Hi!! Just reread all of Maybe Someday - 😍😍 It is SO amazing and completely canon in my mind! Cannot wait for the rest of Someday!

I love the bisexual James HC and love to see it here too, and I know it won't be a focus of the fic, but I have been wondering - there is no way James "I support gay people even though I am not actually gay myself" Maguire didn't have a huge-ass crisis, right 😂? Did you have any thoughts on what that might've been like for James?

thank you!! 🥰 also thank you for this ask, i didn't realize how much my brain would light up to get asked questions about the story itself and my headcanons! here is my very long, winding, should-have-been-more-succinct answer to this:

james being bi was mostly something i sort of kept to myself as my hc of choice from the minute i wrote in smoke break chapter 1 about james having tried menthols before. it was the most minor detail, but, while michelle is convinced he tried the methols because of a girl, i chose from erin's POV to have her always think about a possible partner of james in terms of "someone" or "them." because, in truth, in my head, james did try menthols because of a crush at school, but it wasn't because of a girl (and he really doesn't want to talk about it because 1. it's just a crush and 2. he's not sure how he feels about having this crush).

it wasn't until i was chatting with @derrygirlstrash one day about where the story could go after smoke break that she was like "so, to me, james is bi" and it was the loveliest thing in the world for me to be able to say "me too!" that's when i decided to make it officially a part of how i write james.

i read james's sexuality through my own lens of experience - for a while, he's not really sure how he identifies, he's not really sure if his friendship with this crush with the menthols is because he hasn't really been friends with a lad for a long time because all his closest friends are girls, or if because he just admires and respects him, or if it's because he really likes this guy - all he knows is that he wants to be noticed by him, wants to spend time with him, goes out of his way to put himself in his crush's path. ultimately, however, it is something he sort of puts away in a box - he goes to derry for the summer and things happen with erin, and then goes back to london and meets his post-smoke break gf, faye. maybe he had a growing awareness of his sexuality, but it sort of took a back seat because he was with partners who he loved so it didn't really matter that much what he identified as. it's sort of a "i'll think about this later" sort of thing.

i like to think that him being so close to clare and observing her get more comfortable in her identity softened the "realization" of it all. he knew he had people around him that would be accepting, he knew it wasn't some end-of-the-entire-world kind of thing, and he just organically gets more comfortable with himself as he gets older. also - it probably helped that faye is bi, too, as hinted with mentions of with her and clare dating later on during the someday timeline. it just becomes increasingly a part of his ecosystem during the formative years of his life.

my experience is, of course, not everyone's experience. but i vibe with the part of me that figured it out over time without it being much of a struggle with my identity, that it was something that felt like welcoming a new color to my own identity that i hadn't seen in myself before, that also felt like it was about the individual i cared about/crushed on, rather than their gender identity. so that's the experience i choose to imagine for james too.

ultimately, to me, it doesn't really become a thing for james until he meets someone who sort of makes it a thing: miles, who he meets on a set of a film shoot, and who is disturbingly handsome - patrick swayze/john stamos lovechild handsome; the perfect 90s heartthrob, basically.

incidentally, i wrote a short little thing (very unedited) about the first time miles and james meet, which i am happy to share here. i gave him some bi panic, as a treat. but it’s because miles is absurdly hot, not because james is necessarily fighting against or even all that surprised by the attraction. i am not sure if it will show up anywhere "officially" in the future, so here it is now:

“Has anyone ever told you that you look like Patrick Swayze?”

Miles paused before a slow grin came over his face. James swallowed, his mouth feeling very suddenly dry. “Flattery will get you everywhere, mate,” he said, before turning back to his sound board.

“Not trying to flatter, just…wondered if anyone had said. Cause – Patrick Swayze’s great. And you definitely look like him.”

Miles glanced at him out of the corner of his eye, his smirk remaining firmly in place. “Big fan then? What’s your favourite Swayze film?”

“Er – Ghost. I guess.”

“Classic,” Miles answered. “Want to know mine?”

“Sure,” James shrugged, stuffing his hands in his jean pockets just to have something to do with them.

“Dirty Dancing,” Mile said with a wink. James immediately felt hot all over.

He cleared his throat and tried to sound nonchalant. “That’s…good choice,” he said. Miles nodded, and continued connecting cables. “‘I carried a watermelon,’” James offered.

Miles’s hands had been moving quickly, setting up for the day’s shoot, but they stopped as he glanced questioningly at James, “What?”

“Oh. Er,” James started, feeling exceedingly stupid. “It’s what Baby says. When she first meets him.”

“Oh. Right,” Mile said, chuckling, and turning back to his work. “Good memory.”

“I can’t help it. The lines just sort of stick.”

“And see, my brain’s just like a sieve. Goes right through. Maybe I need another watch sometime soon. You can tell me when all the good lines are coming up,” Miles said, another smirking glance sent James’s way.

“Oh. Yeah. Maybe.” James’s cheeks felt very hot. “Well…I should go. Do my…job. Or whatever.”

“Sounds good, mate,” Miles chuckled again. “See you around. And – if you ever want to get lifted like that, well…you know where to find me.”

“Um. Ok,” James said, knowing for certain now that he must look like a tomato. He turned exactly 180 degrees and walked for too long in that direction. It was only when he ended up on the outskirts of the set by the makeup trailer that he realized he’d gone exactly the wrong way. He had to call Clare.

MAG 019 - Confession (part 1)

Summary: Jonathan reads the first half of the statement of Father Edwin Burroughs, regarding “his claimed demonic possession.”

Our first two-parter! Not that I realized that when I listened to the episode the first time, despite it being right there in the title, because I have the observational skills of a blind muskrat...but I’m excited because I know there will be more multi-parters in the future. I like the episodic format right now, but I know that as Things Begin To Happen, I’ll appreciate the increased breadth and depth of longer stories.

89 Bullingdon Rd is the third street address featured in the series so far, the other two being 93 Lancaster Rd in episode 5 and 105 Hill Top Rd in episode 8. Unlike the first two, however, this one actually exists - kind of. According to google maps, the house numbers on Lancaster Rd in Walthamstow run from about 1 to 85, and the numbers on Hill Top Rd in Cowley run from about 1 to 75. But 89 is right in the middle of the range of house numbers on Bullingdon Rd in Cowley, and while google maps says there’s an 89A but not an 89...it’s close enough. On one hand it’s super cool that these locations are relatively real (the towns are real, the streets are real, it’s just the exact buildings that aren’t). On the other hand 89A is a little too close to 89, and I wish Jonny had picked a number completely outside the range of addresses like he did with the first two, just to avoid crazy fans descending on real people’s houses.

It is definitely worth noting the proximity of 89 Bullingdon Rd to 105 Hill Top Rd. They’re only about half a mile (or about a kilometer, since this is in the UK after all) away from each other as the crow flies. And for both of them, the location itself seems to be tied to the paranormal happenings of the episode(s) they’re featured in. In episode 8, Ivo Lensik feels that unnatural burning start when he’s alone inside 105 Hill Top Rd, which stops as soon as Father Burroughs arrives. In this episode, Father Burroughs feels that same unnatural burning start when he’s alone inside 105 Hill Top Rd, and it only stops when Ivo uproots the tree. And in this episode, Bethany claims her problems are being caused by the Bullingdon Rd house itself, though she doesn’t explain what made her think that. But it’s very concerning that she can’t seem to see the only creepy thing about the house that we’re aware of: the old Latin word written in faded blue paint on the exposed wall.

The word “mentis” is Latin alright, but Father Burroughs translates it as “mind” which...isn’t quite right. “Mentis” doesn’t strictly mean “mind”, it means “of the mind”. The endings of Latin nouns change based on how they’re used in a sentence, so if you’re talking about the word “mind” as the subject of a sentence (or as the word in general) it is “mens”. “Mentis” is specifically the possessive form of the word. I don’t know whether this was deliberate or accidental on Jonny’s part, since if you look it up the dictionary entry shows “mens, mentis”. (It’s standard practice to include both the “subject” form and the “possessive” form in the dictionary since they’re different.) It makes me wonder if this word was part of a phrase and if there were other words hidden under the wallpaper. (Also, small shout-out to anyone reading this who is also a Latin geek, and I hope I explained it well enough that the non-Latin-geeks also understand that explanation.)

On the subject of language, this isn’t the first time Latin has appeared in connection with the paranormal. Ex Altiora, the Leitner found in episode 4, was written entirely in Latin (including the title), and the Lord’s Prayer was written in Latin on that long strip of singed paper found in the second trash bag in episode 5. It’s interesting that the same constellation of details from the trash bag incident are also in this episode: Latin, Christianity, and burning.

Latin isn’t even the only dead language to make an appearance this episode. When describing his experiences performing exorcisms at the beginning of the episode, Father Burroughs recounts: “I was once cursed at in Sumerian by a young man who was illiterate.” In episode 12, the phrase muttered by the hospitalized man that seemed to summon the “lightless flame” contained the word “Asag”, which is the name of a Sumerian demon that could boil fish alive in their rivers. Father Burroughs doesn’t appear in episode 12, but if he had been at that hospital, I think he would have pegged that guy as possessed and wanted to have an exorcism performed. So is there a connection between Sumerian and possession and burning? And how do all the different dead languages that have appeared so far (Latin, Sumerian, and Sanskrit) fit together?

I am also very interested in that nurse, Anna/Annie/Anne Kasuma/Willett. (Seriously, how many names does one person need?) For my purposes, I’m going to call her “Annie” because she seems to go by that. In this episode’s statement (made in 2011), Father Burroughs gives her surname as Willett, and in Jonathan’s wrap-up at the end of episode 8 (which he recorded in late 2015 or early 2016), Jonathan gives her surname as Kasuma. As an older, fairly conservative Catholic (she was a member of the congregation at Father Burroughs’ church, fully believed in demonic possession, etc.), it is highly unlikely that she changed her name for any reason other than marriage or divorce. Ivo Lensik described her as “Malaysian”, and Kasuma is an Indonesian name, whereas Willett is found overwhelmingly in predominantly white countries (the U.S., England, Australia, and Canada are at the top of the list of countries where the name is found). So it would make the most sense to me if Kasuma were her maiden name and Willett a married name. BUT when Jonathan mentions her in the wrap-up to episode 8, he calls her “Mrs. Kasuma”. Since everything else fits with the idea that Kasuma is her maiden name and Willett her married name, I’m thinking Jonathan just messed up the honorific, since he also referred to “Miss Popham” at the end of episode 15 when “Popham” was very clearly Laura’s married name. (This overly detailed surname analysis brought to you in part by my ongoing obsession with genealogy. If anyone reading this has anything resembling a passing interest in the subject, feel free to hit me up about it. I will gush.) All of that nitty-gritty was not without purpose: I think she’s important somehow. I could be reading too much into things, but why would Jonny give her a name change if it weren’t somehow important? Even I realized the nurse from episode 8 and the nurse from episode 19 were the same person on my first listen-through, when I missed or forgot 90% of the details in any given episode, so I don’t think he was trying to trip us up. And she has a direct connection to 105 Hill Top Rd: she grew up on that street, and had a lot of information on the property’s history dating back to before she was born, possibly indicating her family lived on that street even longer. But we haven’t met anyone else with either surname, so for now that’s where it stands: possibly a lead, muddled with a probable mistake.

I was so glad when Father Burroughs made the differentiation in this episode between perception and will: “Bethany told me that her will was still her own, but she could no longer trust her senses, and had found herself doing much that she did not understand.” She tried to eat a small slab of slate, and she apparently couldn’t perceive the word “Mentis” that was literally written on a wall. This might be the first time that the author of the statement calls attention to the recurring theme I’ve been calling “altered reality”. This “altered reality” is a heavy presence in the second part of this two-parter, but I’ll wait to talk about that in that episode’s post. Coupled with this “altered reality” is the “eating of something you really shouldn’t be eating”. In this episode, it’s Bethany trying to eat a slab of slate before being abruptly pulled back to reality by Father Burroughs, only then realizing what it was. Hinted at in this episode, and shown in more detail in the next one (minor spoiler, I guess?), is Father Burroughs eating human flesh and only realizing what it was when the police arrived. The only other time I remember these two themes working in tandem is in episode 3 when Graham Folger ate a notebook. No one stopped him or made him realize what he was doing, so we don’t know for sure that his reality was altered, but it makes the most sense to me that he, like Bethany and Father Burroughs, truly didn’t realize what he was doing. I’m not convinced that the events of this episode (and the next one) are actually related to the notebook incident in episode 3, but it’s an interesting parallel.

On a completely unrelated note, I’d like to talk a bit about Father Burroughs’ “possession” itself. First off, I get that Bethany saying “I’m so sorry...it wants your faith” was supposed to be an ominous line, but why is that the only thing she said throughout the entire attempted exorcism at the hospital? She couldn’t even say, “Hey, man, this isn’t working”? All she could do was look at him with pity and say that? I’d be OK with those being her only words if whatever was “possessing” her also affected her speech the way it did to Father Burroughs later...but she specifically established that she was free to speak and act as she wished, it was only at certain times that her perception of reality was altered. So I’m a little annoyed at her for not giving Father Burroughs (or us) any kind of useful warning or helpful information during the failed exorcism.

I was really confused by the apparent theft of the sacramental wine, too. What was the significance of that? Was it just an example of something weird Father Burroughs noticed that keyed him in to the fact that All Was Not Well, or was there something more to it? (This is only a semi-rhetorical question - if the answer to this was said outright or implied in this episode and it isn’t a post-S1 spoiler, please do fill me in. I sometimes miss stuff that’s super obvious to other people.)

I also find it interesting that he can say “God” towards the end of this episode. He stumbled over it, but by contrast he was completely unable to say “Lord” and “Jesus” at the very beginning. Not sure if this is significant, since there’s no real difference between the words “Lord” and “God” in my estimation. Jesus is specifically Christian, and while “Lord” tends to be associated with Christianity, it’s not exclusive. “God” is the most general of the three terms, yes, but in context he is very obviously referring to the Christian “God”, so his difficulty with getting certain words out isn’t based solely on their contextual meaning. Jonny could have written it without him getting out the word “God” at the end and I think most people listening would have understood that’s the word he was going for. It’s either some kind of clue, or Jonny just got sick of stuttering.

Father Burroughs’ call for protection is the point at which he knows something is Very, Very Wrong, as he feels his lips move even though he himself isn’t moving them. But, as with so many of these stories, Things Were Bad Long Before You Realized It. Bethany told him “it wants your faith” years before the Hill Top Rd incident. He himself admits that his pride led to his downfall, since he initiated an exorcism/blessing on Hill Top Rd when he wasn’t supposed to be doing them at all. But it wasn’t just his pride - it was something taking advantage of his pride. I think that, as much as any person can be, Father Burroughs was a victim of whatever possessed him. He made mistakes in his life - his sins, if you’re looking at it religiously, as he did - but he never wanted to be evil or commit crimes like cannibalism. Like the characters in so many of these stories, I don’t think he deserved what he got, and I mostly just feel bad for him.

