N closes her eyes and releases a long sigh. She thinks her eyes already did a 360 by the time she managed to fix her composure. She looks up at the man in front of her, currently giving her an amused look. Y/N’s voice cracks as she says, “Yoongi…This is the only time I will ask a favor from you. Please help me with Nancy’s USB. I just want to end this night and go home peacefully without her chewing my head off further more. So please, please, please, can you just help me for once?”

“Hmm,” Yoongi scratches his chin, “let me think about it first.”

“Yoongi, please!”

“Okay, fine,” Yoongi grimaces, “considering you practically begged to me for dear life, I, as a human with pure soul will help you out despite all the shits you said to me—”

“Just help me out!”

Yoongi slaps your reaching hands, “Stop, I’m not yet done with my speech. Anyway, considering this as a favor, not a request, I expect a return of favor, too.”

“Sure, fine, anything!”

“Okay, I think I may or may not have slipped in Nancy’s USB in my bag,” Yoongi breathes out as he reaches for his black satchel. “Oh yeah, I totally have it,” he says, flashing the orange 32 GB USB in front of you.

What the fuck. All this time-!

“Why didn’t you tell me you already have the USB?!”

Yoongi nearly guffaws, “Didn’t I tell you a “leave” is a leave? Wait, oh my god, you should see yourself, sweetheart. You’re about to pop a vein.”

“Min Yoongi, I fucking hate you!” Y/N snatches the USB from Yoongi’s hand and stomps back to the direction of the Rockfort Building. The man doesn’t seem to go on his own way though because Y/N hears him holler “Same sentiment too, Y/N!”

Y/N doesn’t turn back. She just raises a middle finger up that she’s sure Yoongi will not miss. And he did not, for the man’s faint chuckles only continued.

The travel back up to the 12th floor seems like the longest elevator ride Y/N has ever been on. Every additional second into the constricted metal box feels like a one-second deduction from her own lifetime. So when the elevator doors open to Travel Loca’s floor, the air is immediately knocked off Y/N lungs. But not because of relief. Nancy stands in front of her, bags in hand, and obviously upset.

Y/N quickly steps out of the lift. “Nancy, here! The USB!”

“You took too long. Just e-mail them to me. I have to cram-reading them in the morning anyway because a certain someone forgot to do their job.” Nancy brushes by her shoulder and steps into the elevator. “You know, Y/N, if I’m paying you to make my life easier for me and instead, you’re making it harder, your position in this company is useless.” Nancy presses the button for the parking lot. The doors close in front of Y/N, letting her see the disappointment on Nancy’s face for the last second of the night.

Y/N goes home twenty minutes later, worn out, and ready to sleep the second she reaches her floor. But when she opens the door, Mina’s smiling face greets her, and she immediately rushes to the sofa next to her bestfriend.

“Mina, oh my god, I have so much to tell you.”

“Me, too!” Mina giggles, wrapping her arms around Y/N’s arms, “Can I go first though?”

“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Y/N smiles, fixing her seat.

“Well, remember last week when I told you I finally confessed to Mark?”

“Mark, as in, the café barista Mark Tuan?”

Mina jokingly hits Y/N’s arm, “Yes, what Mark would I be talking about?”

“Sorry, you know how I get so spaced out when I’m tired and groggy. Anyway, what happened?”

“Well, Mark finally said yes!” Mina bursts into a wide grin, arms outstretched in joy. “I finally get to date Mark!”

“Oh my god, I’m so happy for you, Nana,” Y/N engulfs Mina into an embrace, “I can’t believe you’re finally in a relationship! I mean, who would not want to date you? You’re smart, pretty, and funny. The boys have missed out on you for seven long years. And now, there’s finally someone who has eyes and can see what a gem you are. And damn right, Mark would see that. It’s not every day he can have a gorgeous girl court him for six months after getting rejected twice.”

“Oh my god, stop bringing that up!” Mina playfully slaps her back and Y/N chortles.

“Okay, okay, I’m just joking. What I really mean is: Mark is a lucky guy. I’m glad he finally realized what an idiot he will be if he rejects you again for the third time when you’ve been with him through all his problems. He won’t find another beautiful girl willing to ride his motorcycle with him in a huge-ass dress just to help him deliver orders in time. You’re the total package Mina and I’m so happy Mark has realized it.”

“Oh, Y/N, you’re making me blush,” Mina laughs. She sways the both of them in their hug, “Mark has an impossibly high standard to meet now because of you.”

“Mark doesn’t have to meet any standards,” Y/N snickers, “You already drool at his face the moment we enter The Daily Bean.”

Mina detaches herself from Y/N and dramatically places a hand over her chest. “How can you remember that so well and not who Mark is?”

Y/N shrugs, “Because I’m not staring at Mark and eye-fucking him 24/7.”

“Oh my god, I do not!” Mina giggles, making you laugh again as she hugs you tight once more. Mina’s fingers card through your hair as she murmurs “But you do know, Y/N, even if I’m in a relationship now, I’m not gonna leave you alone. Even if Mark will start to occupy the top priority in my life, it doesn’t mean you will lose your spot in the top-pest part of my list. You know you’re still and will forever be my number one, right?” Y/N hums at that, closing her eyes from the head massage Mina is currently giving her. She feels Mina nod, “Right, you should because you’re practically my baby.”

“No, I’m not.”

“Yes, you are! Who would wash the red stain on your pants and underpants in the girl’s CR while you prance around the cubicle only in a top because you bled through your bottoms during your period, much more, on our Christmas Party, other than me?”

Y/N grimaces, “Oh god, you didn’t have to bring that up.”

“You hit right through me when you said I eye-fuck Mark so yeah, eye for an eye, bitch,” Mina cackles as she finally unlatches her arms around her friend. “Anyway, I’m finished with my story of the day. Your turn. What happened tonight?”

Y/N bites her lip, unconsciously easing an inch between her and her bestfriend. Mina is in a good mood today. Y/N doesn’t want to ruin it by ranting off about how horrible Yoongi is again. She knows Mina. She will listen to her rant about another bullshit done by her co-PA and she will also indulge in an insult-fest against the man. That’s just their dynamic: Y/N’s enemy is Mina’s enemy and vice versa. So as Y/N looks at Mina’s smile which doesn’t do much covering up her dark eyes, which have grown from staying up late to wait for her to come home for multiple nights on end, Y/N decides it’s enough negativity for the day.

“It’s nothing, Mina,” Y/N shakes her head, forcing a smile on her face, “just another tiring day from work.”

Mina tilts her head, “Are you sure?”

“Yeah,” Y/N flashes her another smile as she heads for her room, “I’m totally fine. Just tired. Congratulations to you and Mark again.”

“Yeah, thank you,” Mina replies, but the look on her face tells Y/N she’s unconvinced of what she said. Seemingly aware that her friend needed space, Mina turns back the TV. Before Y/N closes her door, she hears Mina chuckle to a punch-line in the airing sitcom.

Y/N flops on her bed face down. If Yoongi didn’t put much of a fight and just handed her Nancy’s USB when he knew he already had it, then maybe this night won’t be so horrible. Y/N would have given Nancy her USB in time, and her boss could have acknowledged it as a peace offering to her unremarkable work performance that day. Y/N would have totally rejoiced with Mina with her full heart into it and not force a smile on her face when such an announcement deserves much more celebration.

Y/N releases a stifled scream into her pillow. Thursdays are really the worst and it’s all Min Yoongi’s fault.

However, what Y/N didn’t expect is that the following week will get much worse. The Writing Department is late in their deadline, causing the online publication of the September issue to be pushed in the first week of October, a big deal late to the releases of their magazine competitors. Thus, Nancy became more pissy and naggy, giving Y/N a cold shoulder for the longest streak in her work life. Nancy became more frigid when Y/N failed to get Nancy the copy of the unpublished sequel of Bird and Foe. Y/N tried her best, she really did. It’s just that the publishers of Russell Park refused to give another copy because they said they cannot give out two unpublished copies at the same time. Of course, this turned out as a lazy excuse to Nancy, making her dump additional workload on Y/N’s already staggering pile. But that was not what made Y/N’s last week of September the worst week she’s ever had. It was Min Yoongi getting promoted as a staff member to the Creatives Team after giving Nancy the unpublished Bird and Foe sequel.

Ringing phones, staff members running to- and fro- the beige faux wood office floor, and the occasional requests for coffee from the break room–Travel Loca is buzzing with life as usual. But not for long though, because the clock hands are currently on 12:49 P.M. At 12:57, it seems everyone on the floor have gone silent. Almost everyone taps their foot against the floor. All eyes were set on the digital wall clock. Some have even glanced on their own wristwatches to check if the wall clock was right. The hands start to move. Everyone gulps.

The hands hit one o’clock. Everyone scrambles off their swivel chairs. Some have bee-lined for the break room. Meanwhile, a huge mass had created a bottle-neck of office workers at Travel Loca’s main door. No one is left on the staff chairs, except for one: Mina Young.

The accountant slides her swivel chair to the left. Her hands meander through her large file cases and when she feels a cold, ribbed metal surface on her index, she smiles. Mina pushes the on-button and immediately, the then-silent office space has now become a replica of her own flat.

“Good morning everyone! Today seems an extra sweet day than yesterday because you know what? I can smell and see the sweet aroma of those dark, chewy chocolates and those pretty pink balloons surrounding our streets. That’s right folks, Valentine’s Day is just around the corner! Which also means–drumroll for me, Alexa–Holidays are about to sweep in! It’s just three weeks to go, folks, note that! So, for our dear, sweet listeners, I hope you already got your hotels booked and your plane tickets ready so you can finally have that amazing buffet, relaxing spa, or a fun tour around places you’ve never been with your very lovable significant others! I’m sure all of you will have that wonderful, exciting, and pleasurable rendezvous away from school, work, and any responsibilities. Just make sure to channel in on our station if you want the best playlist to get you in the mood for some steamy, passionate, and intimate time–”

“Mina, will you turn off that radio?”

The short-haired brunette frowns at her friend, whose also frowning at her. Mina pushes up her glasses on her nose, “Why? You know I always listen to this station during break time. Plus, Nancy is not here.”

“Still, it doesn’t excuse how irritating that DJ sounds.” Y/N rolls her eyes as she plops herself on another swivel chair. “His voice sounds like there are two styrofoams gyrating each other in a sweaty club.”

Mina’s jaw drops as she turns off her portable mini-radio on her desk. She faces Y/N with a frown this time—actually a scowl now. “Kim Seokjin’s voice is like creamy velvet to the ears! Also,” she scrunches her nose in disgust, “you did not just sexualize non-living objects so casually as if you’re not aware that the mental image you’re painting is so disturbing.”

“First off,” Y/N turns to her, swivel chair squeaking in her abrupt movement, “you’re already seeing Mark Tuan for you to have any weird fantasies about Kim Seokjin and his voice or how cute his laugh is when it literally sounds like he’s an old man dying on a choked-out old joke. And second, sexualizing objects is not illegal by law and even if it so, I did NOT sexualize them. They are just the perfect representation of how Seokjin’s voice sounds.”

Mina purses her lips and props her elbow on her desk to cup her face. “Cut to the point, Y/N. Just tell me what is with you today. You barged in furious in here for no reason, threw a fit at the break room, and now you’re ruining lunch by insulting Seokjin for something so trivial.”

“Trivial?! His voice is fucking irritating! Just because he’s handsome does not mean his voice will also sound good on the radio. It’s like listening to a whale dying while making mating calls–”

“The point, Y/N?” Mina cuts you with an unamused look.

You deflate in your seat. “Fine, it’s Min Yoongi. He made it a point that he is more intelligent and capable than me in our 10 AM meeting with Nancy for this month’s spread. Said he knows more about weird facts and trivia about Sweden because I never got to travel outside this fucking country when I damn well know he only uses some advanced search engine to look for info like the computer whiz that he is! I went so many times on his Facebook to know he posts nothing in his wall but his work achievements—and his dog! Of course, if you went outside the country, you will post pictures in your wall, ‘cus social media sites are just platforms masked as an outlet for free expression when we damn well know it’s just a place where you can brag and be not called out for being arrogant. And damn hell, Min Yoongi does not have any out-of-the-country pictures posted there. What only comes close is his picture of that gumbo he said he made—yeah, quotation marks—because it looks too good to be made by his ugly crooked hands and even if it’s got this aesthetic background not expected to come from this fucking country, I still think he just photoshopped it.” Y/N crosses her arms, “Bet that gumbo did not even taste good.”

Mina scrunches her forehead, “Are you the only flawed person Min Yoongi sees? Why does he always have to nitpick every single bit of your work? He just criticized your last week’s report because of your ‘poor articulation.’”

“Right?!” Y/N leans back on her chair. She groans, “I still remember how he sabotaged my files for Nancy’s professional and personal events. Who in their right mind would change the contact names to mythical creatures? Rica’s 2nd baby shower was named ‘Merlin’s Demon Baby’s Party?’ It’s a baby event for God’s sake!” Y/N looks at her friend, “I swear Mina, one day I will get a brain hemorrhage because of Yoongi’s shits.”

Mina winces, “Please don’t. I don’t want to be the one to tell your mother you already died before you even managed to pay your housing loans.”

“Hey! Don’t attack me like that,” Y/N slaps the back of her friend’s chair. Mina, choking on her spit first, erupts into a fit of giggles.

Unfortunately, it seems lunch’s fun will be cut short as Y/N hears Nancy’s megaphone’s speaker start up, “Calling for Y/N to come into my office. A.S.A.P!”

Y/N scrambles from her seat as Mina sees her off with a sad wave. Pushing through Nancy’s glass door, Y/N could see the lines of ridges forming on Nancy’s forehead before the latter can even eye her.

“Y-yes, Ma’am? You called for me?”

Nancy pins her a look, “You’re asking me if I called you? Are you deaf? Did you not understand what I said?”

“Yes!—I-I mean on the understanding part, yes, not about being deaf or something hehe-“

“Y/N,” Nancy clasps her hands on her table, “I called you here because I have something important to tell you.”

Y/N nears her table, pulling up her notebook and pen.

“I need you to work in the Creatives Department for the next two weeks.”

Y/N’s fingers freeze. She looks up at Nancy with eyes as wide as a goldfish. And before she can brain-filter out her words, they’ve already escaped her mouth. “What do you mean I have to be in the Creatives next week? I’m your personal assistant, not Min Yoongi’s!”

“Y/N, I didn’t say you will work for Yoongi. He’s not the head of the Creatives. Steven Spielberg is,” Nancy gives the girl an unamused look, waving her off from her desk. Y/N bites her lip as she takes two steps backward. She didn’t know she’s rushed up too close to Nancy’s table just at the prospect of Yoongi and her working together came from her boss’ lips.

Nancy leans back on her chair, “I know you two have this petty children-in-the-playground fights ever since the start of October last year. I get that your differences are too great to be bridged anytime soon, thus the reason why I grew tired telling you to stop doing your cat and dog thing because I know you two wouldn’t listen anyway. You two just like to bang heads whenever you like—”

“But, it’s Yoongi’s fault-”

Nancy raises a finger, “But, Y/N, this is really important. I will be out-of-the-country for the next three weeks for both some business and family matters. Hence, why I cannot bring you with me as usual. And why I will need you to work under Steven for the meantime: to report to me about any of their progress. The Creatives’ current designs will have us late into this month’s deadline and I do not want this business going down anytime soon because of a weak holiday cover. So, as my PA, you will report everything about their progress to me, and you will report my feedback to them. At the same time, you will tame your childish fights with Yoongi to a minimum so Travel Loca will function as well as it can be while I’m not physically here. Understand?”

Y/N nods, “understand, Ma’am.” She doesn’t have a choice even if she wanted to object. Whatever Nancy dictated is already set in stone.

“Also,” Nancy looks at Y/N, “since I will be off the next three weeks, my schedules for the weeks in my absence will be pushed and packed on the following week. So, I expect you to still work on your station—and work even harder after I came back. Understand?”

More workload? Y/N internally groans. She doesn’t like work getting reduced early into the week then doubling into hell in the latter part of the month. She likes them evened out—everything is balanced, familiar, and predictable. Nevertheless, Y/N only nods, “yes.” “No” doesn’t exist in Nancy’s dictionary.

Nancy returns to her laptop and waves her off, “Okay. Then, capiche.”

“Yes, ma’am, capiche,” Y/N makes a quick bow and scampers out of her boss’ office.

When Y/N reaches her station, she sinks herself into the cushion of her seat. First, Min Yoongi belittles her researching ability in the morning meeting. Then now, she will work with him for the majority of three weeks. After that, another hell will start because of Nancy’s incoming packed schedules.

Y/N’s eyes land on her laptop and she immediately sees her calendar. January 16, 2020. Thursday. Y/N releases an inhumane groan. Of course, the goddamn Thursday curse. When will she ever live?

“When will I ever die?” Y/N sobs into Mina’s shirt. Her friend keeps her arms around her tight as she cards through her hair.

“Hey, don’t think so negative,” Mina coos, “Think of this as an opportunity to finally have Nancy off your back.”

“Yeah, as if working with Min Yoongi is better than that. He already ruins my life when we only physically encounter each other in meetings and breaks and lunches. Imagine working with him for a whole fucking day!”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry, I take that back,” Mina hugs her friend tighter.

