How do you want to do this?

—

Goodbye, Faithful Caregiver.

Back Home

For the record - I really tried hard with the dialogue because I know I can go off rail with those. Call it a practice since I know that's my weakness. Also, this will be cross-posted on my ao3 that i'll link after the main post just 'cause~ As for any warnings, I don't think much will apply (? let me know if there is something that I did miss). It's been quite a while since I've written and finished a 2k worded fic ~ Without further ado, and since this is a long story - enjoy~

///

Gen wakes up with the feeling of last week's unprecedented happenings being carried over to today. There's a gaping coldness by the other side of his bed, moreso within him when the crashing weight of emptiness takes over his thoughts first thing in the afternoon.

It was annoyingly consistent; he wakes up, feels the wash of dreaded loneliness spark him to an unbearable consciousness and he hates that it's such a contrast to waking up with his boyfriend's arm wrapped around his torso.

Ex-boyfriend, to be exact.

He hasn't slept well since they've broken up - him and Senku. To be honest, no one really saw it coming but they knew someone had to bend and break under the heavy weight of Gen's unhealthy pretenses. The anxiety that had built up over the years had pulled the strings taut - much too brittle and fragile and it all ended up a self-fulfilling prophecy as he drove all his insecurity to projection.

Senku happens to be the "lucky one" to be present at the tipping point.

"Gen, tell me."

"I don't know what to tell you."

It was the truth - and somehow a lie at the same time. His thought process was all over the place because anxiety was making everything a tad bitch too hard for him to express himself clearly.

He had been so, so used to carrying these things alone because no one had pried him open to this extent and now that his walls were crumbling, another fear was crawling its way out to his subconsciousness. It's one thing after another and it's dizzying and tiring to have been in this perpetual state of worry.

Needless to say, Gen feels like an asshole for wanting to open up and regretting it right away. He foresaw this coming but Senku - Senku just had this something on him that makes Gen feel safe. Feel loved. Feel immensely needed - that he was actually a person with substance and not an empty shell.

How does he tell Senku that he doesn't feel worthy of whatever they have going on without hurting him?

"Don't lie to me. It's been eating you for days and you've been avoiding me-"

"I am not lying."

"I know darn well you are!"

"Then if you are so smart - then why can't you figure it out yourself?"

"I can't read minds, for fuck's sake."

"Then you better stop assuming that something is wrong because there's none! Don't make this out to be a bigger deal-"

"I'm making a big deal of this if I want to because I can't stand to see you like this! You barely left the room, barely touch your food and talk to me. This goddamn apartment is so small with four rooms but we are never in the same place!"

"Can't you just leave me be for once-"

"No! I might be the densest asshole out there but you know that I'd rather talk this out with you-"

"Don't make this harder than it already is!"

"I don't even know what I am doing that's making things so harder for you, Gen!"

"This! Everything!"

"...what?"

"You heard me. This 'us' is what's making me like this."

"Did I do something wrong?"

"No-"

"Then what about 'us' that's wrong?!"

"Just -"

"Do I ashame you? Do I embarrass you-"

"I feel suffocated!"

No, this wasn't what he wanted to say.

"I can't breathe and I just feel smothered all the time and it's fucking - it's fucking hard that it had to be you!"

This wasn't it. He wanted to tell Senku that it's just been so hard and the anxiety is killing him - that he cannot accept the fact that it had to peak at the moment he was the happiest AND he was - still is happiest with Senku.

He IS fucking happiest with Senku and yet - this happens.

Was he truly...?

Gen doesn't think he can stomach the scrunch of Senku's brows, the slightest quivering of his lips and the sheen layer of unshed tears.

His ruby red eyes were losing it's ember glow.

Gen did this.

He doesn't think he can live this down - Senku must hate him now, despise him for wasting his time, and now that Gen had ruined this thing along with all the wasted relationships on his trail, this was no different than the rest even though he thought he could make it last.

Two years isn't bad.

"Gen-"

"Leave."

"No, Gen wait -"

He doesn't think he can stomach to hear what Senku wants to say.

Anything but Senku telling him that he hates him.

Anything but that.

So he ends things first and foremost - because this is where it's bound to lead right? They all do - and his past, broken pieces were a testimony that this one is no unique case.

They all tell him that - but somehow, it eats him up whole to think that Senku could say it to him. Would say it to him.

He doesn't want to hear that.

He hates that Senku hates him now and he cannot do a single thing about it because he was the goddamn cause.

"I said leave!"

Gen doesn't understand - but when Senku leaves without a word, he knows it's all over.

When Gen hears their front door close with an empty thud, his knees lose strength, the fight in him drains, and he stares at the floor with blurred vision, thinking - how does Senku manage to take parts of Gen as he leaves.

Today's afternoon was no different than those of this past week. The weight of the events always flood him first thing he gains consciousness and - it's tiring.

Gen is tired and he wants Senku back.

But he cannot text him, cannot even call him because he was the asshole who requested for his ex-boyfriend to leave in the first place and in a week of being contactless with the ombre-haired scientist - Gen knows Senku has probably forgotten him.

He hates him, Gen's mind supplies.

He's tired of you.

He's probably moved on, you know?

Hell, Gen kicked Senku out of his own home and atop of all that - Senku never bothered to return and that just sets afire the fact that he really is worthless after all.

Gen asked Senku to leave - he complied and Gen wished Senku didn't do it so easily.

"I am so fucking unfair." He whispers harshly in the mess of their bedroom.

Gen guesses it's his alone now.

///

Gen feels his heart lodge itself up in his throat when he mindlessly opens the front door and is greeted by his ex-boyfriend.

Senku -

Gen doesn't realize that he had uttered his ex-boyfriends name in a hush - breathless and needlessly sounding desperate. The air in his lungs seemed to have been knocked out when the scientist neither moves or says anything.

Senku just stood there and soaked in the mess that is Asagiri Gen - as if he hadn't been chased out of his own home a week ago.

In a surge of pride and anxiety, Gen regains his footing as he immediately slams the door close, thinking that he had less sleep in days to the point of hallucination and that this must be a dream -

But the groan and the foot stuck in the door's gap is probably real.

"Gen, let me in damn it."

"I don't want to." He says indignantly, his teeth clenching down hard at his bottom lip to keep his tears from flowing, hands grasping with a vice grip at the doorknob that is forcibly keeping the door from opening and seeing Senku's face again.

If he sees those coal-ember eyes, he just might lose it.

"Don't be stubborn -" Senku said, breath hitching and Gen felt the doorknob slip away from his hands and - "and just let me in."

There's a warm hand on his wrist, and another on his cheeks - so warm and he almost wanted to lean into it because he misses this most. Gen cannot seem to bring his gaze up towards Senku, but he regrets it the moment he sees those blazen red eyes.

He cannot give in now - this is a trap. Senku is just reeling him and preparing him for the worst and he needs to get away.

Without much of a warning, Gen pulls away from the hold harshly, trying not to flinch at the sudden coldness it leaves in his wake as he sidesteps to run away from Senku and whatever he is about to say.

Senku's going to say he hates him and Gen doesn't want to hear it.

It was so unfortunate that he doesn't get far - not even a foot outside the apartment as he gets pulled in by the waist and is slammed against the now closed front door of their apartment. Senku is now breathing too closely, Gen pinned in between his arms helplessly and the tears - since when had they been falling?

"You are not leaving our home."

Gen's heart gripes and constricts at the phrase. He cannot seem to understand how it was still theirs.

This is a trap - you have to get away -

"Gen, stop listening to your thoughts for once and listen to me!" Senku begged, seeing the way Gen's eyes have lost focus ever since he appeared at their doorstep.

"But you hate me a-and I even kicked you out from your own home and-"

"That's why I told you to listen to me, damn it. This is our home and I can never, Gen," Senku sighs into his lips that is mere centimeters away, forehead pressed on his and Gen cannot escape this anymore. "I can and will never hate you."

"You left me!"

"That's because I wanted to give you space to think. One week would be enough to calm you down even though I have been itching to return ever since I closed the door and left."

"You still -"

"I am here now, Gen. And you cannot chase me away this time no matter how many attempts you try. I'm not leaving."

"They all did - why didn't you?"

"Because I am not them, Gen. I told you I won't leave."

"Why are you doing this? You're just lulling me into a false sense of security -"

"Gen, I love you."

Gen tries not to choke at his own tears and spit and presses on.

"I said all of us was suffocating and smothering -"

"I love you."

"And that I know deep within you must hate how I am so selfish and an asshole-"

"I don't, and I love you."

"I kicked you out of your own home and when you left I just wanted you back and -"

"I know. I love you, Gen."

"And - it's just suffocating how I just wanted to be happy with you Senku. I am happy with you but a voice in my head was so against this and -"

"I love you."

"I'm sorry - i'm just so sorry Senku but I can't let go of us even though I am making this so complicated and shitty and I cannot promise that there won't be more of this but please," Gen sobs, teeth clenched and his hands fisting the shirt Senku wears. "Promise me you won't leave."

Senku presses a chaste kiss on Gen's lips.

"Yeah, I promise."

It wasn't much, Gen supposes but this little thorn that was a broken piece of him that's stuck somewhere was finally removed. To be honest, there were a lot of these broken shards scattered within him and it's still scary, he is still apprehensive and so full of worry but for the time being -

-Gen finally listens.

So he surrenders - his body limp against Senku, his arms wrapping itself on the scientist's neck as he bawled his eyes out because for once within this month - he was crying out of relief and Senku's returned to their home.

It's their home.

One step at a time - he can do that much right?

For once, this is enough.

///

Personal thoughts - Gen should have therapy because his anxiety was striking badly and affecting his relationship with Senku ajdshkjadh he has too much emotional baggage from past relationships and probably from shitty family matters too. this baby boy needs to get help :(((

ngl, it crossed my mind to make a sequel wherein Senku is also bound to break under the heavy mental stress load because he's still just a person and as much as he loved Gen to his very core, being a human prevented him from loving Gen beyond everything. idk if i'll ever do such a fic - but im putting it the idea out there heh Also, here's the link to ao3 if y'all wanted to read it there better - but I'm actually more active in posting here since it feels weird to put not-quite-fic-not-quite-drabble in there HAHAHA

having a full on existential crisis over an episode of anime i watched tonight

it all started with big time rush

in 2009 a sitcom called big time rush aired for the first time on nickelodeon; it was about a group of four teenaged boys from minnesota who move to hollywood under a famous producer to become his next big boy band sensation. a simple premise, launched into unprecedented success, resulting in four seasons of musical shenanigans, three full music albums, and three big concert tours, including international shows. the band, both fictional and real life, featured four attractive young men by the names of kendall, james, carlos, and logan. they quickly gained a fan base of mostly teenage girls, which resulted in online spaces created for the purpose of sharing their passion, and as is common in such online communities, this certainly involved fanfiction- lots of it.

enter me, a teen in high school who loved to write fanfiction. my big time journey began the day my younger sister decided to put on the show big time rush in the living room, where i sat at the family computer typing away. the noise caught my attention, and i got sucked into the episode. there was a boy wearing a dress on the screen. i became interested.

i watched more of the show. i typed its name into the search bar on the website fanfiction dot net. i had a friend at school who shared my interest in fanfiction, particularly of the slash variety. i introduced her to this new show i had been watching. she shared a fanfic she had enjoyed immensely with me. we dragged each other into the world of big time rush fanfiction reading and writing.

it took over my life; i lived and breathed big time rush. i began posting my own stories to fanfiction dot net. i received positive feedback; i met people. i made friends- two people in particular who became very close friends. we communicated through ffn’s private messaging system, then through email. we talked every day, we wrote stories for and with each other, we exchanged phone numbers. it was one of these friends who introduced me to the website called tumblr, where fellow fans of our beloved big time rush gathered and talked about it- a community.

it was a slow start- this website was new and unfamiliar to me- but eventually i got the hang of things and settled into my niche. i had fun, gained followers, met even more people. tumblr was a place not only for sharing one singular interest, but for accumulating all of your various interests and celebrating them in one place. it was through this aspect that i first learned of the up and coming band known as one direction.

they had released their first smash hit single and everyone was talking about it. i was wary, far too loyal to my beloved big time rush- but eventually i started to feel left out and in an effort to feel included, i decided to take the plunge and see what this “1d” was all about. it was intimidating, though- there was so much information, and no apparent beginner’s guide to tell me where to start. this drove me to making a post calling for a “one direction buddy” to take this role, to introduce me to all the most important aspects of this band. and my call was answered.

enter my wonderful friend cam, a follower of mine at the time. they were into both big time rush and one direction and were eager to provide me with all the information needed to get into 1d. while ultimately this venture didn’t amount to anything, as i lost interest in becoming a fan, my friendship with cam persisted and we grew very close. even as time went on and big time rush faded into the background to be replaced with newer, fresher interests, and our paths as fellow fandom members split, we kept in contact and remained friends. years and years of fandoms, years and years of friendship.

in the midst of the tenth year, cam developed a new interest, in a sport called ice hockey. as is tradition, they shared their passion with me, showing me their favorite team, highlighting their favorite members. we watched a game together. personally, i’ve never been one for sports, but i am quite into anime, which consists of many genres, including the “sports” genre. one in particular that i’ve enjoyed immensely in the past is the volleyball anime, haikyuu!!. this anime devotes a lot of time to explaining and depicting the sport in a way that makes it easy for any viewer to understand the rules and inner workings of volleyball. it’s exciting. it’s the first time i’ve ever even adjacently been invested in a sport. one could even call it a gateway into the world of sports.

all this to say, when i watched that game of ice hockey with cam, the same parts of my brain that loved haikyuu!! lit up and in a classic display of my specific brand of interest, i found myself yearning for the epic highs and lows of ice hockey, but in an animated format. an animated format originating in japan. a japanese animation. an anime. my curiosity burned a hole in my brain that resulted in a combination of the google search bar and the words, “hockey anime”.

to my disappointment, i found nothing- at least, not to the degree i was hoping. there is an upcoming anime, slated to air in the fall 2021 anime season, about a group of girls who form an ice hockey team together- as it is an original project rather than an adaptation, it remains to be seen whether the anime will fall into the category of “sports anime,” or if indeed it will lean much more closely to the “moe” genre. the latter is not what i had in mind during that particular search.

adding the anime called “pride of orange” to my “plan to watch” list on myanimelist dot com, i moved onto the next result: an article about an early 2010’s anime i had never heard of before. while not about the sport i was looking for, it featured a character whose signature weapon was a field hockey stick. it wasn’t even the right sport. it was a weak, insignificant link, but all was not lost.

i happen to have an affinity for watching anime i happen upon completely by random and know little to nothing about; i found the movie “anthem of the heart” purely coincidentally, when i searched the name “jun” as part of some research for one of my original characters and discovered that it was the main character of said movie, which i then watched and ended up enjoying quite a lot. another time, when i was at best buy one day i happened upon a dvd on their dedicated anime shelf for a movie called “hana and alice”, which i had never heard of before. i liked the box art, so i took a picture of it to remember the title and watched it on my own later that week; it became one of my favorite movies.

with these and other similar experiences in mind, i saved the anime in my “plan to watch” list, and, later that same week, began my watch of “sket dance.”

it’s a school comedy anime, one of my favorite genres, so it’s no surprise that after overcoming the initial skepticism i carry into every new show i watch it quickly became my new fixation. not an obsession, but something i was pleasantly surprised to find consistently enjoyable. the characters are fun, the humor is tight and fresh, and the stories are unexpectedly touching at the right moments. everything i like to see.

which brings us to tonight. the culmination of this ten plus year string of events and occurrences. getting into big time rush. joining tumblr. meeting cam. watching anime. searching for hockey anime.

i put down my apple(TM) pencil. i set my ipad aside. i downsized the ebook window i’d been referencing. i stretched; i was hungry and tired. i’d been rereading passages of various animorphs books all day. i needed a break. i needed to sit back with some food and an episode of my latest comfort watch, sket dance. it’d be nice to set the dramatic, tragic world of animorphs aside for something lighthearted and fun in its place.

well.

i sat down with my bowl of strawberries and played the episode. it finished. i watched another. this one broke the formula a bit, played with the art style. i was into it. the preview for the next episode was mysteriously blank, and short, stating only the title. it was intriguing. i’m down for the show to get a bit more serious for an episode, i thought. i’m down for some potential backstory for one of the main three. i’m ready.

i was not ready.

bruh.

b r u h .

next two episodes proceeded to take me out back and beat me to within an inch of my life, slowly at first and then all at once. barely made it out alive. questioning everything. how can a show, so silly and goofy, do that, to me. how could i let my guard down like that. how could i be so tricked, and deceived, and blindsided like this. i don’t know who to trust. i don’t know if i can trust again. whiplash so damaging, permanent. i thought i wanted answers. i thought i wanted to know backstory. i didn’t want this. i never wanted this. emptiness

how did it come to this, these twelve years of my life. had i known back then, would i have posted that fanfiction? would i have joined tumblr? would i have sook out a “one direction buddy”? a hollow husk of a person, i am left with only my thoughts to ponder this small history of mine. the things i could have done differently. the things others could have done differently. all these butterfly effect moments, adding up to what? culminating in what? it’s 2:26 am and i’m writing an essay on how shook i am over that episode instead of going to sleep. but i can’t just say nothing, you know? i need to put something out there, reach deep enough within myself to find the thing that’s still there, broken and huddled and tiny as it is. i need to feel some semblance of the self again. the me from before i watched this episode. the innocent version of myself, blissful in ignorance. it’s too late now.

that episode…………..was fucked up. that was seriously fucked up. im not okay bro they really just came in left field and slapped that in my face expecting me to get up and walk away just fine afterwards like No that isn’t how this Works y’all need to bundle some therapy sessions with ur episodes pullin that shit come ON

exhaustion is taking over the shock, i am simply tired now. i will fall asleep and when i wake up sket dance will be a happy fun show again with NO fucked up backstories ever Or Else. i’m fucking serious right now i’m gonna count to 3 and that shit better be retconned when i turn around,

screams

thank you

Hi, may I have a reading ? I was wondering how my 2020 will be? -AG♌️

Hi, AG!! I used Thoth Tarot and Oracle of Gaia for you!!

