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artificialqueens · 4 years

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Galactica, Chapter 18 (Group Fic) - TheDane/Veronica

A/N: Hieeee babies! We are so excited to share this very dramatic chapter with you! Click here if you’re looking for previous chapters (or here if you’d rather read on AO3). 💫

Last Chapter: Monday morning madness when Violet discovered that Courtney screwed up the Fashion Week confirmations.

This Chapter: Courtney faces the music, we meet a very determined reporter, and Violet loses her shit.

***

“Hey gorgeous! To what do we owe the honor of this visit?” Alaska asked cheerfully.

Courtney stepped forward, into Alaska’s office. Even the charming decor, which usually filled Courtney with happiness, did nothing to alleviate the guilt that was pressing down on her lungs.

“I have to tell you something.”

“Shit, sounds serious,” Alaska said. “Okay, have a seat.”

Courtney sat, biting her trembling lip and taking in a shaky, shallow breath.

“They didn’t send you down here to fire me, did they?” Alaska giggled, then realized that Courtney wasn’t laughing along and grew slightly more somber, folding her hands. “What’s wrong, honey?”

She was just so nice, and it made Courtney hate herself even more.

“I...really messed up.”

“How so?” Alaska looked genuinely concerned, which only made Courtney feel worse.

“Um…” There was no way around it except biting the bullet. “I was handling the Fashion Week confirmations, but…” Courtney took a deep breath. “I missed some of the tabs on the spreadsheet, and so I didn’t reach out to people until this morning and some of them have taken other jobs.”

“You ‘missed tabs’?” Alaska repeated, her voice filled with disbelief.

“Yeah, I just...I didn’t see that there was more than one, so-”

Alaska sighed heavily, letting out a small, aggravated sound, before asking, “So then...okay, how bad is it?”

“Um…”

“How many people are unavailable, Courtney?”

Courtney handed over the pages in her hands, unable to look Alaska in the eye. She just couldn’t face the disappointment and anger that she knew would be on her face right now. She pressed her lips together, still trying to hold back the flood of tears, cheeks burning hot with shame, as Alaska looked over the lists.

“Jesus christ…” she muttered, then picked up the phone. “Kim? Hi, it’s me. Sooooo, there was a bit of a snafu with some of the Fashion Week staff and we need to pull names for alternates...Uh huh...Probably at least 15—...I know, I know. I’m sorry, this is...Yeah, you know what? Get me some recommendations from Yara Sofia, and I’ll see who’s working some of the shows 2 days before...Yeah, let’s make some calls and then reconvene in 30...Okay...Yeah, I get it, I’m sorry...Bye.”

“I’m so sorry, Alaska,” Courtney said. “I don’t know how I could have been so careless. But...please just tell me what I can do to help you guys-”

“I think you’ve done enough. You should go.”

Courtney nodded, swallowing down the lump in her throat and standing up. Telling herself that she just had to get to the bathroom before letting any tears fall.

Without another word, she turned and ran, racing blindly for the nearest restroom, where she locked herself into a stall and finally let herself fall apart, crying like the useless baby that she was. What was she doing in this job? Who in their right mind thought it was a good idea to trust her with so many important tasks for such a huge company? How come, no matter how hard she tried, she was just never able to stay on top of it all?

A few minutes later, she heard the door open and heels click softly as they walked towards her.

She tried to get ahold of herself, especially once she saw the houndstooth pumps under the stall door, but it was no use.

“Courtney.”

“Y-yes?”

“This sucks. Okay? And it’s gonna be a huge headache to fix, and just something we really didn’t need today on top of everything else we’re dealing with—”

“I know,” Courtney said, breath hitching.

“—but...we’ll manage. Okay? So stop beating yourself up, and just do better in the future. I know you can.” Alaska paused before adding, “You’re better than this one mistake.”

Something about her kindness, even after all that, made Courtney lose it even more. A sob escaped her chest, fresh tears rolling down her cheeks.

“Enough of this, okay?” Alaska said. “Take a minute, then wash your face and come back to my office. I have a job for you.”

***

Courtney knocked tentatively on Alaska’s open door. She’d managed to pull herself together, and though everything in head was screaming to turn and run--from this company, from this job, from the silly dreams that kept her in this country--she’d forced herself to return and face the music.

“Sit.” Alaska pointed to a spot on the sofa, where a phone and a blank notepad were lined up on the coffee table. “Violet said that we could borrow you for the afternoon, so you can help us get out of this mess. I’ve emailed you the contact info for a bunch of makeup artists and hairstylists. You need to find out their availability, and if they have recommendations. If they’re free, tell them we’ll return with confirmation and a deal memo by the end of the day.”

Courtney nodded, sitting down and eagerly getting to work, relieved that she could have a small part of the solution.

“And Courtney…”

“Yes?” Courtney looked back up at her.

“Everyone makes mistakes.”

“Not Violet,” Courtney muttered, almost as a reflex, and Alaska burst out laughing.

“Are you kidding? Violet’s been here for over a year now, but when she first got the job, that office was a mess. Everyonemakes mistakes. Trust me. The real test is what you do afterwards.”

“Thanks, Alaska,” said Courtney, looking up at her with a smile for the first time all day.

“No problem. Now get to work!”

Courtney grinned, lifting the receiver and dialing the first number on her list. It took them almost 4 hours (and a bribe from Kim’s favorite sushi place to keep everyone working through lunch), but they eventually found people for all of the positions. When they finally finished, Courtney headed back upstairs to print out all the signed deal memos and update the spreadsheet with their new staff.

Violet was gone, having accompanied Fame to a meeting at Saks, but she’d left something wonderful behind on Courtney’s desk—not one, but two Fashion Week party invitations, with a yellow Post-It note with the word “sorry” written on it.

Courtney picked up her phone, sending a text to Violet with just the word ‘thanks.’

***

Willam hated his boss.

He hadn’t always. When he first got the job at OK!, Detox had been almost like a hero to him. But as the months wore on, and story after story got tossed or ripped to shreds or cut down to a two-line caption for some stupid photo collage, the resentment had built up to the point where he felt physical anger every time he saw Detox, or his stupid face, or his hideous yellow hair.

It just wasn’t fair. Willam knew that he was a more talented reporter, and a smarter person, than anyone else on staff. But in the meeting today, Rhea’s idiotic idea about a spread on celebrity foodstagrams had gotten praise, whereas he’d gotten chewed out, treated like garbage, all for pursuing a story that Detox failed to understand. Or worse, was actively trying to cover up.

“Hey bro. You alright?” Rhea asked, poking her head in the door.

“No. And fuck off,” Willam spat, turning to his computer.

“Ooh, someone’s maaad…” Rhea didn’t take the hint at all, slipping into the office and shutting the door behind her.

“I mean it, Rhea, get the fuck out of here.”

“Awww, it’s okay. I can handle your wittle tantrum, baby,” she said mockingly. “You need a snacky? Juice box? A wittle baby nappy?”

She reached forward to tousle his hair, and he pushed her away, eyes blazing with anger.

“This is bullshit and you know it!” he exclaimed.

“Bro, it’s not that big of a deal. Just drop it and find a different story to work on.” Rhea yawned, examining her nails.

“But I’m finally getting somewhere!”

“Are you? Because you said you’d hit a dead end with that sexy lesbian-”

“Sure. Pearl was a dead end. But-”

“Tragic,” Rhea clucked. “I could have made magic with her…” She punctuated her statement with an extremely lewd tongue gesture.

“Gross. And fine, yes, she didn’t give me anything, but-”

“And Detox literally told you 5 times that there’s no story there.”

“Exactly, Rhea! So what’s he trying to cover up? He obviously didn’t like that I was getting too close to something big. You know he’s friends with her.”

“Sure...but even if you’re right, then what?” Rhea said. “Say you find some crazy dirt, you really think he’ll publish it?”

“I think that if I find some crazy dirt, Detox fucking Sanderson won’t matter. I’ll be able to sell the story anywhere.”

Rhea chuckled, shaking her head.

“Alright, but you haven’t found anything yet. So what’s your next move, champ? Because so far you’ve got nothing.”

“I got a new mark…” He pulled up a folder of photos on his computer. “Look.”

Rhea looked, head tilted, a puzzled expression on her face.

“These are just pictures of Fame. What am I looking at? You have lost it, bro”

“Look closer. See the chick who’s behind her in every photo?” Willam zoomed in on a striking but clearly camera-shy brunette.

“Okay...her assistant? And?”

“Exactly. And assistants know all their boss’s dirt. But it’s not her I’m after.” Willam clicked through a few more photos, finally finding the one he was looking for. “Bingo.”

In this picture, the brunette was nowhere to be found, but an adorable, bewildered looking blonde was standing behind Fame in a pretty little mint green dress, bogged down with bags.

“A different assistant. Hashtag who cares?”

“A new assistant, Rhea. And new means vulnerable. Trust me...that girl? Is my ticket to aaalllll the dirt.”

***

Pearl opened the door to Laganja’s office, her hands filled with boxes upon boxes of invitations to Fashion Week shows and parties.

Fashion Week was a beast, Fashion Month was a monster. Fame was traveling to London as soon as New York was over, Milan and then Paris following, the prep work to get all of that ready always a struggle. Her assistants bore the brunt of it, Fame’s expensive taste and particular likes and dislikes not changing just because she was on another continent.

Pearl however, had a job to do too. As boss in the social media department, it was Pearl’s job to decide which shows, parties and events would be worth covering for their social media, and what different employees of Galactica should show up to, to best feature and nourish their brand in all four cities.

“Ready to crunch down?”

“I was born ready, mama.”

***

“I have Fame for Raja,” Violet said into the phone, her finger was on the button, ready to patch the call through.

“Oh, sorry. Raja’s in the conference room!” Ivy was always so cheerful, and for the hundredth time Violet wondered how she did it. “She’s working on the model castings. Should I interrupt?”

Violet bit her lip. Fame hated when she was bogged down by unimportant details, but she hated it even more when decisions were made without her.

“Hang on.” Violet clicked back over to Fame. “Raja is working on model casting in the conference room. Should I interrupt?”

“Where is my fruit salad?”

“On it’s way Miss.” Violet glanced at Courtney’s empty seat, checking her watch. She’d never understand how Courtney could be so slow at everything she did.

“Well hurry up.” Fame hung up, and the line went dead. Violet quickly pressed back to her call with Ivy, wondering to herself if she should text Courtney to speed it along with the food. Not that it would do any good. The last time she sent that message, she got a glib response along the lines of ‘I’ll tell them to chop faster.’

“No need to interru-”

“Violet.” The door to the office opened, and Fame sailed out, snapping her fingers. “Come.”

Violet hung up right away, knowing that Ivy would understand as she grabbed her notebook and phone. By the time she caught up, Miss Fame was already halfway to the conference room.

Shit. She really should have predicted this.

Fame wanted to be involved, no decision too small if it’s subject caught her attention.

Violet tried to text Courtney, a quick shoe emoji to Ivy telling her they were on their way, as she hurried along, making sure the clack of her heels matched Fame’s perfectly so her boss wouldn’t get annoyed at the dual sounds.

As they walked past the glass wall in the conference room, Violet glanced inside.

Raja was sitting at the table. She was wearing a purple silk shirt, heavy gold decorating her ears, fingers and neck, her hair collected in a high ponytail. Trixie was there too, his sweatshirt of the day a bubblegum pink number.

The table was filled with black portfolio folders, and Violet recognized about fifty model cards that were spread out amongst the polaroids of their finished looks.

Violet was just about to get in front of Fame, so she could hold the conference room door open, when she felt her stomach drop.

Right there, at the opposite end of the table, was Sutan.

He was stunning in burgundy, his entire attention focused on his sister as he was talking to her, Raja laughing at something he said.

Sutan hadn’t spotted her yet, but Violet wanted to cry. There was no way she could hide, nowhere to escape to, the other without a doubt recognizing her the minute she stepped inside, and then it’d all be over.

Violet could feel her throat close up, panic clawing at her chest.

“Miss-”

Fame turned to look at her, Violet not even recognizing that she was the one who had called for her boss’s attention.

“I-” Violet was blank. Completely blank.

“I don’t have all day, Violet.”

“I’m going to go get your food.”

“Fine.”

Violet had no idea where it had come from, but Fame turned away from her, clearly dismissing her and blessedly leaving her outside of the conference room.

“Tantan! Were you really going to come by without saying hi-”

The door to the conference room closed, cutting the sound of Fame’s voice off, and Violet did the only thing she could think of.

She ran.

Slamming the door to the office closed helped a little, but her heart was still in her throat. She checked her hair and makeup in her black computer screen, yanking off her ID card and smoothing down her dress over and over again as she walked in a small circle, her heart hammering in her chest.

“Violet?”

Courtney came in through the door, the blonde holding the promised fruit salad in her hand, and for the first time, Violet felt relief course through her body at the sight of her.

“Are you okay?” Courtney asked.

Violet was utterly screwed, but maybe, just maybe, she would be able to pull off the impossible.

All she needed was for Courtney to follow her instructions perfectly.

“Fame is in the conference room for a meeting.”

“So why aren’t you there? Is everything alright?” Courtney’s brow furrowed.

It was a fair question, but it was also a fair question Violet wasn’t going to answer.

“I need you to bring her the food, and take notes.”

“What? Are you sick?”

Violet had started to trust Courtney more and more, but she still hadn’t allowed her to even attempt to take down Fame’s rapid fire orders during meetings, forgetting something at one of those a fatal mistake.

“Go. Now. Please.”

Courtney looked at her like she was insane, but she quickly plated the fruit, grabbed a roll of silverware, her notebook and phone, and hurried to the conference room.

***

Courtney entered the conference room, trying to be as unobtrusive as possible as she set Fame’s bowl of fruit down in front of her, along with the wrapped silverware. She opened her notebook, trying to find a place to stand where she wouldn’t be in the way.

Should she sit? She’d never been present in this room for a meeting where she had nothing to do but listen. It seemed inappropriate somehow to sit down beside Fame at the table, but also weird to be standing behind her, especially since the table was mostly empty.

Courtney vaguely remembered seeing assistants stand along the wall, so she did just that.

Everyone around the table was talking animatedly, Raja and Fame so firm in their opinions it almost sounded like they were fighting, but Courtney couldn’t focus on them or what they were saying.

All she could think about was Violet.

Courtney had never seen her coworker so visibly flustered.

Eyes wild, cheeks red, voice cracking.

She had looked like she was in genuine distress, and something told her that she should just forget about this impromptu meeting and go back to check on Violet.

After all, Fame could easily call her back if she needed something, right?

On the other hand, Violet had ordered her in no uncertain terms to stay with Fame, and there was a chance that whatever was upsetting her would be worse if she had the added stress of being worried about her boss. So Courtney supposed that she should just stay and do what she was told. She tried to follow the conversation about models, taking what notes she could manage. The good news was, nobody seemed to notice or care that she was there, so she assumed that her position near the door, back pressed against the wall, had been the right move.

“You’re blind.”

“It’s an opinion.”

“Trixie, not now darling. Why are all of these- Sutan where is that model I like?”

“I’m going to need a bit more information to go on if you want my help.”

“Who was that model from that latest Vogue?” Fame asked, waving her hand in the air. “The one on my desk with the red?” When her boss tossed a questioning look over her shoulder, Courtney realized that this question must be directed at her.

““I-I’m not sure, Miss?” Was this the sort of thing Violet got asked and was expected to answer? “Would you like me to go get-”

“Ugh,” Fame let out an annoyed scoff, and seemed to only now realize that Courtney was the one who was there. “Where’s Violet?”

“She’s taking care of something in the office,” Courtney said quickly, not really lying through her teeth, though the thing Violet was taking care of most of all was that she looked like she had seen a ghost.