His call for protection, he says, was answered by something that was not God, and when Jonathan reads the words that Father Burroughs’ lips were forming (“I am not for you. I am marked.”) we once again hear that creepy static or interference. And I still can’t decide if this is supposed to be some kind of clue or if it’s just to make things creepier. It feels like a clue, but I can’t figure out what exactly it’s supposed to mean. Most of the times I’ve noted it appearing (probably not a complete list - I’m working on it) it appears during a specific quoted phrase or instance of someone speaking: “Can I have a cigarette?” in episode 1. “Isn’t it funny, Amy, how you can live so near and never notice. I’ll need to return the visit someday” from not-Graham in episode 3. “Some hungers are too strong to be denied” from Angela in episode 14. Laura’s sister Elena asking her “how lost I was, in a low, grating voice” in episode 15. If the examples were limited to things like this, then I’d say that it occurs whenever some as-yet-undetermined otherworldly monster is given a human voice to speak through. But it also occurs the first time Ex Altiora is said in episode 4 and the first time The Boneturner’s Tale is said in episode 17, as well as two different moments during the recounting of the story inside TBT. So how is it connected to the Leitners? It didn’t occur when Jonathan read the title Key of Solomon in episode 4, which is implied to be a Leitner. And there’ve been a few other occurrences where something obviously supernatural is happening but that doesn’t involve speech or quoted words at all: When Laura describes the light changing from appearing like an approaching candle to sunlight (which it still wasn’t...) in episode 15, and when Jonathan reads the description of the bleeding books in episode 17 (”red dripped and pulsed from the cart”).

I don’t know what to make of the creepy static yet. But my specific concern with the most recent instance, when Father Burroughs “said” “I am not for you. I am marked” is: Who are the “I” and the “you” referring to? Is the “I” supposed to be Father Burroughs, or the thing “possessing” him? And who on earth is the “you”?

This post is part of a series where I write my thoughts about each episode and obsessively connect dots in an effort to figure out The Big Mysteries of the series. All posts in this series are tagged “is this liveblogging?” Comments and messages are welcome but I have only listened to season 1, so I ask that you not spoil me for anything beyond episode 40. In the words of Jonny Sims…thanks for listening!

On Astrology and Energy: what purpose does astrology serve?

Oh great void! Where art thou?!

I have not updated this blog in two years. But…. worry not! The following and liking you guys did over the past few years has motivated me to post another entry. Aren’t you, like, super excited?

Although I have not completely banned astrology from my life, I recently started to adhere to a more holistic view on what it means to interact with the universe and the people living in this world. A view in which astrology plays more of a minor role. I have taken up this view because, well, life happened.

A very succinct summary of the past four years of my life: eventful. I first left my old job at university to finish a master’s degree in Law. At that time I was still living in a student home, but the dirty dishes, mice and parties every other week had started to grow on my nerves by then. I spent my time feverishly looking for another place, but eventually ended up living there for another three years…

In 2016, I found my first real job at a big consultancy firm. I took on a lot of responsibilities I had been afraid to take on in the past. Finally, I quit my job there, started working at a municipality and moved out of the student home. The past year has been my first “uneventful” year in four years. And I could not really deal with that very well. Because, well, what goal to reach now? Why was my life so “empty”? Er… the only thing it had done, was slow down….

So now I am forced to slow down and reflect on how important it is to understand your own energetic purpose in this world to prevent failure as much as you can. Wait… did I say prevent failure? Let me rephrase that. Prevent yourself from failing to follow your own energetic purpose. Not that it’s not alright to fail, of course. On the contrary: it is absolutely crucial to fail.

Seek, and thou shall not find

What I’ve learned over the past four years is: seek, and thou shall not find. The whole thing with energy is that it needs to flow. It cannot be forced. Like most things cannot be forced. Or, let’s put it differently: of course you can force things, but will it make you happy? Probably not. At least not in the long run. Finding happiness in the long run is hard. Because we are often motivated in the short term. But just think: if you could be happy in the short term, because you know you are happy in the long term, isn’t that the greatest motivation you could ever need to (re)structure your life? Working with energy has taught me that being happy in the long term is achievable.

Now… how does astrology incorporate this search for happiness? This question made me think about the time I was still working at uni and made the professors there their own personal astrology outline. One of them e-mailed me back, saying: “Thank you, Maudy! What I like most about it: you are born to something, it is in the stars, you cannot change it… Excellent explanation/excuse for things.” This quote stayed with me over the years. And I only recently understood why. Astrology is, in contrast to energy, mostly an external explanation for behavior. It’s an explanation after the fact, not an inherent motivation to act. This has been my problem with astrology the past few years - I failed to find a purpose for astrology in my life, other than as an explanation for past behavior. But I have only recently shifted my focus to motivation. And I am still trying to find a way to incorporate astrology in this whole shift, because, frankly, astrology has brought me so much over the years and ignoring and discarding it now kind of feels like throwing out your favorite comfy but old house slippers: you know you should buy new ones, but they still feel so comfy and have taken you so far for so many years, it is just so hard to throw them away.

Astrology and energy

Whenever I worked with astrology and did consults, I found myself trying to explain behavior to people who deep down in their hearts already know what it is they need to know, but they somehow find it hard to integrate this knowledge in their lives and inner being. While astrology is definitely a helpful tool in the search for future goals and explanation of behavior, it is hard to use astrology as a motivation for future behavior without falling into the deterministic trap, i.e.,: see I am a Scorpio, so I am always going to mess up relationships anyway. While future behavior that encourages change is possible and happiness is achievable is exactly the goal I want astrology to serve.

So, in light of this new found purpose for astrology, here is an exercise I would like for you to do in the next three weeks: write down for yourself what makes you reach for astrology. Is it to explain your own behavior? Is it to understand if you really match with someone? Or is it to understand your place in this universe? Or something else entirely? Let me know your answer in the comments below, I am really super curious. I will focus on what I learned from your comments in the next entry.

Keep your shizzle together! I will try to, too.

Yours energetically,

Maudy

Neo Coin Explained August 2021

Who has trouble when someone comes up next to me? What is neocoin explained? Neo cryptocurrency explained neocrypto review. So i’m doing this review on neo well, because it’s on rank 49. So it’s part of the top 50.

It has a total supply of 100 million and it’s pretty much having a market cap of two billion dollars. I really enjoyed reading the white paper for neo because it is rather short, it’s like 11 pages compared to those long ass white papers that spans like 30 to 50 pages. Those were insane but neil was rather short, and it was very succinct with the explanation of what problem they’re trying to solve. If you ever thought about how you could digitize your assets like your house, then neo would be probably the blockchain that you would be looking at. But if you’re thinking about investing into neo, because your friend told you about it, then please watch this video first, because i took two hours of my life to read the white paper to jot down these notes on neo and to explain to you what neo does From a software engineer perspective, because i’m a software engineer, so if you don’t want to waste two hours and just spend 10 minutes finding everything you need to know about neo, then this video is for you other than that.

If you haven’t already yet, please smash the like button, smash the subscribe button and now, let’s jump into neo, oh as with any of these coin project reviews. The first thing we got to talk about is the problem and the goal of the project. The goal of neo is to really use blockchain technology and digital identity to digitize assets. What that means is using smart contracts for digital assets to be self-managed, basically to achieve what they call a smart economy in a distributed network. So first we got to talk about what digital assets are.

Well, they are programmable assets that exist in the form of electronic data with blockchain technology. The digitization of assets can be decentralized, thrustful, traceable and highly transparent and free of intermediaries on the neo. Blockchain users can basically register trade and circulate multiple types of assets and on this blockchain it also proves the connection between the digital asset and the physical asset that it represents through something that they call the digital identity, which we’ll talk about in just a little bit. But assets that are registered through a validated digital identity are protected by law. So neo really has two types of digital assets: global assets which are recorded in system space and can be seen by all smart contracts and clients, and then they have contract assets, which is a little bit different, they’re recorded in what they call private storage and they’re.

Less visible and need specific sorts of clients in order to see them or recognize them when they talk about digital identity, it’s basically digital identity, which means it’s anything that can be used to identify individuals, organizations and other things that exist in electronic form. Now, neo’s method of issuing or using digital identities include the following features: facial features, fingerprints, voice, sms and other multi-factor authentication methods. I have no idea how excited i am for smart contracts to run in the machine and the machine to tell me to pee in a cup to unlock my car. That is something that neo has smart contracts. They have their own independent, smart contract system, which is called neocontract, and that is really the biggest feature of neo, because developers coming in they don’t have to learn a new programming language like developers who develop for ethereum, has to learn solidity.

They can use the ones that they’re familiar with like c sharp java, golang etc, which makes it super easy for smart contract development, debugging and compilation. The neocontract smart contract system basically allows developers to quickly carry out development of smart contracts and get things up and running. Much faster than other blockchains, including ethereum, any tokens that you’re looking at the tip here is that you always have to look at the tokenomics and neo has really two tokens the neo token, which is under the ticker neo and the neo gas token, which is under The ticker gas, so neo itself really has a hundred million tokens like we first saw at the start of this video and that gives the owner the right to manage the network. Things like voting rights parameter changes. Things like that.

The minimum unit of neo is one which means that it cannot be subdivided like how we can subdivide bitcoin into satoshis and ethereum into ways now. Neo gas is a fuel token, with the maximum total limit of 100 million, the neo network charges for operations and storage of tokens and smart contracts, and this creates incentives for bookkeepers and also the incentive to prevent the abuse of resources. Now the minimum unit of gas is by eight decimal places. That means that there is zero point, seven zeros and then one – and that is the smallest unit of neo gas. With the neo tokens.

The whole 100 million was generated at the genesis event, but the hundred million tokens of gas will be generated through time and will be expected to be fully generated in 22 years. Since the genesis event, if neo is transferred, then the gas generated will be credited to the new address and neo’s 100 million tokens were pretty much divided into two groups. First, 50 million was distributed proportionally to supporters of neo during crowdfunding. The other 50 million was kept by the neo council for long term development, growth operations and maintenance, so this was vested in the beginning, but by now i believe that the whole 50 million by the neo council has already been unlocked and they say that it won’t Enter exchanges and will only support neo projects which doesn’t really make sense, because if you have neo tokens which goes to neo projects which ultimately goes to people and they can profit from that, then i’m sure they’re going to be able to sell it and will sell It to the exchanges now how the gas is generated is that when new blocks are written, then gas is generated, kind of like bitcoin and with the algorithm they have, the 100 million gas will be fully generated in 22 years. Now each block is generated in 15 to 20 seconds, and each year they estimate that 2 million blocks will be generated.

Anyhow, how it is generated is not too important. What’S important is just to know that the block rewards do get smaller and smaller kind of like how bitcoin does it when it goes through halvings and that’s pretty much all you need to know about the tokenomics. So neo has something called neox, which is a really cool protocol that i haven’t seen in any other blockchains that i’ve looked at when it comes to blockchains. Each blockchain is pretty much independent to each other. They have problems with interoperability, which means talking to each other, and there are projects like polkadot that is trying to solve this problem, but neox does have cross-chain interoperability and it is also divided into two parts, the first part being the cross chain asset exchange protocol, which Basically allows participants to exchange assets across different chains, and the exchange that is made between these chains would either all work or at all fail.

So that’s what we call atomic either all succeeds or all fails. The second part is the cross chain distributed transaction protocol. What this means is that, when you’re executing a smart contract, then there’s multiple transactions and you can see those as multiple steps now, these multiple steps or transactions can be scattered across different blockchains, and that is okay. The consistency of the entire transaction is secured. Basically, a smart contract can perform a different action on multiple blockchains for the transaction and it will either all succeed or it will all fail.

So you can just imagine a car assembly factory now in this factory, there’s multiple lines: building multiple parts. If one of those lines screws up and doesn’t build the part right, then we don’t get a car at the end. But when all the lines are running perfectly, then we can assemble a final product. The car. At the end, everything works.

Fine everything either succeeds or everything either fails. I am a really big fan of digitized assets just because they are digitized, which means that you can take them anywhere with you. So if you need to escape the country for maybe some law that you broke, then you could take all your assets with. You know the government can’t freeze your assets like they could do to your bank account but having these digital assets, especially if they’re passive income and assets that makes you money while you’re holding them. That is what you want in cryptos.

You could do that with staking mining yield farming things like that, but in real world i use something like a walmart automation store to make me money. While i sleep and i’m going to take a bit of time, to tell you about that right now, all right guys just want to walk you through walmart automation. This is something that is another passive income stream. For me, i work with a trusted partner. In order to do this, they do all the work and i just sit back and collect payments while providing the funds to fund inventory.

You can see that the last payment that i got was 4 700 and the payments before that was 4100, so they’ve been scaling it up. But on top of this, i’ve been using amex to buy all the products from amazon and wayfair things like that and mark it up 25 30 and sell that to walmart and we’ve been seeing all these transactions. So every dollar on these transactions is 1.5 because of the card i’m using. You could also use cards to earn travel points, and things like that, so you could travel for free while earning a profit, but not only that.

I’M also doing these for write-offs, because i own a business now you can see that i started this in 2020. My federal refund is 18k. Compare that to 2019, which was 11k, the only difference there is because now i have a business i could do more write-offs. So you could earn more money by sleeping, earn, more points by sleeping and you get a bigger and better write-off on your taxes. So if you want to learn more about this, then please feel free to dm me at support.

Horsehack.Club i’ll be happy to explain more of this to you if you want to know more. Here’S, a quick summary of neil and my opinion about this whole coin. So neo is a distributed network that combines things like digital assets, digital identities and smart contracts and neo is completely new to me, because i only read the white paper but looks like they were doing something that is really really cool and really really niche, especially connecting Physical assets to digital identities and digitizing them. When i read that, i really thought about the buying and selling and trading of houses and with digital identity features, i mean who knows what kind of use cases that may bring in the future, something that i thought of was maybe it can pretty much scan our Faces or take our fingerprints to show that we own a certain car and without those, then we won’t be able to start the car which will prevent any sort of car theft in the world anymore, which will really solve the problem of car theft.

And maybe even a legal entry on our property, but with illegal entry that is kind of pretty much overdoing because i live in the united states and everybody has guns, so i think people would think twice before trespassing onto another person’s property, especially if you’re living in Texas, neo is definitely an interesting coin and project and i’m not surprised that they’re in the top 50, because they’re doing something really cool, i’m just curious as to where they might go in the future. Anyways guys, that’s it for this review on neo. If you’ve enjoyed this content, if you want to know more, please smash the like button smash. The subscribe button check out these other videos on cryptocurrencies and passive income and i’ll see you next time. Peace, [, Music, ] anyways.