Y/N continues, “And after enduring all that, my workload will quadruple when Nancy comes back after three weeks! I already experienced this during her daughter’s debut last year. When Nancy said a pile of work will come, it fucking means four metal file cases of work. I spent the last two weeks of August plunging myself into an abyss of papers. I did not sleep for two weeks straight! And now— I will have three weeks-worth of hell work to come after spending three weeks working with the personification of Satan. Can the world just eat me up?!”

“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” Mina pulls away to hold her bestfriend at arms-length, “What did you say will happen in three weeks?”

Y/N closes her eyes, “Another hell will come because a shit-pile of work is coming in three weeks! Mina, I’ve been telling you this since morning-”

“Y/N, after three weeks, it’s Valentine’s Day.”

Y/N’s eyes immediately shoot open, “What?”

“Look,” Mina clicks on her phone and flashes Y/N her calendar app. “Today’s January 17. Exactly after three weeks is the Valentine’s week.”

Y/N’s jaw drops ajar, “Oh my god.”

“Yes, Y/N, oh my God. It’s the fucking Heart Holiday.”

“…The country’s long-time problem with their low birth rate has driven the government to build another department that will help its citizens build, manage, and maintain healthy relationships. The Department of Relationship Management was established in 2015, and ever since then, there have been impressive developments in our country’s birth rate. One of the best programs of DRM behind this wonderful growth is the Heart Holiday, the holiday held in the week of Valentine’s Day. It grants any person employed in a private sector one week of paid holiday vacation leave as long as they are currently in a relationship. Meanwhile, education establishments and students are given one week off their academic calendars without regard to their relationship status. Isn’t that sweet? The only downside to that, folks, is that government employees can only have two days of paid holiday leave on the 14th and 15th. But, still, a holiday is still a holiday! So for our lovely listeners, start planning your vacation trips and hangouts! Especially when Cloud 10 Airlines is there to make your holiday week even sweeter with their 70% discount on local trips! Just contact 675-9859 and 568-987—”

“Mina, can you turn off the radio?!”

“Again?!” Mina heaves, “What’s with your aggravation streak these days against Kim Seokjin’s voice?”

“It rattles me,” Y/N half-screams, plopping into the swivel chair next to her friend’s cubicle. “Yesterday, he already announced that goddamn timeline of the DRM and ‘all hailed’ importance of the Heart Holiday. Why does he have to repeat it again today? In that overly-enthusiastic voice, too, as if he’s never read of that script again and again?!”

“Y/N, it’s how broadcasting works. It’s one of the most awaited holidays in the year, so of course, they will nab as many advertisement deals as they can.”

“Well, I don’t like how they work!”

“You cannot just tell a radio company to stop working,” Mina turns in her chair to face her friend, “Also, stop venting your frustration on Seokjin. He doesn’t even know you hate his voice. Routinely doing this noise pollution doesn’t do anything at all. Just tell me what made you upset today.”

“It’s Yoongi!” Y/N scowls. “He won’t explain to me the technical editing terms on Steven’s report for Nancy! He said a five grader can even know what they are. I went through fifth grade, Mina, and I did not freaking know about any photoshop shit!”

“Well, that’s because you’re old.”

Mina looks up and sees Yoongi hovering her cubicle.

Y/N’s scowl deepens, as she turns her chair to the direction of the intruder. “As if you’re any much younger. From what I know, you’re four years older than me, dumbass.”

“Well, at least I know what Steven is talking about,” Yoongi props his chin on Mina’s cubicle.

Y/n rolls her eyes, “Because it’s your freaking line of work! Of course, you’ll know about it!”

“Well, you’re now working most of the time in the Creatives Team and you don’t know it. What does that make you, then? I’ll give you a hint: It’s what you called me three seconds ago. Starts with the letter ‘d’ and ends with the letter ‘s.’”

“What? You think you’re so smart now just because you know that vector-mask-thingy?! News flash, Yoongi, you did not graduate with any Latin honor. I did! So, who’s the real dumbass?!”

“You damn well know Latin honors doesn’t actually have any effect on real life. Practical knowledge has—especially knowledge about terminologies used in digital designing. Which you need because you won’t be able to report anything to your god Nancy. Because, well: You. Don’t. Know. Anything. Like. Always.”

“Min Yoongi, fuck you–”

“Guys, guys, guys, can you stop?”

Y/N gives Yoongi another glare before fixing herself back in her seat. Mina puffs, “Yoongi, can you leave us alone for a while? We’re talking here and you just invited yourself in our conversation.”

Yoongi chides, “Well, tell your friend that if she wants to shit-talk a person just a meter away from her without the said person barging in the conversation, she should keep her voice on the down-low. Not screaming around like a crazy ape.”

Y/N’s jaw drops open, “What crazy ape?! You’re the crazy ape! You look like a fucking gorilla who accidentally get dwarfed by a tooth fairy and-”

“Min Yoongi, just leave us alone,” Mina gives the man a pointed look.

Yoongi shrugs and detaches himself from her cubicle. He heads back to their office but he doesn’t completely leave the room without giving Y/N a middle finger.

Y/N’s mouth drops open in disbelief. She turns to Mina. “See? Isn’t it obvious he just wants to make me the bad man to Nancy again? What kind of person are you to not cooperate with your co-worker like a goddamn adult? I don’t get why no one sees this bitch’s true face but you and me! I just want to freaking tear off his face, make him wipe it in his ass, then place it back on his head since he’s such a literal ass—”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa,” Mina clasps a hand over your shoulder, “don’t get too homicidal. What you just said, aside from disturbing, is very disgusting.”

Y/N slumps in her seat and crosses her arms.

Mina sighs. “Okay, yeah, I know, Min Yoongi is the worst. But I don’t want you to do anything stupid so let’s not talk about him for a while, ‘kay?” Y/N nods. Mina leans back in her seat with the nth sigh for the day. “Okay, I got some update from Jaehyun.”

Y/N leans forward. “What did he say?”

Mina gives you a sad smile, “He already has a fiancé.”

“So soon?” Y/N scoffs. “He was just courting me two months ago.”

“Yeah, well he’s getting married this week. Whatever,” Mina waves off, “I don’t like him for you anyway. He dresses like a college fuckboy.”

“Okay, what about Dahyun?”

“Already married.”

Y/N’s eyes widen, “and she didn’t tell us?”

“Yeah, I already nagged her on the phone. She said it all kinda happened too fast–her and Sana. And the marriage was in New York. We’re too broke for out-of-the-country trips to attend anyway if we were informed.” Mina smiles, “She said she’s gonna invite us to the Christening of their baby.”

“Okay, I’m glad she still cared about us. Oh,” Y/N pipes up, “what did Jackson say over the phone?”

Mina gives you a tight smile. “Getting married, too. And guess what, the invitations were already in our mail box when I went to get our bills.”

“Momo?”

“Engaged. She and Heechul just broke out the news a week ago.”

“Sam?”

“Married. And 4 months pregnant.”

“Jongdae?”

“Engaged. Also has a baby in way.”

“Hana?”

“Engaged.”

“Changmin?”

“Engaged.”

“Jaebum?

“Engaaaaaged.”

Y/N throws her hands in the air, “Why is everyone getting married?!”

“Well, we’re in our late 20s. It’s the “marrying age” they say. It got more enphasized when DRM’s programs had succeeded in encouraging hundreds of people to marry in the recent year. Even my mom already expects Mark to propose by next month. We’re just dating for 6 months!” Mina cringes. She pulls Y/N’s chair closer to her to hold her hands. “Y/N, I’m really sorry. It kinda slipped my mind that we always apply together for the Heart Holiday every year. It’s just that Mark and I—”

“Hey, hey, don’t blame yourself. You’ve been pining after Mark for about two years and now look at you—together, stable, and in-love half into the year! I don’t want you to fret having a relationship with the boy you liked for so long.”

“Yeah, Y/N, I know,” Mina closes her eyes. “It’s just sad and unfortunate everyone we know are already in relationships.”

“Yeah…” Y/N nods and the two fall into silence. Why is everyone conveniently in a relationship just in time with the Heart Holiday? What, the whole world suddenly knew the loophole in DRM’s program? Y/N and Mina studied that for a whole year! This is unfair. Y/N cannot be the only single person out there who’ll miserably work in the office while everyone gets to have the time of their lives—wait.

Y/N grabs Mina’s hands. “Hey, Nana, I know we said co-workers are off-limits because Nancy will definitely know it’s a ruse. She’ll block my application form before it can even have the seal from the HR. Especially when she found out our lesbian “relationship” was fake after you and Mark updated your civil statuses.” Mina winces and opens her mouth to apologize again but Y/N cuts her with a finger to her mouth. “Nancy will definitely call me a liar and grill my head if she finds out what we’re planning to do now. But look, Nancy’s out of the country. Teddy is the general supervisor and she’s the next in the hierarchy. We damn well know her 45-year-old heart is soft for some nicely-woven romantic story. Even more, in an office setting—the bane of every middle-aged woman’s sappy romantic heart. So, what do you say?”

Mina lets out an exasperated breath, “That crossed my mind, too, you know. But, Y/N, the thing is—the whole Accounting Department is in a relationship. And the same goes for the Writing, Marketing, Logistics, and HR. All of them are either in a relationship, married, or getting married.”

“What?” Y/N’s eyebrows curve up high, “How come I didn’t know this?”

“Uh, because you’re busy working for Nancy day-in and day-out? Also, I just happen to be friends with Jisoo from HR. She’s in charge of the company’s relationship records. Sometimes, she slips in everyone’s stories while we listen to WWL Radio during break time.”

Y/N bites her lip. This can’t be happening to her. Not now. Not when the most un-objectifiable reason for a break from Nancy is about to slip through her fingers like fine sand.

Mina scratches her nape, “I…may have someone in mind though.”

Y/N’s eyes look straight into Mina’s. “Tell me.”

“Well, the entire Creatives Department is either married or engaged save for one.”

Y/N holds Mina’s hands tighter. “Who?”

“Min, Yoongi.”

Y/N must be going crazy. She thinks she must be growing a nest of vultures in her brain now, the mother routinely picking on her numerous dead brain cells to feed to her young. It doesn’t help that the bags under her eyes have started to droop like a waterfall, forming a sad saddle of grey on her cheeks. She cannot even remember the last time she had a decent meal. All she remembers is the finger foods Mina hands to her station every once in a while.

The universe is being unfair to her and it is all taking a toll on her body. They weren’t kidding when they said adjusting to a new environment is an entire whole work in itself. The Creatives Team runs a completely different routine. Large monitors crammed with multiple editing softwares Y/N cannot understand surround the studio-size office space. There are drafted papers and previous issues scattered in every possible corner, some even gathering dust by the floor-to-ceiling windows. Y/N is not even sure if anyone has re-arranged their desks in the last few months. The Creatives’ work ethic is loosely bound on schedules and everyone seems to be doing everyone else’s job. Except for Y/N, because Steven is the only one willing to share their team’s progress to her. But that alone is not enough for her daily report to Nancy because Steven is always busy in his computer. More unfortunately, everyone is wary of her. Y/N’s sure she even saw Kim Myungsoo clutch their design folders closer to his chest when her eyes glanced at his cubicle.

Sure, Y/N expected everyone will have their guards up on her. Who wouldn’t be when they know Nancy still has eyes on them even if she’s countries away? But still, it doesn’t lessen the pain on Y/N’s self-esteem and the stress on her back. If Y/N can’t get someone to talk to her, she won’t be able to provide a more substantial report to Nancy more than just reading Steven’s printed reports verbatim.

Y/N is desperate to find a workmate to discuss everything happening in the Creatives with her, but unluckily for her, she only has someone she wishes to not even breathe the same air with. Of course, no one in the Creatives wants to talk to her except for Min Yoongi. He’s an insufferable ass who doesn’t know when to shut up. He welcomes Y/N every single day with an annoying “Yo, Y/N” and an unneeded commentary about her outfit, like how yesterday he told her “I know retro is in but I didn’t know grandma blouses are deemed stylish again.” He blabbers about his unnecessarily extensive general knowledge about every South Asian country, even if Y/N countlessly told him she didn’t care. He brags about the cover designs and templates he did in the previous issues, flipping the pages too close in Y/N’s face while he speaks about colors and mixing like Y/N is an imbecile about basic color combinations high school students used in their PowerPoint presentations. Yet despite them all, Yoongi still refuses to explain to her the jargon in Steven’s reports.

Y/N tried her best to keep herself from bursting and giving Yoongi an earful of sense. Yes, everyone knows she does not like Yoongi but Y/N doesn’t want them to know to what extent she can go to express them, afraid of embarrassing herself. But in her defense, three days into the first week without Nancy, Yoongi has gone as far as to chip a small bit off Y/N’s mug in the break room. The mug with the “creative juices” in cursive printed around its body—Mina’s gift from college. Y/N’s patience meter was blasted off the roof. It will be safe to tell that at the end of the day, Y/N has screamed the hell out of Yoongi that everyone can be sure the latter’s ears may have fallen out of his head. Steven was close to reporting to Teddy what just happened. It was just Y/N’s remaining luck that helped her successfully and implicitly begged Steven not to do so by telling him calling Yoongi “a mean, inconsiderate, self-absorbed jerk who should eat his shit because people are what they eat and he is obviously the biggest shit in her life,” is just her “unique” way of expressing co-worker appreciation to the man.

Aside from putting up with Yoongi’s Satanic attitude, Y/N has to endure Nancy’s intermittent calls with her forever pissed voice coming in first thing in the morning until in the late, ungodly hours. And despite Teddy’s patient guidance over Y/N’s “transition” to the Creatives Team, Y/N’s still close to digging a six-feet deep hole in her station. No, not because of Teddy or Nancy. It’s because she poured her remaining effort dedicated for work by spending the entire week going through every staff member of Travel Loca. Y/N thought Mina must have overlooked a face. That it’s possible Jisoo skipped on a detail she told to her friend. But despite learning Lee Minyoung from the Writing Department is going to call it quits to her boyfriend just after Valentine’s, or how Michael Park from Marketing is about to pop the ring to his girlfriend just right on Valentine’s Day, the looming fact Y/N dreads presents itself on January 24, two weeks before Valentine’s: No one else in the office is single but her…and Min Yoongi.

Of course, it didn’t surprise Y/N, Yoongi must be single. With that know-it-all façade and condescending tone wearing you out like a 24/7 walking instruction manual no one even asked for, who would even like to date him? One week with him as a co-worker alone already makes Y/N want to throw herself into the flaming hot pit of the nearest volcano.

But it’s only two more weeks before Valentine’s and Y/N is desperate and desperate times call for desperate measures. Y/N did a last-minute check-up on her and Mina’s lists of contacts—phone, social media, e-mails, everything under the sun—only to come up with nothing. Mina’s “marrying age” theory must be true because everyone, every single one, of their acquaintances are already married or getting married. Y/N then changed up her game. She started to opt for resources she never thought she will ever use in her life: dating apps. Tinder, Bumble, The League, Grindr—name it, Y/N had made every account for every conceivable dating site. She even spent the most of her break time this week hiding her phone beneath her desk and swiping right. But even this last considerable option proved to be pointless as all the replies she received are either honest “sorry, not interested,” rude “you’re no fun,” or out-right salacious “suck my dick.”

This then left Y/N no choice but to consider the most unspeakably horrendously unfortunate option she didn’t even want to have. Min Yoongi is her only choice left. And for that, Y/N spent two days making an elaborate plan. She can’t afford any loose threads or plan-holes that can further make her at the mercy of the infuriating jerk. However, even if she made everything as seamless as it can be, Y/N knows it will be the worst decision she’ll ever make in her life. Mina also expressed the same concern, even apologized for planting that small information about Yoongi in her friend’s mind. But even her friend’s day-by-day discouragement to push through with her plan is not enough to deter Y/N.

Because even if just thinking about the plan makes Y/N feel the world is about to crumble and swallow her down in its unending, fathomless depths; even if it makes her want to set up an appointment with an exorcist, Y/N knew she won’t back out. It’s not viruses or bacteria, it’s a seeded idea that is the most contagious living entity that can take hold of any human being. And the moment Y/N realized there’s no other ticket way out of her dilemma but Yoongi, she knew this thought will haunt her for nights on end.

This is the reason why Y/N’s currently standing by the corner of the Creatives’ office when it’s already 6:46 P.M. while almost everyone has left the office. Almost, because Yoongi, apart from her, is the only one left in the office as Steven requested him to finish a color palette by tonight. Y/N gulps a thick blob of saliva. Sweat runs thick on her forehead. God, if Mina could see what Y/N’s about to do, she will be already by her side, yelling for her to just give up. Y/N shakes her head. This is Mina’s fault anyway. If she didn’t plant the idea in her head, she wouldn’t have to do this. She wouldn’t be creeping behind a door like a disgusting stalker. She wouldn’t be profusely sweating in an air-conditioned room like a guilty murderer. She wouldn’t be-

“What the hell are you doing behind the door?”

Y/N shrieks and jumps a half-foot away from her spot.

“The hell—what’s gotten into you?!” Yoongi frowns, “And why are you even here?”

Y/N’s brows meet together in her forehead. But before she can speak, Yoongi’s snickers drown out the words in her throat.

“Wait, don’t tell me you’ve come as far as spying on my work. I didn’t know you’re going to be this petty,” Yoongi sighs and puts his hand on his waist, “Well, if you think going through my work laptop will get you to understand Steven’s report, I’m sorry to say you won’t get anything, little girl.”