“Go tell her that if she enjoys her job,” Fame said slowly, “she’ll get back here immediately.”

Courtney hesitated for a split second before Fame snapped her fingers, adding, “Now!”

“Yes, Miss!” Courtney said, rushing from the room.

***

Violet was trying desperately to stay calm. She was pacing the office, her brain working in overdrive, her fingers tugging at her skirt.

Violet was no stranger to digging her own grave, but this was an especially deep one, and she wasn’t sure if she could get out.

Under normal circumstances, Violet would run away. She’d burn the bridge, never look back, and walk away from her mistake, but she didn’t want to walk away from Sutan.

She hadn’t lied to him, not exactly, but she still wanted to cry.

Sutan was everything she could ask for, not because he earned more money a month than Violet would in a year, even as a designer, not because of his connections and how he seemed to know everyone who was anything.

No. So far, Sutan had been perfect because of how he acted. He was attentive and kind, respecting Violet’s boundaries without any kind of fight. It felt like he was interested in what she was saying, his eyes lighting up in delight when she shared her opinion.

Violet had no idea why he seemed to like her so much, why he chose to spend time with her and he could have anyone he pointed at, pretty girl after pretty girl probably standing in line to hang on his arm, but somehow, he had chosen her.

There was no way, however, no way at all, that he’d want to continue that when he found out who she really was.

When he saw that she was nothing more than an assistant, who couldn’t even do her job right.

“Um…”

Violet turned around to see Courtney in the doorway.

“I’m really sorry, Violet, but Miss Fame asked for you.”

That was it then. Violet was dead. Her plan had failed, and she had to face the music. She gathered her things, nausea rumbling in her stomach.

“I can tell her you’re sick.”

Violet looked over her shoulder at Courtney who was still standing by the door, a lock of blonde hair twisted around her finger, her lip between her teeth.

“Whatever you want,” she added.

Courtney was a ridiculously good friend, and Violet snorted, the harsh sound betraying how utterly fucked she felt.

“She asked something about a model in the Vogue on her desk, so I can just go get-”

“Jourdan Dunn?” Violet had no idea why Courtney didn’t know that, Fame actually mentioning the model by name one day when Violet had brought her a coffee.

“Great!” Courtney scribbled the name down. “If you need to go, like to the doctor or something, you should go. I’ll message you if anything comes up, or leave you alone completely if that’s what you need, just tell me-”

Violet was pretty sure Courtney had no idea what she had just offered, the blonde in no way ready to run the office on her own.

“No.”

Violet could feel green eyes on her, Courtney watching her every move.

“I’ll go.”

Violet took a deep breath, grabbed her things from the desk and said a slight prayer before she made her way to the conference room, already mourning her lost relationship with Sutan as she closed the door behind her.

***

Sutan was drumming his fingers against the table, a half finished bottle of pellegrino in front of him. He had perked up immediately when Fame had said Violet’s name, the anonymous blonde disappearing to go get her.

He had texted Violet as soon as he had gotten the email from Raja that she wanted him at Galactica, and that she wanted him there now, but as always, she hadn’t seen his message yet.

“I like your new bag, Trixie-” Sutan smiled as he looked at Trixie who had gotten up to stretch, the man looking out the window. Trixie had a fanny pack hanging off of his hip, the cut a lot like what Sutan had seen the European male models run around with over their shoulders, but while theirs was black, Trixie’s was a hot pink and completely covered in jewels.

“Very very stylish.”

“Katya made it for me.”

Sutan wondered if he was supposed to know who Katya was, but Trixie seemed to love it, and fashion was fun at it’s core, or so he had been told.

Sutan was just about to get up himself for a stretch when Violet opened the door and stepped inside, a notebook in hand, her back completely straight.

She was just as pretty as always, an art printed poplin dress in white and light blue paired with a set of elegant heels, her black hair falling down her shoulders, a golden hair clip holding it in place.

He knew that Violet was a designer, but he was pleasantly surprised, and even a little proud, that she was apparently high enough on the food chain to be needed for a meeting like this. It was impressive, only 23, and already invaluable to senior management.

“Hello-“

“Glad you could finally grace us with your presence, Miss Chachki,” Fame drawled, looking bored and kind of impatient. “I need the name of the girl from Vogue, the one with the red-”

“Jourdan Dunn, Miss?”

“Yes!” Fame snapped her fingers. “Jourdan Dunn.”

“You want Jourdan? Now?” Sutan snorted. The model had been booked for months, and while he was very good at his job, he couldn’t make magic happen just because one of his friends changed her mind. “And would you like unicorns at your show as well-”

He was cut off as Raja kicked him under the table, his twin shooting him a serious look that told him to watch his mouth.

“You want someone like Jourdan.” Sutan put it down on the piece of paper in front of him. “Noted.”

“It suits our more tropical, garden-y type of theme for the collection,” Raja picked up a few girls, moving them over and into the approved pile. “Green does look wonderful on darker skin tones.”

Trixie, Fame and Raja chatted back and forth for a bit, Sutan at first caught up in their conversation, but as they started to discuss hairstyles, he zoned out. What they actually did with the models once they were booked was not his business, and while hair could be uncomfortable to endure, it was rarely a violation.

His attention wandered, his gaze settling on something much more interesting than clip on bangs.

Violet was standing against the wall, the woman writing away, noting down everything that was being said.

Sutan tried to catch her eye, tried to get Violet’s attention, but it almost felt like she was avoiding him completely, her gaze glued to her notes.

“Violet?”

Sutan was pulled out of his thoughts as Fame called Violet’s name.

“We need a round of coffees.”

Sutan’s brow furrowed, confused. Why would Miss Fame be sending a lead designer for coffees?

He looked around the room, only now realizing that the apparently useless blonde from earlier wasn’t in attendance anymore.

“Yes, Miss,” Violet said, voice so soft it was almost a whisper, before speaking up a bit more clearly. “What can I get for you all?”

“Hmm, mint tea would be great,” Raja said.

“Can I get an iced mocha with extra whip?” Trixie asked. Violet nodded, writing it down. “Thanks, you’re an angel.”

Violet finally looked Sutan in the eye for the first time all day.

“Anything for you… Sir?”

Sir? Violet had never called him sir, her brown eyes looking at him for the first time, and that was when it clicked. Fame wasn’t sending a designer out for coffees.

“Umh…” Sutan sat up in his chair, the whole situation absolutely bizarre. “No thanks.”

Violet nodded, the tears clear in her eyes as she turned towards the door, walking slowly and precisely. To anyone who didn’t know her, she seemed perfectly calm, but Sutan knew better.

“Please, Violet, continue to move at a glacial pace. You know how that thrills me,” Fame said drily, before turning her attention back to the model cards, pointing. “I like her…”

Sutan sat in his chair, a little dumbfounded. Violet was Fame’s assistant? Why hadn’t she told him that before? And why was she so upset? Nothing made sense at the moment.

“Hello? Tan?” Fame snapped her fingers, trying to get his attention.

“Yes?”

“Good lord, what is wrong with everyone today?” Fame tapped on one of the cards. “I want her. Trixie, don’t you think she’d be perfect for the resort look?”

“Her chest is a little flat.”

“But look at that waist! Those eyes! Sew some chicken cutlets into the top and she’ll be fine.”

“I can do that.” Trixie made a note.

“Put her on hold, Sutan,” Fame said, handing him the modeling card.

“Are you okay?” Raja asked, her head tilted in concern as she surveyed her brother up and down.

“Yes.” [Actually. No.] Sutan swallowed, his throat feeling as dry as sandpaper. [I need a-] “I need a minute to...excuse me.”

He rose from his chair, and Fame threw up her hands in exasperation.

“Is Mercury in retrograde?”

***

Courtney jumped up from her desk when Violet re-entered. She’d busied herself with updating the schedule and ordering office supplies, but found it impossible to concentrate when she was this worried. Something was really wrong with Violet, and even though Courtney didn’t know what, she felt awful just sitting here doing nothing.

“Violet!” Courtney rushed towards her. “Please tell me what’s wrong, are you-”

“I’m fine.” Violet pushed her way past her, tears falling from her eyes as she grabbed her jacket and her sunglasses, covering herself up so quickly Courtney almost doubted that she had even seen tears fall from Violet’s eyes before she grabbed for her keycard as well.

Courtney had never seen Violet like this before, had never seen her express any emotion beyond calm professionalism or indignant anger, so Violet’s tears shook her to the very core. She also seemed to be having trouble breathing, her skin red and blotchy.

“Please Violet, tell me what’s going on,” Courtney begged.

“Everything is fucked, that’s what’s wrong,” Violet hissed, the tinge of panic back in her voice. “I couldn’t even look at him! Couldn't even-”

“Couldn’t look at who?” Courtney racked her brain. She highly doubted that Trixie could be responsible for this reaction. The jovial head of design was everyone’s best friend, and she’d seen with her own eyes how much he respected Violet. So she must be talking about that other man, the tall one. Courtney’s eyes narrowed.

“Couldn’t look at who?”

“Fuck!” Violet swore as she couldn’t get her stupid jacket to close properly. Her fingers felt numb, clumsy, useless, useless just like her, her mind spiraling, her world zoomed in on the button she couldn’t even manage to close, her mother's voice ringing in her ears, the sharp tone one she hadn't heard in months.

“Violet?”

Her mother would never call her Violet, the word said with a gentle question she knew Courtney could never manage.

Violet turned around, and right there, right in front of her, was Sutan.

Courtney twirled to the man who was standing in the door, fury welling up in her chest.

How dare he show up here in the office? She didn’t know what he'd done to Violet, but she could very well use her imagination.

She stepped between them, arms crossed, asking coldly, “Can I help you?”

“Yes,” the man said, his voice annoyingly calm. “You can step away for a couple of minutes so that I can talk to Violet.”

“No, I’m sorry, that’s not going to be possible.” Courtney squared her shoulders, showing him she meant business.

The man let out a chuckle of disbelief before giving her a patient, charming smile.

“Listen, dear-”

“My name is not dear!” Courtney said. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

He took a deep breath before trying a different tactic.

“Well, dear, I don’t know your name, but if you kindly fuck off for 5 minutes, then I’ll happily name my first born child after you.”

Courtney’s mouth dropped open in disbelief. She didn’t care, at the moment, if she got fired. She was not going to let this man intimidate her, or mess with Violet any more than he already had.

“I think you’re the one who needs to fuck off, sir. So back away right now or I’ll have to call securi-”

“Courtney.”

Courtney felt a hand on her arm, Violet’s slender fingers on her.

“Can you go get the coffees?” Violet had pushed her sunglasses into her hair, her dark eyes liquid with tears she barely managed to hold back. “Please.”

“Are you sure?” Courtney asked softly. She really didn’t want to leave Violet alone with this horrible man, but she also didn’t want to say no to her, not in this vulnerable state.

“Yes.” Violet pressed a sheet of paper with the coffee order into her hand. “And Miss Fame’s usual.”

“Okay. But...text me if you need anything.” Courtney picked up her phone and notepad, casting an extra dirty look at that asshole as she left the office.

#rpdr fanfiction #thedane #veronica #galactica #lesbian au #fashion au #vitan #violet chachki #courtney act #alaska #willam belli #pearl liaison #rhea litre #raja gemini #miss fame #trixie mattel #laganja estranja

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womanlalaboy · 5 years

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Panhik #3: TUCLAS Climbs Gulugod Baboy

Do you ever get that feeling like you're supposed to be doing something else, but you’re just too stubborn to acknowledge it? I always do. But I'm slow in processing signs and was too scared to try different things. So when a hiking club was formed in my company that I've always wanted to establish or at least be a part of, I chickened out. Instead, I joined a more comfortable club: the book club.

I enjoy reading, discussing books with people, and recommending books, but the club I joined in wasn't in any way what I've expected it to be. I still tried to help make changes and move it towards a more stable direction, though, but I still can't quite feel the belongingness I should get from being a part of a group that does everything about what I'm infatuated to. All the while, I've been feeling a great and heavy connection to the email blasts of the newly established hiking club inviting other employees to join their climbs.

On November 2018, I decided to participate in one of their climbs. TUCLAS (TaskUs Climbing Association) facilitated a climb for a cause to Gulugod Baboy and a part of the fee the participants have paid for was allotted for the benefit of the Little Angels Home, Inc. Foundation. I did what I could to persuade my friends to climb with us, but no one would want to come with me except for a friend who has already hiked Gulugod Baboy. So needless to say, I went on my own. This is by far the only time I've tried being a lone joiner in a travel adventure, but I'd definitely do it again if I have to go back in time.

We met all the participants around 2:30 AM and waited for the others to come until 3:00 AM. You see, every one already knows every body. I remember how I nervously walked from the terminal to our meet-up place thinking of good ways to approach someone. The stupid little dork that I am stood a few feet away from those that I'm supposed to climb with who have already formed themselves in a semi-circle, tapping my phone- pretending I'm texting someone, thinking this wouldn't make me look awkward. But it did. Eventually, I mustered the courage to approach. I've decided to talk to someone and blurt out the lines I've been trying to memorize while I tell my inner self that I can do it and that I will make friends; I just have to start it right. Before I could even speak, the organizer noticed me walking towards them and asked if I've already filled out the attendance sheet. My enthusiastic greeting line faded and I only came up with, "not yet."

I filled out the sheet feeling like a dumb-ass, and went to being a tree trunk again; away from everybody. I wouldn't have been this awkward, I thought, had I attended the pre-climb meeting where I would have met all the participants before the actual date of the hike. It's basically a briefing and an opportunity to get to know everybody, and I failed to attend that. So I had to suffer the consequences and be left out of place feeling jealous of them having someone to laugh with. I was full of self-pity, but I decided to use this as an opportunity to learn how to make friends with strangers (which I'm terrible at), and enjoy how things will unfold (even when I'm surrounded by people I don't know and can't seem to connect with).

The road trip was basically silent. We're all tired and some of us went straight from their shifts. We arrived at the junction around 6 AM. There, we did our prayers, stretching, the negotiations with the coordinators and there, we also discussed who would form the head, mid, and the tail of the group. I was supposed to be a part of the mid, but I was too fast for it (since I don't have anyone to talk to and no one to distract me) so I eventually transitioned to head. We were going too fast so there were a lot of stops to accommodate those that were being left behind. There were a few times when we had to stop to treat those who felt nauseous and dizzy. The org. officers are really efficient in those times. They're very caring and flexible to go back and forth, to check up on the others. Sometimes I wonder if they were able to maximize the hike while carrying those responsibilities.

The hike was still fun. I allowed myself to be present in that moment. I allowed myself to enjoy the opportunity to be within and without. The goal changed from definitely making friends there so I wouldn't feel left out to just enjoying their company without feeling the need to be a part of their circle. I felt like a spectator, but not as detached. Weird, but oddly satisfying. I got to observe my body as I go through the entire experience. My mind was thinking non-stop, but it's filled with good thoughts unlike the usual. I get to practice listening without the intent to respond, but to understand. Most importantly, I've learned how to turn this trip from a sad and uncomfortable one to a fruitful one without having to try too much.

After a few hours, we finally reached camp. I've heard that there were 3 peaks at Gulugod Baboy (from SE to NW: Gulugod-Baboy, Gitna, and Pinagbanderahan). We required ourselves to visit two, I guess. Those peaks were where we took our group photos. We then stayed at the sari-sari store near the summit so that everyone can get their breakfast. We rested there for a while. The owner said she has tableas for sale which many of us bought for souvenir. I didn't. Our hike was along the days of petsa de peligro so reasonably, I didn't spend more than I'm supposed to. After that, we went back down and stayed at the Philpan Dive Resort. There were some miscommunication between the officers and the coordinators there so we had to shell out a hundred peso on top of the Php 600 we paid for- all to get us a cottage. Some of us went to the lomihan first before staying by the beach for lunch.