If they make it so i have to pee in a cup in order to enter my car. I don’t think i can do that because i’m the type of guy who has trouble when someone comes up next to me and pee’s next to me, it’s kinda, i’m self-conscious about that.

Read More: Ripple XRP: We Are NOW At The Final Of This SHOW!

The post Neo Coin Explained August 2021 appeared first on Crypto Coin Guides.

via Neo Coin Explained August 2021

The Book Ramblings of February

In place of book reviews, I will be writing these ‘book ramblings’. A lot of the texts I’ve been reading (or plan to read) in recent times are well-known classics, meaning I can’t really write book reviews as I’m used to. I’m reading books that either have already been read by everyone else (and so any attempt to give novel or insightful criticisms would be a tad pointless), or are so convoluted and odd that they defy being analysed as I would do a simpler text. These ramblings are pretty unorganised and hardly anything revolutionary, but I felt the need to write something review-related this year. I’ll upload a rambling compiling all my read books on a monthly basis.

Gogol - The Collected Tales (as published by Granta) It took me a while to find a Gogol collection with all the stories that I wanted; this is still not it, but it’s as close as I could get without buying the Everyman’s Library edition with the shite cover. I’d describe Gogol as a nice writer; his narration is always warm and inviting (even when adopting different voices for the frame narratives of the individual stories), his tales are often engaging, funny, and easy to follow, and there’s no shortage of amazing weirdness. The book is separated into his Ukranian tales, which remind me a lot of Russian fairy tales (and I guess by extension Arden’s The Bear and the Nightingale), and his St Petersburg tales, which are more like what I’ve known Gogol to be from my readings of his work in the past. I haven’t the foggiest idea what to call his works, which is just as well since critics can’t figure this shit out either; it’s like magical realism but with subdued magic and a loose grasp on realism, where weird and unrecognisable events happen in a weird but recognisable world. I love both of these varieties of stories for different reasons, but I reckon I prefer the St Petersburg stories; fairy tales can get a wee bit repetitive (especially if you read them one after the other), but the St Petersburg stories are just inherently interesting, if only because of how bloody difficult they are to describe. Gogol manages to create some bloody great characters, distinctive and memorable, out of just a few sentences of description, and yet his descriptions are worded so nicely as to find the  good in everyone and never outwardly antagonise any position in society (with the noteworthy exceptions of dissolute drunkards and the devil - Gogol really hates those guys). This does mean, however, that the really minor characters get a maximum of one sentence dedicated to establishment, and when there’s a shit load of minor characters being introduced as soon as they appear, it can be a tad confusing and not a little frustrating when it comes to trying to figure out if I’ve missed something. Also, not to seem thick, but I found remembering all of the million Russian names, and being able to match everyone to their names, a bit of a challenge (especially since, in some stories, the spelling of said names changes every now and then). There are some much-appreciated fiddlings with the storytelling format in Gogol’s tales that usually make for interesting reading; some of such additions to the stories, such as the establishment of some definitive narrators to form a frame narrative to the tale in question, or how unreliable narrators mess with the reality of the story, work quite well, but there are some that are a tad frustrating by how unnecessary they seem. For example, 'The Terrible Vengeance' does not reveal the framing explanation for the story’s events until right at the end, making everything prior to the explanation confusing and subsequently tedious, and 'Ivan Fyodorovich Shponka and His Aunt' is deliberately written to not have an actual ending - I get enough of incomplete stories from writers who unintentionally don’t finish their works, without Gogol pulling a deliberate fast one on me because he cannot be fucked to resolve one of his stories. I will, however, admit to being a tad hypocritical in this complaint; consider for a second ‘The Nose’, how it is deliberately written to be obscure or to have no clear explanation for the story’s bizarre events, cuts away from every encounter without revealing why anything happened as it did, is questioned even by the author, and yet is probably my favourite Gogol story (to some extent because of this stupid structure). The titles of the story’s bely how interesting they actually are; in the St Petersburg stories, the titles are short and succinct and can convey mystery through ambiguity in just a few words, but the titles for the Ukrainian tales were often needlessly verbose and consequently established the stories as perhaps being a tad boring (kind of like the titles of the short stories in Lem’s anthology Mortal Engines).

Voltaire - Candide This is some quality satire right here. This is a ridiculously fast-paced rollercoaster of a novel, a wild world-spanning picaresque narrative of stupid proportions. Harking back to Oliver Twist, another novel that uses satire to examine the world, I wrote that I found its highlighting of social issues to leave a sour taste in my mouth, as I didn’t believe the reasons for foregrounding these issues to be noble; society doesn’t dramatically change its flaws just because some dickhead wrote about them, and so I reckon that writing with the intentions of ‘improving the world’ is folly and what’s more total bollocks. However, this book is not trying to change anything. It is a big fuck-off harangue in novella form, less concerned with changing anything as it is with taking the piss. It expertly highlights exactly how the optimistic philosophies spouted by its idealistic cast are total bullshit, by writing this whole book to completely and utterly fuck these characters up. Reading these characters stumble from one horrendous catastrophe to the next is bloody hilarious; you’re prompted to keep on reading just to see what shit these lads would end up in next, and how their circumstances could possibly get any worse. Obviously a book that emphasises the very worst acts and disasters that the world has to offer might come across as a bit sad and fucked up, but this book avoids such labels by a) making the pace so fucking fast that you don’t have any time to have a contemplative pause about the atrocities being written about before you move on to the NEXT horror, and b) our protagonist Candide is so unwaveringly happy and genial, emphasised excellently with the reductive language of the characters and narrator. The story is absolutely ridiculous, spanning half the bloody world and satirising every city Voltaire could get away with writing about (although I will say I wasn’t a fan of how England was not a major part of Candide’s adventure), and yet characters still fortuitously stumble across one another (usually in significantly shittier circumstances than when we last saw them). If I was feeling cynical I would say that the constant returns of characters previously thought to be lost was due to the fact that there really aren’t many memorable characters in this story, and so Voltaire needs to get the most out of the few interesting characters that he has; of course all of the characters are funny because of their status as reductive character archetypes (and because of their laughably hyperbolic downfalls), but aside from Pangloss and Martin there aren’t many characters in this story who will stick in your memory. However, I am well disposed to this convoluted and stupid story, not only because such serendipity is justified within the framework of the picaresque narrative, but because the circumstances behind characters’ impromptu returns to the text are often fucking hilarious (especially Pangloss). The story is just the right length; it’s fast pace ensures that it gets more than enough out of its ninety-something pages, and if it was any longer than it would probably outstay its welcome and lose some of its novelty trying to come up with new problems for its protagonists to be fucked over by. I’ll freely admit to knowing absolutely fuck all about the setting that this book takes place in, but for the most part, thinking about that was hardly forefront in my mind as I was reading; the setting changes so rapidly that you hardly have a chance to focus on any one setting, and since the story is entirely defined by a long stream of grim and miserable events, it’s hardly as though you need to know all the relevant historical context to understand what’s going on. This does, however, make the constant namedropping of place names and historical details seem a tad incongruous with the breakneck pace, as I’ve got to keep flicking to the annotations at the back to understand them. (Yes, I really ought not to bother, as not knowing all this shit isn’t essential to understanding what is going on, but I still feel like I’m missing something in my reading if I’m not understanding everything). I feel that the story takes quite a long time to get to the moral; as much as I love the great amount of shit that is dealt to the characters, the book really keeps dealing out the shit right to the very end, to the point where when the ending moral does finally come along, it seems very much out of the blue and wasn’t really given enough build-up.

Bulgakov - The Master and Margarita This is among the more interesting texts that I have had to analyse, due in part to the fact that the narrative is split into two storylines, one of which is incredibly compelling and fun to read and the other is really rather dull and boring (especially by comparison). I suppose it’s lucky that the Pontius Pilate storyline (i.e the really boring one) is overshadowed by this book’s vast quantity of good shit. I’ve been trying to take a more professional look at the books that I ramble on - these are classics, after all - but I must admit that I struggle to think about this book in a professional way, because it’s very reminiscent of the usual low-brow fantasy nonsense that I pass the time with. Anything ‘proper' I can think of to talk about this book pales in comparison to the nonsense and hilarity of its content. Supposedly it is a satire, and I’ve held the view that all messages in satire are painfully obvious once you know that the text in question is meant to be satirical, but I struggled finding the message of this book. The gist of the book is that the Devil comes to Moscow to bring havoc and disarray to society, but the trouble with this is that I’m no expert on how the seemingly very complex and convoluted Russian society is supposed to run, and so any disarray catalysed by the Devil and his entourage is somewhat lost on me when I could have just as well attributed it to the overall madness and chaos of this sensationalised depiction of normal Russian society. Even before the Devil comes along, there are aspects of society that are told by the narrator as though they are attributable to otherworldly or otherwise fantastical sources, but because I often wasn’t fully sure as to what such fantastical stuff was actually satirising, I didn’t really get the full impact. Some elements of the satire are basic comments on universal human nature, with the Devil making fools of people who are vain or gluttonous or whatever, but oftentimes the satire is indeed dependent on knowing the ins and outs of 1930s Moscow; some of it I could surmise, some of it I couldn’t. The story follows a series of different characters whose lives are negatively altered by the influence of the Devil’s entourage, with things going wrong in any number of ways, and it is amazing fun to read; it’s very disorderly, but that’s the whole point. What did pose a challenge to me is how, with all these characters popping in and out of the story, with minimal descriptions and often not as much characterisation as I would have liked, I often got confused between them all - because, of course, we’ve got an abundance of three-part Russian names with ten bloody syllables in them (honestly whoever thought up the idea of patronymic surnames can bugger off). Obviously this isn’t a deal breaker, and anyone who reads this book will get the hang of it, but this book’s abundance of minor characters posed a bigger challenge than usual. (Oh and also the character names differ in different translations of the text, which is ever so fun to have to figure out). The characters are all alright, especially the Devil and his retinue, who are an absolutely delight (though they are admittedly best when they don’t have to carry stories on their own). I did however feel that the eponymous Master and Margarita didn’t really seem like main characters; the Master isn’t introduced until a good ways into the book and even then could easily be mistaken for another of the minor characters who appear and disappear in that part of the book, and though Margarita has a good few chapters to herself that really establishes her as quite a good character, by the end of the book she is subsumed pretty much entirely by her relationship with the Master. Also their connection to the ever-so-boring Pontius Pilate storyline can get a tad vexing, having to keep on returning to read about Pilate for a bit before the actual storyline can continue. I was wondering how a book with such a basic premise as this would have ended, since I didn’t really think this book could have ended in a way more interesting than ‘the Devil went home again and things returned roughly to normal’, but this book cleverly subverted my expectations by making the ending more Pontius Pilate bollocks.

Burgess - A Clockwork Orange I get the feeling that a lot of modern classics that are heralded as ‘the book that will change your life’ are going to be like this one, in that the actual story will by far and away be the most forgettable aspect of the book. Most of the things I love about this book are attributable to the narration. As someone who loves colloquialisms, Nadsat is an absolutely incredible language and it colours the book so brilliantly. Not only does it make the book incredibly fun to read, but it’s incredibly versatile, being able to diminish the horror and repulsion of the book’s acts with its alien descriptions and subsequently reflects Alex’s desensitisation to such matters. Alex is an incredibly interesting and compelling character, to the extent that I can forgive the book for not really having any other memorable characters. The book is really rather disturbing at points (to the extent that I don’t reckon I’ll ever be able to watch the film), but the aforementioned beautiful writing style/language and overall black comedy tone of the book carries it well. You don’t get a detailed look at the dystopian setting that the story takes place in, but what you can glean from Alex’s perspective is bloody amazing. However, the story is exactly what I expected it to be; heavy-handed satire with a few cool bits interspersed throughout, but overall the least interesting part of the book simply because it only serves to highlight the issues that it is satirising. The premise for this book is really cool, but in practice the story cannot do much other than display Alex being a bad person, or describing how his sadistic tendencies are remedied, over and over again. And in the end it hardly really mattered, because he goes back to the way he was at the beginning of the novel, and the one permanent change of his character occurs right at the end of the book in a rather anticlimactic manner. But of course you can’t feel too irritated by it, because the story, seemingly uneventful and circuitous as it is, is written so eloquently and fantastically that it is still a joy to read, and you’re willing to forgive its possible flaws.

Himes - The Heat’s On I haven’t read many books in the hardboiled genre, mainly because I felt that I didn’t need to read a lot of them to get a feel of what they are all like. This book features most everything I would expect from the genre, but perhaps a tad more sensationalised, which I like a lot. There’s a big horrible crime-ridden city, and there’s not one but TWO hard-as-nails policemen who have got to swear a lot and pistol-whip some motherfuckers for the good of society. Reading the blurb of this made me think of Sin City; the setup is generic but the characters and events within the story are absolutely ridiculous and very memorable. Characterisation is kept minimal because this is hardly the most profound of books, but none of the characters are one-dimensional. The writing is of course bloody great; it’s tight and clear, employs some excellent turns of phrase that make for surprisingly rich analysis despite how simple it is when taken at face value, and facilitates the story’s fast pace. Oh and of course, an important trope of hardboiled literature, this book included, is that the ending simply must be an anticlimactic frantic tying together of all loose ends. Since this book is essentially what I’d expected from a hardboiled text, I don’t have anything to say about it as an overall piece that couldn’t have already been surmised from me saying ‘it is a hardboiled text’; therefore, any comments that I have on this book aren’t really especially academic, but are more of just little subjective nitpicks. I do think that this book does venture at points into being a bit too silly; obviously I’m not expecting, or even hoping, for sophisticated literature here, but there needs to be consistency in its established stupidity. There’s a fine line this book walks between Machete’s level of dumbness and Machete Kills’ level of dumbness, and it often threatens to audaciously cross that line. Though I do appreciate the fast pace, because you need a fast pace in a book like this, there are times where character development occurs too quickly to be logical, and said development is often made when the plot itself has somewhat slowed down, which makes the irrational changes within people all the more noticeable. I base what I know about the hardboiled genre off of Hammett’s Red Harvest, and I reckon that although Himes is better than Hammett, Hammett did a few things better. Red Harvest took place in a fictitious city, and whilst Himes’ representation of Harlem is very sensationalised and fun, his constant name dropping of real place names can be a bit alienating when I know fuck all about anything American. Also this book isn’t really as centred on Harlem itself as I would have liked, instead continuously reaching out to other places in the world for its characters and plot progression. The lack of any molls or femme fatales was a bit saddening in some regards because that is a trope that I enjoy, but honestly the pursuit of love isn’t really forefront in the protagonists’ minds, and I’m content to substitute some romance subplot with more stupid action sequences.