Yes, it’s true. The words did die out in Y/N’s throat. It’s just flames of anger sweeping in the valleys of her mouth. Y/N surges forward, fists clenched tight, “‘Little girl’? I am not a fucking little girl!”

Yoongi grins, “Then what should I call someone who’s a foot smaller than me?”

“What fucking ‘foot’?! We’re just inches apart! Have you ever seen yourself in a mirror? You’re not even that tall!”

“Says the one who’s looking up at me just to level her eyes with mine,” Yoongi raises his brows, “and who’s now standing a little too close to me because apparently, standing a socially-decent foot away won’t enable her to see my face.”

Y/N’s eyes widen and she immediately takes a step back. She doesn’t get how easy it is for Yoongi to rile her up that she instantly forgets how to control her body. When she looks up at him, the man is smirking at her. Her mouth aches to tell him he actually looks stupid with that lopsided smile if he thought doing it will make him a tad bit inch sorry excuse of “sexy.” But then, Y/N remembers she has a purpose tonight. She didn’t just waste an hour waiting in the excruciating office space of the Creatives Team just to get nothing done.

Y/N closes her eyes and breathes out. When she opens them again, she looks at Yoongi in the eyes. “I’m not here to fight with you, Yoongi. I’m here to make an offer.”

Yoongi scoffs, “An offer? You? Are you hearing yourself right now? In case you weren’t informed, I don’t need anything from you. And I didn’t—”

“You’re single right?”

Yoongi gawks at her, “W-what?”

“Well, I’m single, too. And Valentine’s week is coming in two weeks.”

“So?”

Y/N tries not to grit her teeth, “So, that means the Heart Holiday is also coming. Nancy is bound to come back during that time, too, with an obvious incoming large workload to come for me. I can’t afford to hole myself up in this office while everyone gets to enjoy a paid holiday week. And since you have an affinity for disliking your job, I figured you also wouldn’t want to go to work during Valentine’s week.” Y/N crosses her arms, “So I’m here, Min Yoongi, to give you an offer: Fake date me for two weeks to make it to DRM’s PRS’ application deadline. When our application gets approved, we part ways and never speak about what happened in these two weeks. It’s a win-win situation. I don’t get to work during Valentine’s. You also don’t get to work, and we both will still get paid. So, what do you say?”

Yoongi just stares at her. Y/N could feel cold sweat running from her scalp and down to her back. Why is he looking at her like that? Why is he being so silent? Is he about to make fun of her and bring it up to work tomorrow? Oh God, Y/N shouldn’t have even gone through with this plan. This is a bad idea. A bad, bad, bad, idea that should have never been entertained and buried in a trunk of embarrassing memories, never to see the light again—

“I’m in.”

Y/N freezes, “W-what?”

Yoongi takes a step closer to Y/N. He leans forward, closing the distance between their faces into mere six inches. Y/N doesn’t need to crane her head up anymore because this time, their eyes are finally leveled with each other.

Yoongi smiles, “I’m telling you, Y/N, I’m in in your plan.”

Y/N looks at him. She just looks at him. Five seconds have already passed. Yoongi should be laughing in her face right now. But the man did not, and takes a step back away from her. He fixes his satchel on his shoulder and closes the Creatives’ glass door behind him shut. When Yoongi looks back at Y/N, he gives her a shrug, “Hey, if you’re not going home, I am.” He heads for the main door, hands dug into his pockets. Y/N’s eyes just follow his figure. Before Yoongi completely gets out of the office, he hollers, a hand cupping over his mouth, “I said I’m already in in your plan. You can go now. See you tomorrow.” He sends Y/N one last smile.

It takes Y/N five more seconds before she breaks her frozen stance. What did just happen? Yoongi didn’t laugh at her. He didn’t put up a fight. He….agreed? Just like that? This is impossible. This cannot happen! Yoongi doesn’t agree, he argues! Always! And he just doesn’t bid her goodbye and “see you tomorrow.” Yoongi annoys her with one last hit of “goodbye, grandma.” And Yoongi doesn’t smile. He smirks. He just pulls up one side of his lips, squints his eyes, and snorts. Y/N must be going crazy. This is not Yoongi! A whole different man has suddenly appeared before her. This cannot be!

But despite all the things going back and forth in her head right now, there’s only one looming thought on top of them all that had Y/N release a staggered breath:

What the fuck did she just get herself into?

next | series masterlist

Disclaimer: This first chapter is based on Netflix’s Set It Up (2018), particularly Nancy’s briefing scene and the USB scene. Netflix’s Set It Up (2018) is the inspiration for this fic and so I based Ms. Nancy’s personality on Lucy Liu’s portrayal of Kirsten Stevens! Ms. Lucy Liu was fantastic in her performance! That being said, all scenes and references from the movie used in this story are the property of its respective owners. The rest belongs to the author. This work is for entertainment purposes only. No copyright infringement is intended. Anyways, if you wish to watch the movie, don’t worry about encountering any spoilers in this fic!

A/N pt. 2: Hi hons! I decided to cut this fic into parts as this will be very long (hello banter dialogues). Writing a 25+k wordcount (so far, this is my assumed final wordcount) may overwhelm a lot of readers and make them not want to read this anymore ☹ Anyway, the succeeding parts will be released soon as I already have a detailed storyboard and outline for this mini-series so you don’t have to wait that long. Thank you for giving this fic a chance, hons. Also, feedback is more than appreciated. Tell me what you guys think! ♡♡♡ \(> u

Taglist: @fangirls94 @ditttiii @chogiyeol-utopia

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secretgamergirl · 3 years

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How not to Write a Campaign

I have been playing RPGs for a very long time. Back in the day, I avoided any and all pre-written adventures of any sort because my limited experience with them was... just frankly terrible. Weird inconsistencies in tone, unfair encounter setups, too many assumptions about PCs’ motives and actions, etc. Then much later I discovered a group of writers who actually got it, wrote things perfectly in line with how my friends like a game to go, and we’ve been all in on those for a decade and change. But I just finished running a ROUGH one, and I want something good to come of it.

I don’t want to make this a specific review, because... I’m in the industry, I know the people who wrote this campaign, I can guess at some of the problems involved, and I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings or reputation, so let me just refer to the offending prewritten campaign here as the Amnesia Campaign. It’s for a big fantasy RPG, it riffs of a particular author’s work, you can probably guess what it is from that, but, I’m trying.

The first problem I need to bring up with the Amnesia Campaign is that it just commits the cardinal sin of long term RPG campaign writing- The mustache-twirling villain who always manages to escape from the PCs at the last minute. I cannot convey just how important it is that you never, ever do this. The worst sort of example is when you plan around the PCs actually confronting your villain multiple times, and failing to kill them, which is a terrible idea because there really is no way to ever stack the deck and account for every contingency to make an unwinnable fight, or even one where escape is always possible, and especially if you’re publishing adventures, some number of groups will kill the villain too early, either shorting things out or forcing a handwave to keep an ineffectual villain in play and pretend they’re still a threat.

The Amnesia Campaign doesn’t quite go there. Having an actual chance to go toe to toe with the villain is reserved for the very end, but it does use another variant, where no matter what happens, the PCs arrive just after the villain they’re chasing has left. Now... there’s a way you can make that work. If you have a villain who cannot be reached in practical fashion, and can launch attacks anywhere within a huge region, you can build a whole campaign out of characters reacting to the aftermath of evil actions they could not be expected to even learn about until the villain has left the scene. Here, meanwhile, we have a villain with a big elaborate plot that requires traveling all over the world gathering things, based on research he does at the very start which the PCs can, and indeed are expected to do, quickly pick up on these research notes, and basically know everything the villain plans to do from nearly the start of a very long campaign. And... frankly, the villain has no real edge to keep him believably one step ahead. He is a mildly wealthy man hiring goons, mundane forms of transportation, and having to negotiate and fight his way through to various sub-objectives needed for his plan, and it is at least strongly implied that he doesn’t have a lot of lead time. When presented with a scenario about someone needing to be chased down and stopped, PCs can pretty reliably be counted on to constantly be rushing forward, coming up with clever ways to accomplish what they need to in less time, and cut down if not completely nullify their travel time. But, like with battles the villain somehow keeps escaping from, I am forced to continuously state to my players in running this that no, somehow even after avoiding this whole side quest by reading the mind of the person with important information, and directly teleporting to where the villain left for by riverboat, he somehow beat them there, and once again, just left. It’s frustrating, and implausible. We end up with a villain who seems overwhelmingly outmatched, but keeps succeeding because... well, he has plot armor so we’re railroading this.

Admittedly, having a good villain when writing a full campaign in advance can be tricky. The safe and tested formula is generally to start off with minions of your main villain, starting with some who don’t even know who they’re ultimately working for, gradually build up to who’s calling the shots and to what end, have a big side trip to prepare for the final confrontation not directly involving the villains, than cap it with a big showdown. If the PCs know who the main villain is from the very start and where to find them, it becomes hard to rationalize anything between. Sometimes you can pull it off if they’re leading an army or ruling a country, but even then, you want to work up a food chain to them.

A similar problem, which crops up a bit towards the end of the Amnesia Campaign, is making too many assumptions about how the PCs react, and who they befriend. In RPG writing, you need to make as few assumptions as possible about the specifics of what the PCs will do in any situation. You can count on the real broad strokes. The party will investigate the situation described in the adventure, they’ll explore the area, find the villains, fight them, win, learn something to keep the larger plot growing, but that’s it. You can’t assume they’re going to team up with this NPC, enter this room from that direction, or otherwise reenact what you’d imagine you’d do in their place, or what happened in your test play of your adventure. This is particularly important when you include a little sidequest unconnected to their primary goal, or you’re presenting an open-ended investigation.

Ideally, you just have a sensible location, have some villains in it with clear goals and personalities laid out, and you scatter around some things to enable various clever tricks if players think to try them, without mandating any of them. Mention where windows are, and chandeliers, and holes just too small for the average human to fit through, but don’t, as part of the Amnesia Campaign does, invest heavily in the assumption that the PCs will start investigating a sewer system when investigating how a cult gets around a city and go sparse on other possible clues. Also don’t waste adventure background note space on thousands of years of history at the expense of what the actual current problem in the area is and who or what is behind it.

The next problem is one that, were I the average consumer just buying this book would bother me a hell of a lot more than it does as someone who knows how the sausage gets made. Put mildly... you do not want to play a rogue in the Amnesia Campaign. Nor do you want to play a swashbuckler, a critical-hit focused character of any stripe, really any class out of the... roughly 25% of all classes who rely on knowledge of where to make a hit count the most to do the full amount of damage with their attacks, because practically everything is immune.

Now, again. I partly understand how this happens. We have several different authors writing different chapters of the campaign, simultaneously, in pretty unforgiving crunchy conditions, with just a rough outline to go off. Nobody really has a chance to confirm notes and say “hey, did your chapter totally invalidate one of the foundational character archetypes, because I was thinking of doing that and having two of those back to back would be a bit much.” And while the publisher of the Amnesia Campaign does throw out little booklets of tips for players on what sort of character concepts will/won’t work, they’re not written last, so this sort of tip is missing there too. On the other hand, it’s a huge problem within nearly any given chapter just on its own. If you’re making the call on what all monsters to include in a multi-level stretch of a campaign, you should generally avoid choosing nothing but monsters immune to one of the most common bread and butter class features. And honestly, given how the subject matter naturally lends to the deployment of a particular monster type, erring on the side of assuming everyone else is heavily deploying them wouldn’t be a bad assumption for any author to make.

This though, unlike the rest of my gripes, is ultimately a high level problem that needs a high level solution. When you’re publishing a whole campaign, and you’re doing it in a game where several foundational character concepts kinda live or die based on things like whether things are properly harmed by particular flavors of damage, or whether a decent percentage of enemies fall under a certain classification, that really shouldn’t be a double-blind. Coordinating to get all authors to use a decent spread, or include outline notes like “it’d make sense for about half the enemies in this chapter to be fire elemental themed in various ways, but keep a good variety otherwise,” and/or trying to get a rough handle on emergent themes to adjust for/warn about in player-facing pitch material. Even the best-written campaigns are prone to rude awakenings or hilarious reductions in challenge as turns out, say, going all in on cold damage does indeed pay off for the one with Fire in the title.

Meanwhile, on the other side of that coin, more or less, huge swaths of the Amnesia Campaign really just completely break down by failing to account for some basic standard issue capabilities of a typical party. Particularly the fact that past a certain point, you need to account for the fact that the PCs are almost certainly capable of flight. It’s a thing that happens. If you are really keen on writing adventures where local warlords are chilling out on the open-air rooftop patios of their otherwise heavily fortified fortresses, or melee-oriented monsters plan an ambush in a canyon in a vast wasteland, or a dangerous leapfrog between a series of elevated platforms over something dangerous, you want to make those low-level adventures, or else a typical party, possibly even accidentally, will just completely circumvent the whole thing. There is a whole lot of that in the back of the Amnesia Campaign. My group... literally skipped giant swaths. Heck, there was a whole side quest in the last book where the PCs are rewarded with the location of a giant obelisk which I had to cut because... it was in the middle of a big open outdoor space, and they flew over the city on the way in. They definitely had a view over those hedges.

This sort of dovetails into the next issue, consistently escalating threats. The whole fantasy RPG gimmick is that at level 1, you’re a helpless peasant barely capable of doing anything remarkable, and by level 20 you’re literally punching gods in the face and have more money in your pocket than everyone else in your home country combined (with the obvious exception of the other people in your party). Now, mechanically, balancing around that is a very easy math problem. Characters of level X are meant to deal with threats of level Y, either pull a Y level monster out of the book, or slap levels on something lower to bring it to that point, or spread that out over more enemies, then they drop Z amount of fancy loot. Easiest thing in the world. But you also need things to fit together thematically. You can absolutely throw fighter levels onto the local chicken-stealing goblins to make them mechanically as threatening as a demigod bursting through from another plane of reality, but when a group of characters is at a level where they can be expected to handle the former, it’s just plain weird for them to end up dealing with the latter. Like, yes, these particular goblins have 200 HP instead of the usual 4, so the local town guard can’t handle them, but that should never be true of chicken-stealing goblins. You don’t get that tough stealing chickens, and once you’ve gotten that tough, you should have your sights set a good deal higher than that. At least be stealing rocs or something.

The 4th chapter of the Amnesia Campaign is a particularly blatant example of not getting this, featuring a large number of “please be aware the party can fly at this level” moments mentioned above, and also just demanding the PCs deal with problems that really are beneath them at that point. Seeking out local guides, impressing petty local warlords, getting challenged by giants they must impress to rest safely when crossing a huge desert. These are... not appropriate speed bumps at a point in the narrative where the party is traveling to a location where they are going to literally fight a god, weakened or otherwise. The whole setup would be wonderful as the first chapter of a campaign, but that far in, it just doesn’t work. Particularly when the actual opening of the Amnesia Campaign sets the tension very high right off the bat, with extradimensional threats, shapeshifters, an evil cult, things that typically come later as things start to escalate.

This isn’t to say you can’t mix things up a little. Dealing with threats well below a party’s capabilities can be really nice as a chance to just sort of flex, and get some perspective on how much more capable they’ve grown over time, but you have to do it in a low-tension point of the narrative, and a little self-awareness about it doesn’t hurt.

Finally, while I really kinda hate modern wealth-by-level assumptions, they are baked into the design of the game, so if you’re running with it, you really need to make sure you’re really giving the players something they can use. The Amnesia Campaign really leans heavy on treasure being weird oddities that may be of value to a collector... while also being set, generally, in places so totally removed from civilization that shopping trips aren’t really practical. Much less those needing the party to really find the right sort of buyer.

Really, you want to give out entirely practical loot (really hard to do without knowing the party makeup, but variety can work), big piles of cash/sellables along with sufficiently large cities along the way for viable shopping, or raw materials suitable for crafting plus ample time to really do something with them.

Anyway, hopefully this has come across more as practical constructive advice for anyone writing a campaign, either as a printed product or just for your home game, not just me tearing into the Amnesia Campaign at length.

#rpg #game design #gm advice

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countessofbiscuit · 3 years

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thank you for the reply to the codywan ask! I've been a long time admirer of your fics and the way you write, and i adore the way you engage with sw lore, characters and relationships. i'd love to pick your brain about something - how do you write and see characters with all their flaws without being "turned off" by it? i recently read meridian, and was fascinated by your exploration in the power dynamics btw ahsoka and rex, but also discomfited because ahsoka is one of my favourite characters1/

Hey there — you’re very welcome and it’s always an honor to shepherd someone into the Rexsoka fold ♥ There’s a lot of meaty stuff here and I’m kinda hungover from Christmas Adam, but I’ll pitch in a little on what I think are your two main questions:

1. How do you write and see characters with all their flaws without being "turned off" by it? . . . . I frequently am turned off by it — if by ‘turned off’ you mean, that I feel my instinct to stan diminish. It’s almost bound to happen when one stops privileging their POV by exploring them from the perspective of somebody else, especially when said character is privileged in and by the narrative, too. And I don’t think transforming and complicating one’s relationship with the source material in that way is a bad thing; it makes for stronger writing and more empathetic stories. It’s interesting that you mention Ahsoka, though, because where I used to enjoy her pretty easily as a character with flaws, in the sense that she was written as being real (and therefore, relatably human), I have struggled to reconcile myself to her as a character who now seems flawed by inconsistent writing — or perhaps I should say, inconsistent framing. There’s a dissonance (imo) between how she’s elevated by the Powers That Be, and what her late actions in canon beg us to believe about her. There’s a chasm in the treatment of her character that I’ve felt somewhat compelled to fill with fic (as I am sure others have), while at the same time, I’m sitting under a disappointment that’s not very inspiring, lol.