Your cards: Page of Swords, Queen of Cups (reversed), Four of Cups, The Hanged Man, Ten of Swords, The Sun.

During this year you can start any project, idea or dream you have in mind. Despite the oppositions you may encounter during this year, my cards talk about the possibility of starting anything you want. Your passion and intuition will guide you on your way to get what you set out to do. The most prominent obstacles you can encounter are your lack of experience and maturity in what you are planning to initiate, but don’t fear, AG. The obstacles will gradually disappear during the year. On the other hand, my cards ask to work some dissatisfaction you can drag during 2020. You could suffer some difficulty to show your interior to others, especially your feelings. If, as my cards says, at some time of the year you feel your faith and your hope begin to deteriorate, you must fight so that it doesn’t happen, since you will only feel anger and anguish if you allow it. Avoid getting trapped in imaginary worlds that will only bring high expectations and disappointments to your life. On the other hand, my cards warn of the appearance of one or several women (pisces, cancer or scorpio) that could make your days difficult during 2020.

Don’t make rash decisions. The possibilities are around you and you must take your time to make the right decision. Don’t hurry to get things done this year. In addition, the appearance of The Hanged Man announces the beginning of a cycle of material experiences. All beginnings are difficult, so this card also announces difficulties. It cannot be otherwise, since you are oriented towards a domain that you don’t know. You only possess theoretical knowledge, but not practice. The Hanged Man announces bad results for hasty decisions and full of excessive security. No matter what area of your life you refer to, things are not as clear as you think and you still need practice in what you think you know.

You may feel that you aren’t good enough to achieve your purposes during 2020. The Ten of Swords can become an enemy if you aren’t able to fight it correctly. Your self-esteem and your security in your decisions and actions will be fundamental to not fall into a sense of permanent victimhood, since you could feel that people, the Universe, punish you unfairly. Also, AG, be careful with the people around you, as you could suffer some betrayal this year.

On the other hand, my cards mention some advice about your love life: don’t be afraid to love or start a new love relationship. If you have a partner, my cards talk about a possible suspicion about your partner that will accompany you during this year. If you are single, you must work your self-esteem so as not to fear falling in love again.

With the appearance of The Sun at the end of your reading, my cards announce how happiness will return to your life and put a happy ending to your 2020. The Sun asks you to create and manifest everything you want in your life: to light a new world, to have children, creating companies, giving their energies so that everything underlying can manifest itself with force and vigor. Announce, then, an unprecedented period of prosperity, a period of great and important realizations in which you will externalize the accumulated powers throughout your existence.

An advice for you: Lost love: Surrender, healing, liberation.

It’s normal to feel sad when a relationship or a friendship ends. However, this healing card has appeared on your roll today so you know that truly everything has a reason. Trust and accept that superior forces are working in your life right now and that your soul is leading you to an even greater love. You may not feel it right now, but you are surrounded by an ocean of love: you are more loved than you can realize. It makes no sense to look for answers; accept things as they are. The truth is what it is; however, there is also what was and what will be. There are no errors. Everything you experience has a purpose and is significant. Everything is part of a superior plan for your life. Every day is a new beginning and yet nothing is lost in life, everything is an endless cycle. What goes always comes back. Love is eternal.

Everything I experience in life has a purpose and it’s significant. Everything is part of a superior plan. Each experience expands my understanding and my appreciation of love. The truth is what it is. The truth is what it was. The truth is what it will be.

Good luck, AG!!

Reflecting on 2018

As yet another year comes to an end, I just want to take some time, like many others around the world, to reflect, remember, and rejoice about the events that transpired this year.

TL;DR - It was hard, but I accomplished a lot. It was a chaotic year, but I had a great one. I couldn’t have had such a great year without the all of the amazing people in my life. Skip to the bottom if you wanna hear why I appreciate you.

I remember at the start of 2018, I had no idea how things were going to go. All I knew was that it was going to be unpredictable. I was excited as I frantically worked with @swanofmischief and @nyessagaming to put together the largest and greatest project I have ever worked on to-date: @back-tothe-story. We were brimming with anxiety and excitement both, eagerly anticipating the day where we were to premier the beginnings of a story that would change our lives. That first month of January flew by, as on the very last day, we released the very first episode.

I’ll admit, it wasn’t great work, and it’s a chore to listen to even now, but we were all proud of it, nonetheless. For the first time ever, we had a podcast. It would take most of the year until I finally learned how to create a passable sound for our show, considering our meager setup. I’m proud of where Back to the Story is at now.

For me, my anxiety and anticipation didn’t end, because it was my final semester of my undergraduate degree. At last, after three and a half years, I only had four months left, and I was free. The days zipped along at lightning speed, as every day I filled out assignments, studied for tests, organized group projects, and researched for my papers. On the weekends, I edited the beloved podcast between my schoolwork. I even put in extra effort to keep ahead in editing. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to finish one episode every week during my two-month internship that would crown the final achievement of my degree.

Miraculously, I only had to skip one week in uploading the podcast. Somehow, I managed to maintain 16-hour days, 6 hours (often less) of sleep, and podcasting on the weekend for a solid 9 weeks. It was the busiest I had ever been, and the hardest I had ever worked. I was exhausted, but the elation I felt remains unmatched to this day. I set a goal, and I accomplished it: I completed my degree, and maintained the project I am most proud of during it. While not glamorous or philanthropic necessarily, it remains my greatest personal accomplishment.

However, pride does not sate exhaustion, and I needed some time to recover. I had to put the podcast on a temporary hiatus. Thankfully, the cast are the most understanding and accommodating people I’ve ever met, and were happy to adapt for my need of rest.

My life slowed down, but then again, nothing can compare to the roller coaster that was those first four months  The remainder of the year consisted of looking for work, maintaining the podcast and honing my skills as a sound engineer, DM-ing my Pathfinder-Eberron game, and migrating my online presence from that of a voice-actor to a more general online persona. After graduation, I finally had time to develop who I wanted to be for the forseeable future. I’m by no means done with that, as all of life is a development of one’s character, but I finally feel happy with who and where I am, and what I want to do.

2018 was a chaotic, confusing year, full of unprecedented events and uncertain outcomes. The developments and discoveries of truth were harrowing to say the least. But at least in my personal life, some light shined and filled it with growth and accomplishment.

But I couldn’t have done it on my own. I didn’t, and there’s no way I could have done it without the lovely people in my life.

I couldn’t have done it without my professors, whose knowledge and wisdom I absorbed from them and used to develop my own skills, talents, and philosophy regarding the world.

I couldn’t have done it without my family, whose effort in raising me during my childhood made me into who I was during university, and whose love was a constant encouragement throughout.

I couldn’t have done it without my amazing Pathfinder-Eberron players, whose patience and understanding knows no bounds. I’m sorry for all the breaks, and I hope to make it up to you next year.

I couldn’t have done it without the cast of Back to the Story, who have quickly become some of my closest friends, despite the many miles that separate us.

I couldn’t have done it without the people who read and appreciate my writing. Even seeing just a single little heart in my notifications feels so validating, knowing that my efforts to entertain and relate and teach are appreciated.

And I couldn’t have had such an amazing year without all of the other friends in my life as well. There’s not a single person in my life that I wish was gone from it. I’m lucky to have so many people in my life that are so easy to love and appreciate.

Thank you everyone for making 2018 as great as it could be. I look forward to spending 2019 with all of you. Happy New Year!

Battle Plans,” an Ede Valley story by Hedgehog.

Doug laughed, shaking his head. Then he looked down at Jilli, her arms wrapped around him as they lay on his bed, and frowned. “Wait, you’re serious?”

“Yes. We’re going to take over the school. Abby and Victor and I. Maybe Gil and Sonia too, but I haven’t talked to them yet.” Though the words emerging from her mouth sounded utterly insane, the tone with which she said them was no harsher than if she was commenting on the weather.

“You know this sounds crazy, right?” Doug sat up. “You can’t just ‘take over a school’. Even in normal circumstances it wouldn’t make any sense, let alone here.”

Jilli faced him, her slim waist glowing in the afternoon light. “Do you want things to stay as they are?”

“No...” he admitted, looking down. “But if you try to change anything, she’ll kill you.” There was silence. Jilli didn’t need to ask who “she” was.

“The way I see it, what I’m doing right now isn’t living anyway.”

She made to stand, but Doug grabbed her hand. After struggling weakly for a second, she let him pull her back to him. He gripped her tight there to his chest. He knew it was stupid, but he was afraid that if he let go for just one second, that she would just disappear.

“This isn’t going to change my mind,” she said.

“I know,” he mumbled into her hair. “And before you say, I know this won’t either.”

Doug nudged her face upwards, towards his, and kissed her. They had kissed before, of course, small, stolen things in the heat of the moment, but never before like this. It was soft, at first, both a little unsure of the feeling of their lips pressed together, then it became harder, more desperate.

He pressed her to him, his hand firmly on the small of her back. Jilli ran her fingers through his hair, his scalp tingling at her touch, and Doug felt his heart beating very fast. She was real, and warm.

It was an eternity before they finally pulled apart. Jilli stared at him for a moment, the look on her face impossible to place.

“I... I don’t...” she shook her head. “What was that?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted, and then they were kissing again, feeling their breath on each other’s faces, entangled together.

“Help me,” she breathed as he kissed her neck. “Help me free us all. Please.”

He pulled away, looked down at her pleading face. She was scared. He could see it in her eyes. “If you kiss me like that again I’d do anything. But no can do, I’m afraid,” he glanced down to the metal band around his wrist. “I never told you what this does, did I?”

Jilli shook her head.

“If I take one step out of line, or I’m off campus for too long, then bzzt,” he gestured, and laughed as Jilli twitched. “I get a nasty little shock.”

It took her a moment of staring at the glowing metal before she seemed to understand. “This is why,” she touched it gingerly, “this is why she needs to die. What she’s done to you? What she’s done to all of us? It’s unforgivable.”

“Sure it is,” he shrugged.” But do you really think you can do something about it?”

She peered into his eyes with her icy blue ones. Doug felt himself freeze at the sight of them. He simply couldn’t help staring.

“I’m going to try,” she said simply.

Sighing, Doug shook his head. This whole thing was insanity. Then again, he could say the same thing about his life in general, so really, this wasn’t anything new. The world was almost becoming predictable in its lunacy.

“Alright,” he said finally. “I don’t know what I could possibly contribute, but I’m with you.”

Not even a second went by before her arms were around him, and his bare chest was wet with her tears. “Thank you, thank you so much,” she breathed. “I don’t think I could do this without you.

“I need you.”

~~ o ~~

The world was falling apart. Everything was falling to pieces and no one would tell Mike anything. Okay, maybe the world wasn’t really ending; he might have been feeling that way because he’d only gotten a total of about three hours of sleep in the last four days.

But he couldn’t sleep. There was a ticking clock now. He had to figure out who the Director was and what she—if she really was a she—was doing to Jilli before she did something crazy. But there was nothing. Nothing. Every book jumped over the subject like clockwork, every leaked article was heavily expunged.

He skipped his classes, chugged Red Bull—which he’d previously written off as disgusting, until he’d found that it truly did give you caffeinated wings—and practically lived in the library. The only person who was there more than he was was Abigail.

Said student librarian seemed increasingly concerned about his well-being. “I think that’s enough studying for one night,” she said one evening, well past midnight, as she rather forcefully pushed him out of the table his butt had practically molded itself to. “My, that must be some project.”

“But—” he protested. “I need... I need—”

“What you need is to get some sleep. This would be the worst time to catch a cold.”

“Five more minutes,” he begged. “Please.”

She sighed, sitting next to him. “I know this isn’t for some school project,” she said. “Literally every amateur detective has used that excuse. Why are you really here?” He opened his mouth, but she answered her own question. “Is it because of Jilli?”

“Did you know she had a session the other day?” Mike leaned forward.

“What?” Abigail blinked. “That can’t be right. Jilli’s one of the sanest people at St. Adelaide’s.”

“I think the Director did something to her, that why she’s... saying crazy things.”

There was a second’s pause as Abigail processed this information. “If that’s true... why, I can’t even imagine. And that must be why you’re researching St. Adelaide’s, to find out who the Director is.”

“Wait, how did you know that?” Mike asked.

“I’m the librarian,” she smirked. “I keep track of my books. And I’m sure by now you know as well as I do that there’s not even a single line about the Director in any of those books.”

His head fell to the table in defeat. He was so tired. “Of course.”

“Did you ever think that maybe you’ve been looking in the wrong places?” Abigail tilted her head.

“The... wrong places?”

Shrugging, Abigail pushed her round glasses up the bridge of her nose. “I mean, you don’t need to just stick to books when her office is right down the hall.”

Mike sat back up. “Are you suggesting breaking into the Director’s office?”

“Well, if Jilli has anything to say about it, the Director will be deposed in a matter of days. So, does it really matter? Of course Jilli will want to see what’s in there.”

“But then it will be too late!”

“Will it?” Abigail leaned on her arm. “Honestly, I’m a little curious what happens if she does succeed.”

“You want me to use Jilli...” Mike began slowly, “to save her?”

“Sure, that’s one way to put it,” Abigail smiled. “Now I think it’s time for both of us to go to bed.” She grabbed his arm and guided him to the door. “I have a feeling that the next week might be the longest of our lives...”

~~ o ~~

Gil was also studying, but unlike Mike, he knew what he was looking for. Back in Atlantis he’s had a grimoire with all of the spells that he knew. Some had been inherent to him, of course, his space-hopping and control over the elements, but a lot of the most finely-tuned spells needed time and ingredients. He’d never bothered to memorize these, partially due to his own narcissism in his own abilities. But now he was discovering that without the grimoire, he was essentially crippled. So he’d had to start completely from scratch.

Spending the last several years reconstructing his grimoire had been tedious, time-consuming work, but it had given him something to do as this new body grew and became stronger. He had to be prepared, for just as he was gaining strength, the Truth would be as well.

The other thing that had occupied the last few years of his life was tracking down the blasted thing. He’d gone back to the cave on the coast several months after he’d been freed, but the abomination had disappeared. Either it had gotten out by itself, or much more likely, someone had helped it. And if someone was under the Truth’s sway, the world was in trouble. Whoever it was, they had managed to retain their individuality thus far, seeing as the world still hadn’t ended, but they wouldn’t hold out forever.

Which was why he needed to find it as quickly as possible. He’d found a surprising ally in the form of the internet. At first, it had seemed such an alien host of eldritch complexity that he avoided it like the plague. But then in the sixth grade english class the education overlords had deemed paramount to his further growth, a project had required him to do research for a laughable essay about “you favorite animal,” and he’d discovered that it had its uses. Eventually, with the help of some rather strange characters he’d met on a forum, one of whom insisted she was a dragon, he’d managed to track the Truth to an American suburb called Ede Valley. From there, it was only a matter of acting strange enough to get himself sent to the school there. For Gil, that hardly proved a challenge.

And now he was here, and something was coming; he could feel it. Gil was running out of time. He needed Muirne. But regardless of how many books he read, how many forums he inquired upon, he couldn’t find any usable information on his and Sonia’s condition. According to one witch—who he was mostly positive was legitimate—it was unprecedented, even.

He’d never told Sonia about it. He didn’t want to scare her. Truth be told, she more often scared him. She told him of dreams and ghostly appearances. It was Muirne. She was trying to get in, just as he had. But he didn’t know how to help her.. And there was that small part of himself, the one he told himself wasn’t there at all, that didn’t want to watch Sonia go. All he could do was watch the struggle.

He was close to giving up.

~~ o ~~

Victor glanced around his dorm room, filled from wall to wall with gizmos and gadgets. Jilli had filled him in on his part of the plan, and now he was digging through the bits and pieces of his past constructions, trying to distinguish what would actually be useful.

He had his older stuff in the far corner of the room, at least, the things his parents had deemed safe enough for him to take. These were mostly bits and bobs off of much bigger machines, Rube Goldberg-esce inventions. As a kid he’d dreamed of having machines to do everything for him, so he could sit and play video games all day. Of course, he’d eventually grown out of that phase, and he’d scraped several of his past attempts for parts. This stuff was mostly useless.

Progressively towards the other wall, the machines began to evolve into more robotic machinations. At first they were more helpful—over there on top of his dresser was a drone he’d modified to whisk eggs—but more and more they became more... well, deadly. He didn’t really know why that’s where his mind always went. His mother claimed his “degeneration” was caused by violent video games, but no one else he knew had put down Call of Battlefield 4000 and proceeded to make a death chamber in the basement.

Not that he ever intended to make use of it. He just wanted to see if he could get it to work.

Of course his parents had flipped. That was the first time he’d been taken in for an exorcism. Victor shuddered to himself. He didn’t like to think about that afternoon.

In fact, now that his mind had gone down that road, he found that this whole side of the room was making him queasy. He’d found some good stuff that he could install quickly; that would be good enough for now. Besides, he needed to go down to the shop to modify a few things. He might as well spend some time on his ongoing project.

It was that first exorcism that had gotten him thinking about life and the creation thereof. Again, he wasn’t insane, or unstable, just curious. He wanted to see if it was possible. Could something so crazy really exist?

He didn’t feel quite normal again until he was down in the shop with his lab coat on. Victor took a calming breath, and reached down to pull back the sheet which covered his project...

Until he heard the door open with a metallic cha-chuck, and let the plastic fall again.

“Victor?” came an unmistakable voice, and Victor relaxed, even smiled a little.

“Hi Abby.”

She peeked her owl-like visage around the door, and seeing that he was alone, slunk inside. “How’s the preparations?” she asked, grabbing his arm.

Oh god. She was touching him. She had done this before, of course, but every time his heart did the same esoteric series of leaps in his chest. And now he was going to start stuttering, or his voice was going to crack, or something even more embarrassing was going to happen.