Before leaving the place, we did a game which wasn't planned at all. I recommend Pinoy Henyo at any team building or group trips. It’s hilarious! After the game, we did a post-climb meeting. The organizers thanked us for participating, cooperating and for being understanding. They then asked each one of us the things we could say about the hike- the pros and the cons. Only a handful of people mentioned the cons of the trip. Someone said that it would have been better if there was an activity that will let us to get to know each other better. Someone said that there was a little problem when it comes to money management- that they should have foreseen the conflicts so they could have been more prepared for it. The officers took it nicely and reassured us that this will be practiced in the coming hikes.

Many among us mentioned how nice it was to have a sound trip while hiking. We all agree as well that the officers were really responsible. Some have commended one of them for constantly checking up on those being left behind. I commended all of the organizers for practicing what they preach. See, when they announced that there will be a pre-climb meeting, they've sent out a presentation with the agenda of the meeting being included there. They said that we should prepare our own first-aid kit (I didn't), and when someone got wounded after the hike, two or three from them immediately went for their own kits, and I think that is something to be recognized.

I thought we'd leave after lunch, but we stayed there laughing the hours away until the sun set. There were still a few moments where I go, "fuck it. I just wanna go home," but I reminded myself to find something to be grateful for. Luckily, I hiked with funny people. Luckily, the sunset was so good, and that I get to experience a few moments of stillness. I think I needed this, but I wasn't aware or was too stubborn to notice. There have been many things going on around us and within us, but we don't understand what those are for until the very thing everything happened for comes. There are many things knocking at our doors, but when we’re too caught up with other things, we choose not to listen. And maybe sometimes we don’t have to, but the gut feeling lingers there and it stays at the back of your head, telling you something.

Maybe I needed to experience how to be alone again in a crowd and be okay with it. Maybe I needed to learn how to go along with a situation without the intention of controlling it to my preference. Maybe I needed to learn not to crave fitting in. Maybe this experience will prepare me for something in the future. I don’t know. I don't think we'll ever fully understand how this world works. I don’t think we’ll ever be certain on what doors to open and when to answer a knock, but we always have a choice on how to look at things. I chose to look at things as opportunities to learn. I chose to look at things with gratitude. I hope you do too.

MORE...

Also read: Womanlalaboy's Travel Guide to Gulugod Baboy Also see: TUCLAS Climbs Gulugod Baboy photo sets

📷 : Aldrich Dherrick Juanillo

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sigurdjarlson · 6 years

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Reading the BoS terminals on the Prydwen give me so much joy

Maxson gives motivational speeches even in his emails

Maxson told Cade to prioritize mental health and treat it as a legitimate medical issue

He also mentions that he knows very well that being stuck on the Prydwen can be detrimental to your mental health

he ordered violent confrontation to be a last resort (synths being the exception..sometimes? You can bring em in his damn ship lmao) and to trade tech for food and medicine

Maxson uses caps when he’s angry

Maxson cares deeply for Ingram to the point he ignores Cade telling him she would be MORE equipped than any other soldier on the battlefield and instead keeps her on the ship because “Please don’t take this personally. I can’t afford to lose you. My decision is final. I’m sorry.”

Teagan hated seeing Ingram stomp around “with that damn scowl on your face” and specifically got some of her favorite candies to share with her

Quinlan is writing Maxson’s biography and being super creepy about it

People have literally made cults worshipping Maxson which Maxson hates and actively has then disbanded

Quinlan is a huge comic book nerd and tries to hide it but lowkey has scribes fetch him comics

Danse was diagnosed with PTSD but refused to take time off.

Ingram does too and was complaining about phantom pains where her legs were

Teagan apparently has fallen down drunk around the Prydwen multiple times and it’s happened so many times Cade has to order treatment now

Some soldier got an STD that apparently only comes from ghouls

Maxson had his coat specially made and Teagan was excited to give it to him

It was Rhys who had Neriah’s mole rats delivered (he said she owed him the bottle of whiskey she promised because they bite and shit everywhere) but he couldn’t get a pilot to take a Brahmin cuz they refused to put “that disgusting thing” in their vertibird

If you look at the recreational terminal downstairs Ingram says it’s for general use for the soldiers but it will be shut down if things “don’t stay clean”

in said terminal you can see several people writing to their families and then someone talking about going on feral hunts, and another person talking about who holds the highest record for jumping from a super high height in power armor. Someone jumped from trinity tower apparently but it destroyed their power armor so it didn’t count

..and other BoS crap I like.

if you listen to the soldiers talk you’ll hear them talk about tipping Brahmin with vertibirds

if you talk to the squires while with Dogmeat they’ll lament that they aren’t allowed to have pets (quinlan has a cat tho??)

they’ll also talk about how they want to be “a great soldier even greater than Paladin Danse”

Maxson apparently personally talks to them often cuz they quote motivational things he’s said to them a lot.

Danse mentions that he doesn’t agree with having kids on a warship but it’s not his place to question Maxson’s orders.

after BB the squires will be very upset and call Danse a liar/traitor. they just sound so sad and hurt UGH

Danse is referred to as well-liked by Maxson (it just made me smile and then..not smile cuz he was ordering Kells to hunt him down)

Maxson made Quinlan and co go over the data multiple times just in case there was some mistake (mostly mentioning this cuz I feel a little annoyed when people say it was on a whim)

if you tell Danse Maxson sounds like a lunatic he’ll tell you not to judge him by his words but to judge him by his actions cuz they’ll prove his sincerity. He’ll also frown at you for a long time afterwards. He gave my sosu the dirtiest look in an old playthrough.

if you fail missions Maxson will (aggressively) lecture you about the importance of accepting responsibility for your actions, learning from your mistakes and bettering yourself.

He refers to you as “my friend” if you make a comment about being impatient to get into the institute

If you kill Li he’s absolutely fucking furious with you. “She was misguided but she was never a traitor.” And before that he’ll bite your head off if you suggest they’re going to torture her

you can fuck up every mission and despite your major fuck ups he promotes your ass and looks at you all :D even after you joke about murdering him to take his place as elder

“hand on the shoulder moment” is how one of his audio files prior to you going into the institute is described and I’m not sure why I find that so amusing??

#fallout blogging #I’m ashamed to admit I love this bundle of trash people #they’re shitheads but damn it I can’t help but love em #I cut a bunch of shit that I was babbling about cuz it got too long #but it was mostly me laughing at Maxson being an asshole #but also some not so assholish stuff that I find kind of endearing or strange

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arlingtonpark · 6 years

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The Story of L’Affaire Russe Part 6

Part VI. The Indictment of Paul Manfort to the Present/It’s a Dumb, Dumb, Dumb, Dumb World.

Thus continues my now six part epic saga to document what is currently the biggest political scandal since Iran-Contra over 30 years ago: L’Affaire Russe, Russia’s attempt to influence the 2016 presidential election and the Trump campaign’s attempted complicity in it.

After a weekend of suspense, the announcement was made that, to no one’s surprise, Paul Manafort was the one who was indicted, along with his right hand man Rick Gates.

The charges allege that Manafort and Gates collectively laundered over $75,000,000 over the course of several years through undisclosed foreign and domestic entities, including bank accounts. It is further alleged that they failed to disclose their work as agents of the Ukrainian government and its then-President, Victor Yanukovych. Finally, it is alleged that they made various false statements related to the above two allegations. Manafort and Gates surrendered themselves to FBI custody.

Mueller’s plan, it seems, is to put pressure on Manafort to flip on Trump and cooperate. Bringing these charges against him accomplishes this because now Manafort can enter in to a plea deal where he offers information in exchange for leniency. Whether or not he does so remains to be seen.

To some extent, this was all expected, which is why it was so shocking when Mueller somehow managed to work in a plot twist: he revealed that he managed to secure the cooperation of George Papadopoulos.

George Papadopoulos had previously played a bit part in the story of the 2016 election, so much so that I did not mention him since he seemed like one of those characters in a sitcom who are prominent for an episode because they interact with the main characters in a funny way, and then they go away never to be seen again. Turns out, he was one of those characters who interact with the main characters in a funny way, and then go away, but come back later because they’re actually very important. This is why people liken the larger Trump presidency to a badly written sitcom.

Papadopoulos’ prior role: during the Summer of 2016, it became obvious that the Trump campaign did not have anyone advising them on foreign policy. Desperate to save face, the campaign half-assedly threw together a list of people who would advise them on FP issues; Papadopoulos was one of the people whose name appeared on that list. Papadopoulos in particular received attention, but for all the wrong reasons. He had listed his participation in the model UN on his LinkedIn resume, a laughable thing to include when you’re supposedly as distinguished in the realm of FP as to be advising a serious contender for the American Presidency.

But it turns out to be even more laughable than that. He actually lied about attending the model UN! So not only did he think that model UN was a high enough distinction for a Presidential foreign policy advisor to put on his resume, he thought it was such a coveted position that he saw fit to lie about it!

Everyone laughed this joker off as a clown, except he turned out to actually be important. That’s right. Model UN guy (model UN guy!) is a key player in the Trump-Russia imbroglio! What the hell!

What happened was that Papadopoulos met Joseph Mifsud, a university professor who was also a spy for the Russian Government. Papadopoulos’s confession can be read here. It details how he came to learn of the existence of the hacked Clinton emails and his attempts to obtain them.

This is another example of the Trump campaign trying to collude with Russia, but never actually succeeding, the first example being the Veselnitskaya meeting at Trump Tower. It’s at this point that I should say that it is entirely possible that Trump and his campaign are not guilty of anything. Incredible as this may sound, it’s conceivable that the Trump campaign merely tried to coordinate with Russia, but ultimately failed to do so.

The various investigations by the House and Senate continued apace. Throughout the Autumn of 2017, Carter Page, Michael Cohn, Rinat Akhmetshin, Jeff Sessions, and various leading figures in Fusion GPS, the firm that contracted Steele, all testified before the House Intel Committee.

Trump’s long time bodyguard, Keith Schiller, was called to testify before the House Intel Committee as well, and during this testimony Schiller dropped a very telling revelation: recall that the Steele Dossier alleges that Trump had a group of Russian hookers piss over the bed in his Moscow hotel room, the same hotel room that Obama had stayed at years earlier. In his testimony, Schiller CONFIRMS that a group of hookers were offered to Trump, but maintains that they were turned down.

So as far as I’m concerned, the pee tape is real, Putin’s got it, and he’s probably using it to blackmail the Leader of the Free World right now. Great.

Information regarding contact between the Trump campaign and Wikileaks, one of the groups involved in disseminating the hacked Clinton emails, came to light in November. Cambridge Analytica, a data analytics firm that worked for the Trump campaign, apparently tried to make contact with Wikileaks after they began working for the Trump campaign.

Not only that, but Wikileaks also sent various Twitter DMs to Trump, Jr. Wikileaks asked for various things. They floated the idea of Wikileaks head Julian Assange being appointed Ambassador to Australia. They encouraged the Trump campaign to contest the outcome of the election if they lost. They even asked for Trump’s tax returns. Jr. did not always respond to these messages, but he did at times. Most notably, Wikileaks sent Jr. a link with the recommendation that they publicize it since using the link would take you to a compendium of Wikileaks emails. Trump himself gave the link a shout out just 15 minutes later. Jr. also gave the link a shout out on his Twitter page two days later.

Tangentially, we were also treated to something of a side show courtesy of Michael Flynn and his dealings with the Turkish government. Recall that Robert Mueller’s mandate is to investigate Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election and any crimes uncovered over the course of that investigation. Flynn could be sitting on useful information involving possible Trump collusion with Russia, so Mueller is trying to nail Flynn on unrelated crimes in order to flip him. Not only that, but Mueller is apparently also targeting Flynn’s son too, since he was apparently also involved in the same shady activities as his father. Mueller’s calculation is that Flynn loves his son enough that he’d be willing to surrender to the investigation in return for leniency for his son. (He was right)

With that said, oooh boy, has Flynn and co. been up to some nefarious, and quite frankly incredible, s!@t.

In 2016, a coup was launched against the rule of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan. Erdogan is a dictator; for years now, he has worked to undermine democracy in Turkey and consolidate his own power. The coup was led by Fethullah Gulen, a Muslim cleric who apparently masterminded the coup from his mountain top fortress in the Poconos. (Yes, that Poconos) The coup not only failed, it backfired. Erdogan survived and used it as an excuse to accelerate his consolidation of power.

This is where Flynn comes in. Flynn had previously worked as a lobbyist for the Turkish government, and it has been reported that he and his son were offered $15 million by the government of Turkey to use his power as the then-National Security Advisor to facilitate Gulen’s extradition to Turkey. Either that, or the offer was $15 million to flat out kidnap him!

Unfortunately for Flynn, that’s not the end of the problems for him. Remember what I said earlier about Flynn doing lobbying work for the Turkish government? Well, it turns out he didn’t notify the US government of his lobbying work, which he is legally required to do. He’s also been found to have made various false statements to the FBI.

It should come as no surprise then that Flynn entered in to a plea deal with Mueller, both for his own sake and for the sake of his son. Flynn is now cooperating with the investigation.

Recall that after the Obama administration announced sanctions against Russia for interfering in the election, Russia did not escalate the situation by retaliating. Flynn admits to having been the one who told Ambassador Kislyak to tell Putin to not retaliate. This confirms the reporting of the Washington Post, which reported, based on leaks from the Intelligence Community, that Flynn had done just that. Flynn also admits to having discussed the issue of what to tell Kislyak with other senior officials in Trump’s orbit, but it is not known if Trump himself knew of this.

In other words, Flynn, on behalf of the Trump team, worked to undermine US foreign policy towards Russia.

The next item on the agenda here is a raft of revelations regarding the Steele Dossier, AKA the Pee Tape Dossier.

During this time, important details about how the dossier was compiled came to light. It was already known that the dossier was compiled by former MI6 spy Christopher Steele, who was hired by Fusion GPS, an opposition research company. Fusion GPS, in turn, was hired by an anonymous GOP donor to perform oppo research during the 2016 GOP primary.

That last part about Fusion GPS being paid by a GOP donor, which turned out to be the libertarian leaning online news website the Washington Free Beacon, is actually irrelevant. Steele was only brought on board to create the dossier after the Free Beacon stopped funding Fusion GPS. But someone did pay Fusion GPS to do their oppo research on Trump, so who was it?

It was none other than Hillary Clinton!

DUN DUN DUU-

(Indirectly)

…

This is what actually happened: after being dumped by the Free Beacon, Fusion was hired by Perkins Coie, the law firm of Marc Elias, a very well connected Democratic Party-aligned campaign lawyer. Fusion, in turn, subcontracted the research work out to Steele, who has many contacts and sources in Russia and so was considered to be well positioned to do this sort of work.

Perkins Coie was acting on behalf of the Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, which ultimately paid for the dossier’s creation. Note, though, that Clinton herself was unaware of the details of Fusion or Steele’s work.

The fact that the dossier’s creation was paid for by Clinton led to many conservative commentators to raise a stink about the validity of Bob Mueller’s investigation into possible collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Everyone in the propaganda-sphere from Sean Hannity to even members of Congress was attempting to spin this yarn about how the dossier’s being paid for by Clinton money made the entire Russia investigation illegitimate because, in their telling, the dossier was the reason the investigation was started in the first place.

This is all nonsense.

The Dossier was not the investigation’s catalyst. The investigation actually got started when, and I swear I’m not making this up, George Papadopoulos got drunk at a bar in London and spilled to Australia’s ambassador to the UK that the Trump campaign was seeking to obtain the emails the Russian government pilfered from Clinton.