(n.b. Interestingly, Bo-Katan has lately been subject to a similar inconsistent treatment from On High; but as she’s never been practically deified by the creators or the fandom, I don’t find the discordance so jarring, since I’m used to admiring her as a difficult anti-hero with dips into villainy.)

2. Escapism vs Critical Engagement: There’s a doozy. Let’s just say we contain multitudes, and acknowledging that as individuals is hard enough sometimes, let alone when people come together to enjoy (or not) A Thing (especially A Thing as big as Star Wars). I don’t have the answers on how to make it less unsettling when someone critiques or criticizes something that you (general ‘you’ here) just want to casually imbibe for the feel-good factor, except to allow yourself to be comfortable with being unsettled. It’s a popular adage in fandom that people come to the table for different things: some folks want a five-course meal complete with palate cleansers and wine pairings, some folks want a bowl of Easy Mac, and other folks want a rigidly healthy Paleo plate; as long as we’re all sitting down and engaging in good faith with each other about our choices, knowing when to leave the table or just swap seats or try something new, all to the good. The problem comes when one person demands that everyone should have what they’re having (usually the Paleo person, lbr), and lashes out when they meet opposition. We understand this pretty well in day-to-day life, yet when it comes to something as intensely personal as consumption and production of fictional material, everybody’s got an opinion about how others are doing it wrong — undoubtedly because, for so many of us in fandom, our identity and self-worth are so wrapped up in it. I catch myself doing this all the time; to reference Codywan again, I feel my lip curl when people write it with no reference to the ~reality~ of those characters’ situations as I see it (as I am sure plenty of people recoil at ships that I like) … but then, I recognize this feeling as irrational and selfish and I just channel my frustration into doing my own thing instead and hope it touches somebody else who feels the same.

To bring this back round: “Let people enjoy things” and “think critically” should be able co-exist, and beyond saying that yeah, it’s difficult and takes maturity, I’m hesitant to add any other sort of proviso to that statement (“should be able to co-exist, so long as X Y Z” &c.). Do I think people have to performatively genuflect in the direction of all the ~problems~ with something before they are allowed to engage casually with it? No. Do I think acknowledging war crimes in a google doc about a some cartoon space siege will stop actual war crimes? No. Do I personally appreciate when even casual engagement displays some element of critical thought, and do I find myself drawn to those creators in particular? Yes and yes. Everyone’s escapism looks different.

But if I can make one random value judgement statement about critical engagement here, without equivocating: the anti preoccupation with defanging sex and interpersonal romantic relationships in fiction, to the exclusion of other topics concerning humanity and the myriad ways it can be shitty, as part of some progressive movement is so bizarre to me; not only do the goalposts constantly change for what’s “pure” between two or more people, but it’s a very myopic way to regard characters who exist in the complex round, and, imo, a really privileged Western mindset. Also, it’s boring as fuck. I like intellectually playing in the dirt; someone who tells me to wash my hands while I’m sitting ass-deep in mud just makes themselves look supremely dense.

Not sure I really answered anything here, but I did appreciate the chance to noodle over your thoughts. It’s always a good exercise. And thank you for taking the time to engage with my writing : )

#asks #fandom

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nookishposts · 3 years

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Managing Messages

It would appear that there is a sea change going on in my brain. Self-reflection seems to be a mid-life given and I believe that has ramped up for many of us during restricted pandemic conditions. Once we tired of bread making and Netflix binges and being unable to wear anything but buffet pants, many of us got contemplative; involuntary monks in retreats that needed dusting.

As a storyteller I listen a lot and try to see the funny in the foibles and fairy-tales of everyday living. We tell ourselves whatever we need to in order to get from place to place,between frustrations and surprises, for better or worse. Case in point : “I will eat this last cookie, in addition to the two I just had, because it would be silly to put the bag back in the cupboard with just one cookie left.” Please tell me it’s not just me....

Rules of comportment have changed a lot in the last year and we have been more often confronted with the quirks of our own company. We examine the world through a lens of a necessarily more domestic perspective, noticing the dust dinosaurs under the bookshelf from our horizontal couch-lolling, seeing the cobwebs near the ceiling, remembering that we’d promised to freshen the cupboards with a coat of paint, and scrolling, scrolling, scrolling the hours away.

There are things I promised myself last November that I would spend the Winter doing; among them squats my own personal elephant-in-the-living-room; the actual work of assembling/organising some of my writing for publication. I have promised myself this every Autumn for the last 4 years, maybe more. Not following up has absolutely nothing to do with the pandemic and everything to do with the mixed messages in my early brain-wiring that I have managed until now to avoid reconciling. No, I am not blaming my parents for my failures; but I am finally acknowledging that they inadvertently gave me a puzzlement of fears to figure my way through. Analysis paralysis. That particular writing assignment is way overdue. I guess I have to start somewhere.

My parents, both born pre-Depression grew up in financial poverty, in families that strove to keep them fed and sheltered rather than striving for the sake of striving itself. Neither finished school because it was just not a priority next to taking on some responsibility for keeping the families basic needs of living met. They were taught to keep their heads down and noses-to-the-grindstone, to never think of aspiring beyond their “station” in life or if they did, to keep it to themselves. Which I think they did. I don’t recall either of them ever talking about having dreams for themselves except in the most self-deprecating or pipe-dreaming kind of manner, as if dreams were to be sloughed off, abandoned to the past, along with childhood.

So I grew up the eldest child of two very hard-working people whose attitudes combined in a united defensive front against those they’d been taught to believe were their “betters”; people like academics, doctors, and politicians. People of means, likely inherited. People of power and influence, genetically programmed to screw the little guy. Seriously.

I was a dreamer from the get-go. I had a hearty imagination fuelled by a belief in magic and a natural disinclination to follow the rules, a deeply curious little kid who had a knack for remembering and a sense of wonder at the world itself. My parents, like most of their generation were more concerned that I be prepared for harsh reality than for questioning the status quo. I too was to work hard, keep my head down, and not entertain any real ambition for fear of life beating it out of me. They both knew how to laugh and were not without creativity, but all of it was directed and drained off in matters of pure practicality.

Mixed messages have dogged me ever since, though I have long been of an age where I know it is my responsibility to unravel things for myself. Distilled, the messages that I carry are as follows: from Dad it was “who the hell do you think you are with your book-learning and big words? You think you are better than us? The hell you are!” And from Mum it was: “Well, good for you, but don’t get used to success because it doesn’t ever last.” Both attitudes came from fear, his from being usurped or found wanting and hers from being afraid of serial disappointment. Translated in my brain, those echoing, looping messages have kept me from believing it is okay to just take a grand leap of faith in myself. Good lord, what if I fail and embarrass us all?! The child in my brain wrestles with the adult who logically knows there are no guarantees either way, but that to do nothing is also futile.

I am a storyteller. My maternal grandparents were too. I read from a very young age and made up my own stories, even inventing a couple of imaginary friends to take along on my adventures. In school, I loved to read and write and went through systematic progressive phases of writing poetry and one-act plays and folk songs and short fiction. As an adult, I have written as therapy, for myself and for others of my generation who can relate to the things we all go through but I am willing to write and often laugh about. Writing is confession, and community, and collective consciousness. For me it’s most often spontaneous, off-the-cuff riffs about flushed car keys and public prat falls. Stories are how I make sense of the World, as well as the world of possibility. I write, I send it out like a flimsy paper airplane and hope it doesn’t crash too soon.

This past Winter I was all set to organise the many musings that I have blurted out on Facebook, in my blog, as a result of writing groups and workshops and the encouragement of kind readers. I wanted to prepare for publication a collection of mostly lighthearted observational spit-takes and rim-shots. But I didn’t do it. Every time I sat down, I would find a distraction to wander towards instead of the focus I needed to cobble my pieces (literal and figurative) together. I have watched friends publish works over the past two years and been so very proud and thrilled for them, admiring of and inspired by what they have done. Yet, I seem paralyzed in my own attempts. They tell me this is quite normal, this abject terror of imposter-ing, of discovering that I am just not any good at what I love so much that it is a significant part of my identity and therefore too personal to withstand the possibility of repeated wounds of rejection.

Possibility. It’s a double-edged sword of a word if ever there was one. We could fall. Or we could fly. The net between the two is full of holes.

I hear the words again; “who do you think you are?” and “don’t get used to it” and they stop me in my tracks, they burst the shiny pink bubble of joy that comes with delicious combinations of sounds and ideas, and I drop to the ground in a heap, feeling simply foolish, embarrassed to be caught dreaming. But I am a big girl, and I know full well that the real joy is in the doing, and the real fear is in the letting go...in sending those bubbles of joyous play and pondering out to fend for themselves in a world where most are shot out of the sky with a sharp stone from the slingshot of publishers simply trying to dig through a constant avalanche of submissions to find their own diamond..a money-maker that will keep the rent paid and the doors open. It’s really just a different degree of striving isn’t it?

I don’t ever expect to make much money from writing, although between copy-writing and biographies, I do make some. I would like to find the guts to write one really good book made up of many quirky little parts, something that other people could enjoy and relate to. (Yes,I’d settle for a bathroom book.)The very best part for me about telling a story are the stories that other people tell in response..that lovely, luscious, leveller of hearing “me too!” makes me feel like I’ve accurately described our human-ness. It’s that thing connects us all.

I’ve read lots advice from writers I admire...all the bits about getting my ass into a chair and just DOING it, letting a good editor chip the mud away from the motherlode, and suspending self-criticism in deference to those people paid to do it as their part of the journey toward publication. I have researched the publishers who accept the kind of work I think I write (that definition is hard!) and I have several versions of my elevator-pitch all ready to go. I have a ton of material to be shaped, and another ton in my head yet to be written down. What I am currently working on, the linchpin to all the rest, is courage. And perhaps a refresh button on my discipline. I really want to do this in spite of and perhaps to some degree, because of those old worn thin mixed messages. Wish me well.

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rainming7561-blog · 4 years

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8 Toxic Habits You Should Get Rid of to Improve Your Quality of Life

Avoiding them might change your whole life.

When I first tapped into personal development, I tried to build as many positive habits as possible.

I set up a morning routine, started to meditate, went to the gym frequently, and read at least one book per week.

Yet, a year later, I didn’t feel happier, more fulfilled, or improved.

And I didn’t understand why my life didn’t change even though I built all these new, powerful routines.

Change your habits and you’ll change your life is one of the bold promises of the self-help world and I didn’t know why it didn’t work for me.

But it’s true: Your routines can change your life.

Yet what I overlooked is that those good routines aren’t worth much if you don’t let go of your negative habits first.

Quite often, it’s our little, harmful routines that break our success, not the lack of good ones.

The following habits are certainly not easy to give up, but once you let go of them, you won’t only feel relieved but also much more energized in your daily life.

You make a mountain out of a molehill.

Did you ever make a great decision because you spent lots of time thinking about it?

Me neither.

The truth is that we never make good choices by overthinking.

According to Malcolm Gladwell, we make all our choices in the blink of an eye. Yet, we are not aware of it and want to have a logical reason. That’s why we overcomplicate most of our decisions.

In his book Blink, Gladwell explains how all our decisions are based on our intuition.

We don’t make the right decisions by thinking logically, we just try to find arguments for decisions we already made based on our gut feeling.

But life is so much easier and fun if you go with the flow, allow yourself to make mistakes, and correct your course on the way.

Spending time to think about problems or decisions might sound smart, but it isn’t.

Most people are overthinking everyday situations and end up spending hours and hours without producing results.

How to change it:

Small steps can lead to enormous changes: Why not try to choose your next meal in a restaurant quicker than you’d usually do?

Why not be the one who suggests where to go and what to do when hanging out with your friends instead of saying, “I don’t know.” or “I don’t care.”?

Try to take control of the small things in your life. Give your best to make the unimportant decisions as quickly as possible.

You are obsessed with other peoples’ opinions.

How often do you get discouraged because of other people’s opinions?

The odds are high that your answer is too often.

The bad news is that you’ll never be able to satisfy everybody. The good news, however, is that it doesn’t matter.

You have one life and you don’t need to waste it by living up to the standards of others.

How to change it:

You can’t be everybody’s darling, but you can indeed be your own hero and save yourself.

Stop muting your inner voice to satisfy others and start sharing your light with the world.

You are living for the weekend.

So many people waste their lives looking forward to the weekend.

This is a particularly dangerous trap for people who aren’t happy in their jobs and spend the whole week surviving instead of living.

But the truth is that weekends are just a small part of your life. You can’t be unhappy from Monday to Friday and expect the weekend to compensate for these negative feelings.

A week is a great period to set small, realistic goals and track your progress. And if you like what you do, each Monday is a new opportunity to create an amazing week.

How to change it:

Nobody hates Mondays. You either hate your job, your coworkers, your boss, or something else related to Monday, but certainly not the day itself.

If you live a life you love, you’ll appreciate each day as an opportunity to share your gift with the world.

Stop blaming Monday and identify the part of your life you really hate. That’s the only way to eliminate it and create a week and life you truly enjoy.

You are fearing change.

You don’t have to be cheerful about everything that happens in life. Yet, your fear shouldn’t hold you back.

We all know that things could be way worse at any point in our lives.

Even the fact that you are reading this article right now indicates that you are among the wealthier, more privileged people of the world.

Life is changing faster than ever before and we might be facing new challenges every single day. That’s why the most adaptable people will always win in the long run.

How to change it:

Stop being afraid is easier said than done, but it’s probably one of the most underrated pieces of advice.

Even if changes might be uncertain, there is almost always a positive aspect to them.

Most of us grow up being taught to play it safe, get a well-paid job, build security, and avoid changes. Yet, change can also mean improvement.

Every challenge in your life will help you to improve and become a better version of yourself. Be courageous, keep your eyes on the positive aspects, and try new things. And if it still gets too scary, ask yourself the following question:

What’s the worst thing that can happen?

Quite often, you’ll realize that the worst thing isn’t that bad.

You are trying to please everyone.

How often do you find yourself doing something just to make someone else happy?

Sure, sometimes, it’s great and necessary to do something just for the sake of making someone happy, but most of the time, the problem is our inability to say no.

If you can’t say no to the wrong things, you won’t be able to say hell yeah to the projects, people, and opportunities that truly excite you.

How to stop it:

Be aware of your self-worth. Remind yourself of what you want and what you need to do for it. Saying yes to others often means saying no to yourself.

If you always try to please others, you’ll be ignoring your own desires.

The first step, however, is to know what you are actually aiming for. You need to be aware of your life purpose, your goals, and your priorities.

Once you know your priorities and the things you want to achieve, you will waste less time on the wishes of others.

You are living paycheck to paycheck.

Every single day, we’re being bombarded with thousands of sales pitches. Making purchases is simpler than ever before and great marketers know how to catch our attention, even if we don’t need anything.

Yet the harsh truth is that overspending will not only ruin you financially, but it’ll also harm other areas of your life.

You can’t increase the quality of your life if you always live paycheck to paycheck and are surrounded by stuff you don’t need.

How to change it:

Get used to saving your money before spending it and avoid the trap of wasting your entire paycheck on consumer goods.

Sooner or later, you might face unexpected emergencies. When these situations occur, you’ll be glad to have a safety net instead of waiting for your next payment.

You are living in the past.

The surest way to live a miserable life is by spending too much time worrying about the past.

If you want to be happy and fulfilled, you need to learn how to be present and enjoy the small joys of everyday situations.

Instead of thinking about your past mistakes or fearing the future, try to be fully present right now. Because now is to only time you can influence and change.

You can’t change anything about the past, and you can’t determine your future. But you can give your very best to enjoy every moment and live intentionally.

“Do not dwell in the past, do not dream of the future, concentrate the mind on the present moment. “

— Buddha

How to change it:

Start focusing on the now. What can you do today to live your best life?

Set daily intentions, focus on your goals, and think of all the things you are grateful for.

Journaling, for example, is an excellent method to be more present and focus on the given moment. By writing down what you’re grateful for and what you feel at any given moment, you’ll learn to be more present and listen to your inner self.

You are talking yourself down.

Imagine having a friend who followed you 24/7, telling you things like:

“You’re too fat.”

“You’re ugly.”

“You can’t do that.”

“You aren’t worth it.”

Would you enjoy the company of that friend?

You probably wouldn’t.

Yet, too often, we are this friend ourselves. Most people are professionals in talking themselves down. But your relationship with yourself is the most important one.

You are the only person who’ll be with you forever.

So make sure to get on well with yourself and be your own cheerleader instead of your own critic.

“Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny.”

― Lao Tzu

How to stop it:

Focus on your strengths and achievements.

It’s easy to be confident and proud when you accomplish great things, but you need to be your own fan, even if you fail miserably.

Throughout your life, you will meet so many people who’ll try to discourage you or don’t respect your achievements.

But no matter what others say, you need to stay true to yourself.

Want to grow? Grab my free Personal Growth Toolkit with 42 effective & actionable tactics, resources & tools to elevate your life.

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wellesleyunderground · 4 years

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Wellesley Writes It: Interview with Patrice Caldwell ’15, Founder of People of Color in Publishing

Patrice Caldwell ’15 is the founder & fundraising chair of People of Color in Publishing – a grassroots organization dedicated to supporting, empowering, and uplifting racially and ethnically marginalized members of the book publishing industry. Born and raised in Texas, Patrice was a children’s book editor before shifting to be a literary agent at Howard Morhaim Literary Agency.