“It’s g-g,” he cleared his throat. “Going well. I’ve got almost everything I need. Just a few modifications, a-and I’ll install most of it tonight, after the teachers have left for the day.”

“What about those creepy psychiatrists, though?” Abigail blinked up at him.

She was worried about him. Victor was pretty sure he was going to start floating off the ground soon.

“Gil’s offered to ‘give me some cover.’ Though I’ve got no idea what that actually means.”

“Good,” Abigail smiled. Then, she reached up to touch his cheek, and he downright froze. “That means you have a free minute then.”

Only one thought ran through Victor’s mind as she pressed herself against him:

Oh shit.

~~ o ~~

They were all assembled in Jilli’s dorm room. It was a bit cramped, Abigail was literally sitting in Victor’s lap, but they had all managed to squeeze in somehow. Jilli glanced around the room, taking stock of what she had to work with. Gil and Sonia: distractions. She didn’t know exactly what they had planned, but she had to admit that together they were rather distracting. Victor: incapacitation. His job would be to dispose of the psychiatrists that worked as the Director’s hands. Abigail: look out. She’d keep everyone updated on the operation’s progress. Doug: emotional support and sounding board.

And then there was Jilli. While all of this was going on, Jilli was going to find that bitch the Director and take her down.

Jilli opened her mouth to lay all of this out, when there was a knock at the door. Everyone froze. They couldn’t have been found out. There was no way. No one said a thing for the longest time.

“I know you’re in there,” said a voice from outside. “Come on, let me in please.”

Relaxing, Jilli let out the breath she’d been holding. It was only Mike. She stepped over Gil and Sonia—who were sitting on the floor—and opened the door a crack.

He began speaking before she could even open her mouth. “I want to help.”

Oh no. She had been afraid of this. Though Mike was that much younger than the rest of them, Jilli couldn’t help thinking of him as much more... well, innocent. Maybe it was because he wasn’t absolutely fucked up like the rest of them. He still had a chance to get out of this unscathed.

“Mike,” she began. “I don’t know...”

“Come on, please,” he begged. “If you keep me out of the loop I think I’ll go insane. If you all might die tonight, or worse, I wanna at least go down with you all. You’re my friends.”

Jilli looked back a Doug, who had stood, and was only a step behind her. He paused, and then, finally, looking exhausted, he simply shrugged.

“Alright,” she said. “Come on in.”

“Thank you,” he smiled, but it wasn’t until she opened the door fully that she was how rough he looked. His skin was pale and sallow, which made the large bags under his eyes stand out even more. His eyes themselves were red and bloodshot, and his hair was tangled and stood up at odd angles, like he’d ran his hand through it for days straight.

Doug sat back down, and made space for Mike on the bed. Jilli readied herself to speak again. She was so nervous. This was ridiculous, she’d sang in front of hundreds of people before, so why was it so hard to lay out her plan for school domination to a few of her friends?

Okay Jilli, she told herself. Here you go.

“Alright everyone,” she said. “Here’s what we’re going to do...”

Rainforests of the Sea: Why Kelp Could Help Save the Planet

[By Emma Bryce]

When we think of forests, we mostly think of tree-filled landscapes. But the ocean also holds emerald stands of trees so vast, they line one-quarter of our coastlines. “The area is probably equivalent to about the size of the Amazon rainforest, if you add it all up,” says Karen Filbee-Dexter, a marine ecologist doing a research fellowship at the University of Western Australia. These are kelp forests – one of Earth’s most beneficial ecosystems.

Kelps are a type of seaweed, or macroalgae, made up of roughly 33 genera and 112 species — though there remains some disagreement over what constitutes a kelp. What makes them unique amongst other seaweeds is mainly their large size – giant kelp (from the genus Macrocystis and the biggest of the kelps) can reach heights of 45 meters. They tend to grow in cooler waters, where they create lush habitats rich in biodiversity. As ecosystems, they are as important as coral reefs and mangrove forests to the overall health of the ocean. And as Filbee-Dexter points out, it’s also “really important to understand the benefits that these ecosystems provide to humans”.

As a nursery and refuge for many marine animals, they support our fisheries. They store carbon in their photosynthesising fronds, and their wave-buffering bodies are the surest defence some coastlines have against violent storms. They also clean up our waste: kelps can rapidly absorb nutrient pollution caused by fertilizers running off from farmland into the sea. They use it to fuel their own growth and this averts the development of algal blooms which are so harmful to other marine life. In addition to all this, kelps have immense cultural value for many coastal communities.

(Illustration: Ricardo Macía Lalinde / China Dialogue Ocean)

But the world is losing kelp at an unprecedented rate. Water pollution, off-kilter predator–prey dynamics and the warming waters brought by climate change are driving marine deforestation and eradicating some kelp forests altogether. Meanwhile, just a fraction of these forests is protected. In the northeast Pacific Ocean, where some of Earth’s largest kelp populations occur, only four percent of the area covered by giant kelp falls inside marine protected areas.

Now though, an increasing number of researchers, conservation organizations and governments believe we need to better protect and restore our ocean’s once-mighty oases of kelp. Otherwise, we risk losing a significant carbon store, and a foundation of food security – a loss that many compare to the deforestation of the Amazon.

Ignored for too long

Part of the reason kelp forests have not received the attention they deserve is that more “charismatic” marine ecosystems, like coral reefs, have become synonymous with ocean biodiversity, and thus the focus of conservation, says Filbee-Dexter, who studies how climate change affects kelp populations in Norway, Australia and the Canadian Arctic.

She explains that, with rising temperatures, expanding layers of warm water are beginning to develop at the ocean’s surface. This is a problem, because warmer water contains less oxygen, and it’s also more buoyant than the nutrient-rich cold waters below – as the warm layers thicken, there is less mixing of oxygen and nutrients between deeper layers and the surface, where these ingredients are needed to fuel the growth of kelps, as well as other marine organisms.

Warming may also be contributing to kelp bleaching, which disrupts their ability to photosynthesize. At points along the coasts of mainland Australia and Tasmania, Mexico, the United States and other countries, marine heatwaves and other anthropogenic impacts like pollution have already permanently wiped out whole forests.

Despite this, kelp forests have been left off the priority list for the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, which began in January 2021. “In the oceans [section of the Decade’s website], they talk about coral reefs and mangroves. But there’s not a single mention of kelp, despite it being one of the largest coastal ecosystems,” Filbee-Dexter says.

Another reason kelps have been ignored is perhaps the historic lack of research into the ecosystem services they provide. Scientists know they can sequester huge amounts of carbon thanks to their large biomass and high productivity – giant kelp can grow 45 centimeters a day. It’s been estimated that wild seaweeds (of all sorts, not just kelp) sequester about 173 million metric tonnes of carbon each year when they die and get buried in sediment on the ocean floor. But definitive calculations are difficult to make, because wild seaweed is always on the move. When kelp dies or is torn off the rocks by storms, it breaks loose, carrying its carbon store out to sea. Without knowing where all this loose kelp ultimately goes (it could end up rotting on a beach and discharging its carbon, or be buried forever in the deep sea), it’s difficult to calculate the carbon locked away by an individual forest.

The benefits of farming seaweed

Seaweed farms offer a more stable environment for researchers. In China, as well as Japan and Korea, seaweed aquaculture has been practiced for centuries. There are thousands of farms along China’s long coastline, where seaweed is grown for food, and for use in pharmaceuticals and biofuels. “We have seven types of cultivated seaweeds in China, but kelp is the major one with the highest yield. It accounts for two-thirds of all China’s seaweed yield,” says Jiaping Wu, a professor of marine science at China’s Zhejiang University.

Wu is interested in how seaweeds’ ecological and commercial value combine in this farming context. His research shows that farmed seaweeds can significantly offset agricultural pollution, removing phosphates and nitrogen that spill into coastal waters and fuel mass algal blooms. Such blooms strip oxygen from the water and create dead zones devoid of marine life. In another study, Wu calculated that at their current growth rate, China’s seaweed farms would remove 100% of phosphorus pollution from the country’s coastal waters by 2026. “Seaweed is a perfect solution to marine eutrophication,” he says.

Traditional seaweed farming in China’s Fujian province, where species such as Saccharina japonica (konbu) are grown on ropes hung between bamboo poles in tidal areas (Image: Alex Berger / Flickr, CC BY NC 2.0)

Research is also ongoing to show the role seaweed farms could play in mitigating climate change. An organization called Oceans 2050, which Wu is part of, is leading an effort to definitively calculate how much carbon farmed seaweed locks in, based on a survey of 23 farms around the world.

When the unharvested parts of farmed seaweed die, they fall to the bottom directly below the farms, locking their carbon in the sediments in an easy to measure way.

“The farmer, by controlling the location of the farm, can control where the carbon ends up,” explains Carlos Duarte, distinguished professor of marine science at the King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, author of several papers on the carbon-storing potential of macroalgae and principal investigator of the Seaweed Project at Oceans 2050.

Farming could gain recognition for seaweeds in programs like the UN Blue Carbon Initiative. This organization raises awareness about the carbon-trapping potential of mangroves, seagrasses and salt marshes, but has historically excluded seaweeds because of their unpredictability in the wild.

Eventually, the goal is to incorporate seaweed farms into carbon accreditation schemes, because seaweed farming is “scalable and accountable," Duarte says. “I think Oceans 2050 is going to deliver the first robust science to underpin the inclusion of seaweed farming in blue carbon.” Duarte adds that seaweed aquaculture also provides jobs, as well as social mobility for women, who make up the majority of seaweed farmers worldwide.

Optimism for wild seaweed

Filbee-Dexter believes that the growing interest in farmed seaweed “is also translating to [wild] seaweed forests”. This is important, she says, because the enthusiasm for seaweed aquaculture shouldn’t override the importance of protecting and restoring natural ecosystems, especially kelps.

Wild kelp forests are worth more than the carbon they lock away. This has become increasingly evident in Tasmania, where 95 percent of the giant kelp that used to line its shores has been wiped out by warming waters, taking with them the rich fish stocks upon which local fishers had long relied. But for the past two years, Cayne Layton and Craig Johnson – marine ecologists at the University of Tasmania – have been trying to revive these once-great forests by breeding some of the few kelps that survived after warm waters swept through during the 2015-16 El Niño event (a climate phenomenon that research suggests is intensifying with climate change).

Believing these species might be more resilient to warming seas, Layton and Johnson began in 2019 by culturing samples of reproductive tissues from the remaining kelp stands, from which they bred baby kelp. In 2020, they planted these “saplings” out in the wild on 100-meter-squared plots off Tasmania’s coast. Out of three test sites, two grew successfully. Now, ten months on, the duo’s hypothesis has proven correct: several hundred resilient kelps are thriving on those plots, Layton says. “Perhaps most encouraging was that despite our warmer than average El Niño summer, our ‘super kelp’ seemed to withstand the warm temperatures, and looked healthy and had nice dark pigmentation, with no bleaching or necrosis,” he says. “This was in contrast to the natural giant kelp, which was shabby, bleached and pretty unhappy.”

Although seaweed breeding has a long history in countries such as Japan, Layton thinks this may be the first time kelps have been bred explicitly to withstand climate change. The discovery could aid other restoration projects, and possibly provide a solution for kelp farms that struggle with climate-related declines in the future. “We’ve demonstrated the potential to use selective breeding to ‘future-proof’ restoration efforts,” Layton says.

Conservation and protection

But climate change isn’t the only threat kelps are facing. Many forests are under attack from kelp-eating sea urchins, which have thrived with the decline of their natural predators, like sea otters. Along the southern coast of California, a local NGO called the Bay Foundation has taken a simple but highly effective approach to tackle this threat: they’ve partnered with fishers who cull the urchins by hand, and have managed to restore 23 hectares of forest to its former glory. This simple approach has also brought back hectares of kelp forest around Japan’s Hokkaido island, thanks to voluntary divers schemes, while the reintroduction of sea otters in Norway has helped kelps regain a foothold there once more.

Others are pushing kelp conservation in a new direction, not by restoring seaweed forests but by creating entirely new ones. In China, Jiaping Wu is involved in the development of 150 floating “marine ranches” that span the length of the coast, where multiple species of seaweed – including kelps – are being cultivated without any commercial intent. “The requirement is to restore seaweeds primarily for ecological conservation. The ranches are never harvested,” says Wu. The goal is ultimately to incorporate these carbon-sequestering, biodiversity-supporting life rafts into China’s climate mitigation plan, he explains. “We’re thinking of all kinds of ways to capture carbon.”

Carbon sequestration is, of course, not the only ecosystem service kelp provides. But developing more sophisticated measures of wild kelps’ sequestration potential could be a good way of getting these ecosystems the protections they need, says Filbee-Dexter. Along with colleagues, she’s now developing models to precisely map where kelps end up in the ocean when they break loose, to try and reliably account for the amount of carbon individual kelp forests lock away. “If we don’t account for ecosystem services, then often there’s less of a push to restore and protect, and people care less what happens to these ecosystems,” she says.

Alongside this, there are small but positive signs that kelps are beginning to receive more protection. In Australia, giant kelp forests were granted endangered status in 2012 – a world-first for macroalgae. Earlier this year, US President Joe Biden’s executive order on tackling climate change mentioned the protection and restoration of wild kelp forests as a priority. And now, researchers from the University of Queensland are embarking on a pioneering project to comprehensively map the planet’s kelp, so we know what we have, and where marine protected areas might better safeguard these ecosystems.

“There are very large areas of kelp forests that have no protection, no monitoring, and haven’t even been seen by a human eye. From a global standpoint, we’re far away from any similar knowledge that we have about forests on land,” Filbee-Dexter says. But things are changing. In research circles, there’s an argument that “we should stop calling them ‘kelp beds’,” she says, because it minimizes the magnitude of what these ecosystems do in our oceans.

In other words, it’s time to start seeing seaweeds – and their giant mascots, kelps – for what they are: the rainforests of the sea.

This article appears courtesy of China Dialogue Ocean and may be found in its original form here.

from Storage Containers https://www.maritime-executive.com/article/rainforests-of-the-sea-why-kelp-could-help-save-the-planet via http://www.rssmix.com/

The Stop-Motion Animation Studio With a Cult Following

Travis Knight, CEO of Laika, is breathing new life into an under appreciated art form

Travis Knight is sitting in the back of Laika Experience, an exhibition at Comic-Con in San Diego, next to an interior set from his film Kubo and the Two Strings, one of several film sets stationed around the room. Each setup looks effortless, but the reality of the hours and decisions that went into that tiny space is something only Knight and his team understand. In a way, you could say seeing the sets re-created is like returning to an alma mater campus. Memories. Sometimes too many. “I won’t say which one, but one shot on Kubo took two months to get the expression right,” says Knight, CEO and president of stop-motion animation studio Laika. “It’s ridiculous on some level.”

The first stop-motion film was made in 1898, but the technique was largely replaced by hand-drawn celluloid animation by the 1920s. Stop motion was deemed too time consuming: painstakingly animating clay or wooden puppets by hand, frame by frame, so that, played in succession, photographed frames mimic real action. “One of the things I wanted to do at Laika right from the start is take this medium that I’ve loved since I was a kid and bring it into a new era, dragging, kicking, screaming,” Knight says.

And guess what?! We get some new-ish info on film five!

“According to Knight, the fifth film (the name of which is still secret) is a major departure for the studio. For one, it has no characters who are children.”

Read the rest under the read-more below!

Knight, 44, grew up outside of Portland, Oregon, where he filled his time with illustration, music and the arts. He watched stop-motion animation flicks like Ray Harryhausen’s creature features and Rankin/Bass specials including the holiday staple Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. In 1998, shortly after Knight graduated from Portland State University, his father, multibillionaire Nike co-founder Phil Knight, invested $5 million for a minority stake in an animation studio led by Will Vinton, who co-directed Closed Mondays, the first stop-motion short to win an Oscar for best animated short film. Vinton, who had opened the animation studio in Portland in 1975, was in financial trouble and in need of an investor. The younger Knight, coming off of a failed attempt to launch a rap career in New York and still passionate about animation, started an internship.

‘I wanted to take this medium...and bring it into a new era.’

At Will Vinton Studios, Knight rose to production assistant and then animator on the Emmy Award–winning stop-motion show The PJs, which was created by Eddie Murphy, Larry Wilmore and Steve Tompkins. He quickly became one of the studio’s standout animators. But by 2003, Vinton was still struggling, so Phil bought the company—he has said he was partly motivated to own Will Vinton Studios because if it failed, his son would likely leave for a studio in Los Angeles. He had spent most of his sons’ childhood away from home, a reality that was especially difficult when his older son, Matthew, died in 2004 at 34. In 2005, Phil and Travis launched Laika and began developing their first feature.

What links Laika’s films—Coraline (2009), ParaNorman (2012), The Boxtrolls (2014) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016)—is their depth and complexity. Ben Kingsley, who voiced the villain Archibald Snatcher in The Boxtrolls, explains that the movies “include a dark side many other people in [Knight’s] field might outlaw.” Coraline, adapted from the children’s gothic novel by Neil Gaiman, follows a blue-haired girl who slips away from her inattentive parents into a twisted dream world. Kubo, a story in which Knight says he channeled emotion from his own experiences, is about a boy who seeks his deceased father’s armor to protect him from his unfeeling specter grandfather and aunts. In both films, family members vie for control over the main characters’ sight and identity.

Gaiman met Travis years before he became CEO, when Gaiman and Henry Selick, director of the 1993 film The Nightmare Before Christmas, were already working on the screenplay for Coraline. Shortly after the film’s release in 2009, Travis was promoted to president and CEO. “It was terrific watching a relatively reclusive animator step up,” Gaiman says. Animators work mostly alone. Once a director has briefed them on a shot, they work solo with the puppets and sets. There are 24 frames in a single second of film, and each puppet is meticulously posed and made to stand, often with a rig that is later removed from the picture using CGI. An animator will finish around four seconds of film per week. If a character takes a couple of steps, it’s a good day.