Stuff I read this month that I couldn’t be arsed to ramble about: Maud: A Melodrama by Tennyson and a few miscellaneous poems from Christina Rossetti. 

Bunny Fic Recs: The Top Ten Strikes Back!

My friends think my fanfic-reading habits are hilarious and bizarre--and I tend to agree. I read stories in very distinct and obsessive phases, like if I’m in a Star Trek phase I literally cannot bring myself to read a story from a different fandom. Can’t do it--that’s just how it is. My fic-craving phases (there’s no way to put this that won’t make it sound like a drug habit) can be as short as 2 weeks (sorry @ginny-of-course) and as long as 5 months (aka my last Star Wars phase). 

This means any fic rec summary will reflect my fandom phases of that year, which is kind of a fun way to see all the twists and turns my journey took me and the characters I discovered (and rediscovered). So, in no particular order, here’s the top ten fanfics I read this year!

1. Bargaining by proantagonist (Thor): Faced with an eternity without his brother, Loki strikes a bargain to change the past. Post TDW. (Complete) 

This story is AMAZING. Not only does it contain some of the best characterizations of Thor, Loki, and Odin that I’ve read, it deftly examines their relationships in all their complexity and contradictions. The relationship between Thor and Loki is captured beautifully and simultaneously heartwarming and tragic. The way Loki grows over time and learns trial by trial is especially rewarding so that every big choice he makes had me fist-pumping in pride because the story builds up these twists so well. Every single detail matters, and this story gave me so many things I never knew I wanted from a Thor story. I thought I had the fic figured out, and then the ending completely shocked me in the best possible way. I cried so many times reading this story, and its insight into Loki’s headspace and the dysfunction of family relationships is remarkable. 

2. too wise to peaceable woo by theMightyPen (LOTR): Most marriages in Gondor are matters of convenience, especially among the nobility. But Dol Amroth is a different sort of place, with a different sort of royal family. Sometimes, Lothiriel is not convinced this is a good thing.(or, how in Middle Earth the too southern, too dark, too outspoken daughter of Imrahil ended up married to Éomer, son of Éomund) (WIP)

I could write an essay about everything I love about this story. Not only does it make a compelling, lovable heroine out of a character I had not given much to previously (Lothiriel), but it tackles race, class, and inter-cultural issues in Middle Earth with incredible nuance and emotional depth. The slow-burn love story at its center is developed organically and complements the exploration of family and friend relationships and world-building for Rohan culture. I appreciate so many intentional elements--like the friendship between Eowyn and Lothiriel, the complex politics of countries still recovering from war, and a woman of color coming into her own as a leader. The Rohan the author paints is a breathing place vivid in detail, and even the OCs are easy to love and root for. A truly wonderful love story woven into an intricate cultural landscape, this fic puts me on the edge of my seat waiting for updates. 

3. The Gentlest Schism by SanwichesYumYum (GOT): Jaime Lannister/Brienne of Tarth. The war is over. Some of them hadn’t thought that they would outlive it. And yet... (WIP but ends at a satisfactory point)

This is a rare story that goes against your expectations and makes you linger in the disappointments and losses along with the characters. The premise is heartbreaking, and becomes even more tragic as you keep reading, but at the same time, it’s a beautiful testament to the resilience of love and the importance of family. I love the community the author cultivates on Tarth, the unexpected characters they weave in, and how this little island becomes an entire functional and complex world of its own. The second half of the fic gets a little repetitive occasionally and there is some explicit content, but it’s a really compelling read and one of my favorite Jaime/Brienne stories. 

4. The Days and Steps series by CatKing_Catkin (Thor): Even after everything, Thor holds out hope that his brother can be redeemed. Now that he's away from the Chitauri, his mind is fully his own again. Not that he's home, even as a prisoner, maybe he can start to remember what it's like to have a family and a place to belong. Maybe he can even come to truly understand the other worlds as something other than a conqueror. (Complete)

After reading the last story in this series, I wept like a baby. These stories trace Loki’s excruciatingly slow healing process in such a realistic and moving way that the ending feels so, so earned. Again, it’s the family dynamics that shine here, in particular, a family actually processing and dealing with the ways they’ve hurt each other and the mistakes they’ve made. The realizations strike deep and the characterizations are rich so you become fully invested in this family’s journey. 

5. Captains and Pawns by sian22 (LOTR):  "The board is set and the pieces are moving." So Gandalf said, but what unseen hand made them move? How far back did the game start and with what unexpected results? The Lords of Gondor and Rohan find Saruman will use them for his own end and both the Steward's sons and Rohan's Prince and Lady must find their way. A tale from Faramir's birth until the fateful kiss. (Complete)

If you’re a Faramir fan, this story is for you. It’s a fascinating character-driven story that fleshes out a lot of the subtext in the events before and during the War of the Ring. It moves the narrative from Gondor to Rohan and we follow Faramir, Eowyn, and Eomer from childhood to adulthood, reminding us of the cost of war and also deepening your love for these characters. 

6. Ad Infinitum by Stormontheocean (Dragon Age): After a bus accident, Liz wakes up in Haven, stuck in the fictional world of Dragon Age. How does a modern girl get by when she can't speak the language, and her expansive knowledge of the Blight and Kirkwall, but limited knowledge of Inquisition would only make her look more suspicious? Fake being deaf and mute, and hope not to get caught before she can find proof of her origin. But the best laid plans never work out as expected... (WIP)

Okay, I’m usually wary of self-insert fics, but this one put ALL my doubts to rest. It works. It really does, and it manages to make the OC main character (the stumbling block of many a writer) a completely three-dimensional and lovable addition to an existing universe. The first big plot turn of the story made me so unbelievably gleeful and excited that I won’t spoil it here but let me say--the story does not turn out in the way you expect. Even the slow-burn romance is believably developed, and this story cemented my love for Bull’s Chargers. A stand-out AU fic that is just plain enjoyable to read. 

7. Jacob and Esau Say Their Goodbyes by LadyCharity (Thor): After Svartalfheim, Loki is still alive. In the end, it changes nothing.In which Thor hurts, Loki loves, and Jane learns how to lie. (Complete) 

Let me emphasize that this was a near-impossible choice to make. I love every single one of LadyCharity’s Thor fics, but I decided to go with the one I think excels at every level. It’s emotionally devastating, poignant, and with brilliant characterization. I appreciate how succinct, poetic, and introspective the author’s prose is, and she just gets these characters and their relationships. Shout-out for her great development for Jane as well, who all too often gets overlooked in fanfic. 

8. A Wreath of Thorns by LadyNormaOfTheWesterlands (GOT): In the aftermath of the Battle of the Bastards and the destruction of the Great Sept in King's Landing, new allegiances are forged and family ties will be tested, as two Queens dance around a blood-dripping throne and a new King rises in the North. The day of reckoning is getting closer, for princes and commoners, for friend and foe, while cold winds bring the longest of winters, and, with it, an enemy who doesn't respond to honour, nor love. Post-Season 6. (WIP)

There’s a lot to love in this understated story, which captures the POV of multiple GOT characters as events hurtle towards an inevitable culmination. It’s an introspective story, almost meditative in nature, and everyone is perfectly IC. It’s tragic, inspiring, and ultimately a great tribute to these characters. 

9. The Native by StarTrekFanWriter (Star Trek): The relationship that started it all - Sarek/Amanda. How a logical guy like Sarek fell for a human, and why he would defy his people to marry her. Sybock & Spock will be featured. (Complete)

The beginning of 2017 was my introduction to Sarek/Amanda fic, and this was one of the standouts. I’m a sucker for stories that navigate the cultural differences, tensions, and development of interracial relationships, and this one does a great job immersing you in Vulcan culture. Amanda is also a really wonderful character, strong, empathetic, intelligent and you can definitely see why she and Sarek are so well-matched. 

10. The Abduction of Eomer, King of Rohan and House of Sun by  Lialathuveri (LOTR) (Complete)

Okay I kinda cheated here but I honestly could not choose between these. I like them for completely different reasons: The first fic is a hilarious series of misadventures that bring Lothiriel and Eomer together and the second is a much more serious development of a love story after an arranged marriage. The world-building in both stories is well-realized, and Lothiriel is simply a delightful character that I will read in ANY iteration. 

More Bunny Fic Recs:

My Top 10

The Next Top 10

Game of Thrones

Merlin

Makorra

LOTR/The Hobbit

Captain Swan

Star Wars: Romance One-shots

Star Wars: Gen One-shots

Star Wars: PT Multi-Chapter Fics

Star Wars: OT Multi-Chapter Fics

Pencil Neck’s Next Phase of Nothing: Obstruction Rush Limbaugh ^ | 11/04/19 | El Rushbo

RUSH: Pencil Neck is right now gonna little press conference, complaining about all the White House people that didn’t show up to testify/give depositions, and so now he’s talking about obstruction. Obstruction! I thought they had the goods with the whistleblower. What is this obstruction? Let me just… Folks, any time Pencil Neck and the Democrats start talking about obstruction, what it means is the original charge is baseless. Remember Trump-Russia collusion? Zilch, zero, nada. What did they go to? Obstruction.

Here comes Pencil Neck today complaining about people that didn’t come talk to him, the quid pro quo. Any time the Democrats say this, it is proof that their original charge is baseless. It means that Vindman and the whistleblower cannot withstand public cross-examination. This is what this means. I want to play you a sound bite quickly from Andy McCarthy, who was on Fox & Friends today to talk about what Schiff’s next move is. Question: “You say it’s time to get ready for the next sneaky chapter of this inquiry. What do you mean? What’s next? What’s Schiff gonna do next?”

MCCARTHY: They’re going to issue this report. The resolution doesn’t just open up the process to the public or publicize the stuff that’s gone on behind closed doors up to this point. What it does is it calls for Adam Schiff, who runs the Intelligence Committee, to write a report transmitting the findings and recommendations. Their plan is to take whatever of the underlying testimony that they’ve had up ’til now — whatever they’re gonna give us of that — and they’re gonna append it to Schiff’s report. And they’re gonna hope that what happens, you know, between that and coordinating it the media, that the public will basically read Schiff’s report and not the hundreds of pages of underlying testimony.

RUSH: Just like they don’t want you to read the transcript. They want you to believe what the whistleblower’s secondhand version of it is.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: At any rate, back to Andy McCarthy’s answer here. I had to jam that in. You’ll note the timing of that worked out perfectly. Andy’s bite here was 44 seconds, and I started it right on the dot, giving me five seconds to conclude going into the break. But let me break this down. See, Andy knows the game. He knows there’s something coming. When this doesn’t work or when one aspect of this doesn’t work, there’s gonna be something else.

I’m telling you what it is right now. Schiff, he’s still doing his little presser, and he’s now off on obstruction. Where the hell did that come from? I thought they had Trump dead to rights with the whistleblower. I thought they had Trump dead to rights in asking Ukraine to dig up dirt, make up dirt on Biden. They don’t have that. That didn’t happen. You can read the transcript. Anybody can.

If everybody took the time to read the transcript they would be scratching their head, saying, “What the hell is this all about, then? There’s nothing in this phone call that’s the slightest bit odd.” See, we’ve got a whistleblower who said he was deeply outraged, deeply offended, very worried about American foreign policy. Now we got a uniformed military guy, Vindman, backing it, “Oh, it’s horrible, it’s horrible.”

Even Kasich is out there saying once people see Vindman testify in his uniform, things will change. What do you mean, things will change? What Kasich’s admitting is they don’t have public opinion on their side for impeachment. Don’t pay attention to these polls. They don’t have it. Kasich knows nobody in Ohio’s talking about it. Nobody’s talking about it anywhere that is in any way a reflection of these fevered polls. NBC found out. The audio sound bites of that are coming up.

So Schiff is talking about obstruction. Intelligence guided by experience. They start talking about obstruction, that means the first phase failed. Trump-Russia collusion failed. They started talking obstruction. In all of the two years of Mueller and Trump-Russia collusion, you ever hear about obstruction? Yeah, peripherally, tangentially but you didn’t hear it as the primary thing. It was Trump colluded, he was a traitor, he cheated, he stole the election, stole it right out of Hillary Clinton’s pantsuit, or muumuu, whatever.

Then that blows up. They are off and running on obstruction, and they don’t have a case on that. So here comes the whistleblower bought and paid for by Schiff, arranged for by Schiff. The whistleblower’s a secondhand witness to the phone call. He wasn’t even on it, he wasn’t even there. Vindman passes off whatever he thinks is outrageous.

If you boil it all down, it means these national security guys — folks, do not doubt me on this. And this is not just specific to Trump. It means that these people in the national security, slash, military, slash, intelligence complex of our government, they think they make foreign policy, not the president. That’s what this is really all about. Every president intrudes on their territory. But most presidents respect them, and most presidents listen to them, and most presidents bring them in.

Trump’s told them to go pound sand from his campaign on. But I’m telling you — and I don’t want you to doubt me on this — the National Security Council and whoever, even some of the people Trump’s appointed have been bad actors. McMaster is a bad actor. He’s part of this cabal. These are the people, by the way, that just still resent the hell out of Trump pulling out of Syria. He didn’t listen to them.

And I’m telling you, the national security structure, the administrative state that is the national security structure in Washington, which has as part of its membership generals and admirals, three stars, four-stars, and then the intelligence community, this little troika actually think they run foreign policy, not presidents. They are permanent. Presidents come and go.

Just like the State Department. They’re part of the State Department apparatus, they think they run foreign policy. They thought they ran it during George W. Bush. Don’t misunderstand. This is not specific to Trump. It’s just worse because Trump does not play the game and include them and promote them and credit them and thank them. He’s out trying to drain the place of them.

So as James Carville said, “This is an all-out war!” This is a microcosm of the deep state, and it contains all these people, Clapper and Brennan, FBI buddies, they were all in on this. They think they run foreign policy. Like Vindman. I don’t know Vindman, but I’m gonna make a guess that Vindman is part of the structure that thinks they run foreign policy.

The president doesn’t. The president takes their advice and implements foreign policy based on their advice, they’re permanent, he’s transient, whoever he is, and Trump has come in and wrested control, doing everything upside down, and they’ve got to get rid of him. This is not the way it’s always worked. So you’ve got a guy like Vindman and whoever else listening to Trump’s call to the president of Ukraine, and they just can’t believe — you don’t talk to a president that way.

There’s a certain way you speak, a certain way you behave. You just don’t do it. And then you don’t do this and you don’t do that. So things that they wouldn’t do because of their official decorum manual, they then pop up and say, “This guy’s not fit. This guy has no business being president. We run foreign policy.” This is all a turf battle, in addition to it being a deep state attempt to get rid of Trump and reverse the election results. Folks, the transcript is nothing!