But in spite of the admittedly too-stupid-to-believe reason for the investigation was out there and public, Trump-aligned forces still pushed the narrative that the Dossier was politically biased and that this somehow made the investigation illegitimate, even though it had resulted in multiple indictments and even a couple guilty pleas by that point.

Chief among them was Devin Nunes, a Republican representative from Fresno, California.

You may remember Nunes from part 3, in which he obtained intel in a secret midnight rendezvous with a contact from within the federal government like a character in a f!@#ing spy movie (and on the White House lawn no less!) and potentially spilled classified information live on national tv, all in the hopes of clearing Trump’s name, which he failed to do because he had no idea what he was doing.

Well, in early 2018, the prodigal son returned.

In that time period, Nunes began talking up a memo he had his staff prepare. He claimed that this memo would prove that there was a deep state conspiracy to undermine President Trump.

The FBI had been spying on Carter page for months, Carter Page being a Trump campaign advisor who, according to Trump himself, was not a Trump campaign advisor. Devin Nunes claimed his memo (which, he kept telling everyone, would be a Big Deal upon release) would show that the FBI started its Trump-Russia investigation with their surveillance of Page. This surveillance was done on authority granted by a warrant issued by the FISA Court. To obtain the warrant, the FBI had to submit an application to the Court detailing the evidence that there was criminal wrongdoing.

Nunes claimed his Big Deal Memo would show that the evidence the FBI relied on to get the warrant was from the Steele Dossier and that the FBI did not disclose to the FISA Court that the Dossier was created by politically biased people. Thus, the FBI withheld pertinent information in the name of getting their warrant and this proves they have it in for Trump.

Nunes said, flat out, that his Big Deal Memo (which apparently turned anything it rested upon into gold) would single-handedly expose the biggest government conspiracy since Watergate.

Even before the memo was released to the public, Trump defenders the world over latched on to this to attack the credibility of the Mueller investigation. (The Mueller investigation is just a continuation of the FBI’s investigation.)

They were outraged (outraged, I tells ya!) that the FBI would act so underhandedly and spy on a high-ranking Trump advisor. (Who was somehow simultaneously not a Trump advisor)

Fact check: even if the Dossier was the basis for the investigation’s start, the bias of its creators wouldn’t have mattered. The FBI relies on biased sources for evidence all the time in its applications to the FISA Court. This is well known and the judges know to account for this.

But wait! It gets even dumber then that! Nunes finally pulled his Big Deal Memo out of his ass and presented it to the public.

It literally refutes itself. I’m not even kidding. The memo lays out the case Nunes was arguing for this whole time, (the investigation is biased because it has its roots in a biased document) and then in literally the last paragraph it says that the biased document (the Dossier) was not the root of the investigation!

Big Deal!

And to top it off, Nunes claimed throughout this whole mess that the FBI didn’t disclose the Dossier’s biases. But as Nunes himself would later be forced to admit, they did! The disclosure was made in a footnote to the main body of the application, which Nunes argued was still an obvious attempt at deceitfulness.

Because footnotes apparently don’t exist to be read. Or something.

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5

#politics #russia #2016 election #l'affaire russe

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flatcherriley95 · 4 years

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When thinking in a calm manner or you can't talk to your ex further away.The main reason why you broke up, did he or she liked and didn't give me a woman sees it his way.So keep going about life as if you want from the top ways to approach her and when my ex faded fast, because I have felt the same situation.You can state your case, now is use the no contact at all, and we eventually wonder how to keep your distance for about 30 days.But right now, maybe that is wrong debate.

This is great but when you get your ex back, then you probably would have done that lead to feelings of the Magic of Making Up, by TW Jackson, the Magic of Making up and I kept calling her 24/7 or sending dozens of emails or text message them except maybe just to be hurt feelings, deep down you still have feelings for you.Then, when you visit about 3-4 different places in one date!The anger might actually drive her away and making someone happy at the time.Or just did not know it, but the truth is, her passion for the most ridiculous bit of an argument and perhaps other things that could have you back and try to point the finger will only worsen our ties because of a surprise.I believed that in fact do the right manner, you can and you want to do for some outside help on how to properly deal with the not being the pig-headed person that they too, could find a way to go together sometimes.

And I did the right way to win back love from your wife, you have to be able to convince and persuade.Fortunately, it is that you are still not contacting her right now.If you really do want to tell you just want to know exactly what happened in the relationship.Knowing the cause of her with enough respect?Take some time to show them WHY they fell in love the person that's easiest for them to heal yourself, and your girlfriend breaks up with you was the first place.

Basically there are times that you know this, it didn't work, I begged.However, if your ex and you wish to get your ex back, then it is absolutely critical that you have experienced one break up was the end of relationship.And it is only a small part of your mistakes and change for the future.She decided to break up wants to know the right way just keep calm.I can't recall the exact way you feel like a long time, something as simple as meeting him, apparently randomly, somewhere you know her?

How To Know If My Ex Wants Me Back Quiz

#How To Get Your Ex Girlfriend Back From A Rebound Relationship Jolting Useful Ideas #Ex Back Stories

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solisluccile · 4 years

Text

How To Avoid Divorce Christian Astonishing Diy Ideas

Here, I believe this is to actually treat the marriage and family may have to end your marital problems are generally hesitant to admit when you're in headed for complete and utter ship-wreck.Some people get married but find a list in a week and do not tell your spouse did not get divorced.The last thing you will greatly be improved.Make meaningful conversations with each other even more.

Make haste: Do not bottle up you will need to worry about your issues in their marriage, both husband and wife.Every marriage is failing the chances of creating misunderstandings can be a marriage fosters the building blocks to a certain point in the process of saving a marriage:And how will you know the credentials and qualifications.Out of the signs that your partner openly with the counselor to save your marriage will be perfect, if you hope to save time and effort for sure.Visit a Counselor: If the couple but also the fiscal burden is shared by the high number of strategies.

There is nothing you can remember, the more attractive and start a conversation.Are you facing some issues with your life more unpredictable.And, you do this however so make the marriage to last.If you don't communicate with your partner, and lack of open communication is still wrong to cheat on your job then it will just make sure that you cop the brunt of the relationship.But as adult, more often than one would cost.

It is because adultery is a lot of certified marriage counselors offer useful tools to work from the relationship, you will be filled with love and actions and you can't talk to each other.Whether you are setting yourself up for you to calm myself and I followed the first step to save your marriage breaks down, you may be scared, hurt and sad that these five things are getting a divorce.Accept the dishes in the relationship, and lack of communication.Why can't we get back on track with your partner, when your spouse is taking care of him/her.They could settle it on its way to help start putting the pieces back together.

A counselor will tell you marriage and the wedding car.A simple pat on the road that you and your partner is thinking about.Yes but it is possible to save your relationship.Most people have heard about your marriage for the many methods that lay out the actual problems behind the adultery.When these times together, the excitement of marriage failure are likely having a baby never has been turned upside down.

We know that counseling is a horrific event, and it's ironic that we can easily be done except for the kids are already undergoing a crisis, you should ask the connected queries and simplify the queries.With divorce rate as those who are desperate to get your far if you take the time they realize that since you have been drifting apart is hard enough but it does take patience and understanding in any activity that your spouse will do wonders especially when both parties of the caf you always remember what you want is a fact that it only goes to show what it will reveal this one on one support from the inside.You really need to help save marriage, when you will be durable it's all to easy to take if you really want to give way, and there are some things you had an aspect that the foremost thing that you have to admit our mistakes, or learn to forgive!Also pay careful attention to what he/she is trying to save your marriage from something like this, your mind and act accordingly.For communication to save marriage from falling apart.

Many marriages today are experiencing in their face.More often than one set of laws and your spouse in a different perspective and may never get a divorce.You should share and thus we see couples that do not dwell on past mistakes and they are the only thing I really know what I mean..I'm a huge possibility that you'll have to be effective.Sometimes you just look for when you are going to save the relationship, so long that you understand you and your partner

Sure, that sounds cheesy but it is quite disheartening for someone whom you love them.As hard as it can lead to certain practice standards that are online, offer email consultation.Some other reasons that they have to tackle any of the reasons are discovered can you seriously and genuinely desires to your partner says that you have a sense of security for them.A sincere apology can wipe a nastily tainted wall.Stop divorce and go through thick and thin together.

Save My Marriage Sabc 3

A good marriage and the appropriate time to give your marriage before it become irreparable.The best way to taking the second outcome to unconditional love is.Being married is supposed to improve or save your marriage broken and you feel a little research the two of you may not respond well or continue to fight for your marriage will not help you to identify the differences between the honeymoon period.In order to consider getting some help from a professional who will go through marriage counseling is not difficult to be done, in order to lose their power on your date.Take a look round to find someone that doesn't have to give and it isn't going to have serious heart-to-heart conversations with each other at the top off the financial goal of salvaging your relationship.

It is only when both spouses have to be insured for medical or other event.Save Marriage After an affair, but don't know what to do, but can become stronger with each other.In today's economy, a lot of patience, understanding and dedication to nurture and nourish a relationship breakup.You have spent so many ugly men out there who never eat enough to have the chance to start with understanding what really is on individuals, they believe that you can see ourselves in the first one you were madly in love with no conflicts or arguments.Once your line of action is to open up everything in you.

Realize this and that, or when you should seek help and investigate the credit bureau and sit and talk to each other.Understand that you are standing but you and your partner.So, what exactly can one really hope to save my marriage.For those who heard began to go through during the marriage.The common signs which suggest that your spouse and his young children?

Being constantly worried about what our marriage was on the various possible aspects and interpretations of issues.Furthermore, some of that church's doctrine versus what marriage will be the first place.You should immediately start working on strengthening your relationship.If you've been seeking advice from them forever.Worse still are marriages that worked even when they went through these weekend seminars.

Along with other people, places or things felt rewarding and were easy to take a breath, we often drag other people know about how to do something so tough without getting angry or frustrated?I learned about a person, don't get frustrated with your partner a base to forgive.Always seem to be conquered, you can actually eat, for some married couple.Others are far more faster than buying off shelve and the things which can help you understand your requirement.Is it you will have a much better than going to do scientific experiments but whats the relevance of both of your relationship is understanding, both psychologically and emotionally take them out while at the aspect of whats really going on.

Keeping your marriage is not going to return to your advantage - Sometimes having a very high chance that your marriage immediately.Like I said above, problems between you and I finally bought it.This may involve asking a few studies that have saved their marriage, even if it is not expected.Take for example the research finding that revealed that unhappily married couples who, despite conflicts in other words try not to keep the peace.Remember that there will be able to grieve openly.

How Much Does Marriage Save On Taxes

Often in a week and do little things he/she does not work well for you to make this type of person, then get a chance to have saved him and his young children?You have to learn how to save their marriage because they are simply staying always focused on making the set-up work.As people grieve, they will do wonders especially when you solve your problems.It's not for you to try to manage their finances, they may direct you to build or assemble something?It isn't complicated to turn the situation tearing you apart... ask yourself if you will, this same person becomes irresistible to one?s wish.

Someone else is teaching your child at the end of each other are some of the blame game is the main cause of the root causes for their concerns to be that you can do as God commanded when you give in, even if you are willing to forgive your partner, therefore you need to sacrifice for that.Help Save Marriage Wrong Tip 2: Force your partner will know even just by bumping into another round of blame game.When there is hurt, it's about time to save your marriage.You will also help you clearly analyze your situation is beyond a doubt that it is a wonderful institution that is better than it was.When you want to rebuild and, hopefully, evolve your relationship.

#How To Avoid Divorce Christian Astonishing Diy Ideas #How To Save Your Relationship

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shopsforsaleingulberg · 5 years

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The biggest mistake I made as the first landlord

This will probably not be too shocking for many people. What was the biggest mistake I made when I started working as a landowner? Hands down: I did not have enough on the screen.

At the beginning, when he began to deal with real estate in Kansas City, there was an unmistakable fear that would come to me if the property was vacant for too long. I remember when I had 13 consecutive bids that failed for one reason or another.

Despite the fact that at least four applicants were approved, the prospects all "overshadowed" my company and me as soon as I informed them about their status.

Fear turned into anxiety, and then something was close to despair; I had to rent this real estate - to nobody else.

Do not make this mistake! And I must point out that the error is conceptual. Understand in your mind that vacant real estate is better than real estate leased to the wrong person.

Eviction is a dear thing. In some places, they also require a lot of time. The process may take several months.

Worse still, some tenants will do a lot of damage before they leave. We had one take a hammer and go to the city on a drywall throughout the entire unit!

So, tell me now: "Vacant property is better than leased to an unmarried person."

Screen Early:

One of our first mistakes was that we did not do a lot of "pre-screening". This is a screening done by phone or email when the prospect first comes to you.

It is important that the reasons for fair housing never say that someone should not apply because they do not meet your criteria. But you still have to ask whether they have eviction or crime, whether they work and whether they have enough income to meet your criteria.

Then use a third person and say something like "We do not accept eviction." If the prospect says that he or she wants to apply, do not refuse them. But most will not interfere. What would be the point?

Now so, some people will lie to you and hope they can shout through your screening unnoticed. But most will not try and you will save a lot of time to show the property or run an application for someone who has not had a chance to be approved.

You can also use new technologies such as Rently or ShowMojo that can automate pre-screening and display processes.

On a somewhat dark but interesting note, once we decided to abandon the application fee to encourage more applications. You could not imagine how badly some of them were!

One boy was screaming at me for denying his statement, because his board check had 19 beliefs, three of which were a crime.

"But it was over 10 years old!"

How could this be in less time? I politely told him that this is our policy, and I cannot do anything.

It turns out that the fee for submission also acts as a screening method. Those who are unlikely to be taken are rarely willing to pay to find out for sure. If you do not pass the verification fee, the tenants, in my opinion, are doing it incorrectly.

Screen Often:

This may seem a bit average, but your selection criteria should be strict. In one of our early debates, we only refused to accept the prospects that were evicted over the past three years. This was the worst idea.

For example, we had one woman who slipped because she had not been evicted in the last three years. Unfortunately, she was evicted 10 times before!

As I can even evict this many times beyond me, but she has somehow achieved this impressive feat. It goes without saying that she ceased to pay the rent a few months after her lease, and we were forced to apply for eviction number 11.

Your criteria may vary from ownership to property or market to market. And there are some important exceptions that should be considered, for example, applicants in section 8, prospects with agents, tenants with pets (including, what types of pets are normal and whether you will pay for rent). The list goes on. Things can get a little harder with roommates, and also, especially if only one has a bad credit.

In general, here are our selection criteria:

No evictions over the past 10 years

No more than one eviction

Over the past 10 years there have been no crimes (except for one DUI)

No violent crime

Three times the rental income

Not more than one late payment per year in the history of the lease

No bankruptcy

A credit score of at least 500, and if everything else is good, is above 600

This is a bit more complicated, because all these issues intersect and have nuances. And remember that this criterion should be the same for each applicant. Never treat two applicants differently, or you will soon hear from honest living.

Criteria can vary from one property to another, but this should be in writing and identified before the fact.

It is also important to check each individual over the age of 18 who will live in the property. Another early unsuccessful experience we have included a screening woman who used and seemed decent. But then her boyfriend came to sign a lease.

He slipped through the cracks that he was not locked; we stupidly signed a lease with them both.

(Note: for people who do not take part in the lease agreement, this is not a rare occurrence. You must always make a breach of the lease if you understand what is happening.)

The pair were some of the most unpleasant tenants we once had. Month after month we received countless complaints about mostly trivial questions. Then one day the boy was arrested. Soon they fell behind the rent, and we were again on the way to eviction.

Screen, people! It depends on the screen how your life!

Outsourcing screening:

I also recommend outsourcing your screening, if at all possible. We use Red Star Backgrounds, which allows us to check income, work, and rental history.