After years spent tending to the micromovements of puppets, Travis grew into his role as CEO, then director, and has now branched out. This summer, he began filming his first live-action feature, Bumblebee, a Transformers prequel backed by Steven Spielberg. But his accomplishments with Laika are still his greatest achievement. Each of the studio’s four films has been produced with the same budget, about $60 million, a fraction of the cost of CGI projects from studios like Pixar and DreamWorks. If his father’s Nike empire was built on products for speed and momentum (“Just Do It”), Knight has dedicated his life to stopping motion, breathing life into pauses and stillness (just barely move it). Yet, working as a businessperson and artist, Knight often calls on his father for wisdom. “Personally, one of the most rewarding things has been how I’ve been able to understand and connect more deeply with my father,” he says.

All four of the studio’s films have been nominated for an Academy Award for animated feature film, and in 2016, the studio won a scientific and technical Oscar for its innovation in rapid prototyping, or 3-D printing, in animation. Each puppet is designed so that the facial expressions can be switched, with thousands of eyeless masks that can pop on and off the puppet’s steel armature. Although this technique, known as replacement animation, has been used for a century, Laika’s integration of modern technology has given its characters unprecedented depth. In The Nightmare Before Christmas, the moon-headed Jack Skellington wore 800 hand-sculpted faces. For Coraline, the title character had 6,333 printed and painted faces. Kubo had even more (23,187).

But despite all of Laika’s accolades, none of the films’ characters have been mass-marketed—meaning none have ever appeared on bedsheets or sippy cups. The studio launched its first Instagram page only a week before the exhibition at Comic-Con in July. “At some point you step back and realize we’re doing the company a disservice by not exploring these opportunities,” Knight says. In 2016, Laika hired Brad Wald as CFO (he had commercialized Downton Abbey for NBCUniversal in London). Knight wanted to expand the studio’s brand and produce a film each year, along with apparel, dolls and life-size foam figures. For the fifth Laika feature, which will wrap filming around March 2018 and will be released by 2019, the plans for merchandise are already underway.

According to Knight, the fifth film (the name of which is still secret) is a major departure for the studio. For one, it has no characters who are children. The collective vision of the films will be on full view at a Laika retrospective, Animating Life: The Art, Science, and Wonder of LAIKA, that will run at the Portland Art Museum beginning this month. When you see a tiny puppet with bits of human hair dipped in silicone and remember how they blew across the character’s face in a snow gust, you can’t help but marvel at the fact that each strand had to be lifted by hand to create that swirl. “The only life [a character] has on-screen is the life that the artists bring to it,” Knight says. “I just think that’s movie magic in its finest form.”

A party that works and wins for working people will need to understand us first

First published here. Full text below.

I’m nervous to add to what will become an avalanche of post-election analysis. But having seen the response to 2017 from the vantage point of one of the country’s leading public attitudes houses and now witnessing the 2019 campaign from an organisation determined to give working class people the voice we’re so often denied, I already fear that working class concerns are going to be appropriated, mischaracterised and weaponised by politicians and commentators who neither understand nor value the modern multi-racial working class.

Working on the British Social Attitudes reports in 2017 and 2018 I could see the frustration of seasoned pollsters as talking heads leapt to rapid conclusions that months later robust research would disprove.

What follows, therefore, isn’t primarily about what has just happened — the British Election Study, British Social Attitudes Survey and others will show that in time. Instead I want to offer some simple pointers about what the wider evidence shows for when you’re reading articles in coming days:

If any analysis of this election starts and ends with 2019 — and ignores the long-term trends — it’ll likely be wrong.

If the analysis starts and ends with Brexit — it’ll likely be wrong.

If it starts and ends with the analysis of any party leader — it’ll likely be wrong.

If it includes sweeping statements about ‘left behind’ or ‘traditional’ working class people — it’ll likely be wrong and probably dangerous to boot.

Why 2019 is bigger than 2019

The result is obviously an enormous win for the Conservatives, especially after austerity and nearly 10 years in power. The size of their majority could easily mean they are in power for another decade. If we want a different future we need to understand how we got to this dismal present. Here are the seven long-term trends to be aware of.

First, since the late 1990s Labour has consistently shed overall working class support as a portion of its vote while it, to varying degrees of success, appealed to more middle class voters. The loss of this support was hidden in Labour’s electoral dominance in the early 2000s as more of this switched to non-voting than to other parties.

The left of the party made regaining this support a rallying call for the Corbyn project but they’ve only succeeded in exacerbating the problem. To understand this further, I would really recommend The New Politics of Class: The Political Exclusion of the British Working Class by Geoffrey Evans and James Tilley. Their analysis — based in part on the British Social Attitudes survey — uses more sophisticated class coding than the crude ABC1 C2DE cross-breaks found in weekly polls. Among other things they highlight that over this period people became less likely to describe Labour as a party of and for the working class and that this feeling was stronger when (where relevant) their Labour MP didn’t come from a working class background.

Crucially this is a long-term trend, meaning any suggestion that 2019’s result is purely about Brexit is likely to be wrong. We get hints of the truth of this from early analysis showing that Labour’s vote also dropped notably in remain as well as leave seats and that Brexit isn’t the top reason people give for voting another way.

Second, the Conservatives are likely to have continued to do terribly amongst BAME voters. In recent elections Labour has returned to the dominant (around 80%) 1997 levels of BAME voter support across all social classes, but this was in evidence well before the 2016 Brexit vote. British Future and the Runnymede Trust have long been pointing this out and urging pollsters to produce the breakdowns of BAME voter support to give us a more consistent picture.

Third, age and education have become much, much bigger voter divides. Again, these trends pre-date this election, with poor support among older voters support costing Ed Miliband dear and formal education level being the single best guide to how people voted in the 2016 referendum. Academic Paula Surridge and others have been pleading with us to pay more attention to this for some time now.

Whereas your social class tends to be a good guide on where you sit on the left — right economic scale (i.e. working class people are more likely to support things like redistribution), education is a better guide to where you sit on what’s called the libertarian — authoritarian scale. This measures your attitudes to things like law and order and whether you think young people ‘respect traditional British values’. Crucially these scales don’t neatly overlap so any party wanting to hoover up the votes on one end of these scales, e.g. the economic left, will have to find a way to appeal to those left-leaning voters spread across the liberal and conservative scale (or vice versa).

It’s important to note the authoritarian/conservative — libertarian/liberal scale doesn’t directly get into issues often seen at the heart of US “culture war” debates, like LGBT rights and abortion. On both these issues we’ve thankfully been getting consistently more liberal across class and age for some time now.

As Paula Surridge has been pointing out, the big group of people who feel politically homeless at the moment are economically left-leaning social conservatives. Labour has been doing especially badly amongst older working class people in this group. During the campaign the Conservatives seemed to appreciate this by honing in on socially-conservative dividing lines (Brexit and crime) while being prepared (at least in messaging terms) to flirt with economic left ideas around more public spending. By contrast journalist Jennifer Williams and others highlighted pre-election that Labour’s failure to major on issues like tackling crime and anti-social behaviour would hurt them.

Fourth, Labour’s vote has become a lot stronger in big cities and their suburbs, and weaker in towns, as the Centre for Towns has charted. The relates to the trends above, with cities themselves becoming younger and more diverse and towns being home to an older demographic. As Lewis Baston has pointed out, the make-up of towns like Mansfield which consistently voted Labour post-war looks demographically very different to the ones that voted Tory in 2017 and 2019. Crucially he adds “Labour is coming close to exhausting this potential source of gains — there are simply not that many city, suburb and university town seats left to win.”

Fifth, the Conservatives have a women problem, and Labour have a men problem. This was on display in 2017 and from pre-election polls looks likely to have been a major factor this time round.

Sixth, Labour also need to resolve their now long-term problem in Scotland which threatens to undermine another redistributive trans-national political and economic union. The Conservatives equally have a problem in Scotland, but it’s easier to ignore when they’ve done so well in England and Wales.

These six long-term trends do a lot of explanatory work, but they don’t explain the scale of the defeat. For that we must also account for the fact Jeremy Corbyn has been an unprecedently unpopular leader. Labour is unlikely to win with a leader as unpopular as Corbyn and his faction need to account for their role in Boris Johnson’s rise to power given he beat Ken Livingstone twice in Labour-leaning London (in 2008 and 2012) and has now demolished Corbyn nationally. Corbyn’s leadership is the top reason given by people for not voting Labour and that’s despite his competition being two PMs who themselves were not well liked at the end of both election campaigns.

Likewise, some outriders are in a bit of a tangle with the much-promoted line that the Labour manifesto swung the 2017 election more toward Labour but bears no responsibility for 2019. It can’t be both. A good starting point in understanding the role of policy in political choice is Drew Westen’s 2007 book The Political Brain where he pleads with Democrats in the US — following their back-to-back loses to George Bush Jr — to realise that their long lists of individually popular policies are little use if the Presidential candidate can’t emotionally connect with voters’ hopes and fears and convince them of their credibility to deliver the policies in office.

Labour doesn’t have a hope of working out where to go if it can’t face up to where it is and why. Members need to take an unflinching look at these six long-term trends alongside the stark reality of the more recent leadership problem when picking a vision for the future. While emerging leadership contenders are already signalling their intentions to run, what members really need to be clear on is which of the following four visions they choose and why.

Four visions of Labour

From my perspective running a organisation dedicated to supporting a new generation of working class leaders, I already worry about how class will feature in this debate. Only one of these options will truly deliver for working people and take account of the six trends above. But the other three all have serious backers and could yet take Labour away from its historic mission.

I. Liberal Labour

Tilley and Evans’ analysis shows that Labour has done especially well in recent decades amongst the ‘new middle class’ –people working in roles like university lecturer, nurse, social worker, dental hygienist and occupational therapist. They’re socially liberal and broadly in the middle on economic policy, unless it comes to funding the public sector when they’re quite left.

One future strategy would be to try to max out this vote out — for example to try to hoover up those of them found in the 12% of Lib Dem voters on Thursday. This has a certain logic to it and falls in line with the Conservatives doing much better with working class social conservatives.

But, this approach may not work. As noted above, Lewis Baston and others seriously question whether there are enough seats with these kinds of voters in to make this a route to government. More importantly, I’m not sure this route is possible without the Labour Party gradually abandoning being on the economic left.

If you start unifying people based on their social conservatism or liberalism you’ll be pulling in people with views across the left and right of the economic spectrum. As the Conservatives may well soon find out, for them that’ll mean they either have to deliver on some of their more economically left rhetoric or find their new voter coalition rapidly splinters. If you are what you eat, a Labour Party primarily focused on gaining more middle class social liberals would gradually cease to be a working class party of the left and more resemble the Lib Dems.

II. Posh Labour

The Labour Party has always been a cross-class coalition that has had leaders from well-off families (a personal hero, Clement Attlee, was even posher than Blair or Corbyn), but it has ultimately been rooted in a mass-membership working class union movement. Historically this has provided a talent pipeline of brilliant working class politicians and advisers.

It also meant Labour saw itself first and foremost as striving to provide representation for working class people, rather than being primarily driven by theoretical conceptions of class struggle. Jonathan Rose (part quoting fellow historian Ross McKibben) puts it better when analysing why a Marxist party never took off in Britain:

‘”The sort of men who were so prominent in European socialist parties — marginal bourgeois, journalists, ‘theoreticians’, professional orators — were comparatively rare in Britain.” The British working class had forged its own organisations and its own leaders, who did not care to accept middle class patronage, even under the name of socialism.’

Trade unions continue to provide a great working class talent pipeline but haven’t been able to stop senior parts of the party being dominated by people not just from middle class backgrounds, but very posh ones.

Labour need not worry about choosing this path if ideological focus is what matters most. If instead Labour wants to be the parliamentary wing of the British working class then it needs to start looking and sounding like us. Right now, I can point to some corporates who take monitoring class diversity more seriously than the Labour Party.

III. ‘The Labour Party your grandad voted for’

This approach is summed up with ‘less identity politics, more class politics’ and the idea the party needs to appeal to the ‘traditional working class’. It doesn’t tally with the evidence (if you read only one piece linked here, I’d make it academic Cas Mudde’s account of why left leaning parties mimicking populist ones rarely prosper) and it crosses all sorts of moral lines that shouldn’t be open to people on the left.

When Labour has done so badly in many leave voting towns where it once weighed rather than counted its vote the appeal to forget the cities and focus on ‘the heartlands’ is getting a lot of traction but there are two things we have to guard against here.

Firstly, it can slip into suggesting that people in cities — especially London — are having a high old time of it while ignoring the reality that our cities are often home to the biggest numbers of people who are really hard up.

Much more dangerously it implies ‘identity’ issues like racism, sexism and homophobia aren’t issues that concern working class people, who are presumably all white, male and straight. Labour should be the party countering, not indulging, sweeping characterisations of working class people as some homogenous lump. Nobody whose values are rooted in social justice should be mounting an argument that echoes the language of the Brexit Party and before them the BNP with their slogan that they were ‘The Labour Party your grandad voted for’.

If your image of the ‘traditional working class’ doesn’t have space for black, Asian or LGBT working class people, it’s neither progressive nor accurate and has no place in left politics in 2019.

IV. Modern Working Class Labour

Instead, Labour’s future has to lie in building a multi-racial modern working class movement — one that keeps the voters it’s got but appeals to those it needs like older voters on the left who didn’t vote for Corbyn or Miliband.

This will require delicate balancing, but it’s perfectly possible for Labour to do things like respond to the rising concerns about anti-social behaviour in working class communities without embracing a criminal justice approach that criminalises young working class black men.

Likewise, it’s possible to design an immigration policy that has widespread buy-in but doesn’t demonise or dehumanise immigrants or indulge ideas that they are responsible for a low-wage economy.

This option requires more dexterity than the other three, but both strategically and ethically it’s Labour’s only option. Given that, the task for the months ahead is clear — candidates for Labour’s leadership must show how they’ll build a movement of diverse working class talent, top to bottom.

Building a truly modern working class movement

Here are the six places they could start.

1. Monitor and have a plan to fix class diversity in all of the Labour’s Party structures ­

Jeremy Corbyn called on the BBC to do this, but as far as I can see this doesn’t yet happen in Labour. In my day job we’re helping corporates and charities do this so there’s plenty of good examples to learn from.

2. Speak to people’s pride and dignity

People need meaning and sense of pride but the right are better at speaking to it, with messages along the lines of ‘you’re amazing and you’re being mugged off by these people over here’. That resonates — in many working class families people will tell you they’re proud and strong but also struggling, hard-up or feeling like they’re ignored and invisible. Labour hears that but for whatever reason communicates back using terms we never use about ourselves. Try talking to my single mum and others like her about being the ‘most vulnerable’ and see how far you get.

3. Don’t shy away from immigration and race — build working class unity across communities

Labour should act on the brilliant research coming out of the US on how to build a mutli-racial working class movement. Anat Shenker-Osorio, Celinda Lake and others have for a few years now been publishing research showing that it’s possible to build greater unity amongst working class people. To do that you have to explicitly say you want to deliver for working class people whether white, black or brown, a newcomer or someone whose family has been here for generations, so everyone feels included. You also need to make clear that some politicians have an active strategy of pitting communities against each other. Closer to home, Runnymede and Class have also been taking the lead with the race / class narrative work that deserves much more attention.

4. People with little actually have the most to lose — stop promising a ‘revolution’

I once heard an academic say ‘the history of labour studies is middle class academics trying to work out why the working classes didn’t do what they thought they would’.

Well off people on the far left have often assumed that the worse it gets the more people will embrace radical change. In reality, when you’ve got little you tend to hold on even more tightly what’s left. The Conservatives in 2019 promised a ‘safety first’ manifesto that will radically change the shape of the economy. They did much the same in 2010 — cautious language to sell a very radical agenda. By contrast Labour promised that ‘the revolution is coming’. They need to urgently consider which of being radical or sounding radical is most important, because Conservative success would suggest you can have one or the other but not both.

5. Make sure policy actually addresses working class priorities

One of the most astonishing things about Labour’s 2019 manifesto — for all the rhetoric about how revolutionary it was — was that its social security plans would only deliver a halt to the rise in child poverty, not reduce it. This felt symptomatic of a policy agenda that never seemed to be truly driven by the actual priorities of working class people.

One Labour-supporting film released just before the election promised ‘a mighty choice is coming’. It still is. Which of the four visions Labour members choose will determine whether the Labour party can once again work and win for working people, in all of our magnificent diversity.

Interview – Jean-Marc Pontroué on Panerai’s Innovations, New Materials, COVID-19, Environment and… Experiences!

Jean-Marc Pontroué became CEO of Panerai in 2018, bringing new ideas, energy and a more contemporary approach to the brand. Although changes within the company were inevitable, the core values and instantly recognizable aesthetics remain intact. During the digital Watches & Wonders week, I talked with Jean-Marc about Panerai’s plans and challenges in 2020 during this unprecedented Corona Virus pandemic. New models will launch as planned, while others will wait until next year as the company adapts to global boutique closures, cancelled events and a big shift to a single, major fair in Geneva. With a focus on the environment, partnerships and long-term ambassadors like Mike Horn, Panerai is poised to emerge from the crisis stronger than ever with exciting new projects and innovations in the works.

While the interview was conducted some weeks ago, one of the first announcements made by Panerai’s CEO, could already be seen yesterday when the brand introduced a new blue dial edition of the Luminor Marina with automatic movement. Moreover, this starts the cleaning of the collection, now grouped into four pillars – Submersible, Luminor, Due and Radiomir – and sort of a relaunch of the Luminor Marina in the Panerai collection. Among others, the Luminor Marina will be void of the fauxtina luminescent material in the future. And again… an apology to those who don’t like a 3,000-word interview. For everyone else, enjoy!