There’s nothing in it that would even approach irregular, much less impeachable, and yet look at what these people are doing! Well, there is a reason. So now to Andy McCarthy, to parse his bite a little bit here, ’cause there’s always the next thing. Obstruction means that something hasn’t worked out. Gotta move on. So these rules that the House passed last week on the impeachment inquiry require that Schiff issue a report at the end of his testimony.

And this report will go a long way when they get to a final vote on whether to actually prepare articles of impeachment and do it for real. Andy said that the resolution that made the rules doesn’t just even require the process to the public or publicize the stuff that’s gone on. Remember, they’re making a big deal, “Yeah, we’re taking it public. We’re bringing it out from behind closed doors.” Andy says that’s not all this is doing.

In addition to the — and by the way, it’s a phony show of going public. There’s a clamor. The Republicans are on strong ground, demanding, “You’re impeaching the president. This has gotta be done in public. It’s gotta be done bipartisan. You can’t do it behind closed doors.” Democrats say, “Yeah, it’s probably a point. So, okay, we’ll make it public.” Well, yeah, they’re gonna make it “public,” pages and pages and pages and pages of stuff nobody’s gonna read of the testimony.

Schiff’s out there characterizing it. “Republicans were allowed to ask questions. I didn’t guide anybody. The guy can say whatever he wants.” The media eats it up and spits it back out the way he wants them to. In addition to the reams of pages of testimony that are made public, Schiff has to write a report. Schiff can say whatever he wants in this report. But it calls for Schiff to write a report transmitting the findings of his committee and the recommendations.

So the plan is to take whatever the testimony is they’ve had up until now and add Schiff’s report to it. The report’s gonna be much briefer; it’s gonna be much more succinct; it’s gonna be many fewer pages; it’s gonna be much easier to read. Why read thousands of pages of transcript when you can read Pencil Neck’s 25 pages and find out what went on? It’s in that report, Andy McCarthy says, that Schiff is gonna dress this up and exaggerate and take liberties like he has been all along.

Because Schiff’s gonna be confident that nobody’s gonna go do a side-by-side comparison — nobody that anybody’s gonna listen to. The Drive-Bys will not go measure what Schiff says in his report against the testimony that’s in the packet of pages released. So essentially this whole resolution to make everything public is nothing but a trick that enables Schiff to write a report characterizing what went on in there, which will then replace the actual evidence of the multiple pages of testimony!

I’ll give you an example. Schiff, while conducting a public hearing, said that the president called the president of Ukraine and (summarized) “told him nine times to ‘dig up and make up dirt on Joe Biden, and don’t get back to me until you do. Don’t get back to me ’til you have it — and until you have it, you’re not getting a dime’s worth of money from the United States.'” Now, all of that was made up. Trump never said it, but Schiff did. It took 30 minutes for a Republican on the committee to call Schiff out.

That only happened because that member got a letter, an email from a constituent who was livid that not a single Republican objected and spoke up when Schiff was lying through his teeth about what Trump had said. Well, I’m telling you that this report that Schiff is going to write is going to contain similar kinds of exaggerations that will require somebody reading a few days later and then popping up and saying, “This didn’t happen in our committee. This testimony was…” By then, it will be too late. You know exactly what I mean. That’s what Andy’s telling everybody to get ready for: More lying, more mischaracterization.

It’s the next phase of nothing.

They literally have nothing.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

RUSH: This is Andrew in my adopted hometown: Sacramento, California. Hi, Andrew.

CALLER: Hey. Betsy Ross dittos, Rush.

RUSH: Thank you, sir.

CALLER: Thanks for all you do.

RUSH: Brand-new items are available at RushLimbaugh.com in the “Store” tab, folks. Brand-new Betsy Ross and other items. Thank you for mentioning that.

CALLER: Hey, right to the point. The Democrats have always been headed to obstruction of justice. What they want is the grand jury material behind the Mueller report. Then the Judiciary Committee subpoenas Don McGahn, and they’re off and running with impeachment with obstruction of justice being the article of impeachment.

RUSH: Well, I think you’ve got a point because that was, I think, the original purpose of the whistleblower. Let me review this. Folks, there’s so much… I understand this like the back of my hand, and I want you to be able to as well, which requires repetition. So I beg your indulgence. The whistleblower met with Schiff. This whole thing is orchestrated. These people know each other. When Trump-Russia collusion bombs out, when obstruction bombs out, when Blasey Ford bombed out, when all these things bomb out, there’s always the next phase.

And they’re already planned. So Schiff had met with the whistleblower, the whistleblower’s tied to the CIA, to McMaster. Do you know that this whistleblower was the aid, the number one aid to McMaster at the National Security Council? These people have been in there spying on Trump since day one, folks — or day 10. So, anyway, the whistleblower is supposedly (sniveling) “so outraged by what I heard on the phone call.” He didn’t hear anything. Vindman told him. The whistleblower actually never heard the call. Secondhand, he goes to Schiff.

Well, that didn’t happen. They orchestrate all of this. This is all part of a plan. The objective was for Schiff to announce this whistleblower, saying, “The whistleblower’s got this shocking, shocking thing that happened in a phone call. Oh, my God! It’s worse than we ever knew! Oh, my God.” And then they expected Trump not to release the transcript because of separation of powers, executive privilege, thinking of future presidents.

Congress can demand all they want, but they do not run the executive branch. Trump blew the plan up by releasing the transcript. The transcript… See, if Trump had held on to it, then Schiff was gonna shout, “Obstruction! Obstruction! Cover-up! Cover-up!” That’s how they got Nixon. Trump blew that to smithereens by releasing the transcript. But they’re still now focusing on obstruction ’cause they think it is a magic word for guilt.

TOPICS: Crime/Corruption; Editorial; Government; News/Current Events

KEYWORDS: obstruction; pencil; scam;schiff

How 2 Write Gooder: Episode I - “How to Write A Novel - Part #I - The Idea Phase”

If you’re here, you probably are a writer. Or you just love the fact that I’m an omnipotent perfect being with an amazing sense of humor, quick wit, outstanding humility, a penchant for writing, and an oxford comma enthusiast, despite the fact that we’ve never met. But if you’ve journeyed here from the far recesses of the Tumblrverse to the smaller, yet still vast Writer Tumblrverse, I should make your stay worthwhile, so sit back, relax, and read on as I detail How 2 Write Gooder. This is the first episode of a segment I’m just now creating with my mind, because I’m a writer, “How to Write a Novel

The first step to any piece of fiction is the initial idea - the spark of creativity that turns your mind ablaze until all the whisky is burt up and your brain is a white, ash-caked soulless desolate wasteland, because let’s face it, us writerfolk become consumed by our manuscripts and ideas. But here lies the crux of the issue- how do I get ideas?

Really? REALLY? It’s your job as a writer to be creative, to think of stuff and ideas 24/7. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart didn’t get to become one of the world’s most renowned composers by sitting on his ass all day until inspiration suddenly hit him-he was constantly thinking of music with every waking minute. You should be the same way. (Social life, what’s that? Say WHAT? People enjoy spending time with me, FINE I guess). However, you aren’t completely SOL if you rack your brain and are coming up dry, although that is a little concerning. 

Find what it is that inspires you- whether that be reading other books written by authors you enjoy, going outside and perhaps playing basketball, going for a jog, or riding a bike, or listening to music. The decision is ultimately up to you. One thing that I recommend is taking a long shower or bath. Water is therepeutic and relaxing. How many times have you just lost yourself in your thoughts in the shower or bath? Probably a lot. This is because when you’re in the shower or bath, the primal, animalistic part of the human brain realizes that it’s not in danger, and thus you become less uptight and stressed, and are more relaxed and kind of like a complete mind-blob. Ideas may come to you in the bath. Let them. But don’t jump up as soon as you get an idea. Let it sink in. Let it fester and permeate your entire being. Let it ferment for a while as you lay, still relaxed in the tub. More ideas will come to you, and more after that. Once you have what you believe to be a sufficient amount of ideas for this story, events, characters, places, et cetera, you are ready for the second phase: the thought dumping phase, which will be covered in my next installment of “How to Write a Novel”, if not my next “How to Write Gooder”.

One last piece of advice I have regarding ideas is this: write what you want to read, not what you want to write. You may have heard the old adage “write what you want to write”. I have too. However, I find this advice counterproductive for one main reason: If you only write what you want to write, your book could very well wind up as non-stop sex scenes, non-stop fight scenes, or non-stop streams of dialogue, or anything else I’m not mentioning, and then your book is without any substance, characters or narrative. “But Mr. WarmBloodedVulcan,” I hear you saying “Nobody would do that, that’s just silly.” You’d be surprised. 

So write what you want to read, not what you want to write. This inevitably means your gonna have to write stuff you hate writing, or find boring. Get over it. I’m sorry I can’t be nicer about it, but seriously. If you want to grow as a writer, you’re going to have to write stuff you’re not good at, or you hate writing. We all are scared of failure. We all wish we were the best writer in the world. Sometimes, we want to curl up into a ball and cry. Fear of failure is normal. You know what you do? You write the damn thing anyway. Garbage can be edited and molded into something amazing. Michelangelo’s “David” in Florence started out as a rectangular chunk of rock. Now, it’s one of the most recognized marble statues of all time. The Sistine Chapel started out as a blank ceiling.

While I can’t guarantee you’ll be the next Michelangelo, or JK Rowling, or the next Stephen King, Jane Austen or William Shakespeare, what I can guarantee is that you will regret not trying. Again, garbage can be worked with. A blank screen cannot. But I’ve veered off topic. What does writing what you want to read truly entail?

Well, have you ever read a story where after you finished it you enjoyed it, but you hypothesized about how the story would be different if it took *this angle* or *that angle* or instead of plot twist X, the author went with plot twist Y, or what if this person didn’t die, or that other guy did? I know I have. You’ll notice that I’m being pretty vague with my descriptions, this is intentional. This is a feeling you should get while reading fiction. Use this to your advantage. Obviously, don’t plagiarize. I don’t condone plagiarism or intellectual theft in any form, and find it cheating. But what you can do is use similar elements from different books and put your own spin, or take it in an angle you wished the books you read did.

For example: How many books are there with dragons in them? More than a metric ton, but I guarantee the way dragons are dealt with in one story versus another are completely different. In “Harry Potter” dragons are fearsome, untamable creatures that require special spells and magical objects to control, and are used to guard bank vaults. In “The Lord of the Rings”, or “The Hobbit”, I should say, the dragon Smaug is the villain. In George RR Martin’s “A Song of Ice and Fire” series, better known as “Game of Thrones”, Dragons are fierce creatures, tamable only by the noble family who’s blood of the dragons, House Targaryen. The objective is to find certain elements from the genre, and put your own spin on them so they feel fresh, new, and not elements indicative of the genre, in other words, cliche and trite. It’s hard. It’s really hard to come up with worlds, characters and events out of nothing, but then again, writing a book is really, really, REALLY, hard. We write because we want to-because we love writing, and love sharing our stories with the rest of the world……we might also be masochists.

But the bottom line is-WRITE THE BOOK. No one’s gonna motivate you but you. You’ll encounter a whole lot of shit on the way that’s gonna try and bring you down-haters, naysayers, crippling self-doubt, the works. The only thing you can do is write on. The more you put off writing for lack of inspiration, or just not feeling like it, the less likely it is you’ll achieve your goal of writing a book. I lock myself in my room and tell myself I’m not allowed to go outside my room for a glass of water or food until my scene was done. It took from 6 to 8:30 at night, but the scene was done. Hold yourself accountable. Set goals for yourself. But above all, believe in yourself. You’re the only one who will…at least for now.

That’s it for today! So what are the five things we learned today? 1. Me and succinct do NOT mix, 2. Write what you want to read, not what you want to write, 3. Writing a book is hard, and you’ll inevitably encounter a lot of hardship along the way, 4. Hold yourself accountable, set goals for yourself, and exercise every muscle of self control to complete them, and 5. No one will believe in yourself, but you. And maybe me. If you’re good enough. Maybe. (You are.) And remember: if you’re ever down, if the haters ever get to you, use their criticism as motivation. Resist the urge to rip their spine out of their throat, and channel that rage into writing the most amazing book popular, because there is nothing better than being able to say “Hey, jerk, you didn’t beleive in me, well, I finished the damn book–I TOLD YOU SO.” But then before you say that remember not to stoop to their level, and take the high ground.

So that’s all! Happy reading and happy writing!

‘Till Next Time,

The Warm Blooded Vulcan 

Live Long and Prosper!

BizSugar Community Roundtable: Virtual Teams Key to Long-term Business Success

One of the key findings of the recent survey undertaken by the BizSugar mastermind community was that many small businesses focus heavily on DIY for things that have to get done outside of their area of expertise.

Not only does that cost you precious time, a lack of expertise may cost you even in more in the long run.

That’s why the BizSugar advisory board, along with a few members experienced in building virtual teams, recently got together for a LinkedIn Live discussion to share tips, tricks and hacks for putting together successful virtual teams to get things done for your business. Participating in the discussion are:

Anita Campbell, Small Business Trends

David Elkins, Zoho

Ivana Taylor, DIYMarketers

Monique Johnson, Live Video Labs

Gail Gardner, GrowMap

Martin Lindeskog, EGO Netcast Podcast host

John Lawson, ColderIce Media

BizSugar Roundtable – Virtual Teams and Business Success

We covered a lot of ground in the hour long group conversation, from how to decide when to bring on virtual help, to tips for hiring virtual assistants, to what apps and sites to use to manage virtual workers. Below is an edited transcript from a portion of the conversation. Click on the embedded SoundCloud player below to hear the full conversation.

smallbiztrends · BizSugar Roundtable: Building a Virtual Team May be Key to Long-term Success of Your Business

Determining the Right Time to DIY, Automate and/or Bring on Virtual Assistants

Anita Campbell: I’m a big believer in doing everything. I’m a big believer in automating where you can, first of all, because it’s almost always going to be cheaper and you’re going to get more what I would call data that you can use. If you automate, use software for as much as you can.

However, there are things that you just can’t automate and you shouldn’t automate, definitely should not. I mean, we were just talking in our team meeting earlier about the need to have personality, to bring personality into your business, and I think that’s important for any small business. You’ve got to give people something to remember your business by. And personality, whether it’s the people involved with personality or your brand or whatever it is, that all matters. And that all comes from people. And today, you can get so much of that by people working remotely and virtually.