In 2018, she was named a Publishers Weekly Star Watch honoree and featured on The Writer’s Digest podcast and Bustle’s inaugural “Lit List” as one of ten women changing the book world.

Her anthology, A Phoenix First Must Burn – 16 stories of Black girl magic, resistance, and hope – is out March 10, 2020 from Viking Books for Young Readers/Penguin Teen in the US/Canada and Hot Key Books in the UK! Visit Patrice online at patricecaldwell.com, Twitter @whimsicallyours, and Instagram @whimsicalaquarian.

Wellesley Underground’s Wellesley Writes it Series Editor, E.B. Bartels ’10, had the chance to converse with Patrice via email about publishing, reading, and writing. E.B. is grateful to Patrice for willing to be part of the Wellesley Writes It series, even with everything else she has going on!

EB: When did you first become interested in going into writing and publishing? Did something at Wellesley spark that interest?

PC: For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved writing. It’s how I best express myself. That love pretty naturally grew into creating stories. I’ve always had a very vivid imagination. I’ve also always been pretty aware that publishers exist. I remember at a young age noticing the logos on the spines of books (notating the imprint/publisher), so by the time I was a teen I could recall which publishers published my favorite books (served me very well in interviews, haha) and was curious about that process. But I was a theater kid, intensely, that’s what I thought I would do, but then I decided to go to Wellesley and majored in political science (especially theory—I took ever class Professor Grattan, she’s brilliant) but then dabbled in a bunch of other subjects, including English. I think English courses definitely strengthened my critical thinking, but I absolutely do not think you have to be an English or creative writing major in order to work in publishing or be a writer. My theater background is just as helpful as is my political theory one. (I have friends who are best-selling authors who did MFA programs and others who never went to college.)

Wellesley was my safe space. I came back to myself while at Wellesley. I wrote three (unpublished) manuscripts during my time there, starting the summer after my first year, and I held publishing and writing related internships. I also took a fantastic children’s literature course taught by Susan Meyer (who’s a children’s author herself!) that changed my world. I highly recommend it. We studied children’s literature, got to talk to an author and a literary agent, and we wrote our own stories. I later did a creative writing independent study with her, and I truly thank Professor Meyer for expanding my interest in writing and publishing.

EB: How did People in Color Publishing come about? What goals do you have for the organization? What would you like people to know about it?

PC: I founded People of Color in Publishing in August 2016 to allow people of color clearer access into the book publishing industry, better support networks, and professional development opportunities. It really is about sending the elevator back down for others after climbing (& maybe even assembling) the stairs.

We’re currently working towards nonprofit status. You can learn more about us and our initiatives at https://www.pocinpublishing.com/ and sign up for our newsletter, which is incredibly well done. As you’ll see when you visit the site, the organization really is a team effort. I don’t and couldn’t do this alone; I’ve had an amazing team with me from day one. We each play to our strengths and work really well together. (The org is very active on Instagram and Twitter, too!)

EB: I am really excited about your collection A Phoenix First Must Burn, coming out from Penguin Random House on March 10, 2020. What inspired you to put together that anthology? What was challenging about the process of compiling the anthology, and what was rewarding about it?

PC: Thank you; I’m so excited for it as well. I talk about this more in the book’s introduction, but I was inspired by my eternal love for Octavia Butler—the title even comes from a passage in Parable of the Talents—as well as similar adult market anthologies like Sheree R. Thomas’s Dark Matter, and wondering what one for teens would look like. The answer is power and imagination like I’ve never before seen, in the form of a kick-ass, #BlackGirlMagic anthology that’s hella queer—I love it and wouldn’t have it any other way.

Before I became a literary agent, I was a children’s book editor. The editing of these stories was the easy part. It was super fun. The hard part was wrangling of everyone, haha. Thankfully they were amazing to work with and I wasn’t doing it alone—my then editor Kendra Levin also has a fantastic editorial eye.

As for what was rewarding, my younger self needed this. Like I said, it’s Black and queer. Since Toni Morrison passed, a day hasn’t gone by in which I’ve thought, about how she wrote for Black people, especially Black women, unapologetically. I feel that deeply. I got to work with some of my favorite writers writing today. How often does someone get to say that, you know. And, I grew a lot as a writer. I never thought I could write a short story, but I did. We’ve been getting some really great early reviews (like this beautifully-written starred review from Kirkus, OMG!) But going back to how my younger self needed this, the most rewarding thing has been the people who’ve reached out how excited they are to read it and how much they’ve been craving a book like this. It’s a dream come true. A dream I strategized to reach, worked my butt off on, and so yeah, I’m over the moon.

EB: You're also the author of a YA fantasy book (publication date TBD) in addition to the anthology. How is the experience of writing a fantasy novel different and/or similar to compiling an anthology? What advice would you give to someone writing their own book (of any genre)?

PC: It’s such a different experience in that writing this novel is all me, especially because it hasn’t sold yet (I’m finishing revising it now). My agents are amazing, with an excellent editorial skills, and so they’re certainly there to help and advise me should I need them—and then I have author friends I can ask for advice too—but ultimately if I don’t write this book, it doesn’t get written. There’s no one else to nudge.

The similarities, however, between novels and short stories are that ultimately, I’m the same writer, I’m the same person. For instance, I love experimenting with structure. My story for A Phoenix First Must Burnbegins in the present, goes back in time, and ends again at the present. The story I just wrote, for Dahlia Adler’s Shakespeare-inspired anthology, is epistolary—told partially in journal entries, and my third short story (for an unannounced thing) takes place partially on the set of a scripted reality TV show, so there’s definitely going to be script excerpts throughout. My novel is similar in that it’s told through three women, but two of them are narrated in first present tense (like, I am) whereas one is in third past (she was). And then every few chapters I have an excerpt of something from this fantasy world’s archives—oral myths passed down about various gods, peace treaties made over the years, accounts from the war that just ended, etc. It’s been a huge challenge and lot of fun.

I didn’t have the skills to pull this book off when I started writing it, which is something I think a lot of writers deal with at some point. Therefore, I had two options: put the book down and write something more manageable or take the time it took to write this. Neither option is better than the other—the best option is what’s right for you, and I didn’t have anything more manageable that I was as passionate about, so I had to write through it. When you’ve tried everything you can possibly try (including breaks, they’re important!) to unstick your story, you have to write through it. You have to deal with the voices (including sometimes your own) saying you can’t, and the only way to truly deal with those voices is to show up to the paper, the screen, whatever it is, and write. In writing and believing in my own work before anyone else has, I’ve found my confidence. Confidence in your own writing is key because only you can write the book you want to write <3.

EB: What are you currently reading?

PC: Realm of Ash by Tasha Suri. I just loved herdebut novel, Empire of Sand, and I’m so pumped to be diving into this one. Badass women, incredibly rich worldbuilding, and very cool magic as well as a lot about access to forgotten history and assimilation into other cultures.

My Dark Vanessa by Kate Elizabeth Russell. It is getting fantastic early reviews and was pitched as a 21stcentury Lolita (by one of my agents who sold it actually) and given all the #MeToo conversations, it has ended up being super timely. I hated Lolita (could not finish), and I love this book. Oh, and Stephen King loved it, which for me is an auto-buy. It’s out March 10, 2020.

The Midnight Lie by Marie Rutkoski. You definitely don’t have to love someone’s books to be friends with them, but in this case, Marie is a friend whose work I’m obsessed with. It’s set in the same world as another one of her series—one of my favorite series that’s like game theory in a fantasy world and begins with The Winner’s Curse. Marie is brilliant, this book is brilliant, and it’s also very queer. It’s out March 3, 2020.

Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik. This book has been getting the best of reviews and praise, so it’s been at the top of my to-reads list for a while, but I started reading it because a friend mentioned that it has multiple POVs all in first person (which is very unusual), and like I said, I love playing around with stuff like that. This is book is a masterpiece.

As you can tell, I love reading books. I also love book hopping, so I’m always reading a bunch at once. I’m on a bit of a fantasy streak right now. But from October to December 2019 I read like a romance novel a week (sometimes three a week, haha) and revisited my favorite urban fantasy series, so if you’re into those check out Chloe Neill’s Chicagoland Vampires + Heirs of Chicagoland series, Tessa Dare’s Girl Meets Duke series and of course our very own Jasmine Guillory, my favorite of hers thus far is The Wedding Party). After I’m done with my revisions, I wanna take a writing break and sink into Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey and Dan Jones’s The Wars of the Roses: The Fall of the Plantagenets and the Rise of the Tudors.

EB: What future projects/goals do you have for yourself and your career?

PC: I spent most of Wellesley working towards two goals: being published and working in publishing. In doing so, I accomplished a lot in a very short time, and I totally wrecked my mental health—it took most of 2019 to rebuild that. I’m trying to live more in the present and enjoy that. Career wise, I’m just gonna trust that I’m already doing the work I need to do and that I have the support systems I need to help me keep doing that. And for a personal goal, I have been wanting to spend more time in Paris—I went back for the first time in ten years for all of February 2019, and just loved it. My whole soul felt at home, so I’d like to take some French lessons to fill in the gaps (I took French from middle school through sophomore year at Wellesley and achieved proficiency, but I want to become fluent). And then I want to visit more for longer and see where that takes me.

EB: I so admire your freelance hustle, and as someone attempting it myself, too, I know that sometimes it feels like you have to work 24/7 to make it possible. How do you set boundaries for yourself and your work? How do you take care of yourself?

PC: So, I’m a literary agent and a writer, which means my entire income comes from commission I make from the writer client projects I work on and sell as an agent and advance payments (and hopefully royalties down the line) as a writer. That said, I didn’t become a literary agent until June 2019, and didn’t get the first payment from a client book I sold until November, so most my income is still coming from writing (for reference, I received my first advance check in fall of 2018).

As of now, balancing the two isn’t that hard for me. But you have to understand that I was first an editor and a writer, so I had to do most of the deadlines for A Phoenix First Must Burn while also going into an office 5 days a week, from 10-7/8pm. Now, I manage my own schedule.

My main “freelance life” struggle was that I was diagnosed with ADHD this year. When I left my full-time, salaried job, at the end of 2018, I didn’t realize just how helpful that structure had been. To me, that structure was only ever a limitation. I felt like it was ridiculous with all of this technology that we all had to be in NYC, I felt like editors needed to be more proactive, I preferred to travel to book festivals and teach at workshops and meet writers where they are, etc. etc. But then, without that structure, everything fell apart. Suddenly, tasks that used to take me five minutes could actually take me five hours because I only had myself to answer to. I would hyper-focus on everything but what I needed to be doing. It was a really hard time for me because I had all of these things I wanted to do now that I finally had more time to do them, but ADHD had other plans—I constantly felt like I wasn’t achieving what I knew I could because I had done it before.

I had to learn to forgive myself. This is how my brain works, and there are a lot of strengths to it (like if I remove distractions like the internet, I can hyper-focus for hours, I’m a fantastic problem solver, and I thrive in chaos—all things that help me excel at my work). Learning to forgive yourself for not accomplishing all the things, whether you have a mental illness or not, is really important.

You also have to be hyper-aware of your strengths and weaknesses. What are things you know you’re just not good at? Can you pay someone else to do it? Is there an app you can download that can make that task easier? I delegate and outsource every detail-level thing that I can because I’m horrible at details and I’ve finally accepted that that’s okay. One person cannot do everything forever; it’s not sustainable.

And then you also have to say no. If you can afford to say no to something that doesn’t really interest you / have a high payoff, do so. That is how you set boundaries. My health has become so much better ever since I started saying no to more things. Why? It gives me time to do other things, those things I’ve been saying forever I’m going to make more time for (like French lessons and reading books for fun). Now, my evenings and weekends are for non-work things. I love my jobs they’re still jobs.

Trust that you’re on the right path. Trust that you have the support systems you need and if you aren’t or don’t, dream and strategize towards those.

Ultimately, I am the happiest I’ve ever been and that’s because I finally stopped focusing my whole life around my jobs, stopped caring what people who aren’t paying my bills think, and started living my actual life.

EB: What else would you like our readers to know about you and/or your work?

PC: I have a website, Twitter, Instagram, and a newsletter. If you enjoyed this interview, definitely sign up for my newsletter (& check out past issues) as I always give creative life pep talks, share recipes and what books and tv shows I’m loving. I think of my newsletter as a longer form version of my Twitter. My website is a pretty standard website—you can find out more about my own books, my clients, events I’m attending, etc. there. And my Instagram is slightly more personal, with pretty pictures of my face and my book haha, and I share daily/weekly updates about my writing there via IG stories.

And, of course, buy my book: https://patricecaldwell.com/a-phoenix-first-must-burn

Thank you so much for having me and for reading. Happy New Year!

#wellesleywritesit #Wellesley Writes It #Wellesley #Wellesley College #Wellesley Underground #wellesleyunderground #Patrice Caldwell #EB Bartels #E.B. Bartels #class of 2010 #class of 2015 #Wellesley '15 #Wellesley '10 #People of Color in Publishing #publishing #writing #people of color #PoC

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blubberquark · 5 years

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The value and place of “good game design”

Last year, noted game design theorist, developer and podcaster Keith Burgun softened his stance on the theory of strategy games and game design as a discipline. I wrote 90% of this as a response to his podcasts back then, but when I read my own words it felt too negative. I don’t want to dunk on somebody for a commercial failure from the relative safety of not even having tried.

I’m posting it now though, because it ties into my ideas about Jam Games and Short Games, which I want to develop further, as well as my previous post about starting with simple games like Pong, Flappy Bird, and Minesweeper: Starting with simple ideas might not be enough. Top-down game design might be important after all.

Why not Game Design?

Part of Burgun’s change of heart was for what I would call “political” reasons, and I try to avoid politics on this blog. I hate how the conversation around game design grinds to a halt when some troll says “Aha, this looks like a game a Communist would make!“, and then the designer tries to explain himself and his politics and we stop talking about game design or the game itself altogether.

It’s one thing to talk about the politics, the political ideas and implications of a game, and quite another to look at the author and to try to read the authors politics into every game developed by that author. This is especially important when the author is outspoken about politics. People can be politically active and have strong convictions and just plain fail to convey their ideas through their game design.

Another reason for this shift was trying to give people more space for self-expression. Maybe you want to make something new and exploratory, or something short and poignant, or some “experience“ or “virtual installation” that is game-adjacent, but not even meant to be a game. Trying to ground “game design” in lessons learn from existing games, or trying to be precise with your terminology might be counterproductive. There is little overlap between the mechanics, dynamics, aesthetics, or affordances of Smash Bros and Firewatch (unless you count The Quiet Man, an artsy game that manages to combine worst of both worlds into a buggy mess). This difference between Command & Conquer and Bioshock is huge, and you can only find commonalities in the individual disciplines like graphics, UI design, or programming, and in high-level psychological and narrative principles of pacing and world-building.

Lessons in game design implicitly tell you how games should be. General statements about “game design” are bound to alienate some people. Artists who make short interactive pieces that are both experimental and personal at the same time, like Tale of Tales, Robert Yang or Anna Anthropy, are most susceptible to this particularly easy to disparage by accident if you don’t choose your words very carefully.

Lastly, it looks like the long development of Escape The Omnochronom, with many iterations on the game design and player feedback in early access, has informed his new approach to game design - just like Auro was the game that embodied the Clockwork Game Design theories. This quick look back on the development of ETO is interesting and sobering: https://keithburgun.net/escaping-the-omnochronom-and-moonshot-game-design/.

Wasted Design?

From a commercial point of view, it looks like a lot of the game design effort on ETO has been mis-spent: More than about interesting decisions and carefully balanced gameplay, players on Steam seem to want tons of content, random loot, and an epic, tragic backstory.

Most indie developers probably wouldn’t have completely scrapped all four prototypes, but released some of them as stand-alone games or as prototypes - either on itch, on Newgrounds, or a on mobile app store. One iteration of the concept - then called “Push The Lane!” - looked and felt more like a puzzle game, and might have been developed into a somewhat successful puzzle game on a mobile app store.

I might be wrong about this. There are many old, failed prototypes of mine that just didn’t work. True artists hate to see their practice pieces, and I don’t want to polish my all of old failed ideas that didn’t work until I can release them. I know why they don’t work. I’d rather try to make the ones that already work better. I’d rather start from scratch than working on a game idea when I know that it won’t work and why.

If you’re looking at somebody else’s failed prototype, you may think it warrants further exploration, or that it can ba salvaged, when the dev has already tried most of your suggested easy fixes and found that they don’t quite work. Ideas and game mechanics that work well in a short game, interesting based on their novelty alone, often cannot sustain a long-form game on their own - and that’s where game design as a discipline comes in.

If you’re just starting out, I can only urge you to fail faster, within days or weeks rather than years. Get feedback from players and other developers! See what works and cut your losses early! Don’t try to make a failed design work if you can use a better one! Try to start with a small game that works!

But if your goal is to make a long-form game, maybe the jump from a small jam game to a larger one is not just quantitative, but qualitative. You can’t just keep adding more stuff to Flappy Bird and hope it becomes Half-Life somewhere along the way.

Maybe the commercial bottleneck is not game design, but market research. The cool kids are all playing Fortnite now. By the time you finish developing your Fortnite clone, the cool kids will probably have moved on the the Next Big Thing. (I wrote this before the current wave of Auto Chess games. The next big thing only took half a year.)