Panerai Luminor Base 8 Days PAM00560 – photo by Tomasz Kieltyka for the Collector’s Series

Frank Geelen, MONOCHROME Watches – Last year, Panerai had a specific focus for the new timepieces that were released. Will we see a similar focus on one collection this year? 

Jean-Marc Pontroue, CEO of Panerai – You’ve probably seen that after 2019, which was the Submersible year, we decided to make 2020 the Luminor year. We concentrate most of our innovations of new materials and new experiences and new guarantee and so on, around the Luminor.

We haven’t done much on Luminor as the core highlight in many, many years. So I wanted to renew the reference 1312, which is the watch that everybody knows. When you know Panerai, you know the Luminor 44mm, with the crown safety lock system and so on, and we decided to make it stretch in many directions. One is new materials like Fibratech, another one is precious material like red gold, another one is the partnership with Luna Rossa, so we try to each time to inject creativity, but keeping our icon where it is. Sizewise, especially!

the new Panerai Luminor Marina 44mm PAM01313

It’s good to have the ref. 1312, because that is our best seller all over the world. Whatever market, in Asia, in the US, in Europe or local markets, or with tourists, the reference 1312 is our best-seller everywhere. It’s, at the same time, a Luminor that has never been debuted in other configurations than what it is today, always with a steel watch with a black dial. In June we have a blue dial in steel and some more variation, including a bracelet, later on, this year.

So that means you will introduce more new watches throughout this year?

Yes, a lot more now is coming, more or less this year.

I was told you’re going to focus more on the core collection?

Yes, we have no plans for new families in the Panerai collection. So, we keep Radiomir, Luminor, Submersible and Due. These are all families which were existing when I joined the company two years ago. Our mission is to strengthen and highlight what are the existing models, so we can work with bigger dials and work with new materials and we stay within the playground of these four families.

I remember that Panerai’s collection comprised a core collection and Special Editions. Every year, several Special Editions were introduced, often featuring new materials, new designs, different and more complex movements. And when sold out, it was over. Is this also where you plan to take the brand again? Meaning a split between the core collection and the annual Special Editions? 

Well, it’s a mix, because we’re going to launch something like 35 new models this year. You have some which are going to be limited to 70 pieces to highlight the 70 years of Luminor. Some, like the blue dial version of ref. 1312 (which was introduced yesterday, and is ref. PAM01313) that is going to be a standout in the collection. So, we play with different one-shots on standout in the assortment.

Will, for instance, the Fibratech or the DMLS, remain in the collection? Or are these the “one-shot standouts”?

Even though we launch it as a limited edition for the first year, we intend to keep going with Fibratech in the future, in a new model. Fibratech is not something we’ve spent years and years to develop, to have only 270 pieces.

Now we’re at the topic of new materials. We see some interesting materials that I had never heard of, like Fibratech or DMLS. How does this work at the Laboratorio di Idee? Is there a specific focus, a plan, to develop specific materials or to source specific materials? Does it have to be related to a partner like Luna Rossa? 

Well, the leading factor when we do our research is always to identify materials which have never been used in the watch industry before, so that we can claim that it’s a first. And the second point is it should bring added value to the customer, especially in terms of lightness, in terms of performance, or the hardness of the material or scratch resistance, and so on. We don’t bring materials for the sake of bringing materials. The idea is to really bring it so that it improves the lives of our customers.

The beauty of Luna Rossa is that it brought us to non-watches industry potential resourcing. Since they associate with this world of superyachts – or aerospace or supercars – and that opens doors of giants in this industry. Giants who work with the same constraints as us in the watches industry, but they have much bigger budgets to work on new materials. And that was just a very good example of an industry which is much bigger, which is very much after lighter materials to sail faster, and making sure materials don’t break, so it meets exactly what we are looking for.

And how did Panerai come to use DMLS and Fibratech? 

DMLS is a titanium that has been used in the 3D printing process for the tourbillon. So, when we claim at Panerai, or at Laboratorio di Idee, it’s the same principle of having a possibility to enrich the industry. So, it’s something which we have used already three to four years ago with our tourbillon. We have sold so far, since the licensing, like 150 of these tourbillons with this principle. That has worked very well using this type of manufacturing principle on this watch, which by the way, you can visit when you come to Neuchatel, our manufacturer is producing these pieces.

Being one of the brands to be a pioneer, to enrich the industry with new experiences or new services, like the 70 years guarantee. You have seen that on the Fibratech, with no less than a 70-year guarantee on the watch. So, it’s how much we can be a pioneer as a brand in many aspects of the watch industry.

Is material research and development executed in-house? 

Yes! We wanted to have the Laboratorio di Idee in-house, so that our dealers and our customers can visit it and see for themselves. You can see that we have our own manufacturing process. Of course, our manufacturing out of Laboratorio di Idee, where we are testing know ideas, of which 90% would fail, but 10% would bring products of the future.

Mike Horn upon giving Panerai a part of his boat, Pangaea: easier to put that in the garbage or you use it to make watches

It’s interesting to have a brand that claims Laboratorio di Idee, and even though it’s Italian, you can understand it whatever you are, Dutch, French, English, Greek, Chinese, whatsoever. But how can we give roots, how can we give some reason to justify that claim, beyond the marketing claim. That’s why we have a room dedicated to this Laboratorio di Idee manufacturer, which is testing, evaluating, etc. for all the potential future ideas we have for future products.

And then there’s the EcoPangaea tourbillon GMT, which is quite a beast, 50mm, complex movement, and related to Mike Horn again, who is a returning thing for Panerai. Tell me more.

Mike is a brand supporter for more than 15 years and he was a fan of Panerai before. When he spends a couple of months alone in some of the most regal parts of the world, he’s always having his Panerai. It’s only mechanical instruments that survive expeditions, like he does, somewhere in the world. And a year and a half ago he gave me a part of his boat, Pangaea, and he told me: easier to put that in the garbage or you use it to do watches. I was surprised when he made me this offer, but he said, “OK, why not, let’s try to see what you can do with this piece of steel.” And I went on to say, “Well with that we can do five watches.”

That’s how the idea started of using it on a watch, it’s a 50mm as you have seen so you need a big wrist to wear it! But we could do only five pieces with the type of metal he has given us. It allows us to bring the very first tourbillon skeleton Submersible into our assortment. All of these pieces already sold out, and because it’s also an experience with Mike, he will take all five people with him to give them a flavour, for three days, of the beauty of the North Pole.

So you want your customers to freeze on the North Pole? Do you require the customers to do some sort of physical test before they go with Mike to the North Pole? 

Before selling the watches, we did that already with the Marina Militare a year ago. If you remember we had the experience with the Marina Militare, which was for 33 people and my biggest worry was that everybody would survive the experience and have fun. At the end of the day, you pay for this concept and the idea is that you live by having learned something and having enjoyed something. If it’s just to suffer for all two days it’s not really fun.

So, I was very happy with the Marina Militare because first, everybody survived. And we got very good coverage of people who were very enthusiastic, whether it was customers or even some journalists and we have decided to continue on this way to introduce in the future even more experiences because we strongly believe that if you want to experience the best of Panerai, beyond visiting its historic boutique in Piazza, beyond visiting its manufacturer in Neuchatel, beyond visiting any of our 150 stores in the world, the best way is to be able to test your watch in the toughest conditions.

Jean-Marc Pontroue – photo by Fratellowatches.com

That’s why we did this with the Marina Militare and we continue to do it with Mike Horn and we have many other projects. But yes, back to your first question, we had a test with doctors before starting Marina Militare, a test for each and everybody. They were tested by a doctor before starting the next day, where he tested all of the critical things like your heart, etc., so we were qualified to go. I have to say that most of the people did about 80% of the experience, so it was very good, very fun.

Maybe we could imagine the next P-Day as a boot camp?

That’s a good point. Well, why not, I never thought about that. But you know, we don’t organize P-Day. P-Day is like an icon of the Paneristi community. Last year it was in Amsterdam and this year it will be, if everything goes well, in New York, but it’s supposed to be September and there’s this concern we don’t know if it’ll work. But why not? It could be a good idea to test one of the P-Day as a boot camp.

Since we’re talking about the current situation, with the pandemic still going on, how many of the initially planned new models will be introduced this year? 

During Watches & Wonders we presented a selection of the innovations 2020 and we keep a certain number of innovations for the rest of the year. We have kept about two-thirds of the planned innovations for this year and a third we have delayed for next year. In numbers, this means that we kept about 75 innovations and about 15 will be delayed until next year.

Now something else, fairs… What do you think about the latest changes with Patek and Rolex moving to Geneva next year? So, the entire centre of gravity is moving away from Basel.

I’m personally very happy because it strengthens the power of Geneva. You know, we should never forget that the watch industry is probably one of the very few industries to have only one country of origin. When in the fashion business, you have different fashion weeks, because you have Paris, you have Milan, you have London, you have New York. Because all of these fashion designers have different countries of origin.

When you come to watches, most of the luxury watches come from Switzerland. So, having a single city and an event that will last longer than the initial four or five days that we had with Watches & Wonders, works very well. Having all of the major names grouped together can only highlight even more the celebration effect. We have more magnitude in what we say and what we do, in press coverage, resonance to customers, making your life easier because you don’t have to travel twice. For journalists and retailers who come from America or from Asia, the two big fairs were very tiring. Press explained to final customers why one fair in three months ahead of or delayed compared to the other one is not easy. So, here we would have one city, one date. On that it would be a very strong celebration.

One last question from my side. Do you also think that due to the pandemic that we are facing, the industry will have to undergo some changes? And if so, what kind of changes?

Well, first of all, I repeat often to my teams and to the people I speak to when I have to react about this pandemic, is that we know that we don’t know. I like to repeat that because I think you have to be extremely clever to be able to foresee what will be post-pandemic. First, we have no idea when it will be finished. Even though we have some ideas, for instance, because you restart in Holland, and we restart in Switzerland in two weeks time to come back to a normal activity, which is when everything reopened. That is already something which is more or less known, but will the customers be back to purchase watches? Although we’re restarting, it’s still something which is not as clear in most of the 200 countries in the world.

So, then it’s what’s going to happen to distribution, and to manufacturing, and to all the competencies that make the industry so vibrant before the Corona Virus started. I strongly believe that the strongest brand, before the Corona Virus hit all of us, will become even stronger in terms of market share. I will say that the business will increase, but I will say the market share of the big ones will continue to be there if not increasing. That is valid for brands, it is valid for distributors.

I think people will be more careful about spending their money, and finally, I think that the digital world is no more something for the next 100 years, but something for now and today! We see it today in our sales results that the closure of many of our stores has led many people to go to our e-commerce activities.

So, it will create big changes and also in our way of living. I personally don’t work today like I was working two months ago. I use the computer eight or ten hours per day to do all the meetings, which is something I used already at Panerai because having three different geographical sites (Milan, Neuchatel and Geneva) we have stopped travelling in all these directions. And we are using video conferencing, on Zoom, on Skype, you name it, and that we accelerate even with our subsidiaries in the world, by avoiding unnecessary trips, and being much more environmentally driven.

You know, we live thanks to the oceans. The brand wouldn’t be here today if we wouldn’t have this sea environment. When we speak with Mike Horn and Guillaume Nery and all the people we work with, they alert us about the fast deterioration of the planet. We believe that on our small level, that it’s part of our mission to initiate a certain number of developments, which are much more environmentally friendly and I am very committed to being the first brand, next year, to bring the first watch that is 100% recycled.

That sounds like quite a statement.

Yeah, we have 15 people at the manufacturer working on that concept. And we have today watches, which are up to 30 to 40 percent of the value made of recycled components. Next year we hope to be the first ones to come with a watch with all components that are recycled.

I’m intrigued! I’d love to see how the hairspring will be made. On that bombshell, it’s time to end this interview… thanks so much for your time, Jean-Marc!

The post Interview – Jean-Marc Pontroué on Panerai’s Innovations, New Materials, COVID-19, Environment and… Experiences! appeared first on Wristwatch Journal.

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Edtech is surging, and parents have some notes – TechCrunch

Unlike most sectors, edtech has been booming over the last few months. Flashcards startup Quizlet is now a unicorn, digital textbook company Top Hat is finding unprecedented surges in usage and student success business Edsights raised nearly $2 million from high-profile investors, all from inbound interest. Investors are so confident that homeschooling might become a trend that they just invested $3.7 million in Primer, which creates a “full-stack infrastructure” to help parents get started.

But as tired parents juggle work, family and sanity all day, nearly every day, they say edtech is not a remedy for all education gaps right now.

Parents across all income groups are struggling with homeschooling.

“Our mental health is like whack-a-mole,” said Lisa Walker, the vice president of brand and corporate marketing at Fuze. Walker, who lives in Boston but has relocated to Vermont for the pandemic, has two kids, ages 10 and 13. “One person is having a good day. One person is having a bad day, and we’re just going throughout the family to see who needs help.”

Socioeconomically disadvantaged families have it even worse because resources are strapped and parents often have to work multiple jobs to afford food to put on the table.

One major issue for parents is balancing a decrease in live learning with an uptick in “do it at your own pace” learning.

Walker says she is frustrated by the limited amount of live interaction that her 10-year-old has with teachers and classmates each day. Once the one hour of live learning is done, the rest of the school day looks like him sitting in front of a computer. Think pre-recorded videos, followed up by an online quiz, capped with doing homework on a Google doc.

Asynchronous learning is complicated because, while it is not interactive, it is more inclusive of all socioeconomic backgrounds, Walker said. If all learning material is pre-recorded, households that have more kids than computers are less stressed to make the 8 a.m. science class, and can fit in lessons by taking turns.

“Even though I know there’s a lot of video fatigue out there, I would love there to be more live learning,” Walker said. “Tech is both part of the problem and part of the solution.”

TraLiza King, a single mother living in Atlanta who works full time as a senior tax manager for PWC, points out the downside of live video instruction when it comes to working with younger children.

One challenge is overseeing her four-year-old’s Zoom calls. King needs to be available to help her daughter, Zoe, use the platform, which isn’t intuitive for kids at that age. She helps Zoe log on and off and mute when appropriate so instruction can go on interrupted, ironically enough.

Her 18-year-old college freshman could supervise the four-year-old’s learning, but King doesn’t want her older daughter to feel responsible for teaching. It leaves King to play the role of Zoom tech support, and teacher, in addition to mom and full-time employee.

“This has been a double-edged sword; there’s beauty in it that I get to see what my girls are learning and be a part of their everyday,” she said. “But I am not a preschool teacher.”

Some parents are finding success in pretending it is business as normal. The moment that Roger Roman, the founder of Los Angeles-based Rythm Labs, and his wife saw that there was a shutdown, they scrambled to create a schedule for the children. Breakfast at 6 a.m., physical education right after, and then workbook time and homework time. If their five-year-old checks all the boxes, he can “earn” 30 minutes of screen time.

The Roman family’s schedule for their child.

Technology definitely helps. Roman says he relies on a few apps like Khan Academy Kids and Leapfrog to give him some time to take work calls or meetings. But he says those have been more like supplements instead of replacements. In fact, he says one big solution he found is a bit more low-tech.

“Printers have been a godsend,” he said

The kids being at home has also given the Roman family an opportunity to address the racial violence and police brutality in our country. The existing school curriculums around history have been scrutinized for lacking a comprehensive and accurate account of slavery and Black leaders. Now, with parents at home, those disparities are even more clear. Depending on the household, the gaps around education on slavery can either inspire a difficult conversation on inequality in the country, or leave the talk tabled for schools to reopen.

Roman says he doesn’t remember a time where he wasn’t aware of racism and injustice, and assumes the same will be true for his sons.

“The murders of Ahmaud, Breonna, and George have forced my wife and me to be brutally honest with my five-year-old about this country’s long, dark history of white supremacy and racial oppression,” he said. “We didn’t expect to have these discussions so soon with him, but he’s had a lot of questions about the images he’s been seeing, and we’ve confronted them head-on.”

Roman used books to help illustrate racism to his sons. Edtech platforms have largely been silent on how they’re addressing anti-racism in their platforms, but Quizlet says it is “pulling together programming that can make a real impact.”

What’s next for remote learning?

In light of the struggles parents and educators alike are seeing with the current set of online learning tools and their inability to inspire young learners, new edtech startups are thinking about how the future of remote learning might look.

Zak Ringelstein, the co-founder of Zigazoo, is launching a platform he describes as a “TikTok for kids.” The app is for children from preschool to middle school, and invites users to post short-form videos in response to project-based prompts. Exercises could look like science experiments — like building a baking soda volcano or recreating the solar system from household items — and the app is controlled by parents.

The first users are Ringlestein’s kids. He says they became disengaged with learning when it was just blind staring at screens, leading him to conclude that interaction is key. Down the road, Zigazoo plans to forge partnerships with entertainment companies to have characters act as “brand ambassadors” and feature in the short-form video content. Think “Sesame Street” characters starting a TikTok trend to help kids learn what photosynthesis is all about.

A preview of Zigazoo, a “TikTok for kids” and its video-based prompts“As an educator, I’ve been surprised at how little content exists for parents that is not just entertaining but is actually educational,” he said.

Lingumi is a platform that teaches toddlers critical skills, like learning English. The company began because preschool classes are packed with so many students that teachers can’t give one on one feedback during the “sponge-like years.” Lingumi uses another startup, SoapBox, and its voice tech to listen and understand children, assess how they are pronouncing words and judge fluency.

“Edtech products were designed to work in the classroom and a teacher was supposed to be in the mix somewhere,” said Dr. Patricia Scanlon, the CEO of SoapBox. “Now, the teacher can’t be with the kids individually and this is a technology that gives updates on children’s progress.”

Another app, Make Music Count, was started by Marcus Blackwell to help students use a digital keyboard to solve math equations. It serves 50,000 students in more than 200 schools, and recently landed a partnership with Cartoon Network and Motown records to use content as lessons for followers. If you log onto the app, you are presented with a math problem that, once solved, tells you which key to play. Once you solve all the math problems in the set, the keys you played line up to play popular songs from artists like Ariana Grande and Rihanna.