One of the things that I’ve done is I’ve assembled a team really by people self-selecting, and what I mean by that is people who became interested in us and then they became on the team. You know, it’s not necessarily that I went out and I recruited someone, but if I look at all the people on this call today, these are all people who just somehow became interested in us. I’ve known Martin since I started online, and that’s because Martin came and visited my site, and he started commenting and I got to know him. And it’s been 17 years now, all the way from Stockholm, Sweden. I’m sorry, Gothenburg, not Stockholm. Gothenburg. I’ve never met him in person, but I feel like I know him. So I do feel it’s really important to use every advantage that you can and that’s a combination of things.

Ivana Taylor: If you’ve read the book, The E-Myth… If you have it, pick it up and read it again, because Michael Gerber gives some excellent tips on outsourcing. So the first tip is that you’ve got to document your processes. Do you know what I did? I just sat down, and for about 30 days, I used the tool, and I kept a time log to keep track of what I did and how long it took to do this thing.

Then, once you’ve done that, you’re starting to notice patterns, you’ll see that there are financial things that you’re doing like invoicing and stuff like that. Then there were physical things I was doing such as writing an article, so there was research involved. There are all these different steps of things that you’re doing. You’re not going to know what you’re doing until you document it and get a real picture of what’s happening.

This is the best tip ever from The E-Myth, once you’ve got your long list of tasks already done, pick out the ones that only you can do. This kind of hearkens back to what Anita said, which is the personality. I can outsource a lot of things. And I know, don’t be fooled, DIY Marketers. There are things you absolutely do need to outsource, and then there are things you absolutely cannot outsource.

Then if you’ve done those tasks, now you can start grouping them. These are financial things, these are marketing things, these are social media things. You know what I’m saying? And so, people always wonder how I do so much with so little, and that is the secret. Pick up The E-Myth.

David Elkins: Yeah, Ivana made me think a little bit about the early stages of my team. I run a team of at this point 12 editors who work with our product teams in Chennai, India. That’s where all of Zoho’s products are built and all of our marketers are located. And so my team is sort of a localized team for the US helping to support those marketing efforts.

And I was thinking about in the beginning, when we were first starting to set up this process, of how we have 45 different products, each product has between three and 15 marketers, that’s hundreds of people involved in these sorts of things. And I remembered an early struggle that we had, which was the amount of mental bandwidth that was taken up by not having things automated, by trying to manage everything in our own heads, by trying to make sure that every T got crossed, every I got dotted. That really ate up a ton of bandwidth.

And I think that’s something that’s true for any managerial position, but when you shift to remote, it means that you have to do so much of that stuff internal to your own mind instead of being able to say,” Hey, can you take care of this? Can you take a look at this?”

So what we did is we built a custom app to help manage that process, depending on the complexity of what you’re doing. I mean, in some cases, you can find solutions and tools that will work out of the box. In some cases, depending on how complex your systems are, how complex your processes are. Sometimes putting together something that’s fully tailored to exactly what you’re doing can be a huge lifesaver.

My team, probably we’ve edited, I think the last count was about 5 million words of content. And if I were trying to do that how we did it in the beginning, which was someone would send me an email and then I’d write down on a yellow, legal pad, “Oh, remember to edit this document,” I would have lost my mind.

So I think that that’s a big, sort of building off of what Ivana was saying, that idea of take a look at the things that are eating up a lot of your time, and also eating up a lot of your mental energy. Because sometimes these little things, like keeping track of all of the requests that come in, that’s not going to take a ton of time, but it will take a ton of energy. And I think energy is also an important resource to conserve on your team.

Monique Johnson: I would like to also jump in here real quick, Brent. I love that book, Ivana, so I’m so glad you brought that up. And even just building off of what you said and David said, because there are some people out there who might be listening to this or watching us and saying, “Oh man, I’ve got to do a lot of typing and a lot of writing.”

Well, you guys know I’m the video person, and in today’s world with the tools and everything, don’t make it so hard on yourself to document your process. There’s different tools out there from Loom to Up! Free to Paid where you can just screen share what are the things that you’re doing and creating what Ivana was saying, SOPs, standard operating procedures. So that when it’s time for you to hire or outsource to build this virtual team, it’s not like you bring someone on and it’s like, “Oh, what do I tell them?” Or, “Go read this document.”

A lot of times video, especially if they’re small and succinct, and people are very much visual learners as well, have the written documentation like David said, but I would also say take the video and even have it transcribed. And if you have to update a new video for any updates, you re-transcribe it. But having both helps with tackling different modalities that we have. I think that helps a lot when it comes to building a virtual team.

Finding the Right Virtual Assistants for How You Work

John Lawson: Okay, so most of my virtuals, I hired from the Philippines, and I used OnlineJobs.ph. All right? OnlineJobs.ph versus any of the other ones. I’ve tried other ones, but when it came to actually adding full team members, I found that one to be the best.

One of the things that I do, and I’d suggest everybody do, is that I hide codes inside of my text for the ad for the worker. So what I mean by that is that if I’m looking for a worker, I’ll say, “This is Job #75124,” but I’ll put that at the very end. You have to say job #75124 in your response, and that way I’ll know if they read it or not. Because so many workers like that, whether they’re in five or any other place, they’ll bid on your job, but they’re bidding on everybody’s job and they won’t read the description at all. So if you hide little things like that in, that’s one of the key things that I do.

The other one, this is a big key thing, because like I said, I’m hiring people for my team. These are people I want to depend on. And so I ask one question during the interview, I say, “Where do you see yourself in the next three to five years?” And I ask that question. If they answer to that question, “Well, I see myself being a doctor or a dentist after I finish my school,” I’m not hiring your ass. That’s not who I want. If you answer to me, “I can see me being a team lead and helping you grow your business,” that’s the person I want. So I will see little things like that to really see the intention of the people.

And another thing is if you’re hiring these workers, I just think it’s better to hire a full-time worker than a part-time worker, especially when you’re talking about the Philippines where you’re paying them literally 20%, even 10% of what you would pay a US worker, why not? If you’ve got them, if you’re paying 10% of them, why put them on part time? Put them on full time so they have your… I don’t want people moonlighting. I don’t want people working for two and three clients. You work for me, you work with me. I need your full attention.

Brent Leary: I’ll give you one. I do a lot of transcriptions and Rev is great for me. They can turn around a 15-minute transcription in two hours or less, and it’s really well done. And that’s part of being virtual too. I don’t know the person who’s doing it, I just put my request in and they do the matching of the person who would be the best fit for doing this job, and they handle all of that stuff. So that’s part of, I consider Rev be a virtual team, even if it’s not an individual person. It helps me to get my stuff done.

David Elkins: Honestly, for me, one thing about building a virtual team is if it’s going to be a full-time team where you’re really expecting it to be a very cohesive environment of people, this may not a very satisfying answer, but I find personal recommendation to be really important when building a virtual team. If I’m hiring somebody locally, I know I’m going to be able to sit down with that person, we’re going to build a rapport. There’s going to be trust that’ll build over time.

But when you’re switching to a fully virtual process, especially one that isn’t easy to set clear metrics and benchmarks where it’s like, “I need you to transcribe 5,000 words a day.” That’s easy to measure. Things that are harder to measure, I really feel that that personal connection is important because having a little bit of that rapport, having a little bit of sort of social consequence if that person ends up being flaky or not really stepping up to the job.

I do think that for those permanent teams that you’re building, pulling from social networks, your personal social networks, is really helpful for me. The most successful remote hires that I’ve done have come in through that source.

Anita Campbell: You know, we use our website, so we’ve recruited a lot of freelance writers just by having a link in the footer. It says, “Looking for writers.” You attach it to a form and then have people fill out the form, just ask them a few bits of information, and you can screen people that way. That has worked out really well for us.

Another thing then that we’ve done is we’ve tapped into our existing freelancers also, so if you get one person working with you, you can tap into them. For example, we had someone from Ethiopia who wrote for us for a number of years, and we talked with him and he said, “Yeah, I know several people and I’d love to get them involved.” And he actually recruited other people locally for us to help write, and to do some SEO work and so on. So that worked out really, really well.

Managing Virtual Team Members with Project Management Software

Gail Gardner: Yeah, well, I’ve been working online entirely for over 20 years, and I do work with people in a dozen countries or so, and I’ve had VAs in the Philippines and in India. And the best way I find people is I find one good one, and then they get me other people. Because in those two countries, there are big companies who hire a bunch of people, train them up on a particular skill, and then when their contract with whomever is up, let them all go at the same time. And so it’s pretty easy for you to get one and then have them let you know, “Oh, their contract is going to be up at X time. How many do you want?” And pick them up that way.

And so that’s how I find the people, but the best way for me is they have to communicate the way I communicate. So in my case, I don’t like email. I have so much email it makes my head explode. So they have to use Skype. All my people that I work with, all my collaborators and all of my clients even, and all my VAs, they all use Skype so that I can message them and expect a live response within a reasonable amount of time. Whereas I feel like you email somebody, it drops into a bucket somewhere, and who knows if they’ll ever see it.

So that’s for me, and I also use project management systems. I use Trello, I use Zoho Connect, I use Wrike for different things. Different people and different groups are in different project management systems. And I love project management systems. If you’ve never done one, pick Trello first. It’s free. It’s very visual. You can get your processes very structured and you can make checklists. Like when I get a new person, I have a very detailed checklist. And everything they do, I’ll say, “Okay, start this one. Here’s your checklist. I want you to check it off as you do it.” Then go to the next one. Same checklist is in there, check that off as you do it.

So I know that they are really doing what I’m asking them to do, because if they check it off and I go check and they didn’t really do it, then I know that we’re going to have a come-to-Jesus moment, and they’re going to either learn to do it the way I ask. That’s a problem you’ll run into. They will just decide to stop doing it the way you’ve asked and do it some other way, so you can’t really just delegate and forget.

READ MORE: 

One-on-one Interviews

This article, “BizSugar Community Roundtable: Virtual Teams Key to Long-term Business Success” was first published on Small Business Trends

https://smallbiztrends.com/

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BizSugar Community Roundtable: Virtual Teams Key to Long-term Business Success

One of the key findings of the recent survey undertaken by the BizSugar mastermind community was that many small businesses focus heavily on DIY for things that have to get done outside of their area of expertise.

Not only does that cost you precious time, a lack of expertise may cost you even in more in the long run.

That’s why the BizSugar advisory board, along with a few members experienced in building virtual teams, recently got together for a LinkedIn Live discussion to share tips, tricks and hacks for putting together successful virtual teams to get things done for your business. Participating in the discussion are:

Anita Campbell, Small Business Trends

David Elkins, Zoho

Ivana Taylor, DIYMarketers

Monique Johnson, Live Video Labs

Gail Gardner, GrowMap

Martin Lindeskog, EGO Netcast Podcast host

John Lawson, ColderIce Media

BizSugar Roundtable – Virtual Teams and Business Success

We covered a lot of ground in the hour long group conversation, from how to decide when to bring on virtual help, to tips for hiring virtual assistants, to what apps and sites to use to manage virtual workers. Below is an edited transcript from a portion of the conversation. Click on the embedded SoundCloud player below to hear the full conversation.

smallbiztrends · BizSugar Roundtable: Building a Virtual Team May be Key to Long-term Success of Your Business

Determining the Right Time to DIY, Automate and/or Bring on Virtual Assistants

Anita Campbell: I’m a big believer in doing everything. I’m a big believer in automating where you can, first of all, because it’s almost always going to be cheaper and you’re going to get more what I would call data that you can use. If you automate, use software for as much as you can.

However, there are things that you just can’t automate and you shouldn’t automate, definitely should not. I mean, we were just talking in our team meeting earlier about the need to have personality, to bring personality into your business, and I think that’s important for any small business. You’ve got to give people something to remember your business by. And personality, whether it’s the people involved with personality or your brand or whatever it is, that all matters. And that all comes from people. And today, you can get so much of that by people working remotely and virtually.

One of the things that I’ve done is I’ve assembled a team really by people self-selecting, and what I mean by that is people who became interested in us and then they became on the team. You know, it’s not necessarily that I went out and I recruited someone, but if I look at all the people on this call today, these are all people who just somehow became interested in us. I’ve known Martin since I started online, and that’s because Martin came and visited my site, and he started commenting and I got to know him. And it’s been 17 years now, all the way from Stockholm, Sweden. I’m sorry, Gothenburg, not Stockholm. Gothenburg. I’ve never met him in person, but I feel like I know him. So I do feel it’s really important to use every advantage that you can and that’s a combination of things.

Ivana Taylor: If you’ve read the book, The E-Myth… If you have it, pick it up and read it again, because Michael Gerber gives some excellent tips on outsourcing. So the first tip is that you’ve got to document your processes. Do you know what I did? I just sat down, and for about 30 days, I used the tool, and I kept a time log to keep track of what I did and how long it took to do this thing.

Then, once you’ve done that, you’re starting to notice patterns, you’ll see that there are financial things that you’re doing like invoicing and stuff like that. Then there were physical things I was doing such as writing an article, so there was research involved. There are all these different steps of things that you’re doing. You’re not going to know what you’re doing until you document it and get a real picture of what’s happening.

This is the best tip ever from The E-Myth, once you’ve got your long list of tasks already done, pick out the ones that only you can do. This kind of hearkens back to what Anita said, which is the personality. I can outsource a lot of things. And I know, don’t be fooled, DIY Marketers. There are things you absolutely do need to outsource, and then there are things you absolutely cannot outsource.

Then if you’ve done those tasks, now you can start grouping them. These are financial things, these are marketing things, these are social media things. You know what I’m saying? And so, people always wonder how I do so much with so little, and that is the secret. Pick up The E-Myth.

David Elkins: Yeah, Ivana made me think a little bit about the early stages of my team. I run a team of at this point 12 editors who work with our product teams in Chennai, India. That’s where all of Zoho’s products are built and all of our marketers are located. And so my team is sort of a localized team for the US helping to support those marketing efforts.

And I was thinking about in the beginning, when we were first starting to set up this process, of how we have 45 different products, each product has between three and 15 marketers, that’s hundreds of people involved in these sorts of things. And I remembered an early struggle that we had, which was the amount of mental bandwidth that was taken up by not having things automated, by trying to manage everything in our own heads, by trying to make sure that every T got crossed, every I got dotted. That really ate up a ton of bandwidth.

And I think that’s something that’s true for any managerial position, but when you shift to remote, it means that you have to do so much of that stuff internal to your own mind instead of being able to say,” Hey, can you take care of this? Can you take a look at this?”

So what we did is we built a custom app to help manage that process, depending on the complexity of what you’re doing. I mean, in some cases, you can find solutions and tools that will work out of the box. In some cases, depending on how complex your systems are, how complex your processes are. Sometimes putting together something that’s fully tailored to exactly what you’re doing can be a huge lifesaver.