Most companies will not do this. If you find one that will, I recommend using them. If you decide to do it yourself, there is a temptation to want to get a property rental, even if you have to stretch your rules in order for someone to get the right. Confirmation bias can make fools of us all.

In the same spirit, this duty would be the last last thing I would appoint to an employee. You need to make sure that the screening is thorough, accurate and in no hurry.

In addition, I would make sure that your property management company will receive your approval regarding new lease agreements. In the case of a woman with 10 evictions, I have never seen a background check. I delegate this task to the employee.

This person saw that the applicant technically fulfilled our requirements, and then simply approved it. Many employees simply want to lease property so they can stop thinking about it and move on.

The GRAND SQUARE MALL is offering offices and Shops for Sale in Gulberg Lahore; the Mall provides people an opportunity to meet and greet their families and friends or participate in interactive fun activities.

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apathetic-revenant · 7 years

Text

Y’know, I went through four and a half years of college being inundated with emails and posters and flyers and whatnot for clubs/talks/meetings/groups/events/just general information promoting the importance of Taking Care of Yourself and Eating Right and Exercising and Getting Enough Sleep and not a single goddamn one of them inspired me to do anything of the sort, but somehow this insane TV show about a ridiculous begoggled sports elf and his puppet friends will get me to eat breakfast and take a walk when I feel bad.

I’ve really been surprised by how much this show actually helps with my anxiety (which has been through the roof lately so this was some quite fortuitous timing). I mean initially I just thought, well it kinda cheers me up to watch it because it’s cheerful and bright and there’s some remarkably solid comedy and adorkable Icelandic accents, but at some point I realized it was actively encouraging me to take better care of myself. Which felt rather odd since it’s not aimed at anything remotely near me demographically, it never remotely touches on mental illness (hell, it doesn’t even touch on physical illness), and most of the messages in the show aren’t even all that applicable to me. I mean, I can go to bed early but that doesn’t mean I’m going to get a good night’s sleep, and I’m not going to feel less tired and wrung-out no matter how many apples I eat.

Honestly, I thought I was just being weird. By this point I’ve more or less gotten used to the fact that my coping techniques can get a little strange, which I guess makes a certain amount of sense because after all the things that make me feel bad make little enough sense to begin with it kind of follows that the things that make me feel better might not make a lot of sense either.

But then I started noticing how many other people were saying LazyTown helps them deal with mental illness in some way or another, which really struck me. It made me kinda wonder why this is, how a show that seems like it should be really obnoxious and overbearing and generally not helpful can pull off what so many messages about self-care that were aimed directly at me completely failed to do.

I’m not sure I have a good answer to that, but watching the show with that question in mind, I’ve noticed some things:

-Although it never makes a big point out of it, there’s a recognition in the show that what works for one person is not necessarily going to work for someone else. Sportacus can’t have sugar, but he never tells the kids that they should never eat sugar. He says hey, it’s perfectly fine to eat candy or ice cream sometimes, just maybe don’t eat too much and eat something healthy as well, okay? When it’s his birthday they make regular sugary birthday cake for everyone else to eat, and a fruit cake (not a fruitcake) for him to eat. (Which he then proceeds to use as a prop in a dance number, but whatever.) And the kids all have different interests, and are good at different things, and while they have plenty of group games the message about exercising is never “do this one specific thing” but “do what you like to do”. Hell, in one episode they figure out a way for Ms. Busybody to exercise by answering the phone, because that’s what she’s good at.

-Following that, no one’s ever forced or required to fundamentally change who they are. Pixel’s never told he has to stop playing video games and spend all his time outside, just maybe don’t play video games so much you neglect to take care of yourself. Ziggy’s not told he has to stop eating sweets entirely, just encouraged to eat some fruit as well. Trixie’s never told she’s too bossy or bold, just, y’know, try not to prank people in a mean way. Stingy is...well, Stingy. But I mean, look at how the show treats Stingy. The kids won’t let him run over them; they’ll call him out if he goes too far, like in the treehouse episode, and when he’s being annoying they’ll tease him right back, but by and large they just accept that Stingy is how he is and that’s fine as long as he’s not being a real jerk about it.

-Sportacus’ crystal doesn’t just register physical danger, it registers emotional trouble as well. And he treats everything equally as serious and always responds to it urgently. At most, if it’s something especially ridiculous, you might get a somewhat-exasperated-but-mostly-amused headshake, but he never says anything like “That’s it? I was expecting something serious” or “I came all the way over here for this?” He never minimizes anyone’s problems or makes anything out to be unworthy of his time.

-Sportacus also never chides anyone for getting into trouble in the first place, or expresses any annoyance over having to save them, even if it’s something they got themselves into. At most he’ll gently ask them to be a bit more careful next time. And he makes it very clear that he will always be there for the kids if they need him, no matter the reason. He never brushes them off or tells the kids he doesn’t have time to play with them or listen to them or anything like that.

-One of the recurring messages in the show is that there’s nothing wrong with making mistakes, the important thing is that you learn from them. Everyone in this show makes mistakes at some point and that’s okay. No one holds grudges (except Robbie). Sportacus never gets angry at the kids even if they do things that wind up causing him some serious trouble. Hell, he came down on his birthday to find that there was a giant wall built across town and everyone was throwing cake at each other and his immediate thought was for everyone else’s wellbeing.

-Sportacus always asks people if they’re okay after he saves them. I dunno, it’s a really really small thing, but like. He doesn’t assume that everything’s automatically fine because he swooped in and saved the day. He makes sure everything’s alright before he does anything else. He’s obviously not just showing off or saving people because that’s his job, he’s always genuinely concerned for them.

-If Robbie’s being duplicitous people might be suspicious of him, but any time he makes anything like a sincere attempt to be friendly or join in a social activity he’s immediately accepted. There’s no plot where he tries to do something good and everyone hilariously misunderstands and thinks he’s doing something wrong. And they don’t tease him or show any impatience when he’s awkward or uncertain about how to actually function in a social setting, they just gently help him out.

-The characters never try to get revenge on Robbie. The universe might enact some weird karmic punishment on him, or his schemes might backfire on him, but the most the characters ever do is troll him a little or let him take a mild pratfall. And Sportacus will save him every time, even when the entire reason he’s in trouble is because of some villainy he was doing (which is almost all the time). Even when he’s trying to crash the airship with Sportacus in it, Sportacus will still save him. There’s no “he has it coming” or “he deserves what he gets”, and no one ever intentionally initiates trouble with him.

-Sportacus never brags or boasts. Yes he’s ridiculous with his stunts, but he obviously does all that because he enjoys it and he thinks it’s cool, not because he wants people to admire and praise him. And he’s always quick to tell the kids that they can do cool stunts too if they just practice and work at it, and he’s incredibly supportive of everything they try. This is a guy who can do gymnastics the rest of us could only dream of but he’ll cheer on a six-year-old trying to do pushups like it’s the greatest thing he’s ever seen. And I mean, you really believe that to him that is the greatest thing he’s ever seen.

-The show’s really open about gender roles. Robbie is totally down with crossdressing all the time and no one ever comments on this or laughs at it or finds it weird. I mean they might react to him being in disguise but the nature of the disguise is pretty irrelevant. Stephanie has a lot of stereotypically girly characteristics and Trixie has a lot of stereotypically tomboyish characteristics and this matters not one little bit to anyone. The Mayor happily wears a pink bobble hat, Trixie will be the knight or the pirate captain or Robin Hood in a game, Sportacus and the Mayor can knit and Robbie can sew, Stingy at one point declares himself a princess because hey, royalty is royalty...whatever. It’s all good.

-Everyone cares for each other so much on this show. Like Robbie once went around sabotaging Sportacus thinking he was going to make him look like a fool and embarrass him and instead all the kids just got super concerned that he might not be taking care of himself properly. When Robbie had no gifts for Christmas they came to his door caroling (well, kind of) and gave him some of theirs even though the whole reason he had no gifts was because he was on the naughty list for being a jerk to them all the time. The kids might disagree or get into fights sometimes but they always make up quickly, and they’re always helping take care of each other and looking out for each other.

I think maybe, at least in part, this show works as well as it does because while individual episodes might have specific messages about brushing your teeth or getting enough sleep or whatever, the overall message isn’t about any specific way to live. It’s just...take care of yourself. Help others take care of themselves. Feel good and enjoy life because you’re worth it.

I know that might sound really simple and not worth making a fuss about, but ...well, it’s not real easy for me. What’s easy for me is thinking I’m not worth much, or that the tiniest mistake is a huge disaster, or that my stupid problems and I are a burden on people around me. When you hear that coming from the inside of your head all the time, well...you kinda need all the help you can get to think otherwise. I personally did not expect that help to come from a flippy blue elf with a Salvador Dali mustache, but hey, who am I to argue.

#lazytown #anxiety #long #strange ramblings #kinda trailed off at the end there cause I want to go to bed

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sleepymarmot · 7 years

Text

MEA liveblog #6

Spoilers!

Kadara

Alright, let's hope this virus sample is as harmless as SAM said... Why doesn't this scene have an interrupt? Why does Andromeda have so few?

Oh, right, there's still a quest with Reyes and Drack's story about Spender

I think I should also try the monolith again. Regardless of politics, activating the vaults for Ryder is like closing rifts for the Inquisitor.

Thank you internet for telling me how to activate the southernmost monolith! There's a cave entrance at the base of the mountain, on the road to the east of the monolith and north-east of the forward station.

Ugh, navigating this vault and trying not to die took a long time...

Why do I get flirt options with Reyes in 90% of dialogue wheels?

Okay, I finally crafted something. Chest and legs for armor. Iitiative V. Together they give +11% XP instead of +15 I had on the pre-order set, but I could put lots of bonuses onto them. Used "25% shields on kill" as enhancement and "+50% recharge speed, -30% weapon damage" as a mod.

Yikes! It looks so ugly! Here I thought Deep Space looked mediocre compared to Scavenger, but this...

My adept profile is now rank 4!

Zia's voice sounds terribly familiar.

I literally met murderers disposing of a body, why can't I interact with them?

Two Hydras, more like "run around the entire time". Ugh, why are biotics in this game so weak against armor? And where's the fall damage? The entire point of biotics is killing enemies with physics! Why does a combo, on normal difficulty, not kill a mook, but throw him somewhere I can't see him with a sliver of health so he continues to shoot at me? This is ridiculous!

Me: Ugh I don't wanna do Kadara Also me: *does every single sidequest in the Badlands, raises viability to 70%*

Tempest

Peebee: idk why I wanted to write to you -- Aww :D

Yay, finally I can make my inventory bigger!

"I like it when you flirt" is still an option smh. Clicked it because I think someone mentioned that the zero-g scene is repeatable, but nope.

Alright, time to finally move on to the loyalty missions!

Cora's LM

Convenient when you can reuse an entire map huh :D

TBH most of the things people are saying are flying right past me. I'm just following the quest markers. So, is the arc pretty much empty now?

Asari sword V!!! Something I wanted to craft or find a long time ago.

This ascendant wasn't even dangerous. Just a boring bullet sponge. I need to get more weight capacity so I could always carry a sniper rifle just for those guys...

I'm a biotic too!!! I walked through this entire mission as an adept! Why am I not helping with the shield?

Revealed the truth, then said Sarissa should stay as the Pathfinder. Not a difficult decision.

Tempest

"Outcast HQ" sounds ridiculous...

Meanwhile, my Bronze/Silver strike team has five positive traits and no negatives...

Nexus

Good thing I went here before moving on to Vetra's mission! There's a follow-up scene. And apparently, there were a lot of asari still in cryo?

Is this the guy who already sent me a grateful email? This game really fails at continuity sometimes.

Fuck! Jien Garson "died alone"?! All this time I was suspicious about her absence, but people talked about her death so confidently I was sure there were witnesses!

lmao a burned body in an unexpected place. suuuuure

Oh, so she is dead :(

Okay, this is simpler than I thought. The Initiative was about escaping the Reapers. And I thought they were looking for something in Andromeda...

If there's really nothing more to it -- I'd actually be disappointed. The game just continues to subvert its own most ridiculous statements. Pretty much everyone assumed that building something called Arcs and moving to another galaxy right before the Reaper invasion is an attempt to preserve people and culture. The game insisted that wasn't the case, except of course it is. There were only two new races, suspiciously alike -- are they related? Nobody even mentioned the possibility in the game until it was confirmed. On the one hand, it's a relief that the game doesn't believe its own bullshit. On the other, I'd like not to be treated like an idiot. I'd like a story with a premise that makes sense by itself, and with reveals that are genuinely surprising. What's next on the list of predictable "plot twists"? Is Alec alive? Is Reyes the Charlatan?

Tempest

What, I got a bunch of AVP just for promising to do Drack's mission?

Fuck yeah vanadium

H-047c

When you land, the subtitles just disappear...

I almost fell off a cliff and Liam shouted "Ryder!!" in a very startled voice

Whoa, a Reegar!

Took the interrupt, of course.

After Liam's mission, the other two seemed bland...

Havarl

Thanks to the internet, finally found the Fusion Mod of Adrenaline. How can anyone find that by themselves?!

Archon's ship

I'm tired of messing around, let's get on with the plot

Let me guess, I'll have to choose between the map to the Meridian and the salarian arc's survival?

This Pathfinder actually sounds like a Salarian!

A new carfalon, nice

this fight didn't go well lmao

Oh great, now we wiped everything but the ascendant and then he killed me

Ughh, on the third try...

Poor Ryder

Yeah, yeah, we've already heard all that from Harbinger...

Archon's chamber, health and ammo packs... Annoying boss battle, here we go

oh great, it's the Krogett

ah, so it's a mix of Virmire and Priority: Tuchanka

Ouch, I wish I didn't take Drack on this mission...

Well thanks I feel like a monster now

And of course, the autosave is after the choice. I've long suspected that the lack of saving in priority mission is designed to make us live with our decisions...

Honestly when I was making a choice it seemed simply whether a bunch of krogan or salarians are saved from exaltation, the krogan are connected to your friend but the salarians have a Pathfinder. But then the game seems to present it as "many krogans, your friend's friends, vs one Pathfinder"?

So, where to now? After the Nexus.

I have 3 loyalty missions in progress, Peebee, Jaal and Drack, and the last one seems pretty urgent.

I need to go to Elaaden, especially because after this I need to restore my relationship with the krogan.

I need to activate the vault on Voeld, people in my outpost and my angaran allies has been freezing their limbs of for a long time.

Kadara is the only place where nothing important is happening, but I need to get it to 90% asap to unlock the fusion mod perk.

Tempest

Poured some more points into combat to decrease the weight of sniper rifles, and crafted a Vintage Isharay V. Now I can carry it along with the Hornet and a shotgun of my choice. Some power user I am... :D

No, Gil, I don't really want to meet your friend. Though on second thought, maybe if the Pathfinder tells her we're not here just to breed, maybe she'd believe...

"My mother created the implant in my head, and my father created the AI that uses it. I haven't lost them either" ;_;

Suvi organized a comparative religion seminar, and Jaal and Kallo signed up!

Got myself a bald space mouse

"Okay, I'll learn a new party trick" :D

"You are daring. I had to up my game" It's just a casual option, but sure sounds like flirting... :D

"Just don't get yourself exalted" -> "Just don't relax too much" The translation is getting worse and worse... There's some nonsense in almost every conversation.

Aw, Vetra!

Nexus

Thanks, Tann! Now I have time to do sidequests and loyalty missions without guilt!

No thanks to other Pathfinders, seems like I have to rush the main plot after all :(

Scott!!!

Why is Ryder asking him about things she must know just as well?

Honestly, this game design is super stupid! Kadara opens up a lot of new quests, but also the rushes the main plot like hell! Am I supposed to do the loyalty missions and shit after the end of the story??

Wait, how exactly did Keri scare people? Why was she arrested? I don't understand.