The app is using a well-known strategy called gamification to engage its younger users. Gamification of learning has long been effective in engaging and contextualizing studies for students, especially younger ones. Add a sense of accomplishment, like a song or a final product, and kids get the positive feedback they’re looking for. The strategy is found in the underpinnings of some of the most successful education companies we see today, from Quizlet to Duolingo.

But in Make Music Count’s case, it’s forgoing gamification’s usual trappings, like points, badges and other in-app rewards to instead deliver something far more fun than virtual items: music that kids enjoy and often seek out on their own.

Gamification, much like technology more broadly, is not all-encompassing of the deeply personal and hands-on aspects of school. Yet that is what parents need right now. We’re left with a reminder that technology can only help so much in a remote-only world, and that education has always been more than just comprehension and test-taking.

The missing piece to edtech: School isn’t just learning, it’s childcare

At the end of the day, if the future of work is remote, parents will need more support with childcare assistants. Some startups trying to help that include Cleo, a parenting benefits startup that recently partnered with on-demand childcare service UrbanSitter.

“As working moms desperate for a solution to the crisis facing parents today, we were focused on developing a solution that didn’t just work for our members and enterprise clients, but also one that we’d use ourselves. After experimenting and trying everything from virtual care to scheduling shifts to looking for new caregivers ourselves, we realized the only solution that would work for families would require a new model of childcare designed for the unique issues COVID-19 has created,” Cleo CEO Sarahjane Sacchetti told TechCrunch in May.

Sara Mauskopf, the co-founder of childcare marketplace Winnie, said that tech companies trying to help remote learning need to remember that “it’s not just the education aspect that has to be solved for.”

“School is a form of childcare,” she said.

“The thing that irks me is that I see these tweets all the time that ‘more people are going to homeschool than ever before,” Mauskopf said. “But no one is going to feed my toddler mac and cheese or change their diaper.”

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Mindfulness and Meditation Are Flytraps For Our Impulses

I was introduced to the practice of mindfulness byS. N. Goenka in 1974, a few weeks after being ordained as a novice monk. Together with a group of young Tibetan monks and Western students of Buddhism, I attended a silent ten-day Vipassanā retreat in Dharamsala, India.

During the first three days we cultivated mindfulness of breathing by focusing on the sensation of the breath as it passes over the upper lip. After a while the fugitive passage of inhalations and exhalations consolidated into a stable point of sensation at the center of the lip. This point then became the exclusive focus of the meditation.

In becoming more concentrated, I started seeing flashes of colored lights and patterns in my mind. They did not last long, and we were advised to pay them no attention. By the end of the three days, I had settled into an unprecedented state of focused attention, which I could sustain for several minutes at a time without distraction.

On day four, we moved our focus from the upper lip to a point at the top of the head. From there we carefully expanded our attention to the rest of the scalp, the face, the ears, the neck, until we reached the torso. Then we slowly continued through the rest of the body, along each arm and leg in turn, until we reached the tips of our toes. Once this downward scan was complete, we repeated the procedure in reverse until we returned to the top of the head. We spent each meditation session “sweeping” the body from head to foot and back again.

At first, my experience was patchy. Some parts of the body buzzed, tingled, vibrated, and pulsed, while other parts felt almost completely insensate. As I persisted with the exercise—it was all we did for several hours each day—the dead zones began to come alive until I felt my entire body as one single mass of quivering sensations.

In a deep, reassuring voice, Mr. Goenka instructed us to pay attention to the range of pleasant, unpleasant, and neutral feelings associated with these sensations. A pain in the knee breaks down into physical reactions triggered by the stress on the joint due to sitting cross-legged for long periods and a subjective feeling of that condition as unpleasant. In refining mindfulness, one learns to differentiate between physical sensations or sounds and how one feels about them, thereby enabling one to dwell in a keenly responsive but less reactive state of mind.

Mr. Goenka told us to notice how even the most stubborn sensations and feelings came and went. I found that if I probed deeply into a piercing pain in the knee, at a certain point it would “switch” from being something solid and unpleasant into a rapidly vibrating pattern of sensations that no longer hurt as much. I realized that what I experienced at any given moment was co-created by the physical processes of my body and the way I was conditioned to interpret and react to them.

I remember a time when I was seated cross-legged outside on the grass between meditation sessions in an ecstatic, silent, openhearted awareness while the gusts of wind rising from the plains of the Punjab below Dharamsala seemed to blow through me. The sense of a separate world “out there” being observed by a detached subject “in here” began to break down.

All this took place more than 40 years ago, but its impact remains with me today. It was my initiation into mindfulness, which has been the basis of my contemplative life ever since. Far more than just a technique, mindfulness offered me a new sensibility on life as a whole, an entirely other perspective on how to be a practicing human in the world.

My Tibetan Buddhist education and training during the two years before the retreat had been an ideal preparation for this practice. I was used to spending much of each day cross-legged on the floor, so long hours of sitting meditation did not trouble me. My daily reflections and studies—on the preciousness of human life, the imminence of death, renunciation, existential commitment, an altruistic resolve, and emptiness—provided a fertile soil of value and meaning for mindful awareness to take root in.

Mindfulness is a balanced, reflective stance in which one notices the meanness or sarcasm that rises up in the mind while neither identifying with it nor rejecting it.

I had thought deeply about impermanence and selflessness. Now I was experiencing them viscerally. I found myself part of the living fabric of human experience into which I was inseparably woven yet was at the same time free to examine and explore. Mindfulness, I discovered, was not an aloof, detached regard. Its practice served to sculpt and shape the inner contours of my solitude.

Nor was the idea of mindfulness new to me. For many months I had been studying Shantideva’s A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way ofLife. The entire fifth chapter of this 8th-century Indian Buddhist text is devoted to the practice of mindful awareness.

Mr. Goenka provided the tools to turn Shantideva’s teachingson mindfulness into a felt reality, while Shantideva’s reflections provided an ethical dimension for Mr. Goenka’s contemplativepractice. “If the elephant of my mind,” wrote Shantideva, “is firmly bound on all sides by the rope of mindfulness, all fears will cease to exist and all virtues will come into my hand.”

The purpose of mindfulness is not just to be more aware of the breath, bodily sensations, and feelings. For Shantideva it means to be constantly mindful of one’s ethical aspirations. Mindfulness is compared to the gatekeeper at the doorway of the mind and senses, alert to any impulse that threatens to divert you from your goals and undermine you.

“The thieves of unawareness,” he remarks, “follow upon the decline of mindfulness and rob you of your goodness.” They circle around “waiting for an opportunity” to break in and take possession of you. Mindfulness is a heightened attention that notices the very first stirring of reactive impulses and neurotic habits before they have a chance to take hold. “When, on the verge of acting, I see my mind is tainted,” Shantideva tells himself, “I should remain immobile, like a piece of wood.”

The piece of wood is a metaphor for equanimity, not indifference. Mindfulness is a balanced, reflective stance in which one notices the meanness or sarcasm that rises up in the mind while neither identifying with it nor rejecting it. One observes with interest what is happening without succumbing to either the urge to act on it or the guilty desire to ignore or suppress it. This entails a radical acceptance of who and what you are, where nothing is unworthy of being the object of such attention. You say “yes” to your life as it manifests, warts and all, with an ironic, compassionate regard. Through sustaining this nonreactive stance over time, mindful awareness becomes the basis for one’s ethical life.

This perspective is spelled out in the 14th-century Tibetan lama Thogmé Zangpo’s commentary to Shantideva’s text. For Thogmé Zangpo, mindfulness is “the recollection of all one aspires to let go of and realize,” while awareness is “knowing how to do that letting go and realizing.” Mindful awareness thus encompasses the entire project of human flourishing. To be mindful means to remember to let go of compulsive reactivity and realize a nonreactive way of life, while to be aware means to know how to refine the psychological, contemplative, philosophical, and ethical skills needed to achieve these goals.

Ever since the Vipassanā retreat with Mr. Goenka and the study of Shantideva’s A Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, thecontemplative and ethical dimensions of mindfulness have been inseparable for me. Mindful awareness both embeds my attention in the raw immediacy of experience and serves as the moral compass that guides my response to that experience.

“What is the power of mindfulness?” asked Gotama more than a thousand years before Shantideva. “The noble practitioner is mindful: she is equipped with the keenest mindfulness and awareness; she remembers well and keeps in mind what has been said and done long ago.”

*

I do not regard myself as a particularly accomplished meditator. I know others who appear far more dedicated to meditation than I am. Had I been more serious, surely I would have committed far more time to the jhānas than two weeklong retreats. Yet despite my interest in this practice, I have little inclination to spend weeks or months further refining or deepening it. One reason for this lack of interest is that I still notice, many months later, how the effects of these jhāna retreats continue to influence my attention and awareness not only in formal meditation but in everyday life.

Collectedness (samādhi) has now become more integral to my daily practice. My meditation has become more embodied and I give greater value to contentment, rapture, and well-being as part of the process.

Jhāna practice has helped me understand that the traditional Buddhist distinction between “stillness” (samatha) and “insight” (vipassanā) can be misleading. While it might be necessary to present them as distinct practices at the outset, as one’s meditation matures they become increasingly inseparable. In theory I knew this from my Buddhist studies. Yet it was only through doing these jhāna retreats that I understood what it meant in my own embodied experience.

Over the years I must have spent many thousands of hours seated on a meditation cushion, but I still get distracted, listless, and bored. On a typical retreat, I will have good days and bad days. I can sometimes be overwhelmed by an obsessive worry that plagues me for hours. My mood can swing between elation and despondency from one moment to the next. There can be long periods when I do not meditate formally at all. Often I feel like a dilettante.

So why do I persist in an activity that in many respects seems to have made little difference to what goes on in my own mind? I have learned that the value of meditation is not that it changes the content of your experience. It changes your relationship to that content. All the worries, egotistic fantasies, lusts, and pettiness that surge into consciousness are simply the result of previous conditions over which I have little control. They are naturalistic processes that happen independent of my volition. I do not choose to feel them. All I can do is be mindful of them as they arise, recognize them for what they are, and not let myself be too influenced or swept away by them.

In trying over the years to lead a mindful and ethical life, I may have reduced the conditions that provoke the most egregious forms of reactivity. By not acting on those reactions, I may not reinforce them as much now as I did in the past, thus lessening the frequency of their occurrence. Yet how can I know that such benefits are not simply the result of maturity or other factors that have nothing to do with formal meditation practice? Can I be sure that I wouldn’t be experiencing the same thing now even if I had never sat a single hour cross-legged on a cushion?

Scientific studies into the effects of meditation are seeking to answer these questions. While some of the findings suggest that meditation may indeed be a key factor in producing such changes, it would be premature at this point to draw sweeping conclusions about its effectiveness.

As the person in whom the effects of meditation unfold, I am probably in the worst position to judge them. I am too close to the process to be able to see with any clarity the consequences of a practice that I have been doing for so long. Rather than ask me, you should ask my wife, my brother, my old friends. I doubt their answers would be unambiguous.

To integrate contemplative practice into life requires more than becoming proficient in techniques of meditation.

In the end, the only thing that really matters for me as a meditator is how well or badly I respond to the challenges and opportunities presented by the situation at hand. If my contemplative practice fails to contribute to my flourishing as a person in my relationships with others, then I have to question the purpose of spending months and years practicing it. Every moment in life offers the chance to start afresh.

I can embrace what is before me, let go of what holds me back, then speak or act in a way that is not determined by my fears, attachments, or egotistic conceits. Although I frequently fail in my attempts to live in this way, I am convinced that mindfulness, collectedness, and questioning are crucial to my ability to do so.

I likewise do not doubt that by training oneself in contemplative disciplines one can achieve nonordinary states of mind that might sound incredible for those unfamiliar with these things. When Leigh describes dwelling for long periods of time in the jhāna and immaterial absorptions, I have no reason to disbelieve him. fMRI scans of Leigh’s brain in meditation have shown different areas lighting up as he enters different jhānic states. Yet I suspect that the ability to access such altered forms of consciousness is due to a range of factors other than formal training. Not only are some people more highly motivated to achieve such states, they may be more temperamentally and perhaps neurobiologically suited than others to enter them.

“We had the experience,” wrote T. S. Eliot in “The Dry Salvages,” “but missed the meaning.” The meaning of contemplation must not be confused with the experience of contemplation. To be able to dwell in a deeply focused, ecstatic, and clear state of mind is in itself meaningless. You can train and develop your spiritual muscles to an exceptional degree without necessarily flourishing much as a person. Your meditation is meaningful to the extent that it contributes to your becoming the kind of person you aspire to be. And since an ethical vision is integral to your life as a whole, it will inform, suffuse, and transform your contemplative practice.

To integrate contemplative practice into life requires more than becoming proficient in techniques of meditation. It entails the cultivation and refinement of a sensibility about the totality of your existence—from intimate moments of personal anguish to the endless suffering of the world. This sensibility encompasses a range of skills: mindfulness, curiosity, understanding, collectedness, compassion, equanimity, care.

Each of these can be cultivated and refined in solitude but has little value if it cannot survive the fraught encounter with others. Never be complacent about contemplative practice; it is always a work in progress. The world is here to surprise us. My most lasting insights have occurred off the cushion, not on it.

__________________________________

Excerpted from The Art of Solitude by Stephen Batchelor, ©2020. Run with permission from Yale University Press.

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via Politics – FiveThirtyEight

On Wednesday, I was working on a story about how our primary forecast was handling former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg when other things got in the way. Truth be told, I’m glad I got distracted, because a mildly bearish case on Bloomberg — roughly how I’d describe our model’s current position on him — is a lot easier to explain after Bloomberg’s difficult debate performance last night.

That’s not to say the model has handled Bloomberg perfectly. His odds of winning a majority or plurality of pledged delegates1 were probably too low initially because Bloomberg is an unusual case. But those odds have also improved a lot in recent days. As of Thursday afternoon — before any post-debate polling was in — he had a 9 percent chance of winning a majority of pledged delegates and an 18 percent chance of getting a plurality of delegates in our forecast.

At the same time, the hype about Bloomberg — a candidate who had yet to compete in any states, to participate in any debates, or to face sustained scrutiny from the media and other candidates — had probably gotten out of hand. Prediction markets have his chances cut almost in half as a result of the debate, from about 30 percent before the debate on Wednesday to only around 15 percent as of early Thursday afternoon. That’s an awfully big correction after a single debate for which we don’t yet have any polling. It may reflect the fact that these markets — and by extension the conventional wisdom generally — had overestimated Bloomberg’s chances to begin with.

So let me advance a few interrelated propositions about Bloomberg:

Bloomberg is unusual because of his money — but also his late start. That makes him hard to predict.

There has understandably been a lot of attention paid to the unprecedented amount of money that Bloomberg has spent on his campaign, especially on television advertising. And even if the evidence is mostly on the side of self-funded candidates not performing well, Bloomberg is spending so much money that he tests the boundaries of any potential equation involving campaign spending.

But Bloomberg is also unusual for his very late start to his campaign, which he launched on Nov. 24, as well as for his skipping the first four states. (He was actually eligible to receive votes in Iowa, but he didn’t campaign there.) In general, starting late has been a bearish indicator for presidential candidates — think about actor and former Sen. Fred Thompson, who flamed out after a lot of hype in 2008, or about former Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, who also entered the race in November but who quit last week after getting 0.4 percent of the vote in New Hampshire. “Not competing” in early states has also been bearish — think about former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani skipping Iowa in 2008 and how that turned out. Often, “not competing” has just been an excuse that candidates offer to lower expectations in states that they figure they’re going to lose.

Somehow, though, the combination of these factors allowed Bloomberg to continue gaining in the polls despite not contending in the early states. Both his paid media and his “earned” media — cable news and social media love talking about him (see point No. 2 below) — kept him in the conversation even when he wasn’t on the ballot. So when former Vice President Joe Biden cratered in the polls after Iowa, the biggest gainer was Bloomberg — not one of the candidates who had actually performed well in Iowa, namely former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Bernie Sanders.

Bloomberg’s recent polling surge is at least partially driven by news coverage. That opens him up to a “discovery, scrutiny, decline” cycle.

Bloomberg had risen slowly but somewhat steadily in the polls since his campaign launch, climbing from 3.6 percent in our national polling average on Dec. 12 to 8.8 percent on Feb. 3. That isn’t bad — a 5.2 percentage-point gain in 64 days — although it was short of the pace he’d need to be seriously competitive on Super Tuesday. If you had extrapolated out Bloomberg’s rate of increase — decidedly not a safe assumption! (see point No. 3) — he would have reached 11.2 percent in the polls by Super Tuesday, short of the usually 15 percent threshold that Democrats require a candidate to clear in order to receive state or district delegates.

Instead, Bloomberg had an abrupt, nonlinear surge in our polling average, climbing from 8.8 percent on Feb. 3 to 15.4 percent on Feb. 13, just 10 days later. He has since somewhat stalled out, for what it’s worth, having risen only to 16.1 percent as of Thursday afternoon.

This increase also happened to coincide with a big spike in news coverage of Bloomberg. I looked at how often candidates’ names appeared3 in headlines at Memeorandum, a site that aggregates which political stories are gaining the most traction, and found that from the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 3 through Thursday afternoon (Feb. 20), Bloomberg was the subject of 80 headlines at Memorandum, slightly trailing Sanders (84) but well ahead of Biden (53), Buttigieg (32), Sen. Amy Klobuchar (19) and Sen. Elizabeth Warren (15).

Now, not all of these headlines have been positive for Bloomberg, especially in recent days. But that’s sort of the point. It’s not uncommon for candidates to undergo what political scientists Lynn Vavreck and John Sides call a “discovery, scrutiny, decline” pattern in the polls, where an initial spark triggers a surge in media attention and a rise in the polls, but storylines turn more negative as the candidate gets more scrutiny and their actual performance doesn’t match the newfound hype. Candidates such as businessman Herman Cain and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich underwent this cycle in 2012. Sen. Kamala Harris and former Rep. Beto O’Rourke did so this year.