My team, probably we’ve edited, I think the last count was about 5 million words of content. And if I were trying to do that how we did it in the beginning, which was someone would send me an email and then I’d write down on a yellow, legal pad, “Oh, remember to edit this document,” I would have lost my mind.

So I think that that’s a big, sort of building off of what Ivana was saying, that idea of take a look at the things that are eating up a lot of your time, and also eating up a lot of your mental energy. Because sometimes these little things, like keeping track of all of the requests that come in, that’s not going to take a ton of time, but it will take a ton of energy. And I think energy is also an important resource to conserve on your team.

Monique Johnson: I would like to also jump in here real quick, Brent. I love that book, Ivana, so I’m so glad you brought that up. And even just building off of what you said and David said, because there are some people out there who might be listening to this or watching us and saying, “Oh man, I’ve got to do a lot of typing and a lot of writing.”

Well, you guys know I’m the video person, and in today’s world with the tools and everything, don’t make it so hard on yourself to document your process. There’s different tools out there from Loom to Up! Free to Paid where you can just screen share what are the things that you’re doing and creating what Ivana was saying, SOPs, standard operating procedures. So that when it’s time for you to hire or outsource to build this virtual team, it’s not like you bring someone on and it’s like, “Oh, what do I tell them?” Or, “Go read this document.”

A lot of times video, especially if they’re small and succinct, and people are very much visual learners as well, have the written documentation like David said, but I would also say take the video and even have it transcribed. And if you have to update a new video for any updates, you re-transcribe it. But having both helps with tackling different modalities that we have. I think that helps a lot when it comes to building a virtual team.

Finding the Right Virtual Assistants for How You Work

John Lawson: Okay, so most of my virtuals, I hired from the Philippines, and I used OnlineJobs.ph. All right? OnlineJobs.ph versus any of the other ones. I’ve tried other ones, but when it came to actually adding full team members, I found that one to be the best.

One of the things that I do, and I’d suggest everybody do, is that I hide codes inside of my text for the ad for the worker. So what I mean by that is that if I’m looking for a worker, I’ll say, “This is Job #75124,” but I’ll put that at the very end. You have to say job #75124 in your response, and that way I’ll know if they read it or not. Because so many workers like that, whether they’re in five or any other place, they’ll bid on your job, but they’re bidding on everybody’s job and they won’t read the description at all. So if you hide little things like that in, that’s one of the key things that I do.

The other one, this is a big key thing, because like I said, I’m hiring people for my team. These are people I want to depend on. And so I ask one question during the interview, I say, “Where do you see yourself in the next three to five years?” And I ask that question. If they answer to that question, “Well, I see myself being a doctor or a dentist after I finish my school,” I’m not hiring your ass. That’s not who I want. If you answer to me, “I can see me being a team lead and helping you grow your business,” that’s the person I want. So I will see little things like that to really see the intention of the people.

And another thing is if you’re hiring these workers, I just think it’s better to hire a full-time worker than a part-time worker, especially when you’re talking about the Philippines where you’re paying them literally 20%, even 10% of what you would pay a US worker, why not? If you’ve got them, if you’re paying 10% of them, why put them on part time? Put them on full time so they have your… I don’t want people moonlighting. I don’t want people working for two and three clients. You work for me, you work with me. I need your full attention.

Brent Leary: I’ll give you one. I do a lot of transcriptions and Rev is great for me. They can turn around a 15-minute transcription in two hours or less, and it’s really well done. And that’s part of being virtual too. I don’t know the person who’s doing it, I just put my request in and they do the matching of the person who would be the best fit for doing this job, and they handle all of that stuff. So that’s part of, I consider Rev be a virtual team, even if it’s not an individual person. It helps me to get my stuff done.

David Elkins: Honestly, for me, one thing about building a virtual team is if it’s going to be a full-time team where you’re really expecting it to be a very cohesive environment of people, this may not a very satisfying answer, but I find personal recommendation to be really important when building a virtual team. If I’m hiring somebody locally, I know I’m going to be able to sit down with that person, we’re going to build a rapport. There’s going to be trust that’ll build over time.

But when you’re switching to a fully virtual process, especially one that isn’t easy to set clear metrics and benchmarks where it’s like, “I need you to transcribe 5,000 words a day.” That’s easy to measure. Things that are harder to measure, I really feel that that personal connection is important because having a little bit of that rapport, having a little bit of sort of social consequence if that person ends up being flaky or not really stepping up to the job.

I do think that for those permanent teams that you’re building, pulling from social networks, your personal social networks, is really helpful for me. The most successful remote hires that I’ve done have come in through that source.

Anita Campbell: You know, we use our website, so we’ve recruited a lot of freelance writers just by having a link in the footer. It says, “Looking for writers.” You attach it to a form and then have people fill out the form, just ask them a few bits of information, and you can screen people that way. That has worked out really well for us.

Another thing then that we’ve done is we’ve tapped into our existing freelancers also, so if you get one person working with you, you can tap into them. For example, we had someone from Ethiopia who wrote for us for a number of years, and we talked with him and he said, “Yeah, I know several people and I’d love to get them involved.” And he actually recruited other people locally for us to help write, and to do some SEO work and so on. So that worked out really, really well.

Managing Virtual Team Members with Project Management Software

Gail Gardner: Yeah, well, I’ve been working online entirely for over 20 years, and I do work with people in a dozen countries or so, and I’ve had VAs in the Philippines and in India. And the best way I find people is I find one good one, and then they get me other people. Because in those two countries, there are big companies who hire a bunch of people, train them up on a particular skill, and then when their contract with whomever is up, let them all go at the same time. And so it’s pretty easy for you to get one and then have them let you know, “Oh, their contract is going to be up at X time. How many do you want?” And pick them up that way.

And so that’s how I find the people, but the best way for me is they have to communicate the way I communicate. So in my case, I don’t like email. I have so much email it makes my head explode. So they have to use Skype. All my people that I work with, all my collaborators and all of my clients even, and all my VAs, they all use Skype so that I can message them and expect a live response within a reasonable amount of time. Whereas I feel like you email somebody, it drops into a bucket somewhere, and who knows if they’ll ever see it.

So that’s for me, and I also use project management systems. I use Trello, I use Zoho Connect, I use Wrike for different things. Different people and different groups are in different project management systems. And I love project management systems. If you’ve never done one, pick Trello first. It’s free. It’s very visual. You can get your processes very structured and you can make checklists. Like when I get a new person, I have a very detailed checklist. And everything they do, I’ll say, “Okay, start this one. Here’s your checklist. I want you to check it off as you do it.” Then go to the next one. Same checklist is in there, check that off as you do it.

So I know that they are really doing what I’m asking them to do, because if they check it off and I go check and they didn’t really do it, then I know that we’re going to have a come-to-Jesus moment, and they’re going to either learn to do it the way I ask. That’s a problem you’ll run into. They will just decide to stop doing it the way you’ve asked and do it some other way, so you can’t really just delegate and forget.

READ MORE: 

One-on-one Interviews

This article, “BizSugar Community Roundtable: Virtual Teams Key to Long-term Business Success” was first published on Small Business Trends

source https://smallbiztrends.com/2020/07/bizsugar-roundtable-virtual-teams-business-success.html

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Bangka Island

There are days when I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming. And these past two weeks, I had an entire ten-day “pinch me” trip. I still cannot believe that I get to call the things I get to do my job sometimes. It just will never get old. At the end of October, I was part of the team from the State Key Lab of Marine Pollution to join Reef Check Italia’s annual course/workshop in Tropical Reef Monitoring Methods at the Coral Eye Research Outpost in Bangka Island, North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Whew! I know that’s quite a mouthful. 

Basically, Reef Check is a global organization that gathers scientists with the wider diving community to conduct reef monitoring annually. All locations in the world uses the same consistent Reef Check method, so this system is really useful in making sure we know what’s going on with our coral reefs. There are regionally specific animals we look out for, so that is the reason we went to Indonesia for tropical reefs. On top of that, North Sulawesi is smack in the middle of the Coral Triangle– the biogeographic area spanning from the Philippines, Solomon Islands, to Indonesia, and houses the world’s highest coral diversity.

To say the least, compared with the non-reefal coral communities I work with in Hong Kong, the reefs I saw at North Sulawesi were breathtakingly stunning underwater cities. From the arrival to the crystal clear waters at Bangka, my jaw couldn’t not stop dropping, especially waking up to still crystal waters each day. I did my best to exercise editing control, but there are still so many photos to share. So I’ll be writing about this 10-day trip in a few posts and try to be as succinct as I can. Try :)

After an overnight layover huddled in my sleeping bag at Singapore’s Changi Airport, my fellow underwater visual census diver, Jeffery, and I finally landed at Manado City. We spent a night here before the early morning transfer to Bangka Island north of the city. Manado reminded me a lot of the back streets in Bali where English menus didn’t exist, which to an extent is refreshing to be in a city not catered to tourists.

The transfer to the island took about two hours, so it was quite a long morning for us. But we finally got to meet our fellow professors and participants from Reef Check Italia once we all got to Coral Eye at Bangka.

Coral Eye itself functions both as a research outpost and vacation resort, which for traveling scientists like myself, I’d likely kill two birds with one stone if I ever had the future luck of doing research here again. Because, just look at it, how could you not? It immediately made me nostalgic of North Island, Seychelles seeing the indian almonds and scaevola by the turquoise water.

As a resort/research outpost, Coral Eye sticks to a minimal footprint in terms of its design, with the architecture well connected with the surrounding flora. Not a ton of artificial lights, scheduled midday electricity shutdowns, and natural AC from the nightly storms. It is such a contrast from living in the city that although we were working and tired from diving, this pared back environment gave me a "forest bathing" effect.

We settled in pretty quickly to get right into lectures on the Reef Check method, monitoring programs for coral reefs worldwide, and coral taxonomy the first couple days. The gear check dive and practice dives/snorkels to get familiarized with the indicator species at Coral Eye’s house reef around the jetty also doubled as some of our only down time in the water.

A Stylophora sp. coral at the house reef.

A cuttlefish I chased to these soft corals to around 3.5 meters deep on a snorkel free dive. It had been so long since I had done free diving while snorkeling (and without weights, gasp) that I felt like I had run a couple miles after.

A blue spot stingray I’d found right beneath the jetty pillars. Free diving to get the perfect position for this blue guy gave me a nasty hydroid sting on my thigh, but it was definitely worth it for this beautiful flatshark.

Razorfish, or shrimpfish, are seriously funny and cute fish to follow. They feed with their long tube mouths on top of corals and swim perpetually vertically so in groups up to a dozen. I had to follow this group quite a while on one breath until they finally stopped perfectly on top of this coral.

Our central communal dining table/lecture hall.

Very fortunately so, we were scheduled some fun night dives at the House Reef (finally photos of fish not barred from posting because of copyright!). Night photos are always a mixed bag– you never know what you might come across, but you get full lighting control. For a photographer who shoots like a portrait photographer even when I’m in the field, I had to flex some serious studio-like light while trying to avoid people’s fins. Tricky but when you get the shot, it feels better than anything else.

I generally prefer to fall to the end of the group to avoid paparazzi crowding, and I found this gorgeous mantis shrimp while everyone had passed. 

Even a fish I see quite often in Hong Kong like this Richardson’s Moray Eel are far less shy and pose well for photos.

Frogfish were one of those bucket list fish I was hoping for, and the divemaster found him within ten minutes of the dive! This one wasn’t shy and stayed nice and still for me. Unlike the orange frogfish, the next frogfish we found that night was not about the intense photographic attention and leapt away to sulk in a hole. The pipefish below was also less than cooperative and preferred darting in all four directions.

Sea pens don’t look particularly interesting until you take the time to look closely at them with the right lighting!

I think my mind was brimming with coral taxonomy and anatomy, so when I saw this Montastrea all I thought was, “ooh! look at that extratentacular budding!”

And of course, as a Reef Check diver, you have to notice the banded coral shrimps! Their fun antennae and coloring lends to the high desirability for aquarium trade, so seeing them in the reef serves as a good indicator of lower harvesting impacts.

Keep an eye out for the next post of photos from the other dive sites!

Bangka Island: the House Reef

There are days when I have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not dreaming. And these past two weeks, I had an entire ten-day “pinch me” trip. I still cannot believe that I get to call the things I get to do my job sometimes. It just will never get old. At the end of October, I was part of the team from the State Key Lab of Marine Pollution to join Reef Check Italia’s annual course/workshop in Tropical Reef Monitoring Methods at the Coral Eye Research Outpost in Bangka Island, North Sulawesi, Indonesia. Whew! I know that’s quite a mouthful. 

Basically, Reef Check is a global organization that gathers scientists with the wider diving community to conduct reef monitoring annually. All locations in the world uses the same consistent Reef Check method, so this system is really useful in making sure we know what’s going on with our coral reefs. There are regionally specific animals we look out for, so that is the reason we went to Indonesia for tropical reefs. On top of that, North Sulawesi is smack in the middle of the Coral Triangle– the biogeographic area spanning from the Philippines, Solomon Islands, to Indonesia, and houses the world’s highest coral diversity.

To say the least, compared with the non-reefal coral communities I work with in Hong Kong, the reefs I saw at North Sulawesi were breathtakingly stunning underwater cities. From the arrival to the crystal clear waters at Bangka, my jaw couldn’t not stop dropping, especially waking up to still crystal waters each day. I did my best to exercise editing control, but there are still so many photos to share. So I’ll be writing about this 10-day trip in a few posts and try to be as succinct as I can. Try :)

After an overnight layover huddled in my sleeping bag at Singapore’s Changi Airport, my fellow underwater visual census diver, Jeffery, and I finally landed at Manado City. We spent a night here before the early morning transfer to Bangka Island north of the city. Manado reminded me a lot of the back streets in Bali where English menus didn’t exist, which to an extent is refreshing to be in a city not catered to tourists.

The transfer to the island took about two hours, so it was quite a long morning for us. But we finally got to meet our fellow professors and participants from Reef Check Italia once we all got to Coral Eye at Bangka.

Coral Eye itself functions both as a research outpost and vacation resort, which for traveling scientists like myself, I’d likely kill two birds with one stone if I ever had the future luck of doing research here again. Because, just look at it, how could you not? It immediately made me nostalgic of North Island, Seychelles seeing the indian almonds and scaevola by the turquoise water.

As a resort/research outpost, Coral Eye sticks to a minimal footprint in terms of its design, with the architecture well connected with the surrounding flora. Not a ton of artificial lights, scheduled midday electricity shutdowns, and natural AC from the nightly storms. It is such a contrast from living in the city that although we were working and tired from diving, this pared back environment gave me a "forest bathing" effect.

We settled in pretty quickly to get right into lectures on the Reef Check method, monitoring programs for coral reefs worldwide, and coral taxonomy the first couple days. The gear check dive and practice dives/snorkels to get familiarized with the indicator species at Coral Eye’s house reef around the jetty also doubled as some of our only down time in the water.