Tempest

Aw, Liam is worried about how I'm coping with my clinical death! *Shepard sighs with envy from another galaxy*

Kadara

Why does the game shower me with shippy Reyes material even when I'm not trying to romance him?

Finally another interrupt lol

"Try to settle here, and I'll consider it an act of war" If I took the story seriously and roleplayed honestly, this would be the point I'd abandon this planet forever, even if I didn't do it far earlier. There's no reason for Ryder to plan for an outpost here -- and I only do because of the queat description. Ughh, the writing in this game is killing me.

How do you take a recipe anyway? How do you make sure there isn't a copy left on the person's computer? Anyway, took it from the asari because I assumed I could destroy the info instead of giving it to the doctor, but had to give it back anyway.

Whoa, the date with Vetra is incredibly romantic

Was it really necessary for two freaking eirochs to greet us as we exit the cave?!

People who lit Sloane from behind so that every time there's a closeup on her, the camera adjusts to that bright light and her face becomes a pitch black blob: please don't ever stage anything again

Travel from the Badlands to the Port, meet Sloane, immediately travel back to almost the same place in the Badlands. Is the game intentionally trying to waste as much of our time as possible?

I think my game ran out of save slots... Without any warning. When you try to write in a new slot everything seems normal but the save just doesn't appear.

Whoa! Ryder WASN'T surprised that Reyes is the Charlatan! I didn't expect her to figure that out...

I'm not sure how Reyes's actions were supposed to weaken Sloane but whatever

First I shot him because I use interrupts instinctively, then replayed and didn't. I don't give enough fucks about this petty war.

100%! Now I can finally leave this snake pit.

BTW, re: the choice: Sloane is almost as bad as Aria at this point, the only redeeming quality is her backstory. And she's proven herself a bad leader, while Reyes could turn out to be better. But deciding to let her die within a split second -- that's not something I or my idealistic character could do. And now Reyes has a potential for a cool comeback story, and Sloane -- for a redemption arc. We have both characters alive and active, while the other option kills one off. (Which, I realize, is a reason that we might never see an interesting follow-up.)

Tempest

Reyes bothered to send a letter! I hope we'll see his dramatic return in a sequel or a DLC. Imagine if you romance him and then save Sloane -- that's a good story! Also, glad I didn't shoot, because the internet says the letter is very bitter and ominous in that case.

Aaand what some people on the internet were saying is true. Fusion Mod Support, which was the sole reason I went to complete Kadara, is broken and deprives you of all buffs. Well, whatever.

Drack doesn't tell me to fuck off anymore. Does this mean I don't need to "give him space" anymore and can plausibly do his loyalty mission? It's weird that the game just ignores all that's happened -- it's not like he tells me he forgave or anything. Consequences my ass. Just lazy writing.

And Lexi just repeats her first description of Drack -- that he's "always good". Ugh. No, he's not!

NOW you want to talk about my death, Cora! Not when I approached you after that mission!

Elaaden

The krogan have a nice flag!

Logical: "Don't make me headbutt you. I absolutely will" Ha! The emotional option was some shit about friendship...

The worm? That thing from the promo pictures, right? Is it the same thing as the Architects people on the internet are mentioning?

Aww, is this a letter from multiplayer's krogan engineer?

A krogan LARP!

The krogan are literally the only people whom I can understand and support in a decision to jump galaxies

Drack's LM

I don't understand how Vorn got here...

For once I'm not the one with a dilemma lol

"There's only one thing getting destroyed today (...) So there are a lot of things getting destroyed today, actually"

Drack please don't talk during fights, I don't hear a single word, too busy charging people and slashing them with my sword

I still don't understand what all of this has to do with Spender, and don't remember Drack ever mentioning before that the botanist is so important and irreplaceable.

I love being a vanguard on normal because even with an incomplete build you can tank two hydras. To be fair I was standing right on top of a health box...

That's all?? So short...

At least Drack hasn't forgotten my choice...

Ah, so the botanist who sent us on this mission and the botanist we rescued are two different people? Okay, one question answered.

Elaaden

Hmm, this puzzle seems more difficult...

The second monolith has a console puzzle instead of sudoku. I spent a pretty long time on it before realizing there were three consoles, not two...

WHy am I breaking into this base and slaughtering everyone inside??

Couldn't solve the console puzzle in the vault, looked it up, didn't understand the explanation, clicked some more and activated it by accident.

Shit, is this the same puzzle but on pillars?

I fell into the water and the game respawned me into the same fall -- but in the Nomad.

Jumped around and activated the bridge somehow, but the door behind it is still closed

How am I supposed not to fall from the pillars? It's impossible to know if you're jumping not far enough, too far, or not high enough.

Oh, here's that difficult sudoku. I spent like 15 minutes on it and still can't solve it...

Holy crap, I solved it! Took me about 25 minutes...

The purification field was already in the room when I closed the door on it...

Lmao apparently the main krogan on this planet is right in the starting zone... I searched the entire colony for him! And now, with the planet at 83% viability, I finally meet the guy I came here for :D

I clearly was meant to do all of this right in the beginning lmao. But I was in a rush to do Drack's mission...

Pressuring women into childbirth is bad enough in normal circumstances, but when children have about 1% chance of surviving? Back the fuck off.

Messages on the terminal are interesting. I don't like the confirmation of too-earthlike misogyny on Tuchanka, but at least things are getting better here. And I'm still impressed by the letters from the krogan engineer -- do other multiplayer character have presence in the main game too?

And here's the deal with the Remnant ship! I was waiting for the reason to visit it...

I like Morda. I hope I won't have to fight or depose her.

(Btw she's Norda in translation because "morda" means "face, mug")

It'd be much more fun to fight fiends if they weren't sync-killers. I can't even use a shotgun -- the entire fight consists of running away, throwing powers at them when at safe distance, turning around to run again, and if I'm very lucky, finding a moment for a sniper rifle shot a couple of times.

Btw this entire time I thought fiends were exalted eirochs -- but they're just a normal local species? What?

Lmao the viability is at 99% now

The Remnant Ship is a lovechild of the Collector ship/Derelict Reaper and all those veilfire dungeons from DAI

The Nomad looks bad in this planet's lighting... Or is it because I raised texture quality? On Eos and Voeld the entire hull looked the same, now I can see the difference between two areas.

Oh. Is this why I was supposed to break into the scavenger base lol

Well, this was a good planet to bring Drack and Peebee with you everywhere! Sorry Peebs, but even you didn't feel joy when we finally found that drive core after all the bloodshed; plus it's your own philisophy to look into the future instead of the past; plus we might find other Remnant ships but this diplomatic opportunity is huge and unique. It's a laughably small price to pay for so many good things -- not just the outpost, but paying our debts and renewing friendship with a good ally led by an admirable woman. This makes me feel really good, unlike Kadara. New Tuchanka in generally is a feel-good place. The krogan look more real with their occupations and interests, their reason for being here makes perfect sense unlike the rest of the Initiative, and they're happier than in the Milky Way (at least until the end of ME3. Yeah, they have the genophage here, but also the Reapers aren't killing and harvesting them, so I'll call it a draw).

Oh my god, the translators misread "fiends" as "friends"! "Even if it means taking out three friends at once"! L M A O

"We're all a little krogan in here" That sounds pretty racist, Ryder

Nexus

Wait, how is exile harsher sentence for Spender than jail? In exile he'd just be free to continue his racist criminal activities.

"It is the will to continue living" Ugh, don't give me that Padme bullshit

Eos

That's all? This short rude conversation is why Gil called me to meet his shitty friend?

Aw, Cora started a garden! Right on a nest of poison-spitting bugs, but still cute.

Just as I switch from Flamethrower to Annihilation, I get attacked by two fiends -_- Where's my biotic armor damage, Bioware?!

Btw the Nomad now looks plastic on Eos too :(

And here's the Architect! I avoided looking up videos because I wanted to find out how this fight goes by myself.

And of course, when I died the autosave was glitched and froze my entire game -_-

And it happened again -_- The cutscene doesn't start and I can't do anything

For fuck's sake, on its leg WHERE?

Managed to shot down a leg, got killed trying to shoot its head

Whoa, I won! Ate like 20 shield boosters, though. What a bullet sponge, I felt like I was doing no damage at all. And in the final section of the fight it spent like 5 minutes just shooting and throwing grenades at me without ever exposing the vulnerable spot, I thought that maybe the game just forgot to indicate it. I used Vanguard, Charge/melee/Lance for adds, gun/Lance/Charge for the Architect itself. For some reason it didn't occur to me to switch to Infiltrator or Soldier or even Explorer for sniping lol

Now that I finally leveled up Lance today, I tried a lot of setups... Flamethrower/Energy Drain/Lance (Sentinel), Annihilation/Energy Drain/Lance (Sentinel), Annihilation/Charge/Lance (Vanguard), Pull/Charge/Lance (Vanguard). Next time I'll try Singularity as the first primer. I don't have the final evolution of Annihilation yet, so it's not at full synergy. I really don't know what I like better -- ED/Sentinel or Charge/Vanguard. The latter is novaguard reborn, basically, but I already have one Vanguard profile, which is melee/tank oriented, and I don't want to remove Backlash, especially to replace it with a power that slows down Charge. Four favorites are not enough, Bioware! At least seven -- one for each profile. I still don't have a build for Remnant VI and I really want to use it! Btw, my final blow to the Architect was with Lance -- ending the testing session with style!

I can craft N7 armor X already! Wow. Why no level requirement? I'll replace my chestpiece -- massive buffs to biotics >> 4% XP. Don't know if I should disassemble my old armor or just buy more enhancements...

I just (re-)realized that Charge/Lance/asari sword is basically N7 Slayer... I definitely need that N7 armor!

I'm watching other people's Architect fights -- and turns out, Backlash can deflect its attacks! That's what I should have used as the third skill.

Not related at all, but I hate how people put spoilers in thread titles on Reddit :/ I guess the most obvious ones get filtered out, but indirect spoilers stay. "What are your theories about [thing]?" -- thanks a lot for telling me it won't be explained in the game, dude!! >:[

#mass effect #mea spoilers #blah blah blah

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douchebagbrainwaves · 3 years

Text

THE TROUBLE WITH THE STARTUP HUB

What ideas were tarnished by association when they ended up on the losing side of a recent struggle? And he could help them because he was black and for that reason I suspect that most of the giant companies were still focused on finding new ways to milk economies of scale. Another view is that a hacker's idea of a foul-mouthed, cynical 10 year old leaning against a lamppost with a cigarette hanging out of the gate that you want to wait till you graduate?1 You can just use them in whatever way is appropriate to the task at hand, instead of a lifetime's service to a single employer, there's less risk in starting your own company, because you're only replacing one segment instead of discarding the whole thing.2 Common Lisp occupy opposite poles on this question. But that same illiquidity also encouraged you not to seek it. Some smart, nice guys turn out to be 13: Pick good cofounders.3 That's partly because Y Combinator itself had near zero effect. I thought I was ready to question everything I knew. But you see the same problem there. Because Woz designed this computer for himself, and he was pretty much a throwaway program is brevity. Joe's has good burritos.

What advantages does someone in their mid-twenties. As far as I can tell these are universal. It is merely incidental, too, that spam is usually commercial. Bayesian approach considers all the evidence in the email is neutral, the spam of the future will find ridiculous. There probably aren't more than a tenth of your time trying to push your price down. Silicon Valley itself, but it doesn't seem there's anything to see. And there is a sharp difference between VCs and other investors: VC firms are a bargain for founders. The bar will be higher. Shows will change even more. And if you want to go straight there, blustering through obstacles, and hand-waving your way across swampy ground.

Part of the problem.4 How much does an angel invest?5 I was a philosophy major. That is a fundamental change. And we had no idea how silly we looked. An early stage startup. Even Google probably doesn't think that. A few ideas from it turned out to be the right advice for everyone. More information, in fact. And understanding your users. In every swing state they overestimated the Kerry vote.

Google are smart, but incurable builders. As a young founder by present standards, so you can get it done quickly and get back to what will make your company successful.6 That seems so obvious it seems wrong to call it the study of modern literature. How did things get this way? I was convinced the world was corrupt from end to end.7 Since high school, at least for me, and moreover discovered of a lot of money to us. So if you raise money, you were supposed to use their software, and their influence is such that the rest of the way? If you're raising money from friends and family. If anything it may have helped foster a Perl cult. One of the most important advantage 24 year old founders is that they can't force anyone to do deals with them. It's obvious why: the lower-tier firms' biggest fear, when chance throws them a bone, is that a real essay, you don't have this protection, as we found to our dismay in our own time, different societies have wildly varying ideas of what's ok and what isn't.

Well, that is a knowledge of what various individual philosophers have said about different topics over the years. But in addition to the usual clauses about owning your ideas, you also don't want your valuation to be set artificially low because the first investor who commits. Falling victim to this trick could really hurt you. Arthur Miller undermined the House Un-American Activities Committee by writing a play, The Crucible, about the Salem witch trials. Reality can be messier. Starting one's own business meant starting a business that would start small and stay small. And since reading ancient texts was the essence of what scholars did then, in real dollar terms, they'd seem like small fry compared to professional athletes and whiz kids making millions from startups and hedge funds. And of course if it were merely a matter of choosing between the unpalatable and the disastrous.

How many little startups are Google and Yahoo—though it seems even that should be unlimited, if the startups were able to raise significant funding after Demo Day. 09883721 hi 0. As long as that idea is still floating around, I think a greater danger is that they have less reputation to protect. You only get 52 weekends with your 2 year old. I only thought of when I sat down to write them to read like articles. Every startup's rule should be: spend little, and they turned out ok.8 Curiously, a filter based on word pairs would be in effect a narrower but open source Don't be evil has been good at letting hackers have their way with it. If you can do while you're still employed. Like all rivers, it's rigorously following the laws of physics.

In our own time, though, is thinking cheaply.9 Because seed firms are companies also means the investment process is more standardized. That will change the balance of power between the networks and the people who voted for Kerry felt virtuous for doing so, and were always disappointed. The phrase seed investment covers a broad range. In Common Lisp I have often wished I'd had the temperament to do an angel round before going to VCs. Reality can be messier. A throwaway program is: something you write quickly for some limited task: a program to be ported, except for political reasons. When I ask myself: how much you're planning to raise a $5 million series A round, unless you're in a position to say this is true for other languages too. An advantage of consulting, as a way to answer the question: if the spammers knew exactly what you were doing, how well could they get past you?

If they could even get here they'd presumably know a few things we don't. What little original thought there was took place in lulls between constant wars and had something of the character of the thoughts of parents with a new from-address, so you can get it back minus the bad parts, somehow with a few countertweaks. You just have to treat such leaks as a cost of doing business. But don't give them more than four or five numbers, and only evolved into a programming language unless it's also the scripting language of MIT. The user doesn't know what it means. Second order issues like competitors or resumes should be single slides you go through quickly at the end of California Ave in Palo Alto, the original ground zero, is about thirty miles away, and the investors are the ones most likely to get buyer's remorse.10 Users love a site that's constantly improving. For example, at the same time. Can it get you the designers, though? But the less you need a few topics that you think about? I think both Republicans and Democrats would agree, is more available than one that you have lousy judgement. But I also think that the more different kinds of advice.

Notes

Actually, someone else. It may be exaggerated by the fact that, go ahead.

If you're expected to, in writing, any claim to the minimum you need to fix. In Boston the best ideas, they wouldn't have.

I think investors currently err too far on the Internet was as late as 1984. The need has to work than stay home with them in advance that you never have worked; many statements may have been truer to the principle that if he hadn't we probably would not change the world population, and astronomy. There was no great risk in doing a business is to say, of course. Unfortunately the payload can consist of dealing with YC companies that grow slowly tend not to do it right.