Be wary of assuming there’s momentum in polls. Bloomberg may keep rising, or he may have already peaked.

Let’s pause for breath here. There’s no evidence yet that Bloomberg is about to enter the decline phase of a discovery-scrutiny-decline cycle. And even if he does, he may have a higher floor than other candidates because he’s running so many ads.

Still, it’s a huge mistake to assume that just because a candidate is rising in polls now, he or she will continue to do so. Empirically, polls come much closer to what statisticians call a “random walk” than to, say, an object in flight that gains or loses momentum. That is to say, if a candidate rises from say 9 percent to 16 percent, that candidate is about as likely to revert back to basically where they were before (to, say, 11 percent) as they are to continue rising (to, say, 21 percent). Or their numbers could flatten out.

There are some qualifications to this. Candidates can gain momentum from winning states, and candidates who fall in the polls are at risk of dropping out. But to a first approximation, political observers vastly overrate the importance of momentum in the polls. There are plenty of examples of that this year, involving not only Harris and O’Rourke but also Warren, whose summerlong rise in the polls abruptly turned into a decline in November, and Buttigieg, who has had several rises and falls in national polls.

Bloomberg needs to improve his position by Super Tuesday to be a front-runner for the nomination. That’s possible, but it’s not a great bet.

But suppose Bloomberg doesn’t decline in the polls. Instead, he holds steady. After the reviews his debate got last night, his campaign might be happy to take that.

The problem is that merely holding steady in the polls through Super Tuesday would result in Bloomberg treading water in the delegate count. Here, as of early Thursday, are our model’s projected delegate counts after Super Tuesday, along with a high (90th percentile) and low (10th percentile) range for each candidate. Note, again, that these numbers don’t yet reflect any post-debate polling.

Sanders leads in projected delegates after Super Tuesday

Projected delegate averages and those delegate totals as a percentage of delegates awarded through Super Tuesday, according to FiveThirtyEight’s forecast as of Feb. 20

Projected delegates after Super Tuesday Candidate Average Pct. Low Pct High Pct. Sanders 590 39% 313 21% 856 57% Biden 296 20 15 1 584 39 Bloomberg 287 19 56 4 521 35 Buttigieg 138 9 27 2 324 22 Warren 115 8 9 1 292 19 Klobuchar 59 4 10 1 118 8 Steyer 14 1 0 0 29 2 Gabbard 0 0 0 0 0 0

“Average” reflects the mean of 10,000 simulations. The “low” and “high” columns reflect the 10th and 90th percentile outcomes for each candidate, respectively.

If everyone exactly hits their averages, then after Super Tuesday, Sanders would have won about 40 percent of the delegates that had been awarded to that point, Biden and Bloomberg would have about 20 percent each, and the rest would be scattered between the remaining candidates (mostly Buttigieg and Warren).

Of course, we probably won’t wind up with those exact results. Candidates may rise and fall in the polls as a result of last night’s debate, or as a result of the voting outcomes in Nevada and South Carolina. One or more candidates could even drop out by then.

Still, 38 percent of all pledged delegates will have been handed out after Super Tuesday, so having only about a fifth of the delegates awarded to that point would make it nearly impossible for Bloomberg to get a majority of delegates later on. And it would be highly difficult for Bloomberg to even get a plurality with Sanders having about twice as many delegates as the former mayor. His chances at that point would probably depend on a contested convention.

But Bloomberg’s 90th percentile scenario, in which he winds up with about 35 percent of the delegates who had been handed out through Super Tuesday, would leave him in a much better position. He’d certainly have a good shot at winning the plurality of pledged delegates, for instance. A majority would require some more work, though it could be plausible depending on which of his opponents dropped out and how much he gained in the polls as a result of his Super Tuesday performance.

And pending that post-debate polling, those upside scenarios are still on the table. By definition, there’s a 1 in 10 chance that Bloomberg hits or improves on his 90th percentile forecast. Far more unlikely things have happened.

But the downside cases are equally likely. And as the debate exposed, if Bloomberg has some unique strengths as a candidate — his money, a smart team behind him, and a slightly Trumpian ability to command media attention — he also has some unique weaknesses. These include: his lack of polish as debater and public speaker, his past as a Republican, his status as a billionaire in the age of Sanders and Warren, his lack of practice as a candidate because of his campaign’s late start, New York’s use of the stop-and-frisk policy during his time as mayor and his relationship to black voters, his age (78), and the lewd comments he has allegedly made toward and about women. On top of that, we don’t know anything yet about how Bloomberg’s support in polls will translate into actual votes; as compared with most other Democrats, his voters are more likely to say they haven’t firmly committed to a candidate.

These are some big liabilities, and ones the media should have paid more attention to amidst the hype surrounding Bloomberg’s rise but for now we’ll just have to wait and see what the post-debate polls say.

Sydney Opera House – History

Sydney

·       Location at Bennelong Point

·       Was used as Gadigal’s fishing spot, a cattle farm during colonisation 1788, got lime from its shell middens, then as Fort Macquarie 1821, then a militaristic tram shed 1902, then Sydney opera house

·       The site’s most momentous use would come as the nation emerged from the Second World War with a sense of optimism and a desire to define itself

 Open Worldwide Design Competition

Timeline:

·       idea for a dedicated performing arts centre in Sydney was due to inadequate facilities, only gained momentum in mid-1950s

·       It was a transformative period for Australia whose economy was rapidly expanding, fuelled by unprecedented levels of post-WWII immigration from Europe. After the rupture of war, a newly optimistic nation was looking to define itself. The site’s most momentous use would come as the nation emerged from the Second World War with a sense of optimism and a desire to define itself – the Sydney Opera House.

·       “In a young country like ours we ought to be courageous… We should pledge the future if need be,” – Premier Cahill during beginning of construction

·       Bennelong Point was chosen out of 30 sites for its historic background and, above all, for its magnificent aspect overlooking one of the finest harbours in the world

·       Molnar: “we want the best opera house that can be built. This must mean an international competition.” “A competition by invitation … invites only those architects whom you expect to have the best answer to your problem … yet the magnificent lonely idea may still escape.”

·       15 February, 1956 international competition for “a National Opera House at Bennelong Point” released.

·       The Opera House - established as a place to not only promote excellence and achievement in the arts, but as a meeting place for matters of local, national and international importance

·       Danish architect Jørn Utzon 38(born 1918 Copenhagen) set to work on his designs for the competition. He sent his 12 drawings to Sydney just before the competition closed in December 1956.

·       Saarinen acclaimed: “Gentlemen, here is your opera house” In the end the other judges’ conservative tastes yielded to Saarinen’s modernist sensibilities. In order convince the genius design of utzons, Saarinen sketched two more detailed drawings

o   Saarinen’s architectural practice at the time was moving away from the rectangular shapes of modernist architecture towards more expressive forms built from concrete. At the same time as the Opera House competition Saarinen was designing what would become his most famous building, the TWA Passenger Terminal at John F Kennedy International Airport in Queens, New York. Its wing-shaped concrete roof bore similarities to Utzon’s design.

·       Of 233 designs from 32 countries, on 29 January 1957 Premier Cahill announced that the winner of the competition was Design 218 by Jørn Utzon

·       “We have returned again and again to the study of these drawings and are convinced that they present a concept of an Opera House which is capable of becoming one of the great buildings of the world,” the four assessors wrote in their report. “Because of its very originality, it is clearly a controversial design. We are however, absolutely convinced of its merits.”

·       Utzon’s sail-like sketches flew in the face of convention. The estimated cost of project was 3.5 million pounds

Why this Architecture?

·       By the mid-1950s, modernism and the International Style of architecture had been in the ascendancy for 30 years. Rejecting the decorative motifs and ornamentalism of pre-WWI architecture, modernist architects preferred to reveal a building’s structure, emphasising function over form. Such modernist buildings typically resembled glass boxes, as did many of the entrants to the Sydney Opera House competition.

·       In contrast, Utzon’s design was more sculptural and embraced expressionism. Among the competition entries, it was singular in making full use of Bennelong Point’s harbour-side setting, which would allow the building to be viewed from every angle.

Utzon’s architectural style:

·       The building embodies Utzons mastery in fusing craft traditions and ancient architecture with modernist thinking.

 Utzon’s Submission

Concept:

·       Utzon intensely studied Sydney harbour’s nautical maps to get a sense of the landscape. This idea was from his keen sailing experience with his father.

·       Unique among the entries, Utzon’s entry placed the concert halls side by side, their shell-shaped roofs cantilevering out over the end of Bennelong Point, evoking Sydney’s cliffs and the sails on its harbour. It was a sculptural response to both the competition guidelines and the location, and was alone in fully realising the potential of its unique harbourside location.

·       Inspired by the judges’ confidence in his winning design, Utzon held fast to his ideals for a “perfect building”, delivering extraordinary and beautiful designs and solutions for both the external and internal spaces. Even as the program for the building and character of the original aspirations changed around him, Utzon would work to maintain these founding ideals.

·       Utzons abiding idea for the podium had always been for it to raise theatre - and opera goers – to a different plane, to lift them spiritually above the level of their everyday lives, just as the Mesopotabian pyramids had raised the Astecs closer to their gods. … it was later when the NSW government would have utzon “discarded like an Aztec human sacrifice”

 Opera House Design Development

·       Stage 1: the podium march 1959 to feb 1963

·       Stage 2: the shells 1963 to 1966

·       Stage 3: the interiors 1966 to 1973

 Construction of Opera House with Utzon

·       Australian author Patrick White described the construction site as evoking the ruins of Mycenae, in Ancient Greece

·       Ove Arup, the engineer proposed the undulating shape of the now famous Concourse beams. single span of concrete beams, some 49m long, visible from under the monumental steps. They provide a beautiful and dramatic sweeping form to the underside of the Monumental Steps, which continue up through the levels of entrance finishing just under the beginning of the vaulted arches. The powerful, elegant form that emerges utterly thrilled Utzon

Time:

·       In 1958 utzon explained the curve of the shells by bending a ruler. The buildings shape slowly shifted away from the competition drawings. The new curves were detailed in the Red Book. The roof ridges were higher and more pointed and no longer cantilevered like a cliff over sea. It also allowed for more interior space. However the drawings were structurally unsound, with difficult bends and each shell was different

·       utzon and his team of architects explored how to build the shell shaped roof between year 1958 and 1962. It evolved through various iterations which pursued parabolic, ellipsoid and finally spherical geometry solutions.

·       it was utzon himself that came up with the spherical solution. It struck to him each shell could perhaps be derived from a single, constant form, such as the plane of a sphere. The simplicity and ease of repetition was immediately appealing. The shells were held up with ribbed vaults

·       It would mean that the building's form could be prefabricated from a repetitive geometry. Not only that, but a uniform pattern could also be achieved for tiling the exterior surface. It would become the single, unifying discovery that allowed for the distinctive characteristics of Sydney Opera House to be finally realised, from the vaulted arches and timeless, sail-like silhouette of the Opera House to the exceptionally beautiful finish of the tiles.

·       By finding the best parts of the sphere that would match their curve drawings, each new form could be extracted. These pieces then mirrored would achieve the completed symmetry of the arch

·       By any standard it was a beautiful solution to crucial problems: it elevated the architecture beyond a mere style – in this case that of shells – into a more permanent idea, one inherent in the universal geometry of the sphere. It was also a timeless expression of the fusion between design and engineering

·       This new design was documented In January 1962 utzon’s Yellow book

Manufacturing process:

·       Utzon wanted the shells to contrast with the deep blue of Sydney Harbour and the clear blue of the Australian sky. The tiles needed to be gloss but not be so mirror-like to cause glare. Utzon found what he wanted in Japan’s ceramic bowls

·       Jørn Utzon remark that the tiles “were a major item in the building. It is important that such a large, white sculpture in the harbour setting catches and mirrors the sky with all its varied lights dawn to dusk, day to day, throughout the year.” American architect Louis Kahn would make the most enduring comment about the luminous effect of the tiles: “The sun did not know how beautiful its light was, until it was reflected off this building.”  

·       Swith drawings ready, Stage Two – roof construction began in 1963. This phase took three years, but as the building came together, relations between Utzon and the NSW Government fell apart.

End of Utzon:

·       Pressures piled upon its architect, Jørn Utzon, who left Australia midway through construction, never to return to see the building completed

·       Utzon's position would eventually become untenable. In the middle of construction he was forced to resign, as he saw it, by circumstances involving the Minister for Public Works, Davis Hughes.

 Opening

·       Opening in 1973

·       “The Sydney Opera House has captured the imagination of the world, though I understand that its construction has not been totally without problems,” Queen Elizabeth II observed, officially opening Jørn Utzon’s masterpiece on a blustery spring day. But as the Queen went on to say: “The human spirit must sometimes take wings or sails, and create something that is not just utilitarian or commonplace.”

 Icon of Sydney

UNESCO World Heritage Site:

·       “It stands by itself as one of the indisputable masterpieces of human creativity, not only in the 20th century but in the history of humankind.” Expert evaluation report to the UNESCO World Heritage Committee, 2007.

Descriptions:

·       the sculptural elegance of the Sydney Opera House has made it one of the most recognisable buildings of the twentieth century, synonymous with inspiration and imagination.

Public response:

·       Frank Gehry said when awarding Sydney Opera house in 2003, “[Jørn] Utzon made a building well ahead of its time, far ahead of available technology... a building that changed the image of an entire country.”

·       Joe Cahill underlined: it was an extraordinary collective act of dreaming in public; a work of art built for the performance of works of art and brought to life by people who believed in the power of imagination

·       Realising the dream took us all - visionaries and pragmatists, politicians and architects, engineers, artists and, most fundamentally, the people of Australia.

·       One of the greatest achievements of this age, the construction of the Sydney opera house demanded infinite patience and unceasing cooperation between architects, engineers, building technicians and contractors for almost 20 years