Who needs Game Design anyway?

So Good Game Design(tm) seems to be only relevant once people have started playing the game. According to conventional game marketing wisdom, iterating on a part of your design can be all for nothing if you realise late in the cycle that the core loop has to be re-worked, and you need to create new content for the new mechanics.

According to conventional game marketing wisdom, a mechanically bland action platformer with good graphics can sell better than a well-designed strategy game with abstract black-and-white graphics.

An accessible multiplayer game can outlast a well-balanced multiplayer strategy game: You need your player base to grow beyond the critical mass to sustain online matchmaking and a competitive scene in the first place.

A game idea that is a great fit for a mobile game, small prototype, demo, or coffee-break browser game cannot always be turned into a long-form game. Many long-form games are impossible to distil down into a five-minute slice.

All that doesn’t mean that there is no market for good game design. There is certainly a market for well-made games, for good design in games, and for carefully designed games. These are not the same as game design though, if you go by the ideas from Burgun’s podcast. Game design is more fundamental, more about mechanics and interactive feedback loops, not about visual design, game feel or intuitive user interfaces.

The bigger your game gets, the more urgent a concern the actual game design becomes. If you’re aiming for a big commerical release, you need to make a long-form game. If you’re making a long-form game, you need better game design than you can get away with in a shorter one. When you start with a small core and add content and features, game design can sneak up on you, and you may end up with No Man’s Sky or Anthem.

My Funnel Model

First Impression: The first thing a player sees of your game is probably a pithy description of the game, and then screenshot, maybe a short video. What gets him interested in installing is a novel, clever premise (like ”puzzle MOBA” or “you play a crazy cat lady”), and your promotional screenshots.

When your potential new player looks for reviews of the game, only opinions, sound-bites and screenshots will reach him, because good game design cannot be easily captured in words and pictures. If the game design is hard to explain or doesn’t translate well to trailers or screenshots, you already have a problem. Labels like “fantasy“, “noir“, “battle royale“ or unique visual aesthetics can give you a way in, or they can turn players off.

Accessibility: This does not mean accessibility to people with disabilities in particular (which is ”Barrierefreiheit” in my native German, the freedom from barriers which exclude certain groups of people), although that kind of accessibility is also important. Accessibility in general means how easy it is to get into the game, in a similar way to how certain books can be very inaccessible by starting off with weird jargon you need to get used to, or fifty pages of dry exposition before the plot gets started.

Tetris gets difficult quickly, but stays accessible, whereas Dear Esther is impossible to fail, but quite dense and inaccessible in its own way. Whenever possible, it makes sense to introduce complexity and difficulty only gradually.

Innovation: Next you have to compete with all the other games in the user’s game library. If the novelty of the elevator pitch doesn’t translate into innovative gameplay, your player might just go back to playing Minecraft, Fortnite, or Hearthstone again. If the game is not accessible and engaging early on, then the player might quit early and not even get to the novel or innovative part. The innovative part must be accessible in itself, without feeling forced or tacked on, and it must feel natural to use it.

Some AAA games try to solve this by early on giving the player “a taste” of what’s to come, for example by giving all the spells in the magic system to the player during a flashback sequence in the first level. Then they take away the innovative game mechanics and proceed with a bunch of boring third-person action adventure RPG shooter things for half the game.

Core Gameplay Loop: This is where the good game design comes in. This is also the part that makes your players recommend the game to their friends.

In addition to good game design, adjacent qualities like responsive control design/game feel, clear visual feedback, legible game state, and quality-of-life features also become relevant when the player goes through the core loop a couple of times. Even when the controls and mechanics of your game are easy to learn, they can still be boring, tedious, or distracting.

Earlier this year, a game with an interesting premise, cool visual aesthetic, and some innovative mechanics on top of the classic JRPG formula was released on the Nintendo Switch. Unfortunately, neither the mechanics of combat nor the NPC dialogue were very engaging, or fun. The game got a lot of attention, but that attention culminated in mixed to bad reviews.

Getting the steps up to here right will give your game more eyeballs, and will get people to try it or even write about it. Getting the core gameplay loop right will make people enjoy and play your game more after that.

Scope: The more content there is - that can be quests, levels, guns, monsters, puzzles - the longer you can keep the core loop going. The amount of meaningfully “new” content you can put into your game is limited by the game design though. Just adding “two billions of guns“ won’t cut it if the gameplay difference between different pieces of content is not meaningful. The value of additional content also depends on the game design. Some games get more value out of their content. Mario Kart 8 for the Nintendo Switch has ten pre-arranged tournaments with for racetracks each. That doesn’t look like a lot of content, but the game gets a large amount of replay value out of them.

Sometimes the scope of a game is limited by the design and the core loop. Some puzzle game mechanics have only a handful of interesting puzzles in them, and are more appropriate for a one-off puzzle set piece in a larger action game than for a dedicated puzzle game.

Some game genres, like point-and-click adventures, are mainly constrained by the scope of the content, and a piece of content can only be used once. Puzzle- and strategy games can often squeeze a lot of value out of content by re-using the same units and mechanics in a new context or a different combination. RPGs are somewhere in-between, by re-using monsters, dungeon architecture, loot, and crafting elements, while quests, NPCs and villages must be uniquely crafted.

“Elegant” game design is not only good for its own sake, it also allows you to add more stuff into your game in a cost-effective way.

There is a flip side to this: Prototypes, jam games, mostly story-driven games, and demos don’t really need good game design at all. One can build a small game prototype based on novelty alone, without a way to expand the scope, maybe even without an engaging core gameplay loop. The core gameplay loops two or three times and then the game just ends.

If you want to make a long-form game, you have to think from the beginning about scope and longevity.

Grand unified theories of game design(tm) become more applicable the larger the scope of your game is. In a small game, individual aspects like game feel, visual design, music, “funny/edgy” dialogue or characters, and novel mechanics outweigh balance, level design, world-building, and well-written characters.

Depth: I am using “depth” somewhat loosely and colloquially: Depth is what keeps players coming back, and talking to each other. That can be endgame content, high-level competitive play, lore, or a modding/mapmaking scene. Depth can be speedrunning, or finding new, clever solutions to puzzles. Depth is finding new meaning in content you already know or played.

After I beat Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery EP, or after Waking Mars, I uninstalled the game and moved on. Nothing is making me come back to Mark of The Ninja, Dear Esther or Thomas Was Alone. I don’t think I will ever want to revisit Torchlight, the first or the sequel. I enjoyed each of these games - or in the case of Dear Esther at least I appreciated it, on a detached, intellectual level. I played Nuclear Throne until I had beaten the game, unlocked every character, seen every gun, and gone to most of the secret stages. Then I quit playing. I have no interest in looping.

I played a lot of StarCraft 2: Wings of Liberty. I played custom matches with my friends, I played on the ladder, I looked up strategy tips on TeamLiquid, I watched live streams of competitive games, and then I watched Day[9] analyse competitive games in-depth.

Back when I was a child, I played lots of multi-player games of WarCraft 3 and Worms: Armageddon. It never got stale for me. I played some multiplayer matches of Swords & Soldiers, but there is not a lot of variety, and it got stale rather quickly.

I know this evaluation of games and my concept of “depth” are both rather subjective. In content-heavy games, this kind of “depth“ can be hidden content, endgame content, side quests, and lore. In mechanics-focused games, depth and longevity are facilitated by game design(tm).

The recipe for popularity?

The funnel goes like this: First Impression > Accessibility > Innovation > Core Loop > Scope > Depth. At every stage, you lose some players, or potential players. If a potential player doesn’t hear about your game, that’s it. If a player looks at a let’s play or a review, and doesn’t understand what the game is about, that’s it. If your game is reviewed by a professional site, you can expect that they play through the main content. The longer players stay with your game, the more relevant game design(tm) will become.

Depth is beyond the scope of a review, but it will make people stick with your game for longer, and can make players show or recommend it to friends.

Depth and scope will make people stick with your game for longer, and make your game show up in Steam and Discord friend lists.

An engaging core loop will lead to good reviews and probably also good user scores.

Unfortunately, good game design is usually not the limiting factor, because we live in a word where we are bombarded with new game releases every day, and we have to decide which ones to buy, which free ones to download and play, or even which reviews to read, because there are just so many games that the limiting factor is time and getting attention in the first place, not how good - or “fun”, or “engaging” - the game actually is.

AAA studios already have our attention, or at least the attention of big gaming news sites, so they can compete for making the game with the best shooting or the biggest open world. AAA studios have an easier time getting a consistent player base for online matchmaking. In contrast to this, indies have to compete for attention in the first place.

However, once you have the attention of players and reviewers, you still have to convince them that your game is any good.

#game design #longpost #clockwork game design #game development #indiepocalypse #are games art

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rwbyconversations · 6 years

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Why I think some people don’t like Jaune

Jaune Arc. Jauney boy. You make very hard to like you sometimes.

Jaune Arc is almost certainly the most discussed character in RWBY, even more so than the titular four girls. This is not a very good thing. Since the early days of Volume 1, Jaune has been derided and mocked by portions of the community, often dismissed as a poorly planned out audience surrogate, a writer-insert and/or Miles shoving in a cliche shonen protagonist into Monty’s tapestry of art. That last one is hyperbole, for the record. But regardless, Jaune is far from unanimously loved by the fandom- just go see how many RWDE posts are about him. I tried reading some of them and after I finished washing my eyes out with bleach, I found myself mildly disagreeing with their contents.

(sidenote if anyone ever convinces Dudeblade to learn how to use italics, bold or underline to emphasize something instead of random capitalization like Baby’s First Word Doc I will actually pay you in pesos)

But while the reasons people give for hating Jaune are many, some of them have little basis in reality. Others, meanwhile, are quite painfully true and have incredibly valid criticisms that can be applied to RWBY as a whole at the core of their message. So today, I’d like to explain why I think some people hate Jaune, why some of the reasons don’t hold much weight, and why a few are quite valid.

Reason 1) “Jaune’s a Self/Author Insert!”

Perhaps the most common and damning criticism of Jaune, especially in the earlier volumes, were claims that Jaune was just an insert character for Miles to fawn over. Miles and Kerry have themselves said that Miles has had very little to do with writing Jaune in the show proper since Volume 1, and that most of Jaune’s larger scenes were done at the behest of Kerry or Monty. Quote:

In the first few Volumes, if Jaune was in a scene it was almost always because either Monty or myself wanted him in a scene. From the very beginning, Monty was very big on having that archetype of character be fairly prominent in the show. Miles has always been incredibly hesitant to insert Jaune into scenes, to the point where he's voiced before that he wishes sometimes that he didn't voice him.

That said, this only came out in early 2018 after Volume 5 had already wrapped. In the years before then, many a fan was utterly convinced that Miles was behind most of Jaune’s more limelight-hogging scenes in Volume 1 particularly. This wasn’t helped by some quotes of Miles that got taken out of context, primarily that he based Jaune off himself as a younger teenager (the quote is in fact referring to Jaune’s voice).

Fandom also plays a purpose in Jaune gaining the inglorious title of self-insert. Jaune’s lack of a semblance, conventional attractiveness, age that put him close to the girls and vague backstory meant it was very easy for fanfiction writers to appropriate Jaune into whatever they needed, which at best included harem comedies and at worst...

Well, hell on earth. Fandom has had a large impact on RWBY, and I believe the “self-insert” accusations regarding Jaune are perhaps the most clear example of this. Some people do still believe to this day that Jaune is an SI, but I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt to the writing team and assume that no, any intent was not maliciously planted and it was an accident.

Reason 2) Jaune’s an audience surrogate

This one actually has basis in reality since the crew have actually said Jaune’s purpose in the early volumes was to be the audience surrogate (see above, second bolded part). To explain the term the audience surrogate is a character, usually found in fantasy or science fiction stories, who is new to the setting and its more complex rules. Thus, when someone tells this character how the system works, it doesn’t feel weird for the audience to have this information. We learn with the character, drawing us further into the setting. On the surface, an audience surrogate is not a bad storytelling device, but what it comes down to is execution, and here is where I feel that RWBY falls flat on its face in handling Jaune.

Jaune’s primary purpose in the first half of Volume 1 is largely to serve as the vehicle through which we discover Aura. Aura, the resource incredibly common in-setting and able to be tracked to an exact percentile in tournaments. In fact, Aura is so easily tracked, Remnant’s smartphones can track other people’s Auras no sweat. Most audience surrogates usually only need lore explained to them when it’s a rare facet of life, hence why it’s often seen in fantasies with magic to get the reader caught up on the rules.

For example, in the Mistborn series, while Vin is aware of burning metal, she unlocks her Mistborn powers at the beginning of the trilogy and then has to learn about the other metals she didn’t know she possessed, and gets further training on the one metal (brass) she could burn that she thought was just her luck. As well, Vin infiltrates high society, so alongside learning about the different metals, we also use Vin’s inexperience to learn how high society works under the Lord Ruler.

For Jaune to have no clue about Aura, despite the commonality of it in-setting, is almost unthinkable and essentially requires his parents to have locked him in a basement for his entire life. While surrogates aren’t meant to know everything about a setting, it is expected that they at least know the basics- again, see Vin from Mistborn as an example of this. Therefore, I will not deny that Jaune is an audience surrogate. However, I do believe that Jaune is a bad audience surrogate who breaks the internal rules of a character alongside the logical rules of the setting.

Reason 3) Jaune’s a cliche shonen lead

Let me rattle off a quick idea for a story, like I’m giving an elevator pitch.

Our story is about a young boy (usually with spiky hair) who goes to join a magical academy so he can slay monsters. He’s not proficient in the art of combat but he has a big heart and genuinely tries most of the time, so through outside circumstances he manages to enroll in the school. Immediately, he gets pegged by the headmaster for special reasons and develops a crush with an cold-hearted young woman who rebukes his advances. All the while, he develops a close friendship with a shy girl who is holding a candle for him but he doesn’t see her desires until it’s too late. In the meantime, he continues to train to prove himself a great hero.

Now, who did I describe. Jaune Arc? Or half of the shonen genre? There’s a reason for the popularity in the stock shonen hero cliche- it’s pretty easy to get right on the first try, makes for a mostly likable hero who the audience can get behind and root for as they aspire to become a Pokemon master collect the Dragonballs win the Battle City Finals become the greatest hero who ever lived. Jaune hits a lot of the cliches of the Stock Shonen Hero in early RWBY, and this set off alarm bells in the minds of many of RWBY’s more anime-conscious fans. The moment Jaune fell for Weiss and she shot him down, the early fanbase were on-edge about Jaune. RWBY had been advertised as four girls fighting monsters and kicking ass with great choreography. And here comes this blonde wannabe in a hoody trying to insert a love triangle into all of that? Yeah, no thanks. Again, this was likely something Monty intentionally pushed through since the AMA says Monty was big on Jaune’s archetype being in the show.

Though Jaune, in my opinion at least, did step away from these trappings later in RWBY, becoming more sullen and less focused on traditional shonen ideals, the early days played no small role in defining why people loathed Jaune in early RWBY. And once the label of “shonen lead” was plastered onto Jaune, it would prove nearly impossible to remove.

In all honesty, this is one of the smaller reasons for people’s dislike of Jaune, but notable in that it set the groundwork- people already dismissed him as a cheap shonen lead, and that principle latched onto Jaune like gum onto a shoe.

Reason 4) Jaune’s stealing scenes and where it hurts characters

Though Jaune has had a significantly reduced presence in RWBY since Volume 1, it seems that his primary scenes in Volumes 4 and 5 had a very unintended consequence of taking away from other characters. One of the often-cited scenes of this is Volume 4 Chapter 10, Kuroyuri.

The scene is set for Ruby to finally confront the trauma bubbling beneath the surface that had been eating at her since Volume 3- Penny and Pyrrha’s joint deaths and the Fall of Beacon, her Silver Eyes and how no one was willing to talk to her about them. And yet who does most of the speaking in this scene? Jaune. Jaune indirectly hijacks the scene away from Ruby so that instead it can become a scene of, quite frankly, platitudes that ring hollow. Despite supposedly being a scene where Ruby is being built up, despite supposedly being about Ruby, and how inspiring she is, the active character in the scene, the one with agency and prevalent on-screen characterization... Is Jaune.

Volume 5 Chapter 11 is the other standout example of this, in what is now an infamous string of events. Jaune basically hijacks not one, not two, but three active character arcs- he again strips Ruby of her agency by going after Cinder, who also has her sub-plot of hating Ruby curtly kicked out a window because of Jaune hogging her attention, and then Weiss takes a frankly insulting dive so that Cinder has someone to spear so we have a cheap cliffhanger so dramatic tension can die onscreen so Jaune can have an excuse to pop his Semblance’s virginity. And let me stress, Ruby has about as much agency as some belly-button fluff for the rest of the Battle of Haven and by extension the entire Volume.

This is a reasoning for disliking Jaune that I fully understand and can get behind. Through a mix of tragic circumstance (the Volume 5 scene is effectively the one time Jaune takes relevance in the entire volume) and some mind-boggling creative choices, Jaune now twice in a row stripped Ruby of agency she has desperately needed, interrupted a two-year in the making subplot with Cinder, and indirectly killed RWBY’s dramatic stakes. Did you really think they’d kill Weiss in Volume 5? Exactly, no one really thought they’d go through on it, Weiss and the rest of RWBY are basically safe until the last two or three volumes. Regardless of whether or not Jaune is meant to be seen as a main character or a side, his focus scenes have the tragic mishap of constantly coming at the expense of someone else being undermined.