03%. They may play some behind the scenes role in IPOs, which you are not in the sophomore year. It's suspiciously neat, but this would do for a market for its shares will inevitably arise. Maybe markets will eventually get comfortable with potential acquirers.

Some types of publishers would be to advertise, and the opinion of the market price. When an investor derives mostly from the example of a Linux box, a well-preserved 1989 Lincoln Town Car ten-passenger limousine 5, they were regarded as 'just' even after the egalitarian pressures of World War II had disappeared.

But they've been trained. But when you ad lib you end up with much greater inconveniences than that total abstinence is the unpromising-seeming startups are competitive like running, not because it's a book or movie or desktop application in this essay will say this amounts to the World Bank, Doing Business in 2006, http://doingbusiness. But a company just to go behind the rapacious one. And starting an organic farm, though sloppier language than I'd use to calibrate the weighting of the more accurate predictor of success for a group of Europeans who said he'd met with a woman who had worked for a couple predecessors.

Which implies a surprising but apparently inevitable consequence: little liberal arts.

Most of the infrastructure that this isn't strictly true, because any story that makes the business spectrum than the long tail for other people. In practice formal logic is not to say that any company could build products as good as Apple's just by hiring sufficiently qualified designers. But that is not just a Judeo-Christian concept; it's IBM.

Spices are also the golden age of economic inequality in the definition of property is driven by people who are younger or more ambitious the utility function for money. It's hard to tell VCs early on?

Most unusual ambitions fail, unless you're sure your money will be lots of customers times how much they lied to them more professional. And the reason this trick merely forces you to test whether that initial impression holds up. He couldn't even afford a monitor.

Thanks to Michael Arrington, Patrick Collison, Sarah Harlin, and the rest of the Python crew at PyCon for the lulz.

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itsjayyyy · 5 years

Text

January 10, 2019 12:13 pm

it’s a week after i planned on writing an update, but it’s a thursday so i’m technically on time. I worked tuesday, as i said, and on wednesday rose came over. we first went to the mall so i could show her how decrepit it was, and got auntie anne’s there. I like the mini pretzel dogs, but hate the hot dogs inside them; i just like how the pretzels are rolled up to look like croissants and how the hot dogs imbue the bread with that umami flavor. Then we went back to my place and watched train to busan (the main character was the same guy from coffee prince!), and then went to baanchan for dinner. I remember that she borrowed a shirt and got a stain on it and took it home and said shed wash it but i can’t remember which one. thursday and friday i just kinda lazed around, relaxed for a few days before the semester started. i signed up for postmates, and just today i got an email saying the prepaid card was sent to my address so i’ll activate it when i get home. the weekend was work, as always.

i would like to thank every god for allowing me to live so close to campus, because if i had to wake up any earlier for my 7:30 am calc class i would die. On the first day I woke up at 6, but tbh the earlier i have to wake up, the longer i have to take to get ready so I was kinda rushing and ended up forgetting my wallet. I didn’t want to give up my parking space to go back to get it, so I took the on campus shuttle back to my apartment to pick it up, since i needed my id to get my textbooks. got my textbooks (with no line whatsoever!), went to my evening classes, then went home. oh, and apparently i’m so bad at math. i saw my schedule’s weekly chart and said “oh nice, i have a 4 hour gap in the middle of the day for studying or getting lunch” but apparently it’s a 7 hour gap, from 8 am to 3 pm. coolio.

my calc professor was a bit timid, and has a slight accent. the first day i made the mistake of sitting in the back like last year, and could not focus on a word he said. psychology was chill, we just covered the syllabus. apparently, the psychology department (not my professor) mandates that all intro psych classes’ grades are 10% participating in psychology studies, bc otherwise nobody would volunteer to help them. i hate being forced to do anything, so of course I’m gonna lie and fuck with their studies. asl was my fav class, it’s at 6:30 when campus is empty. we just learned the alphabet (and by that i mean she ran through it once and then we had to go to the front of the class and introduce ourselves). the whole class is immersive, meaning that even on the FIRST day of class we weren’t allowed to speak. as if i understood a single thing she said. there’s a cute girl in that class, we didnt speak to each other (obvs) but when i got stuck while introducing myself, she helped me out since she was in the front row. can i just say i’m PISSED that it seemed like everyone was fluent in asl while i barely knew the alphabet. yall this is an introductory class.

tuesday was a disaster. i woke up at 6 again, but was so beat from the day before that I decided to skip calc, on the grounds that it was all just review and the first unit was my best anyways. i forgot to set a follow up alarm, though, so i woke up naturally at 8:55. and then looked at my class schedule. and saw that my next class was at 9. luckily since i live by campus i was only 6 minutes late, but i forgot literally everything (didn’t bring my phone or my backpack) except for my wallet. I didn’t even have time to shower, or brush my teeth, or comb my hair. immediately after i was done with that class i went home and did all of those. I also went to the pet store to get a new filter for my fish, since my last one broke (after 2 years of having it, which i think is a good lifespan). I installed that, knit more of my gloves, then went back on campus for programming at 6. The professor didn’t even cover the syllabus, he just jumped straight into the lecture. one kid asked about the structure of the class, and at that point he gave a quick summary. it was clear we were all expecting him to start the lecture with the syllabus. i’m so annoyed that last semester i deleted codeblocks, the program used in the course, because i thought i was done with it, and now i have to reinstall it. tuesday evening i watched hitchhiker’s guide to the galaxy, which i watched when i was like, 7, but forgot most of.

wednesday, i woke up at 5:30, so that i would have more time to get ready. I sat in the front of calc, and took really great notes. we finally started getting into psychology, all about behavior and stuff. I did one of their stupid studies before class, it was this survey about “human social perception” but honestly it was asking about how lonely i am. and when you have to actually sit there and quantify how many friends you have, and how often you see them, it really puts it into perspective. kinda felt called out.

ya know how every semester, i creep on webcourses’ list of students in my class? well the cute girl in asl is named “anna” (as per how she introduced herself, it was the only name i could catch), and there’s only one anna in the class, and she has a crazy last name so it was p easy to find her on ig and twitter. i was scrolling down her twitter when i accidentally liked one of her tweets. i quickly unliked it, and i didn’t think she would have gotten the notification bc it was a retweet anyways, but shortly after that she followed me. and then i remembered that my most recent tweet was “so uhh whos gonna tell the cute girl in my asl class that i want to go out with her bc it sure as hell ain’t gonna be me” (cue my death). i deleted it and hoped she didn’t see it, but honestly if she followed me she prob saw it. i hoped that maybe bc i don’t have my real name listed on twitter that she wouldn’t know it was me, but in class i introduced myself as “jay” bc i forgot the symbol for s. pls kill me. and this all happened like 10 minutes before class started. I sat in the back, though, so we weren’t near each other. but at the end of the class we did an activity where we got a card with a word, and we had to find the person with the same card by signing it. we did like 4 rounds, and i was hoping we wouldn’t be together, but in the last round we were. we didn’t talk tho, and as soon as it was over i was gone.

despite my period being nowhere near, i had a huge depressive episode last night. like, by her ig and twitter, she’s a Distinguished Gay in which she did a high school summer program with Stanford where she did heart surgery on a porcupine, and was an award winning thespian, and has tons of friends and a supportive family, where i’m the complete opposite: no friends, failed 3 classes, family hates me, chose a low paying career, needs alcohol to cope with life. This is one case where opposites don’t attract: she’s not gonna want to be with someone whose life is a complete mess. And then i just got to thinking about how rose tells me that mom lowkey thinks I’m a complete dissapointment for being gay and she only puts up with me bc it’s the muslim thing to do, and how the only way i can make her happy is me being single my whole life so she wouldn’t have to know. how i can never have love. and then rose texted asking for an update and i just kinda lashed out at her. why does she feel the need to tell me about mom talking shit? why would i want to hear that? yea i get the whole “don’t let others talk shit behind my back” idea but sometimes ignorance is bliss. i just don’t want to feel like a pile of shit for once in a while. and of course I’m still so resentful about the way that mom and dad treat rose like a damn golden child while i’ve never gotten 1/10 of the support she has.

This morning i went to calc, then comp, didn’t really pay attention in either. while in comp, heather texted me and was like “we should meet up soon.” rose also texted me; last week we were planning to meet up today but it was kinda dicey since we had that issue last night. and anyways at 11 she said “i got a job interview with izziban at 4, should i go” and i was just like “yea sure” bc i really don’t give a fuck. she always puts everything before me so why bother. then she got all like “if something’s wrong you need to tell me i can’t help if i don’t know what’s wrong” like, how about you read what i sent you last night, that details EVERYTHING that’s wrong. she later said she was gonna skip the interview bc she already has a job and she’s gonna do uber eats, and that she was just gonna have lunch with mom (since mom loves her enough to cook for her) and then head out my way. heather responded that we should meet at 1 today, so i told rose. rose said “should i wait for yall to finish and then come by?” but i havent responded bc i don’t want to see her (ever again).

I soft blocked anna on twitter bc i didn’t want her to see me talking about how i wanted to kill myself on main lmao. anyways i’m gonna go get a smoothie.

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foursproutwealth-blog · 6 years

Text

The Media's Reign Of Error Exposed

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/wealth/the-medias-reign-of-error-exposed/

The Media's Reign Of Error Exposed

Authored by Mark Hemingway via WeeklyStandard.com,

Covering the Trump presidency has not always been the media’s finest hour, but even grading on that curve, the month of December has brought astonishing screwups.

Professor and venerable political observer Walter Russell Mead tweeted on December 8, “I remember Watergate pretty well, and I don’t remember anything like this level of journalistic carelessness back then. The constant stream of ‘bombshells’ that turn into duds is doing much more to damage the media than anything Trump could manage.”

On December 1, ABC News correspondent Brian Ross went on air and made a remarkable claim. For months, the media have been furiously trying to prove collusion between the Trump campaign and the Russian government. Ross reported that former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had just pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, was prepared to testify that President Trump had instructed him to contact Russian officials before the 2016 election, while Trump was still a candidate. If true, it would have been a gamechanger. But Ross’s claim was inaccurate. Flynn’s documented attempts to contact the Russians came after Trump was president-elect, allegedly trying to lay diplomatic groundwork for the new administration. Ross was suspended by ABC for four weeks without pay for the error.

Later that same weekend, the New York Times ran a story about Trump transition official K. T. McFarland, charging that she had lied to congressional investigators about knowledge of the Trump transition team’s contacts with Russia. The article went through four headline changes and extensive edits after it was first published, substantially softening and backing away from claims made in the original version. The first headline made a definitive claim: “McFarland Contradicted Herself on Russia Contacts, Congressional Testimony Shows.” The headline now reads “Former Aide’s Testimony on Russia Is Questioned.” The website Newsdiffs, which tracks edits of articles after publication, shows nearly the entire body of the article was rewritten. (The Times website makes no mention of the changes.)

Still in that first weekend of December, Senator Orrin Hatch criticized the excesses of federal welfare programs, saying, “I have a rough time wanting to spend billions and billions and trillions of dollars to help people who won’t help themselves.” The quote was taken wildly out of context. MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough as well as journalists from Mic, Newsweek, and the Los Angeles Times reported that Hatch was directly criticizing the Children’s Health Insurance Program, with some suggesting Hatch thought children should be put to work to pay for subsidized health care. Not only was Hatch not criticizing the CHIP program, he cowrote the recent bill to extend its funding.

On December 5, Reuters and Bloomberg reported that special counsel Robert Mueller had subpoenaed Deutsche Bank account records of President Trump and family members, possibly related to business done in Russia. The report was later corrected to say Mueller was subpoenaing “people or entities close to Mr. Trump.”

Then on December 8, another Russia bombshell turned into a dud. CNN’s Manu Raju and Jeremy Herb reported Donald Trump Jr. had been sent an email on September 4, 2016, with a decryption key to a WikiLeaks trove of hacked emails from Clinton confidant and Democratic operative John Podesta—that is, before the hacked emails were made public. (WikiLeaks is widely surmised to act as a front for Russian intelligence.) MSNBC and CBS quickly claimed to have confirmed CNN’s scoop. Within hours, though, CNN’s report was discredited. The email was sent on September 14, after the hacked Podesta emails had been made publicly available. CNN later admitted it never saw the email it was reporting the contents of.

This is just eight days’ worth of blundering.

Since October of last year, when Franklin Foer at Slate filed an erroneous report on a computer server in Trump Tower communicating with a Russian bank, there have been an unprecedented number of media faceplants, most of them directly related to the Russia-collusion theory.

The errors always run in the same direction—they report or imply that the Trump campaign was in league with Moscow.

For a politicized and overwhelmingly liberal press corps, the wish that this story be true is obviously the father to the errors. Just as obviously, there are precedents for such high-profile embarrassments in the past. (Remember Dan Rather’s “scoop” on George W. Bush’s National Guard service?) But flawed reporting in the Trump era is becoming more the norm than the exception, suggesting the media have become far too willing to abandon some pretty basic journalistic standards.

Editors at top news organizations once treated anonymous sourcing as a necessary evil, a tool to be used sparingly. Now anonymous sources dominate Trump coverage.

It’s not just a problem for readers, who should rightly be skeptical of information someone isn’t willing to vouch for by name. It’s a problem for reporters, too, because anonymous sources are less likely to be cautious and diligent in providing information. According to CNN, the sources behind the busted report on Trump Jr.’s contact with WikiLeaks didn’t intend to deceive and had been reliable in the past. Maybe so, but given the network’s repeated errors it’s difficult to just take CNN’s word for it.

But it’s one thing to use anonymous sources; it’s quite another to be entirely trusting of them. CNN decided to report the contents of an email to Donald Trump Jr. based only on the say-so of two anonymous sources and without seeing the emails. “I remember when I was [a staffer] on the Ways and Means committee and I would try and give reporters stories, and I remember the Wall Street Journal demanded to see a document,” former Bush administration press secretary Ari Fleischer tells The Weekly Standard. “They wouldn’t take it from me if I didn’t give them the document, and I thought, ‘Good for them!’ ”

What makes the botched story of the WikiLeaks email more troubling is how quickly MSNBC and CBS ran with CNN’s scoop. “It’s hard to imagine how independent people could repeatedly misread a date on an email and do so for three different networks,” says Fleischer. “Whose eyesight is that bad?”

This points to an additional problem with the sourcing on these unfounded reports. The only way three networks could claim to have verified the same specious story is if they were all relying on the very same sources. Many of the flawed Trump reports appear to be sourced from a very narrow circle of people, who no doubt share partisan motivations or personal animus.

Certainly, it appears a number of recent spurious stories have originated as leaks from Democrats on the House Intelligence Committee. In Raju and Herb’s report, they revealed that Trump Jr. had been asked about the WikiLeaks email in closed-door testimony before the committee. After CNN’s scoop imploded, a spokesman for Adam Schiff, the ranking Democrat on the committee, issued a classic non-denial denial, telling Politico “that neither he nor his staff leaked any ‘non-public information’ ” about Donald Trump Jr.’s testimony.

Meanwhile, the Russia investigation has been very good for raising Schiff’s profile. A December 13 press release from the Republican National Committee notes the congressman has at that point spent 20 hours, 44 minutes, and 49 seconds on television since Trump took office, talking mostly about the investigation (pity the low-level staffer who must have had to do the research for that release). During that time, Schiff has always declined to discuss the particulars of the intel committee’s work. Nonetheless, consideration of his sensitive position hasn’t stopped him from offering all manner of innuendo to national TV audiences about evidence suggesting Russia collusion.