Africa Is Leaving Nigeria Behind

Africa Is Leaving Nigeria Behind You should have seen me shaking my head in self-pity, as if somebody had just mercilessly slapped me. I had just landed at the “little” Kotoka International Airport, Accra, Ghana, and needed to use the rest room. What I saw startled me. There were about a dozen toilet cubicles. All the doors were standing tall — none was hanging loose. I also saw a row of urinals in sparkling conditions. The rest room was so clean, so odour-free you could comfortably have your lunch in there without endangering your health. Water flowed freely. There was tissue paper in abundance. The lights were bright. Not a single bulb was bad. I used the toilet and walked away impressed — and depressed. I returned to Lagos the day after and visited the toilets at the “massive” Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA). The first cubicle I opened nearly made me throw up. I covered my nose and retreated. I finally found one that was manageable; the door latch was gone, but since it was the minor business I wanted to do, I soldiered on. To my pleasant surprise, the toilet flushed, and I was grateful. Meanwhile, just in front of the toilets were five cleaners talking on top of their voices about the Belgium-Japan match at the World Cup in Russia. After using the toilet, I walked away depressed. We spend billions maintaining this airport every year. This experience set me thinking again. I started my opinion-writing career by comparing Nigeria with Europe. I then began consoling myself by saying since the Europeans started their development trajectory centuries ahead of us, comparison was improper. It is like comparing the speed of a five-year-old with that of a teenager. I enjoyed the consolation while it lasted. I decided to benchmark us against Asia, with focus on Dubai, Singapore and South Korea. At least, we had similar stories as at 1960 when we began life as an independent country. Comparison with Asia also left me distressed. Their pace of development is such that many Asian countries can now compete with Europe. I decided to lower the bar further by saying that “after all, we are better than most sub-Saharan African countries”. It got that pathetic. But I have finally decided to stop living in denial. The rest of Africa is fast leaving Nigeria behind. Let me complete my airport stories before I delve into the evidence. It is only in Nigeria that you have two officials checking your passport — first by the DSS and then immigration. I have travelled to quite a number of countries. Nigeria is just incredible. Only one official checks your passport in Accra, or any other country for that matter. What exactly is the reason for this sickening anomaly in Nigeria? Is this a cherished relic from the military regimes? I acknowledge that some things changed after Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, as acting president, paid an unscheduled visit to the MMIA. We no longer unzip our bags for searches by officials of DSS, NDLEA and Customs at check-in counters. This primitive practice has stopped. Praise the Lord. However, I still see leaking roofs at the airport, with buckets placed at strategic points to harvest rain water. I will avoid talking about the air conditioning system which works only when it pleases. This is the airport for which passengers pay $60 as service charge to FAAN, the landlords, anytime they buy tickets. This sorry story is similar at other “international” airports. And Nigeria is the Giant of Africa. I have written only about the Accra airport in comparison to our MMIA so as to contain my frustration. I will intentionally ignore the newly opened Blaise Diagne International Airport, Senegal, the adorable Addis Ababa Bole International Airport, Ethiopia, and the elegant Félix-Houphouët-Boigny International Airport, Côte d’Ivoire. I do not want to inflict myself with hypertension. But the point has to be made that although we like to talk big and act big and claim to have a massive population and humongous petrodollars, we are a disgrace to Africa. We cannot even build modern cubicles for immigration and customs checks! The efficiency with which airports are run in these other African countries is not even the main reason for this article. While the airports are important as they are central to travel, tourism and trade — in addition to marketing the image of Nigeria — I am more worried about critical things that are happening in other African countries for which Nigeria is shamelessly lagging behind. Ethiopia has launched a metro rail line in Addis Ababa. The project was delivered within six years (despite delays) for less than $500 million. It is the first light rail project in sub-Saharan Africa. It handles 15,000 passengers per hour across 39 stations in the capital city. And Nigeria is the Giant of Africa. God only knows the billions of dollars we have pumped into railways in the last 20 years with haphazard results, mostly buying toothpick for the price of toothpaste — to quote the immortal Dr Chuba Okadigbo. Only last year, Kenya inaugurated its standard gauge railway project covering about 470 kilometres. It took just three-and-a-half years to build. A presidential term is four years. The terminals look like international airports. Travel time between Nairobi and Mombasa has now been reduced from 15 hours by bus to only four hours and 30 minutes by rail. Imagine being able to travel from Abuja to Lagos by rail within five hours. And Nigeria is the Giant of Africa. The amazing thing about such audacious and well-executed infrastructural projects is not just that they ease life and business — they also create jobs during and after construction. The direct and indirect benefits are limitless. And, ironically, we do not even have to spend one kobo of our money if we get the framework right. Many African countries are beginning to understand how it works. Asky Airlines has made Lomé-Tokoin International Airport, Togo, its West Africa hub. More than 90% of the passengers are just passing through the airport for onward connection not just to West African countries but also to places such as India, US and Brazil. And Nigeria is the Giant of Africa. In 2005, Nigeria launched the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS) with a promise of “universal coverage” by 2015. That means all Nigerians, with emphasis on the poor, will be enrolled on the scheme so that they do not have to pay cash for medical treatment. Rwanda came to study our NHIS some years later. Today, Rwanda has achieved nearly 100% coverage and statistics on maternal and infant health are among the best in the world. Nigeria? We are stuck at 3% — and we got that far because of the compulsory enrolment of civil servants. NHIS is now more about billions of naira to be manipulated by government officials and HMOs. And Nigeria is the Giant of Africa. Maybe I should stop talking infrastructure and focus on governance. The prime minister of Ethiopia, Abiy Ahmed, during the week sacked five senior prisons bosses accused of human rights violations and other misconduct. The government said the needs of prisoners had not been adequately met and their human rights had not been respected. In Nigeria, thousands of people are languishing in police cells all over the country, routinely subjected to torture. We either deny or ignore it. Tens of thousands are in prison awaiting trial for years under the most inhuman conditions. They are transforming to living skeletons. No one ever gets punished. And Nigeria is the Giant of Africa. Lest I forget, President Peter Mutharika of Malawi is currently being investigated by the country’s anti-graft body over allegations that he received kickback from a $3.9 million contract. The entire cost of the contract is not even up to the pocket money (also known as “security vote”) of many Nigerian governors. In Nigeria, we can’t probe a former president much less a sitting one. In Kenya, Busia county governor Sospeter Ojaamong has been charged to court for awarding a contract that was not included in the budget. Can you imagine that? Who cares about what is in the budget in Nigeria? Just take the money and spend like crazy. We are the Giant of Africa. Still in Kenya, the public prosecutor last week ordered the arrest of two farm managers and government officials over a dam that collapsed and killed more than 47 persons two months ago. The nine government officials would be prosecuted for manslaughter and neglect of duty. Who holds anybody responsible for anything in Nigeria? In 2014, 16 young Nigerians died during a badly organised recruitment by the Nigeria Immigration Service. The minister of interior, Abba Moro, described them as “unruly”. Why not? He knew he would not have to resign, neither would anybody hold him responsible for the deaths. And Nigeria is the Giant of Africa. In the year 2002, poorly stored bombs went off at the Ikeja Cantonment, spreading panic all over Lagos. Over 1,000 lay dead at the end of the unprecedented mishap. President Olusegun Obasanjo visited the scene a few days later and famously asked an agitated protester to “shut up”, boasting that he was not even supposed to be in Lagos in any case. The world leader that he was, he was scheduled to be outside the country looking for the legendary foreign investors. Ain’t we lucky he came down to earth to visit Lagos over the tragedy? In the end, nobody resigned and nobody was punished over the catastrophe. That is the way we roll. President Muhammadu Buhari recently said he ordered the inspector-general of police, Mr. Ibrahim Idris, to relocate to Benue state following the internecine killings in January. The president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria and commander-in-chief of the armed forces later said he did not know that the IG was not in Benue as ordered by him. In other news, Idris was photographed cutting a giant birthday cake and having fun elsewhere while Benue was burning. He would not resign and nobody would sack him. That is our culture. That is the way we do it here. We are the Giant of Africa. We have moved from being a role model in 1960 to becoming a laughing stock. What hit us? AND FOUR OTHER THINGS… ‘REFORMED’ APC Since last year, we have been hearing that some politicians will defect from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) to form a formidable opposition to President Muhammadu Buhari’s re-election bid in 2019. It has taken forever but it seems it will still happen with the launch of “reformed APC” on Wednesday. I don’t know how far the R-APC can go in the game, but suddenly there is a growing belief that Buhari will have to sweat for re-election. I won’t be surprised if Buhari’s camp dismisses R-APC with a wave of the hand, but that would be a mistake. I must at this stage confess that things are getting more intriguing than I expected. Interesting. TEACHERS AND THIEVES Think you have seen it all? Let me give you one more. The federal government launched the school feeding programme to improve enrolment across the country. From several accounts, the programme is not doing badly. But according to Connecting Gender for Development (COGEN), a non-governmental organisation, some teachers in Kaduna state are eating part of the ration meant for pupils. As a result, the ration does not usually go round. What a country. We steal from public treasury, we steal from the living, we steal from the dead, we steal from the elderly and now we are stealing from the children. Is there any country like Nigeria on Planet Earth? Mindboggling. UNITY IN DIVERSITY I was a guest of the Unity Schools Old Students Association (USOSA) in Port Harcourt, Rivers state, last weekend where Senator Ahmed Makarfi gave a keynote on “Peace and Unity: The Role of Unity Schools”. I was in the panel of discussants. One thing that I walked away with is the value of promoting national integration through the diversity that these schools offer. My wife attended a Unity School up north and has kept most of her diverse relationships till today. It is a sad commentary that Unity Schools are increasingly limiting admissions to locals, thereby defeating the original objective of promoting national integration. Counterproductive. AND FINALLY… This is serious. A native doctor has been shot dead — accidentally, you would add — after his customer tested “bullet-proof” charm on him. Mr. Chinaka Adoezuwe, 26, had asked his customer to test the efficacy of the charm by using himself as the guinea pig. He must have been so sure of his supernatural powers. Unfortunately, his charms failed him. I know he is dead, but if he could reverse the hand of time, he should test the bullet-proof on a goat next time. Fela once did it. When the native doctor asked to test the charms, Fela suggested using a goat. You guessed right: the goat died. You win either way: you can, after all, make goat meat pepper soup if it fails. Wisdom.       Read the full article

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Ryan Deiss and Perry Belcher – Traffic and Conversion Summit 2 (2010) | 10.1 GB Just One Short Weekend You’ll Discover How You Can Now MASTER Online Traffic and Conversion – Using Our Hottest New Strategies, Tatics and Tricks – So Powerful and Cutting Edge We Will ONLY Share Them Face-to-Face Finally,You’ll Get Unprecedented FACE-TO-FACE Access to Me, Ryan Deiss and My Trusted Team for 3 Full Days – Plus You’ll Get a “License to Legally* Steal” Our Little-Known and Most Jealously Guarded Traffic and Conversion Secrets in – This Private “Closed-Door” 100% Content” Brain Dump 100% Plug and Play Money Pumping, Models, Tactics and Tricks The vast majority of what you’ll learn during the 3-day event are what I call “Plug and Plays”. Quick fixes and tweaks that take minutes each to implement in your business, but when used in concert have a compound effect. You can easily double your business or multiply it 3X, 5X, 10X even 20X by the end of the weekend. 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One of my associates built just built a list of 50,000+ buyers in a VERY competitive market using just postcards – I’ll share…” “Old Yeller” The 2 cent UGLY postcard formula that simply CAN’T be beat for lead generation from direct mail – you get the template. “Classified Ad Traffic” Turn dirt-cheap national classified ads that run for pennies a paper per week into “solid gold” green buyer leads for almost any niche. “My, Drop Me a Line” Trick that increase offline opt-ins by 1000% instantly. (I absolutely guarantee you’ve never heard about this sneaky little trick until now.) “Mail to VM” How to use a simple voice mail system as your 24 hr a day pitch man and how the “Press One” feature closes 20% of the calls. “Rip-Out the page” On simple little trick that triples the response rate for every single person that uses it. This one is shocking – Again, you get the template. Session Four: Mass Media Blueprint “One of the biggest mistakes marketers make is NOT maximizing winning campaigns. Did you knowthere is as much a 500X more traffic available from buying media than there is in PPC, It’s TRUE But you have to know how to play the game. In this module you’ll…” “The Big Boy Method” How to get the media rates of $1,000,000 company by uttering 3 little words to any sales rep. Guess what they are? “CPV Domination” How to swipe customers from right under your competitor’s nose. Imagine walking into a store, lining up all the customers and walking them across the street to your place… with their credit cards in their hands… We’ll lead the way. “Starve the Ponies and Feed the Stallions” 18,000 sales a month! Imagine. That’s what happens when you hit a winner in the CPA networks. It’s kind of like an Internet marketer winning “American Idol” only it ain’t that hard. This is where the whales swim. “Page Leaping” Most people glaze over content advertising because they don’t understand it or have screwed it up in the past. Here is a FACT: Content accounts for a full 2/3 of our traffic on Google Bing and Yahoo. Best of all, it’s wicked-cheap and it converts better than search. “Billy Club Ad-Buying” Got a winning offer? Don’t even screw with PPC. There is 20X – 50X more “Placement” traffic available online than PPC. Here’s how you can CRUSH IT in even hyper-competitive niches like FOREX (not for the faint of heart). Session Five: SEO Brain Suck! “This will be a heavily moderated multi-speaker PANEL talking about what’s working TODAY in SEO, both black hat and white hat. Yes, I said black hat, I didn’t say you have to use it, but it’s good to know what’s going on. You will leave with some information ONLY inner circle SEO’ers have, including…” “Link Buying the RIGHT way” Yes, you can BUY your way to the top of the search engines if you are in a big hurry. It’s real easy to make unforgivable mistakes here. Pay attention! “Automation Nation” Here which SEO Automation tools will get you on top and which ones will get you sand-boxed from real SEO experts that use these tools every single day. “Press Release Secrets” How would you like 1000 “Instant Links” from authority news sites for just a few bucks? This is a GREAT way to get some instant authority to your site. “The PDF Project” The best kept secret in Article SEO. This little trick can get you on top of Google for almost any niche term, sometimes in as little as 24 hours. PDF Files have a a HUGE shelf life that can get you clicks and opt-ins for years. “Back Link Boosting” Getting links is simply not enough, the real SEO pros know that by boosting the quality of the links coming in to you, your positions will increase 10 FOLD! DAY TWO: CONVERSIONS Session Six: Proven Conversion Boosters “Ok, I’m a testing maniac and if you have ever seen my “43 Split-Tests” know that my positive results combined can boost conversions over 1000%. YES 10 TIMES. I’ll be revealing live, tons of new conversion boosters that we have proven in large volume split testing.” “Talking Heads” This one is tricky. It can increase sales 50% or more or totally destroy them. The message is key and you will never guess the one that wins in a million years. Invisible Buy Button Trick” This one really shocked us with a HUGE bump and it only takes 30 seconds to set-up. I’m gonna give you the code. “Found Money” 34% of all online orders decline on the first attempt. Do this one simple thing and watch your declined orders drop by half overnight. “Domainer NO Brainer” Reduce your advertising cost by 40% -90% while watching your sales boost by as much as 50% using this new domain strategy. “Piggy Backing Competitors” This ‘brand” marketing strategy will increase your sales in highly competitive markets, drop you ad costs buy up to half and improve your reputation in the market. “Sticky Mails” Discover two simple messages that you can send out to your customers after they’ve already bought that were reduced return rate by 17% and increase your testimonials by as much as 300% Session Seven: Undercover Listbuilding 2.0 “BIG LIST = Power. That’s a fact and over the last year we have uncovered several new “covert” methods of list building that you may have seen us using but didn’t even notice. I have to admit some of these are pretty sneaky but all 100% above board. In this segment you’ll discover…” “Ninja Conversion Models” Understanding our two ninja conversion models will help you a ton. Either one of these produces an average of 10X the result of the ordinary list building pages. “Red Hot Lead Magnets” Want to convert 5X as many opt-ins? A hot lead magnet is the answer. This one change will easily double most businesses overnight. “Selling The Opt-In” 5 Simple bullets that sell your prospects on becoming customers, plus our proven and tested TEMPLATE to go along with it. “Kiss Pages” This little known tactic from the dating market crushes over free, ebooks, videos or mini-courses and only takes 5 minutes to create. “Sniping Leads From Google” You can GAME Google for leads, even though people say Google hates salesletters and squeeze pages we have proven both are WRONG! “Blogging for Opt-ins” I get tons of opt-ins from my blogs and you can’t hardly find the form. Less is more when it comes to blogs…but it has to be done just right. “NLP Arrows” We have proven in several of our niche markets that subtle arrows that you may not even see with the human eye effect opt-in rats by up to 50%. We’ll show you how to use them and give you our graphics TEMPLATES to rip-off for your own. “Free Standing Report Sites” Creating landing pages designed 100% to give away a lead magnet got me 22,373 new leads on my last launch with just two mails. [DESIGN TEMPLATE INCLUDED] “Opt-In Action Triggers” Opt in borders, placement, form fields and action button can sway an offer by 50% easy. Session Eight: Amazon Marketing “I predict that leveraging “The River” will be the #1 online marketing strategy for the next 18-24 months. Almost NOBODY really knows how to harness the power of this giant, but we do. Information products, hard products, even your own book… Amazon can change EVERYTHING for you in the instant that you “Get It”” “Free Google Ads from AMAZON” Yes, Amazon will buy ads for your products on Amazon, but you have to know the one hidden button that makes this happen. Of course we’ll share this with you. “High Ticket Amazon” Most people use AMAZON to sell books, music and low cost products, but did you know that you can sell $1500 high end trainings on AMAZON using their traffic and borrowing their credibility. Yes you can! “Amazon Strong Arm” This one really turns me on! Discover how AMAZON will help you to SEO your products in Google and with this 5 minute lesson you can get on page one for Google on Amazon for almost ANY term in 24 hours or less… Using Amazon’s strong arm. “The Selection Secret” By making this ONE tweak in AMAZON you can TRIPLE your sales of any item and it only takes a few seconds. This seems so basic, but I screwed it up and it cost me a FORTUNE to fix. “Amazon Warehousing” The Amazon FBA program can move your product above 100’s of competitors and reduce your workload by 95% all at the same time. AMAZON without this is just plain DUMB! You’ll get the whole system. “Amazon Domains” This one is for AFFILIATES! One simple domain trick that can turn a $12 domain into $12,000 a year in affiliate revenue with ZERO financial risk. Just 3 quick steps. You’ll get them all. Session Nine: Triple X Method 2.0 “Upsells, downsells, cross sells, and click button upgrades can make you TEN TIMES as much money as your core sales do – Marketer’s who don’t uses these actions are amateurs. Don’t be a chuckle-head…you can do this!” “Checkbox Ad-On Sales” Simple checkbox add on can pay ALL your overhead every month. This is a simple change to make no matter how non-technical you are. “Single Click Upsells” The BIGGEST news in the “A” list Internet marketing world. Understanding how to put the upsells in place will be critical to your SURVIVAL in the future. Who else is going to show you this? “Physical Copy Upsells” 40% conversions on an upsell? Yes! If you sell digital information you NEED this upsell, but if you over do it you’ll screw it up for sure…we’ll show you the right way. “The Bucket Offer” If apples cost $1 wouldn’t a basket-full for $2 be a slam-dunk sale? That’s the bucket offer, our second best converting upsell. (HINT: It works because people can easily do the math in their heads.) “Slack Adjusters” Big ticket upsells and downsells can totally change a slow day into a major victory. We are currently offering $1000 upsells on $27 product sites with a 4% conversion rate. Do the math on that. “Instant JV Backend Promotions” Don’t have a high-ticket backend product? Promote someone else’s and start raking in cash on the back end of your sales. We’ll show you where to find the highest converting offers and make the JV deals to assure the highest payout. “Webinar Trials” Webinar registrants buy BEFORE the webinar. I can show you how to make big money before your webinars even air. This is simple…but VERY easy to screw up. “The Un-Coaching Model” High ticket coaching makes tons of money but usually is a giant time suck. We have perfected a coaching model that our students love but requires only 4 hours a month to maintain no matter how many students you have. We’ll show you how to set one up in your own business… Session Ten: The Machine 2.0 “We automate EVERYTHING! If you think you have to do all the work you couldn’t be more WRONG! In the Machine, we’ll explain how we continue to build a set it and forget it business that works for us 24/7 and why you should too.” “Atomic Email Followup” The 15 part follow-up system that we use that generates 66% of all our sales! Learn this and triple your income OVERNIGHT! “Flipping The Affiliate’s Switch” Our #1 source of new affiliates are customers. This can be a delicate transition but you will never find a better affiliate than an uber-satisfied customer. I’ll show you how… “Membership Uprising” This simple strategy can take a reasonable number of your email subscribers to paying members and paying members to VIP level members every month on auto-pilot. Really slick and man does it ever work! “Evergreen Webinar Replay Traffic” How to get affiliates to promote webinar replays forever and keep s****** leads from their lists… “Mock Up Signups” Use our G2W clone webinar sign-up template to generate fresh leads for old webinars. “Rolling Launches” This is a BIGGIE! Imagine a product launch in your business going off every single week. This requires software [INCLUDED] and just a little planning (we have three every weeks). You’re gonna love this… DVD List DVD 1 The State of Online Traffic DVD 2 Traffic Boomerang DVD 3 Perry’s Picks and Proen Conversion Boosters DVD 4 List building Loopholes DVD 5 SEO Round Table DVD 6 More Perrys Picks and Boosters DVD 7 Reading Customers Minds DVD 8 Triple X Method DVD 9 Fusion Marketing Panel DVD 10 Still More Perrys Picks and Mobile Advertising DVD 11 Mobile Advertising Continued DVD 12 The PPC Guru