Reason 5) He’s... not actually that good a strategist.

Jaune is a crap fighter, he’ll readily admit to being much weaker in direct combat than anyone else in the heroes side. So instead, he adopted the sub-trope of shonen leads, the strategist/quick thinker. Be it Izuku in My Hero Academia or many of the protagonists in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, shonen has a long history of heroes who fight as much with their minds as they do with their fists.

Here’s the problem with that. Jaune’s really bad at being a strategist. In fact, despite not even doing it since Volume 3, Ruby has displayed far more tactical acumen than Jaune.

JNPR vs BRNZ isn’t won through tactical skill beyond just throwing Nora at the problem after Divine Cindervention (compare this with how effortless RWBY make taking down ABRN look). Jaune even rips off Ruby’s idea of code-names but his attempt fails due to insufficient practice. Meanwhile Ruby says “Checkmate” in Volume 5 and despite not having trained together for months, Blake and Weiss immediately jump into action.

Jaune explicitly quotes one of RNJR having said "you're the strategist", and is the character that gets to come up with a plan for taking down the Petra Gigas. And even though the way his plan is phrased initially gets played as humorous, his dumb strategy ultimately gets vindicated by actually working.

“Keep moving, run in a circle” is pretty poor advice (in fact, Ren had already been trying this strategy when Jaune said it and the Nuck still landed a blow on him), but in-universe it’s treated like gospel. Nobody points out how weak Jaune’s strategies are because from a meta perspective, the only way Jaune is able to stay relevant in fights in Volume 4 is to shout inane “strategies.” The issue with this is that (yet again) it comes at the expense of other characters, including (again) Ruby, who in Volumes 1 through 3 was shown as far sharper when it came to using her team and their strengths. Everyone else on the hero side has to take an intellectual dive so Jaune can take home a glorified participation trophy.

Jaune using his greatsword for a stabbing attack when it’s built for slashing in the Haven battle. I brought this up in my “What went wrong at Haven?” post, but I thought it was worth repeating that this is a massive blunder.

Reason 6) General misc stuff

I couldn’t make full points of these, so I made bullet points for some of the smaller reasons Jaune is disliked

The Weiss obsession. There’s no real nice way of sugarcoating Jaune’s actions in Volume 2, no means no. That this came about from some glorified improv and the idea that it would be a funny idea makes my stomach churn.

The bully arc taking so much time. Thanks to how Volume 1 cut some episodes, Jaune’s arc with Cardin took four weeks in real life to complete. This only exaggerated the issues people took with Jaune, and had RWBY not immediately come back with the fight-scene Renaissance piece that was Blake and Sun vs Roman, I can’t imagine how many people would have dropped the show thanks to an after-school special that got wedged in their fighting anime.

Jaune looking away and letting Cinder shoot Amber. Ignoring that Cinder’s Semblance can let her shoot around targets, which she does in the Pyrrha fight, Jaune never stood a chance against Cinder, and no matter what, most friends would be distracted by their friend’s agonized screams and would likely turn around in despair.

Jaune hating Qrow in Volume 4. Thanks to Jaune being the one member of RNJR willing to call out Qrow for his and Ozpin’s parts in Pyrrha’s death, Jaune got some flack from Qrow’s notable fandom. Ironically enough, people began to dislike Jaune more when he refused to ever act on these feelings after Ozpin’s return in Volume 5, with Jaune only ever calling out Ozpin after Yang did it with the Birds Reveal (I’ve written a piece before about why that reveal fell flat). His out of nowhere tepidness in approaching Ozpin regarding Pyrrha’s death was so out-of-nowhere that people were begging for Jaune to have screentime again, that’s how random it was.

To conclude, there are many reasons why people hate Jaune Arc, and the story doesn’t really help his case a lot of the time in all honesty. While some of the stated reasons are far from logical (I at least hope I’ve explained why I think he’s not a self-insert), Jaune unfortunately fails to set himself as a distinct character without it usually biting someone else in the ass. He fails to be a proper audience surrogate due to lacking essential knowledge about the setting. He has an unfortunate tendency to overshadow other characters and hijack their plots for his own scenes (poor Ruby), and he fails to even be that competent a strategist, leaving his supposed skills to be more of an informed attribute. Add in a variety of smaller reasons for his hatedom, legitimate or not, that have stacked up over the years, and Jaune unfortunately has several valid reasons to dislike him. While I still personally like the Noodle Boy, and I do hope that he can develop and grow stronger as a fighter, tactician and character in the coming future, I cannot deny that I fully understand why people would be turned off by Jaune. So much could have been done with Jaune, but much like a bad salad that comes before a great main course, you’ve already lost your appetite before the main servings arrive.

To surmise, Jaune-hate began because of a perfect storm of circumstances that would be impossible to make happen on purpose. He could have recovered from the flirting with Weiss, the Audience Surrogate/Shonen lead status, or being the main character in several drawn-out arcs, but all at once? Was too much for any one character to bear, and Jaune was unfortunately the character who had all of this lumped on him within a year of the show beginning.

Thank you for reading.

... damnit kid why do you make it so hard to like you sometimes I don’t like doing this

#rwby #rwde #jaune arc #ctrq #ruby rose #miles luna #oscar pine #author insert #pyrrha nikos #cinder fall #rwby analysis

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sheminecrafts · 3 years

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Anyone is building a marketplace for advice, one 5-minute call at a time

Anyone, an audio app that’s building a ‘marketplace for advice’ one five-minute phone call at a time, is launching new versions of its iOS and Android apps today* and beginning to large-scale onboarding after operating in a limited closed beta for the past six months.

The app — which was founded around 18 months ago (so pre-pandemic) — has a simple premise: Advice is best delivered verbally, concisely and one-to-one, in a time-limited format.

Video is distracting and a hassle to fit into busy people’s schedules. Text is time-consuming and prone to misunderstandings. But a simple phone call can — quickly and usefully — cut through, is the thinking here.

Hence the decision to hard-stop at a five-minute phone call. The app automatically terminates each call at the five minute mark — no ifs, no buts (and, well, hopefully fewer time-nibbling ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ too).

To fund development of the marketplace, the team has raised around $4 million in total to date — mainly comprised of a $3.6M seed round led by Berlin-based Cavalry Ventures with participation from Supernode Global, Antler and a number of high-profile angel investors (contributing angels include Atomico’s Sarah Drinkwater and Sameer Singh; and ustwo’s Matt ‘Mills’ Miller, among others).

Broadly speaking, online audio has shown its staying power through a sustained podcast boom and, more recently, a buzzy moment for social audio, via developments like Clubhouse and Twitter Spaces — which speak to a general sense of pandemic-struck ‘Zoom fatigue’ as remote workers max out on video calls at work yet still crave meaningful connections with other people at a time when opportunities to mingle in person are still limited vs pre-COVID-19.

A lot of social audio can still be very noisy, though, and Anyone wants to be anything but. This is short-form, topic-specific audio.

Clubhouse closes an undisclosed $4B valuation Series C round, as tech giants’ clones circle

Why five minutes? It’s short enough for a busy person to almost not have to think twice about taking a cold call from someone they’ve probably never spoken to before — while being just about long enough that some useful advice can be distilled and imparted across those 300 seconds of one-to-one connection.

Naturally the short format does not allow for group/conference calls. It’s one-to-one only.

Anyone’s CEO also reckons this “intimate”, short-form audio format could help drive diversity of advice by encouraging people whose voices may be underrepresented in traditional mentorship fora to feel more comfortable offering their time and knowledge to others. (He touts a current 50:50 user-split between men and women offering expertise through the app — and 25% people of color.)

“It’s not about taking long form meetings and compressing them — it’s about taking those conversations that would never have happened… and making them happen,” says CEO and co-founder David Orlic, pointing out that mainstream calendar apps have a default meeting slot that’s set to half an hour or an hour. So the wider thesis is that our current tools/infrastructure just aren’t set up to help people give and grab bitesized advice. (And, well, on the Internet anyone can claim to be an expert — but of course you can’t rely on the quality of the ‘advice’ you find freely floating around online.)

“Our belief is that there are a lot of five minute problems that we could be solving — whereas there are a lot of 30 or 60 minute problems that have solutions designed for them already. So we’re kind of building this for those conversations that aren’t happening,” he adds.

Orlic hints that the intention is also to leave Anyone’s callers a little hungry for more — to feed demand for more five-minute conversations and so fuel transactions across the marketplace.

“If you look at the demand side — the callers — there’s always multiple calls involved. So people will call a lot of people and ask them basically the same question or bounce ideas. And then they will aggregate those insights into something that’s much more valuable than one conversation,” he continues. “So it’s like building an advisory board for yourself.”

The idea for the platform came after Orlic and his co-founders realized they could trace key career decisions to a handful of short conversations — brief moments of advice that ended up profoundly influencing the trajectory of their working lives, to the point where they were still looking back on them years later.

“None of us in the founding team had any networks to speak of when we were growing up. And we had fairly little exposure to opportunity. Alfred is from a small village in the middle of nowhere in Sweden, I grew up in an immigrant family, and Sam is a working class bloke from Leeds. And looking back at our careers we could track them back to this handful of conversations — these haphazard moments when someone gave us a piece of critical advice,” he tells TechCrunch. “For them it was just another five minute chat but for us it turned out to be life-changing.”

“For Alfred it was some quick advice on how he could land a job at Google which he managed to do and spent almost a decade there working as a growth guy on Google Chrome and other stuff; for Sam it was how to start a company; for me it was the suggestion that I as a creative should pursue an MBA — which I ended up doing. So we started thinking long and hard about the concept of advice, and we became obsessed with opening up these closed networks.”

The aim for Anyone’s marketplace is to make similarly pivotal moments accessible to all sorts of people — by giving the app’s users the chance to call any expertise provider on the network (provided they can afford the fee) and ask their question.

A slogan on its website poses the question “imagine if you could call anyone in the world” — which is certainly a poetic-sounding moonshot to be shooting for, although the size of the user-base remains far off that global vision at this early stage.

“What we’re building is really the phone book of the future,” says Orlic, slotting his elevator pitch into our ~30-minute phone conversation. “We’re building a place for unique, one-to-one, five minute experiences — which is something really different from most social audio plays.”

He points to a trend of other apps intentionally applying limits to change/define the user experience in behavior-shaping ways (like Poparazzi, a self-styled ‘anti-Instagram’ photo sharing app that doesn’t let you take selfies to make you take more pics of your friends and vice versa; or the dating app Thursday which limits users to one active day of use per week to prevent endless swiping and nudge matches toward going on an actual in-person date).

The marketplace component of Anyone’s app is another intentional limit too, of course. Calls are not free by default.

Putting a price on Anyone’s one-to-one advice is one way to try to weed out unserious (or indeed abusive) users from those genuinely seeking others’ expertise on specific topics.

But primarily it’s there to provide an incentivize for people who have expertise worth sharing to make themselves available to take cold-calls (even very short ones) from strangers/those outside their existing contact networks.

Pricing for a five-minute call is set by Anyone users. So the call fee can vary from nothing at all (if the user distributes a free voucher code) to as little as $5 or all the way up to $500 (!) which does sound pretty crazy expensive. But Orlic notes users can choose to donate their fee to a charity if they do not wish to financially benefit from the advice they’re dishing out (so there may be instances where a high fee includes a philanthropic component).

With such highly variable fees, the app will need to have a good safety mechanism to re-confirm a user really does want to be charged the specific fee. (And, god forbid, to avoid the risk of butt-dialling…

)

“If you want to connect with someone I think it’s reasonable to put a cost on the scarcest resource on the planet which is someone’s undivided attention,” Orlic argues, suggesting that plenty of mainstream tech confuses transient ‘access’ with attention. “We can ‘access’ people everywhere — we can listen to them, read them, follow them. But that’s not the same as attention… Someone’s undivided attention is a remarkable, remarkable thing. And the five-minute cap forces you to be very clear and to the point about what you want to chat about.”

With its intentionally attention-slicing infrastructure — which manages ephemeral contacts into precisely measured and billed units — “all of a sudden you have all of these conversations that wouldn’t have happened happening thanks to this manageable way of connecting with people”, is the claim.

Anyone users wanting to list themselves on the marketplace to sell one-to-one advice will need to create a profile that specifies their availability to take calls and some basic details (name, career details, location etc), as well as setting their five minute fee.

They also need to provide details of the “conversation topics” they’re comfortable giving advice on.

Co-founder Alfred Malmros’ profile includes examples such as: “Make the leap. Quitting a dream job to make it on your own”; “Rising quickly in a large organisation — politics vs. talent”; and “It takes a fool to remain sane. Thriving as an employee” — so topic steerage looks intended to be not only specific but maybe also give a flavor of the individual’s personality to further help advice-seekers decide if they want to shell out for five minutes of that particular person’s time.

The risk of imposters or low quality advice is being managed by “vetting and verification” processing all advisors have to go through prior to being able to sell, per Orlic. “Beyond verification, we put a lot of work into making sure that everyone on Anyone understands what constitutes good advice, how to avoid projection and biases in conversations, etc,” he adds.

The platform also incorporates a rating system — again, in an attempt to keep quality up across the marketplace.

Anyone’s early users are a blend of creators, founders and investors, per Orlic — including a lot of first and second time founders, as you might expect, with the pandemic having limited in-person startup networking opportunities.

He also says they’ve attracted a lot of people mid career, looking for advice on how to quit their jobs and pivot into something totally new — again, likely fuelled by the pandemic reconfiguring many things around how we work (and, more broadly, how we may be thinking about work-life balance).

“When you’re doing that kind of big life decision you really want to connect with a lot of people and ask around,” he suggests on the interest from established professionals looking for advice on a career switch. “Also there’s a high willingness to pay, I’d argue, when you’re in that position.”

“Business is a huge thing as a marketplace for advice,” Orlic adds, noting that a record number of businesses started in the last year too. “Investors — by the way — love this for deal flow because they can speed date a lot of founders and then pick who they continue with.”

Parents are another community of early users he highlights — saying they’ve been both offering and soliciting advice during the early test phase. He says one of the best pieces of advice he’s personally gained through the network was a conversation about parenting, adding: “I’ve had some really profound conversations with other dads. People that know a lot more about parenting than I do — where I’ve gotten really actionable advice and support. So that has been a big thing for me personally.”

Orlic also says he’s excited about potential in the area of mental health — suggesting the short-form format could be helpful to get people to have conversations about therapy which, since they’re so bitesized and bounded, may be a non-intimidating introduction toward taking up more sustained support.

He also mentions that he’s excited about the potential for civic society to make use of the platform as a tool for driving public engagement and awareness around issues and campaigns.

Appropriately enough, Anyone’s team has been dogfooding by using the app to get advice to help build the startup. (Orlic admits he asked someone on the network how to get TechCrunch’s attention and was advised, by the unnamed investor, to pitch this reporter — so it sounds like he got some solid advice there ;)

The app has had around 1,000 test users during the closed beta period — with some 12,000 on the wait-list that Orlic says they’ll be onboarding over the coming weeks.

Network building — so growing the size of the user-base on both the expertise and demand sides — is clearly going to be a key challenge here. (And notably Orlic emphases the network effects expertise of its angel backer, Singh.)

Anyone’s five-minute format may be bitesize enough to encourage users to spread the word of any good experiences they have on the platform to their (wider) social graphs on mainstream social networks. Although the calls themselves must surely remain private between the two interlocutors — so there are some hard limits on the app content being able to go viral.

(At the time of writing, a link to Anyone’s privacy policy wasn’t working so we asked for a confirm on the privacy of calls — and Orlic told us: “All calls on the new app are completely e2e encrypted, and there’s no way to listen in on an ongoing conversation. For user safety, calls are recorded, anonymised and stored in a secure environment for maximum 30 days. So in case a user reports a specific call in the app and wants a refund, or if an advisor flags up harassment or other serious issues, we can deal with that in a sustainable way.”)

At the same time it’s not hard to imagine a platform like Twitter (or, indeed, LinkedIn) seeing value in offering a similar one-to-one user call capability — and bolting it on as a feature on an established network where users have already built up extensive social graphs. So If Anyone’s idea really takes off the risk of cloning could get very real — which means it will have to balance network building/growth with attention to the quality of the community it’s building and innovating to keep its users happily stuck to its own (inevitably smaller) network.

Commenting on backing the app in a statement, Claude Ritter, managing partner at Cavalry Ventures, said: “What sets Anyone apart from other audio apps is the quality and connection of 1:1 advice. The team saw the potential of audio and the emergence of the creator economy long before the hype. We’re impressed by what they’ve accomplished to date and by their mission to build the phone book of the future.”

Around 9,000 five-minute calls have been made via Anyone’s platform so far, per Orlic — who says the goal they’re shooting for as they open up access now is to get to 100,000 calls within a year.

The business model for now is to take a straightforward 20% cut of the advice fee.

On the fee side there’s also potential for things to get bumpy if momentum builds around the concept — given that platform giants have been known to take a predatory approach to pricing when trying to close down creator-supporting upstart competition via their own fast-following clones. (See, for example, Facebook’s recent dive into offering a newsletter platform — for which it’s both paying writers upfront for contributions and, at least initially, not taking any cut of their subscriptions.)