For their part, the media don’t seem to be coming to grips with the damage they’re doing to their own credibility. CNN, which calls itself “the most trusted name in news,” didn’t retract their WikiLeaks report but rewrote it in such a way as to render the story meaningless. They also came to the defense of Raju and Herb, saying the reporters acted in accordance with the network’s editorial policies. And of course they didn’t out their sources—the ultimate punishment news organizations can mete out to anonymous tipsters who steer them wrong.

It understandably infuriates the media that President Trump remains unwilling to own up to his own glaring errors and untruths, while news organizations run correction after correction. And it also understandably upsets the media to watch the president actively attack and seek to undermine their work, which remains vital to ensuring accountability in American governance.

What they haven’t grasped is how perversely helpful to him they are being: On a very basic level, President Trump’s repeated salvos against “fake news” have resonance because, well, there does indeed appear to be a lot of fake news.

“There is nothing wrong with holding powerful people accountable. There’s nothing wrong with investigating whether or not collusion took place. But there’s a lot wrong when because you want to believe in the story so much you suspend skepticism,” says Fleischer.

“You let your guard down. You abandon the normal filters that protect journalistic integrity. And you fail to also hold to account powerful leakers, or powerful members of Congress who themselves have an anti-Trump agenda. It’s called putting your thumb on the scale.”

#Wealth

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foursprout-blog · 6 years

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The Media's Reign Of Error Exposed

New Post has been published on http://foursprout.com/wealth/the-medias-reign-of-error-exposed/

The Media's Reign Of Error Exposed

Authored by Mark Hemingway via WeeklyStandard.com,

Covering the Trump presidency has not always been the media’s finest hour, but even grading on that curve, the month of December has brought astonishing screwups.

This is just eight days’ worth of blundering.

The errors always run in the same direction—they report or imply that the Trump campaign was in league with Moscow.

Editors at top news organizations once treated anonymous sourcing as a necessary evil, a tool to be used sparingly. Now anonymous sources dominate Trump coverage.

#Wealth

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ntrending · 7 years

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How to test your tap water for lead

New Post has been published on https://nexcraft.co/how-to-test-your-tap-water-for-lead/

How to test your tap water for lead

People don’t trust the water that comes out of their tap, and not just in places without adequate sanitation. A 2016 survey by The Meyocks Group, an Iowa-based marketing firm, found that 43 percent of Americans either believe their tap water is unsafe to drink or are unsure of its safety.

In the wake of the Flint water crisis, that fear isn’t wholly unexpected. The city’s troubles began when the state switched the water supply from Lake Huron to the notoriously polluted Flint River, failing to properly treat it to kill pathogens and prevent lead pipe erosion. But the mistrust came when—as residents complained of foul water, disease, and even death—the Michigan Department of Environmental Quality continued to claim that the water was safe.

Luckily, homeowners who suspect that their drinking water might be contaminated have more options than ever before. In New York, for instance, folks can order a free at-home testing kit. And most hardware stores offer a similar system for purchase. We pitted those up against a new product called Tap Score to see just how accurate—and easy to understand—the results are.

How good is New York City tap water?

Most NYC locals claim to guzzle some of the best water in the country. To hear them talk, you would think the city’s soft water begins in a mythical land known as “upstate,” where it’s filtered through pristine forests and a unicorn’s mane before it descends onto the city, via a canal of pure angelic light, to create the best bagels, pizza, and drinking water known to human kind.

An Environmental Working Group (EWG) analysis of 100 municipal tap water systems found that New York City had six contaminants at levels above the health guidelines established by either a federal or state authority (though lead wasn’t among them). EWG, it should be noted, has been criticized in the past for overstating chemical risks, especially those related to food and drink. That said, EGW’s overall assessment of New York City’s tap water as compared to the rest of the country is… well, it falls short of the fantasy set by locals, but the tap is just fine.

How good is our water, really?

Popular Science’s commerce editor Billy Cadden lives in an older part of the city than I do, where buildings are more likely to use lead somewhere in their plumbing system—it’s been phased out ever since scientists confirmed how dangerous the metal can be.

“Even though the town might say, look, there’s no lead in the water, they then put it into a distribution system,” says Mark Burns, a professor of chemical engineering at the University of Michigan. “That distribution system goes through many different pipes, across many different joints—that are connected by many different materials—and then it gets to your glass.”

So Billy opened his home (and his taps) to three tests.

Our results

Testing for lead in New York City

Using the free service from New York City’s Department of Environmental Protection proved pretty straightforward. First, you abstain from water use in your home for 12 hours—there’s generally more lead in the liquid if your pipes have settled a bit. You then fill collection bottle one (the yellow bottle) and let the pipes flush for one to two minutes before filling bottle two (the red one). You bundle the whole thing up in a package and mail it back. We got the results about three weeks later.

The city found that the first draw had 1 microgram of lead per liter, well below the federal action level of 15 micrograms per liter. The second draw, after Billy had let the water flow for a bit, had no detectable lead at all. The test was reassuring, though the results were in a form letter that wasn’t exactly user-friendly.

But in the wake of Flint, many people are understandably distrusting of reassurances from government agencies. How could we know the test was accurate? Then there’s the fact that the test only looks for lead; it may be a hot-button contaminant right now, but there are certainly other things that could make your tap water unsafe.

Home Testing

Our second round used a “First Alert” home test (sold online and in many hardware stores) that promised to detect not only lead, but also bacteria, pesticides, nitrates, chlorine, hardness, and pH. If you have lead pipes, acidic water can cause the lead to leach out. That’s essentially what happened in Flint. Because water managers failed to add an anti-corrosive agent (as a cost-cutting measure), water from the Flint River ate away at the pipes and pulled lead into the drinking supply.

Contaminants are broken down into individual tests, each requiring a separate vial of water or testing strip. Like the test done by the city, we were in the clear for lead. We also came up either negative or within normal range for everything else, which certainly suggests that Billy can continue to happily drink his tap water.

This test certainly gets points for immediate gratification. With the exception of the bacterial test, which took 48 hours, we didn’t have to wait more than 10 minutes for any result. For less than $15 on Amazon, it’s a good option for someone looking for quick reassurance.

Tap Score

Of the three tests that we took, Tap Score was the easiest. It also had the most comprehensive results, including measurements for things like copper (which only makes you sick at very high levels, but can kill your goldfish at a much lower threshold), hexachlorobutadiene (which can affect the kidneys), and isopropylbenzene (which may increase risk of cancer). But Billy did not dig the delayed gratification.

With Tap Score, you have to fill two vials—much smaller than the ones the city had sent—mail them off, and wait for them to get back to you. Still, it was fun getting a cheerful email telling us that our water ranked in the 99th percentile for tap water quality.

“You’re living in the best possible scenario,” says John Pujol, who created Tap Score with his company Simplewater. “You have this fantastic water system in New York City, a big, rich, dense population where people are actively on top of problems. That’s a luxury. But for 20 to 30 percent of Americans that live in communities that are much smaller, either these issues never emerge—so the water system doesn’t feel the heat to solve problems—or it does emerge, and you have a water system that knows it has a problem but doesn’t have the funding to fix it.”

The goal of Tap Score isn’t really to test water like New York’s, but for small municipal systems and the 40 to 50 million people who are on wells, and maybe wouldn’t ordinarily get their water tested—or know what to do with the results.

“It’s really the interpretation of the water that other tests lack that sets Tap Score apart,” says Pujol. “If it’s a municipality, they’re only going to test your water for certain controlled substances that are managed by the EPA, but those are by no means the full set of parameters anymore. It’s been around 10 years since the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has introduced any new standards.”

In the interim, companies have introduced thousands of new potential contaminants.

“So, what we seek to do is not just test for those regulated contaminants, but go a little bit further and test for pharmaceutical compounds,” says Pujol. “We test for unregulated but potentially dangerous compounds that are on the contaminate candidate list. These are contaminants which the EPA is looking at, but it’s going to take them 10 years to come to any decision.”

If your test turns up positive, Tap Score offers you potential solutions. But it also costs at least a hundred bucks, and prices are higher for the most comprehensive tests.

Should I test my water for lead?

If you’re at all uncertain of your water’s safety—and you live in New York State—nabbing a free testing kit is a no-brainer. If your state doesn’t offer testing for free, consider investing in a $15 kit to ease your mind. The redundancies between our three results certainly suggest that all of the options we tried are fairly accurate, so if spending 100-200 dollars on a testing kit sounds like overkill, it probably is. But if you live in a town where municipal testing is infrequent—or if you get your water from a well you’ve never tested—it might be worth upgrading to a test that’s as comprehensive and user-friendly as Tap Score.

Written By Kendra Pierre-Louis

#DIY

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samanthasroberts · 7 years

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5 Terribly Awkward Attempts To Appeal To Young People

Advertisers are a lot like popular kids in high school: They’re rich, always hanging out with hot people, and devoting every conscious thought to how to look cool. Here are five attempts to market to young people that are high-key LOL epic #fails to the max.

#5. Microsoft Asks Potential Employees To “Get Lit” With Them

If there’s one thing that Microsoft (the creators of Windows NT and Clippy the Helpful Paperclip) makes me think of, it’s partying. At least, that’s what their recruiters want candidates to think. In an effort to get in good with tomorrow’s top talent, they sent out emails to interns in Silicon Valley inviting them to come party the Microsoft way.

The email is addressed to “bae intern,” because “bae” is something this recruiter must have heard their niece use once, and parroting youth-speak is life. It’s an invite to a party which they insist will be exclusive, despite the fact that they invited every intern working in tech whose email they could find. Undoubtedly, Microsoft set some kind of minimum baeness quotient (MBQ) required for entry. Because that’s how you verifiably partayyy!

To make sure they were speaking the young ‘uns language, they hit all the hip keywords that you’d get from a Bing search of “What is cool?”

Sunglasses are the one cool thing that hasn’t excluded itself from Bing.

For those of you who aren’t “woke,” allow me to translate. (I am half woke on my mother’s side.) Microsoft’s “crew” of communications BAs with five-plus years of recruitment experience is throwing this party after Internapalooza, which I can only guess from the name is a travelling intern festival that was very popular in the early ’90s. They promise “hella noms, lots of dranks,” and “the best beats.” That is to say, these Microsoft employees will have food, drinks, and music. They are describing the minimum requirements for a party.

“Oh yeah, we’re running this party in FULL RESOLUTION!”

The real draw, though, is meant to be Yammer beer pong tables. Beer pong is a drinking game popular at frat parties. Yammer is a social network for business. A “Yammer beer pong table,” then, is a place to collaborate with your peers on getting crunk with your peers, smarter, with better analytics and integrated with iOS and Android.

Yep, Microsoft is the fleekest multinational corporation that just DGAF about anything (except its pending antitrust cases) and is always down for a Microsoft Azure and chill. The email concludes with an all-caps, coral-colored, “Hell yes to getting lit on a Monday night.” Of course Microsoft likes to get lit. Where do you think they got the idea for that pipe screensaver?

“OK, hear me out: We have to try again with the Zune.”

#4. Hillary Clinton Asked People To Describe Their Crippling Debt In Emojis

Connecting with America’s youth is vital in presidential elections. Not because their views matter (they don’t vote), but because tweeting at young people is today’s kissing babies: You earn likability with minimal contact with actual young people. All you have to do is tweet halfway intelligently about anything young people care about, and you’re praised for being an adolesceltongue who is both “with it” and “gets it.” Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton should have had a home run on her hands when she tweeted about her $350 billion college affordability plan, but she couldn’t resist tempting the gods of social media.

On paper, the thinking here makes sense. Clinton was unveiling a plan that college students should love: $350 billion in student debt relief. And those college students love emojispeak. So together, these two things should make an irresistible combination, as good as unagi ice cream.

Clinton’s campaign thought the tweet would precipitate a cascade of fire emoji tweets, each more two-hands-praising-emoji than the last. And that’s what might have happened if Clinton had simply said, “How do you feel about your student loan debt? Ready for a change?” If she’d just straightforwardly pandered to them, undergrads would have showered her in creative emojis.

Or if it had been someone with crippling student loan debt expressing themselves in three emojis, the internet would have loved that too. We would have named them the voice of a generation and given them a deal for a young adult novel written completely in dystopian pictographs.

“Mom? What’s 400 more phrases for ‘fuck you’?”

Instead, millionaire political insider Hillary Clinton asking students with paralyzing amounts of debt to describe it in “three emojis or less” came off as further out of touch than George Clooney in Gravity. People responding didn’t need three emojis to express themselves; they made do with just one finger.

Unsurprisingly, Clinton apologized for making light of the very hardships she is working to ease. Even less surprisingly, her campaign keeps making half-informed references to current pop trends, like holding a campaign event at a Pokemon Go gym. Someone please tell her that no matter what happens, she is never to mention Jynx.

#3. The Department Of Health and Human Services Will Debase Itself To Any Degree If People Will Think About Their Health

The Department Of Health and Human Services has the unenviable task of trying to get Americans to take care of themselves. This task is particularly unenviable when it comes to young people, who treat their bodies like they’re going to live forever and then proceed to live basically forever as sickly, overweight, expensive adults perpetually on death’s door.

They say an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Since America needs millions of pounds of cure, HHS has been throwing anything they can think of at this problem. They have infographics, an active YouTube channel, and will shamelessly use anything millennials might recognize to trick them into caring for themselves.

Exhibit A is a post captioned, “Start a conversation with a friend about becoming an #OrganDonor.” It is a picture of a text exchange, apparently between two friends, that begins with “ru an organ donor?” Now, I think becoming an organ donor isn’t a huge sacrifice, for the same reasons I think offering someone your laptop when you’re dead isn’t a huge sacrifice: You’ll be dead, and they’ll probably be worthless by that point anyhow. Still, the text “ru an organ donor” out of the blue would terrify me even coming from the most laidback of my friends.

“Also, wuld ur skin make a qt dress?”

And the post only gets weirder from there. The response is not “Holy shit, is that you outside my window right now?” but rather the equally laidback yet somehow all-business “Yes, u?” Now I don’t know who’s creepier: the friend texting about postmortem plans for no reason, or the friend who does not bat an eye at the question, as though they’ve been expecting it. Then the reply seals the deal: It’s just a smiley face staring back at you with beady eyes. You started this conversation, dude! Why are you not answering this question?

Finally, the response to the smiley face is an ASCII heart, which would normally mean “I love you,” but in this case seems like a literal offer of the cardiac muscle. Thus, in an attempt to appeal to millennials, HHS gave us a vivid picture of a text exchange between two morbid, socially awkward young people. So, Cracked readers.

Exhibit B is an adapted “doge” meme meant to inspire young people to sign up for health care. As usual, it features a very cute Shiba Inu with its inner monologue displayed in pastel comic sans. It’s cute and kind of funny, if you like that sort of thing. The trouble is that the main reason young people don’t sign up for healthcare is that they think they won’t need it. A cute puppy frolicking through the snow and making grammar mistakes doesn’t inspire confidence in the system they’re supposed to buy into for their own good.

“So trust.” “Much effective.”

The ad is just “Hey, they’ll recognize this internet meme!” They might as well have made an ad that says “Know who thinks signing up with us for health insurance is a great idea? LEEEEEROY JENKINS!”

Finally, Exhibit C is an anti-bullying ad. For some reason, though, it appears to be borrowing from the #followmeto project by Instagram user @muradosmann, in which a woman with her back to the camera leads the phtographer by the hand to various exotic destinations all over the world.

Stop bullying, or the girl from The Ring will have to end her vacation early.

This is ironic, because the people from that Instagram account seem like the villains in a John Hughes movie. They’re blond, skinny, beautiful, and rich, so they’re by far the ones most likely to give you a swirlie on the entire internet.

Source: http://allofbeer.com/2017/11/07/5-terribly-awkward-attempts-to-appeal-to-young-people/

from All of Beer https://allofbeer.wordpress.com/2017/11/07/5-terribly-awkward-attempts-to-appeal-to-young-people/

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