It’s clear that Anyone will need to pay particular attention to the quality of the advice and community it’s building. It may even end up needing to hone in on serving particular niches and specialisms in order to leverage differentiation vs larger more generalist networks which have the advantage of larger user-bases should they decide to move in on the same ‘quick call’ turf.

At the same time, there are signs that some of the buzz around social audio may be fading away to more of a hmm as the hype dies down and app users tire of all the noise. But again, that’s why Anyone keeping the audio side intentionally short looks smart.

“We feel that we are part of a movement that is rebuilding the Internet as we know it and building something that is more sustainable and healthy — and really creating value,” says Orlic, discussing the changing landscape around social apps. “Closed social is a topic that I’m really excited by. We’ve seen this for years, with Slack channels and WhatsApp groups. We’ve seen social closing off because of a tonne of different reasons — and with Geneva and a lot of new really cool startups and platforms we’re seeing everything focus around communities. People building communities around specific verticals and then monetizing them in different ways. So we’re definitely a part of that wave.

“A lot of our most active users are people who have built audiences around specific topic and want more meaningful connections with those audiences — the Substack writers that use us as a way to both connect with their existing readers but also gaining new superfans, if you will, because when you’ve had a five minute chat with someone and then sign up to read their Substack, you will read everything they write after that kind of intro. So we’re definitely a part of that closed social. But as a business we are a marketplace — because again we’re obsessed with that idea of someone’s undivided attention being a very scarce resource and the fact that we’re seeing the ‘cameo-ification’ of everything and everyone. And that is also here to stay.”

“Monetization — in one way — sounds like a really crass and cynical concept but at the end of the day we want people to build income streams around things they’re passionate and know a lot about. At the end of the day that is a wonderful, wonderful thing,” he adds. “A creator middle class is a very exciting concept because looking at all the big platforms, old social media, we know where the money is going — it’s going to the top 0.1% of influencers and creators. Whereas small and mid tier creators are not making money to sustain themselves off their passion. For that you have all of these cohort-based courses through Maven. And platforms like us — that enable people to connect directly with each other in a one-to-one setting.

“We think it’s very cool that we’re doing an opinionated, one-to-one, five-minutes, audio-only platform because that gives us a unique positioning. And this is what excites the team. Seeing these stories come out of it — and those stories would not come out of it if it was just another broadcasting or Clubhouse thing.”

There is of course no small irony that it’s exactly because of the proliferation of mobile connectivity and apps — which have driven increased utility by providing people with on-demand access to so much data (and people) — that the traditional ‘quick call’ of old has been derailed, creating conditions where a startup feels there’s an opportunity to build a dedicated marketplace for scheduled quick phone calls. (Albeit, one that’s aiming to scale to a far wider network that the average person would have had in their phone book back in the 1980s, say.)

But as software and connectivity keeps eating the world, enforcing tech upgrades and reconfiguring learned behaviors, it’s clear that the resulting disruption can recreate the right conditions for new tools to come in and repackage some of the old convenience — which maybe got a bit lost in the noise.

*App Store review gods willing

Social networking app for women, Peanut, adds live audio rooms

LinkedIn confirms it’s working on a Clubhouse rival, too

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comicbookuniversity · 3 years

Text

What Is a Single Issue Comic?

by Bunnypwn Gold

There are a lot of problems in the current comics industry, and it’s pretty hard to know where things are going. Right now, with DC partnered with Lunar for distribution and Marvel jumping to Penguin for distribution by the end of the year, it’s hard to imagine how Diamond Distributors, the former monopoly of single issue distribution in the industry for the past few decades, will survive, and how losing a monopoly like them will affect smaller publishers. Penguin and Lunar could and likely would be interested in picking up new clients, but that doesn’t guarantee the survival of all publishers or a stable future for retailers. All of this, of course, is about the ability of publishers to get their single issue comic magazines to specialty store shelves, the only place they’re sold, with the financial health of everyone involved almost entirely dependent on the sale of these units. And that brings me to a question I’ve been wondering for a long time: What is a single issue comic? Because as a product they are fundamentally unsuited for their apparent purpose, which affects the entire structure of the industry.

First off, let’s give the literal and straightforward answer to my question: A single issue comic is a magazine-style book containing a single chapter of a serialized comic narrative, or one or more episodes in an episodic comic narrative. They are also literally $4 on average for a single floppy. That’s a lot of money to spend on a single chapter of a series, and a comics reader will be following multiple series a week. There are a lot of reasons for this cost, and I’m not going to quibble with making sure creators and such are compensated appropriately. One of the costs, though, is the premium low-pulp, high-heat paper used for printing a single. It’s glossy and smooth, holding onto high-quality ink (another cost) for glorious colors and inks, contributing to the aesthetic improvements in comics in recent times. Though there are benefits to this, it raises the monetary and environmental cost of making comics quite a bit. The modern single issue is still relatively floppy, as a magazine, and clearly not meant for long term storage, but it’s also more likely to keep over the long term than past singles and is much more durable than, say, a newspaper, as an example of something clearly meant to be temporary. The average readers is reading multiple series a week, each series is looking to last tens or hundreds of issues, and each series will also be collected into a trade paperback or a hardback edition. Trades are far more suited to long term storage and rereading than a single, mostly as it relates to quantity of narrative and binding methods, since the single issue uses the same paper as trades and other collections.

That gets into the main problem I have with single issue comics. What purpose are they meant to serve the narrative? If they are a temporary format to facilitate serialized storytelling and are meant to be resold or recycled in some fashion once a collected volume comes out, then they serve that purpose very poorly. They’re so expensive that buying all the issues that will be collected in the next trade would cost more than that trade; not only would buying the trade be paying more money for something you already have, but you also actually pay less money to get it in the format you wanted in the first place. That is, if your goal is to read comics as a hobby and you want to collect the stories you like on a bookshelf, like I do. If you’re just reading them as they come and don’t want to shelve them, then it’s worth noting that $4 a pop is far more than “reading them as they come” money. It doesn’t seem like the industry is all that concerned with selling trades, at least not to the extent they logically should be, and the format of singles isn’t one you’d associate with a temporary unit. While some people do resell their singles to comic shops, not every reader can do that, and they’re such an upfront investment that recycling them would be throwing away a massive amount of money. Not everyone wants a ton of boxes holding all the singles they’ve bought over the decades or has children to give them to; not that most comics these days are actually appropriate to give to children, which is actually another issue with the cost. Children should be a bigger part of the comics readership, to ensure that there are new readers for the future. Children can’t afford $4 an issue, and it’s hard to imagine most parents buying their kid multiple series a week, on top of other kid costs (I hear they’re pretty expensive). For adults, it’s also a very expensive hobby in general; it’s like $1040/year if you’re buying five issues a week (a small number for serious readers), without considering any trades, OGNs, or manga you want to buy, too.

Singles are also literally at the center of the comics business model. The success of a series is almost entirely dependent on the sale of its singles, with most publishers unable (and in Marvel and DC’s case, unwilling) to step in and support a critically well-received book until sales pick up. If too few people decide they want to try the first issue or to stick with it the next week, which adds to the burden on their wallets, then the book will fail. There’s no waiting for trades to come out and buoy the financial footing of a series. This puts readers in the position of either (maybe guiltily) buying singles they don’t necessarily want to own to support a series they love, or trade wait, essentially abdicating an arbitrary consumer responsibility in the hopes that enough others don’t for a good series to make it to trades. Of course, publishers don’t succeed unless a majority of their books succeed, so they are also almost entirely dependent on singles. Publishers probably get more benefit than creators from trade sales, but their business model isn’t set up to get much benefit from it. This subsequently trickles down to retailers, who can’t make enough of their money on trades if their publishers aren’t focused on selling them. Singles are incentivized and centralized at every level, meaning that this overpriced product that fails to serve its seeming narrative and commercial purpose holds all the weight of a dying industry.

The first single issue that ever came out was, famously, a collection of newspaper comic strips, a collected format. After seeing how well it sold, people quickly began making original stories for this format, first as anthology comics that contained multiple stories in the same genre per issue. The success of Superman and Batman pushed publishers to put out individual stories as an entire single issue, and for a long time that was fine; the single issue was the only format comics came in, and being printed on newsprint with four-color printing, it was cheap. Then people started publishing trades and collections of single issues. Instead of the industry evolving over time around the trade paperback as the primary unit of comics, as it did before around singles, they stuck with singles, and changed single issues into a higher-prestige product, like a miniature trade paperback, leaving collected editions as a secondary concern. This was a huge and pretty obvious mistake, and is directly connected to several problems in the industry, most obviously the fact that the Diamond monopoly formed in the first place and how its collapse could spell doom for most publishers. Since everyone is so tied up in the success of singles, and Diamond is the only one delivering them to comics shops for most publishers, most can’t exist without Diamond.

Another effect, perhaps less obviously, is the shift in the focus of publishers away from publishing good books and towards IP farming for movies and TV shows. Though, so far, people have still been buying enough singles to keep the industry alive, the fact that publishers’ entire business models aren’t very well focused on selling books means that they have to find something else to stabilize their finances, in light of the fickle spending decisions of consumers faced with overpriced choices. So instead of selling comics as a way to sell a good story, they sell comics as a way to attain the licensing rights to that story to sell to a TV or film studio, basically treating the amazing and unique creative industry they are a part of as a fancy elevator pitch for movie, TV, and streaming executives. I’m not arguing that adaptation from comics into other mediums is bad; I actually think it’s pretty cool that movies and TV shows want to use comics stories, as a kind of recognition that comics have and have always had some amazing stories, and film, a sister medium to comics, is a natural place to adapt comics stories. But it’s unhealthy to publish stories in one medium primarily as a pitch to another, especially since it’s meant to enrich publishers at the expense of creators and is a huge disservice to fans and, ultimately, retailers.

And like, how can you have any pride as a publisher if one of your major goals isn’t to publish good stories in the medium you (presumably) love and deeply care for, but to sell the idea of that story to someone else who will make a different thing based on that pitch? Like, have some integrity. Let the studios come to you after you amass a huge and enviable catalog, and form deals that put you and your creators’ needs first, instead of becoming a subservient IP farm for a “dominant” industry. Comics should be the dominant industry! Maybe I’m just too passionate about this, but if you don’t believe that comics should be equal to or dominant over movies and TV in our pop culture landscape, then why are you publishing comics? There’s no money in it at the moment, and an IP farming mindset actually means there won’t be in the future, either.

Now that we’ve talked about their failures from a narrative standpoint and how that affects the industry, we get into another argument about what singles are: Collectibles. So, is the single issue good at being a collectible? Maybe? It’s certainly true that a collector would want their collectible to stay in good condition for as long as possible to improve its value, so there’s something to a higher quality collectible item, like the single has become. At the same time, however, a major factor in the high price tag for old issues of comics is their fragility and scarcity. Old comics printed on newsprint before comics were seen as collectibles are more likely to be damaged, lost, thrown away, etc., making any surviving issue of worthwhile quality that much more valuable. If everyone is keeping their copy of the big twist issue of Spider-Man, printed on comparatively durable paper to its forbearers, sealed carefully in a safe for decades, then scarcity and fragility won’t drive up the value. Making collection a widespread practice only hurts the future value that anything you do collect could accrue. It’s not like paintings, where there’s only the one painting; comics are printed en masse. Collection as a monetary investment is tricky, is my main point.

With the collectibles argument, though, I have to ask a follow-up question: Is that what a single issue should be? No, obviously not. In theory, a book publisher’s job is to sell as many books as possible, publish the best books they can, and push for the success of all the books they publish. They’re not in the business of selling collectible items. Marvel, DC, and Image aren’t Funko Pops; they’re not selling cutesy plastic crap meant only to look good and potentially see value in trade or collection. Comics publishers sell stories, and their business model should reflect that. Instead of commissioning hundreds of variant covers over the course of a year and “accidentally” leaking the amazing, collection-worthy exploits of a book so that people preorder, they should spend money on recruiting new creators and advertising in media outside the comics bubble to pull in new readers. The Big Two are especially guilty of this, pumping out dozens of variant covers for their biggest issues, to increase the need for collectors to buy dozens of copies of a single issue in case only one variant cover is actually valuable in the future. It looks a lot like a grift and a sugar high of sales that distorts spending choices for consumers and negatively impacts the sale of other comics, just to feel like they’re selling enough of something.

We’ve seen how collection as a financial investment has impacted other fields negatively, like the fine arts. I recently watched a Wisecrack video that talked about how the rise of NFTs highlights a growing problem in the art world. Over the course of the last few decades, collectors and buyers went from curating aesthetically pleasing collections for rich patrons’ homes and museums to storing pricey artwork in warehouses to protect their monetary investments. Which, I feel like I shouldn’t have to explain too much, is counter to the point of making art. Painters paint stuff so people will look at and appreciate it, not so some newly rich tech guy who doesn’t understand portraiture can stow it in a crate and brag about how much their old-timey selfie is worth. The video discussed how art collectors mainly interested in money and their advisors who choose what to buy end up chasing trends and going after the same hot items, homogenizing their apparent tastes and distorting an already highly subjective creative field.

The market dominance of the Big Two, who exclusively sell superhero comics, has had a similar effect on the comics market; on top of that, selling comics as collectibles has primarily benefitted the Big Two, who seem to be pushing it as part of a strategy to maintain their dominance, since it’s mostly their comics that anyone expects to have collectible value. If you look in comics shops, you’ll find that most of the non-superhero comics on the shelves are either action-adventure or sci-fi/fantasy, i.e., the kinds of stories that appeal to superhero comics readers. All the issues that are considered most collectible are also very similar: New number ones, the death or birth of a character, super hyped up twists, and finales. The collectible mindset helps entrench a homogenous mindset among publishers and, by extension, creators to appeal to a small and shrinking fan base. Comics are a storytelling medium, and publishers should be focused on telling all kinds of stories for everyone, not selling collectibles with, at best, questionable value to progressively fewer buyers. Comics are meant to be read, any marketing strategy for them should be based on that fact, and the collectible item strategy runs directly counter to that fact, since the collectible comic will drop in value if you actually read it. If you want to collect your single issues and some of them end up becoming significantly more valuable, that should be an organic side effect of publishers doing their proper jobs to put out good stories, not the primary goal and purpose of comics publishing or buying.

So, what is the single issue comic? It’s too flimsy for long term shelving and reading, but too durable and expensive to be a temporary and disposable format. It’s potentially decent quality as a collectible item, but an inappropriate item for a business to sell as a collectible (not that it stops them). It’s literally just one chapter of one series on a shelf full of series chapters demanding your attention and wallet. It’s a product that acts as the backbone of the entire comics industry that poorly serves its intended function and shouldn’t even be this central to the industry. And because it is, it helps drive smaller publishers that can barely stay afloat on singles to become IP farms in an attempt to gain relevance. The answer, then, is the single issue comic is outdated and performing a disservice to everyone at every level.

Of course, this all begs the question: What should the single issue be replaced by? I don’t want to be like, “Manga has all the answers,” but like, they do, in this case. And a few others, actually. In Japan, whose comics industry is far stronger and more financially viable than the US’s despite having half the population, they serialize in anthology magazines containing several series and make decisions about which books to move forward with based on a combination of reader polls and, if the book lasts long enough, tankoban sales. Instead of publishing each series as its own magazine and then letting it sink or swim based on its individual sales, leading to higher prices and fractured attention from readers, they bundle chapters together to reduce cost and ensure that everyone who’s series is published in that magazine gets compensated for their work with that magazine at a similar level. They also center their business model on selling lots of all their books, not just the anthologies, meaning that both publishers and creators do better when they sell more tankoban volumes. You know, because they’re book publishers, who want to sell as many books as possible, like our comics publishers should.

The manga industry also prints in black and white as an industry standard, meaning they can get away with cheaper papers, further reducing costs; since color is so central to the American comics aesthetic, I’m not sure if we can copy everything about the manga anthology magazine or wider business model. But that doesn’t mean we can’t find success borrowing from the model. Like, it just makes sense that Marvel and DC could publish monthly anthologies containing all of a particular franchise, like Monthly Spider-Gang, the X-Verse, Gotham Nights, or People of Tomorrow; Image could publish a Shadowline anthology; etc. By bundling them up together, readers are more likely to try out books they ordinarily wouldn’t read and publishers can sell you five or so books for, say, $10 instead of the $20 they’d cost you as singles. This format would also phase out variant covers and dramatically tamp down the collectible mindset, meaning that Marvel and DC can’t sell a ton of variants of a single issue to individual collectors to boost the sales of an already popular franchise over others of their own books and indie comics. Or maybe they’d do variant covers of trades, but since a trade is better suited for that sort of thing, I don’t see that as an immediate problem. This transition away from singles is a natural and obvious step away from an outdated and unhealthy business model and towards one that serves the primary goal of a publisher and the needs of readers, retailers, and creators.

What is a single issue comic? It’s the source of or a notable element in a surprisingly large number of problems in the comics industry that needs to be done away with. It’s an outdated format of sale and distribution that no longer serves the industry, creators, retailers, or readers the way it used to, and it’s being propped up because it serves the interests of the Big Two and their market dominance in the current landscape. It’s something that needs to be gotten rid of so that it can be replaced by other, obviously superior methods of delivering serialized stories to readers, so that the industry can reprioritize around selling books, the things they ostensibly make. It’s a poorly designed product that, unfortunately, sits at the center of a dying industry that’s trying to reclaim relevance by becoming IP farms for more financially and culturally influential media. It’s bad.

#comics #comics industry #dc #dc comics #marvel #marvel comics

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