A Stylophora sp. coral at the house reef.

A cuttlefish I chased to these soft corals to around 3.5 meters deep on a snorkel free dive. It had been so long since I had done free diving while snorkeling (and without weights, gasp) that I felt like I had run a couple miles after.

A blue spot stingray I’d found right beneath the jetty pillars. Free diving to get the perfect position for this blue guy gave me a nasty hydroid sting on my thigh, but it was definitely worth it for this beautiful flatshark.

Razorfish, or shrimpfish, are seriously funny and cute fish to follow. They feed with their long tube mouths on top of corals and swim perpetually vertically so in groups up to a dozen. I had to follow this group quite a while on one breath until they finally stopped perfectly on top of this coral.

Our central communal dining table/lecture hall.

Very fortunately so, we were scheduled some fun night dives at the House Reef (finally photos of fish not barred from posting because of copyright!). Night photos are always a mixed bag– you never know what you might come across, but you get full lighting control. For a photographer who shoots like a portrait photographer even when I’m in the field, I had to flex some serious studio-like light while trying to avoid people’s fins. Tricky but when you get the shot, it feels better than anything else.

I generally prefer to fall to the end of the group to avoid paparazzi crowding, and I found this gorgeous mantis shrimp while everyone had passed. 

Even a fish I see quite often in Hong Kong like this Richardson’s Moray Eel are far less shy and pose well for photos.

Frogfish were one of those bucket list fish I was hoping for, and the divemaster found him within ten minutes of the dive! This one wasn’t shy and stayed nice and still for me. Unlike the orange frogfish, the next frogfish we found that night was not about the intense photographic attention and leapt away to sulk in a hole. The pipefish below was also less than cooperative and preferred darting in all four directions.

Sea pens don’t look particularly interesting until you take the time to look closely at them with the right lighting!

I think my mind was brimming with coral taxonomy and anatomy, so when I saw this Montastrea all I thought was, “ooh! look at that extratentacular budding!”

And of course, as a Reef Check diver, you have to notice the banded coral shrimps! Their fun antennae and coloring lends to the high desirability for aquarium trade, so seeing them in the reef serves as a good indicator of lower harvesting impacts.

Keep an eye out for the next post of photos from the other dive sites!

This is a long one and I didn’t edit it

I feel like I need to explain a few things.

Too late maybe but they're things I need to tell you in complete honesty. No fractioning, no half truths.

I've written them down sporadically over the months but I need it is succinct in one place

None of this is meant to be a justification of my actions it's just... my best go at explaining what happened in my brain and life last year. I don't even know if you will read this, but it makes me feel better to put it all down.

This is the last one of these ones I'll probably write. I'm trying to show you I'm growing.  

First of all, concerning Michela -  

At the beginning I spoke to her a lot because well, since phoebe left I didn't have any friends who were interested in me and spoke to me a lot and had things in common with me? I'd been bored and lonely in Canberra and seriously lacking any good form of friendship and she was interested in me and wanted to hang out and we had a nice time together, she genuinely liked me and my company and asked me to hang out and it felt like a real friendship.

With the addition of laroc we were a real set of friends for a little time.  

I never cheated on you with her, not once

I didn't spend time in the period leading up to us breaking up thinking about getting with her

I hope you believe this

We saw each other regularly in both a friend way and a dating-y way for about 2 months. 

During this time I was feeling pretty intense and hanging out with her and laroc was a bit distraction for me, I didn't have to think about anything and I drank so much alcohol

I wanted to tell you what was happening and I made it pretty clear that she and I weren't a serious thing, that it wouldn't last. That it wasn't anything compared to you. But I did like her, we had a lot in common and we had fun together. It wasn’t any deeper than that. 

But when I asked if you wanted to know about it you said no – within your right.  

And I didn't want to make it worse so when the moment came when you joked about it I maintained that. A poor decision in retrospection, I understand.

I wanted you so badly during this time but I'd made this decision to break up with you and I didn't want to screw you around and everyone was telling me to leave you alone because by talking to you I was being a grade a cunt and to let you go and I didn't know how much you were struggling and I still couldn't understand what was going on with me. Everyone at work got sick of me talking about it, I never shut up about it. Everyone knew how I'd fucked this up and I couldn't never explain why.

I still didn't really know why - I couldn't conceive it.

All I knew was that all I wanted to do was to see you, I actually drove by your house a few times.

Then September came and Cal died and this screwed with me so badly.  

I drove to your house on the night of your birthday which was two days after he passed. I was so upset – all that would have happened is I would've cried.

Then I figured out I was trans and my depression got worse than it had ever been

And I started failing uni

And resisted going back to you because it would seem like now I was just going to you when I was having a hard time and had realised that breaking up with you was a mistake (which I knew it was but shit)

But I missed you so much and I wanted to talk all the time

You were the first one I admitted being trans to. I only wanted to speak to you about it.  

Michela and I stopped seeing each other in a dating way early October. She was obsessed with a guy at her work and I wanted you.

She was still there being emotionally taxing on me though but I felt like I could resolve that and maintain a friendship (because holy fuck I needed a friend - any friend). So my friendship with her and laroc stayed. I was still horribly depressed though and I was crying all the time about you and I didn't know what to do anymore and I basically just wanted to die.  

I wanted to leave Canberra, I wanted to go back to you in Sydney but I was scared of my parents not accepting me and you being angry or idk what I thought you would be...  

And phoebe was so accepting and so excited and happy for me and so moving to Melbourne seemed like a great idea? I needed a place to stay in Canberra over the summer until phoebe's lease was up and we could get a place together and so in an effort to save money (and because it was an easy option) I moved in to Michela's place with Laroc and I thought it would be temporary – hence sleeping in the living room.  

One day the three of us (and a friend of larocs and a friend of michelas) went to the wombeyan caves and went for a swim in a gorge. That night we went out and Michela hit me in the face and broke my phone. The next day laroc moved out and put me a position where I was living alone with someone who hit me and despised me being trans. Two people I trusted both fucked me over. I lost two friends. I had made to feel loved and appreciated by the both of them so I was sad understandably, and you consoled me about it (in vain obviously but I didn’t know that).  

I still wanted to move and I was still planning on it until every person I spoke to (including my parents) urged me to stay and see uni through. "It's not that long" "Just stick it out" "You'll be ok"

So I believed them because everyone said so. (NOTE: make my own choices and go with my gut in future)

So that's how I got stuck living in my current situation. I tried to make the best of it and I did getting keig to be here with me. Which considering I never see Michela (a la kat carrington) is not that bad.  

Concerning my lack of emotions

At the time when we broke up I didn't fully understand what I was doing  

I didn't understand what I was giving up and I obviously selfishly thought that you'd still be there for me. I took you for granted and I hurt you in ways I'm ashamed of

I couldn't understand why I didn't like being touched  

I knew I loved having sex with you but I couldn't understand why I didn't like it myself

Apart from the fact that I bled every time

It was scaring me that I didn't feel attracted to you? But I did because I loved the way you looked and I loved seeing you and my body reacted to you and I loved seeing you react to my touch

And I dreamt (and still do) about you sexually all the time

But the actually feeling of being touched felt wrong to me and obviously I know now it's because I'm trans but at the time I couldn't understand it

And I remember I tried explaining this one time to you but you seemed so offended  

I felt like I couldn't make you understand that I loved you sexually.  

I couldn't understand I was so scared – had I fallen out of love? Was that what this was?

I was tired all the time and driving up and down was exhausting me and I was weak and confused

And I wasn't feeling any emotion, I couldn't cry. I didn't cry again until Cal died.  

I hadn't fallen out of love but I was so confused  

I'm so sorry that my headspace and inability to understand what was happening to me caused you pain and heartbreak. I will never forgive myself for that.

And then new years happened and I fucking cried by myself at 3am because I missed your call and I wanted to call you and my phone died and Michela wouldn’t give me the key to get into the house and get my charger

And then this year happened and well... you know how we got here

Thank you for admiring me and seeing the best in me despite my obvious failings.  

You'll never know how much that means to me.

I want the chance to show you I've changed and that I understand my shortcomings and how this affected you. I know that time isn't now.  

And allow me to apologise for being dramatic and emotional and bitter about you seeing someone else. It scares me to death. I cannot envision a future without you. Even last night when you spoke to me about children... I still picture having them with you.  

I love you and I miss you so much. I have a physical reaction to it. You are never far from my main train of thought.  

I love you so much.

I hope you find it in yourself to forgive me somehow.  

Until a day comes that you can say to me with certainty that you and I have no hope and that it was all too much for you to bare, I will never stop trying. I will always be here for you and I will never let you down again. I will do anything to make this work.  

If you read all of that then, thank you. Thank you for loving me.  

You are (and will ever be) the only place I call home.

BizSugar Community Roundtable: Virtual Teams Key to Long-term Business Success

One of the key findings of the recent survey undertaken by the BizSugar mastermind community was that many small businesses focus heavily on DIY for things that have to get done outside of their area of expertise.

Not only does that cost you precious time, a lack of expertise may cost you even in more in the long run.

That’s why the BizSugar advisory board, along with a few members experienced in building virtual teams, recently got together for a LinkedIn Live discussion to share tips, tricks and hacks for putting together successful virtual teams to get things done for your business. Participating in the discussion are:

Anita Campbell, Small Business Trends

David Elkins, Zoho

Ivana Taylor, DIYMarketers

Monique Johnson, Live Video Labs

Gail Gardner, GrowMap

Martin Lindeskog, EGO Netcast Podcast host

John Lawson, ColderIce Media

BizSugar Roundtable – Virtual Teams and Business Success

We covered a lot of ground in the hour long group conversation, from how to decide when to bring on virtual help, to tips for hiring virtual assistants, to what apps and sites to use to manage virtual workers. Below is an edited transcript from a portion of the conversation. Click on the embedded SoundCloud player below to hear the full conversation.

smallbiztrends · BizSugar Roundtable: Building a Virtual Team May be Key to Long-term Success of Your Business

Determining the Right Time to DIY, Automate and/or Bring on Virtual Assistants

Anita Campbell: I’m a big believer in doing everything. I’m a big believer in automating where you can, first of all, because it’s almost always going to be cheaper and you’re going to get more what I would call data that you can use. If you automate, use software for as much as you can.

However, there are things that you just can’t automate and you shouldn’t automate, definitely should not. I mean, we were just talking in our team meeting earlier about the need to have personality, to bring personality into your business, and I think that’s important for any small business. You’ve got to give people something to remember your business by. And personality, whether it’s the people involved with personality or your brand or whatever it is, that all matters. And that all comes from people. And today, you can get so much of that by people working remotely and virtually.

One of the things that I’ve done is I’ve assembled a team really by people self-selecting, and what I mean by that is people who became interested in us and then they became on the team. You know, it’s not necessarily that I went out and I recruited someone, but if I look at all the people on this call today, these are all people who just somehow became interested in us. I’ve known Martin since I started online, and that’s because Martin came and visited my site, and he started commenting and I got to know him. And it’s been 17 years now, all the way from Stockholm, Sweden. I’m sorry, Gothenburg, not Stockholm. Gothenburg. I’ve never met him in person, but I feel like I know him. So I do feel it’s really important to use every advantage that you can and that’s a combination of things.

Ivana Taylor: If you’ve read the book, The E-Myth… If you have it, pick it up and read it again, because Michael Gerber gives some excellent tips on outsourcing. So the first tip is that you’ve got to document your processes. Do you know what I did? I just sat down, and for about 30 days, I used the tool, and I kept a time log to keep track of what I did and how long it took to do this thing.

Then, once you’ve done that, you’re starting to notice patterns, you’ll see that there are financial things that you’re doing like invoicing and stuff like that. Then there were physical things I was doing such as writing an article, so there was research involved. There are all these different steps of things that you’re doing. You’re not going to know what you’re doing until you document it and get a real picture of what’s happening.

This is the best tip ever from The E-Myth, once you’ve got your long list of tasks already done, pick out the ones that only you can do. This kind of hearkens back to what Anita said, which is the personality. I can outsource a lot of things. And I know, don’t be fooled, DIY Marketers. There are things you absolutely do need to outsource, and then there are things you absolutely cannot outsource.

Then if you’ve done those tasks, now you can start grouping them. These are financial things, these are marketing things, these are social media things. You know what I’m saying? And so, people always wonder how I do so much with so little, and that is the secret. Pick up The E-Myth.

David Elkins: Yeah, Ivana made me think a little bit about the early stages of my team. I run a team of at this point 12 editors who work with our product teams in Chennai, India. That’s where all of Zoho’s products are built and all of our marketers are located. And so my team is sort of a localized team for the US helping to support those marketing efforts.

And I was thinking about in the beginning, when we were first starting to set up this process, of how we have 45 different products, each product has between three and 15 marketers, that’s hundreds of people involved in these sorts of things. And I remembered an early struggle that we had, which was the amount of mental bandwidth that was taken up by not having things automated, by trying to manage everything in our own heads, by trying to make sure that every T got crossed, every I got dotted. That really ate up a ton of bandwidth.

And I think that’s something that’s true for any managerial position, but when you shift to remote, it means that you have to do so much of that stuff internal to your own mind instead of being able to say,” Hey, can you take care of this? Can you take a look at this?”

So what we did is we built a custom app to help manage that process, depending on the complexity of what you’re doing. I mean, in some cases, you can find solutions and tools that will work out of the box. In some cases, depending on how complex your systems are, how complex your processes are. Sometimes putting together something that’s fully tailored to exactly what you’re doing can be a huge lifesaver.

My team, probably we’ve edited, I think the last count was about 5 million words of content. And if I were trying to do that how we did it in the beginning, which was someone would send me an email and then I’d write down on a yellow, legal pad, “Oh, remember to edit this document,” I would have lost my mind.

So I think that that’s a big, sort of building off of what Ivana was saying, that idea of take a look at the things that are eating up a lot of your time, and also eating up a lot of your mental energy. Because sometimes these little things, like keeping track of all of the requests that come in, that’s not going to take a ton of time, but it will take a ton of energy. And I think energy is also an important resource to conserve on your team.

Monique Johnson: I would like to also jump in here real quick, Brent. I love that book, Ivana, so I’m so glad you brought that up. And even just building off of what you said and David said, because there are some people out there who might be listening to this or watching us and saying, “Oh man, I’ve got to do a lot of typing and a lot of writing.”

Well, you guys know I’m the video person, and in today’s world with the tools and everything, don’t make it so hard on yourself to document your process. There’s different tools out there from Loom to Up! Free to Paid where you can just screen share what are the things that you’re doing and creating what Ivana was saying, SOPs, standard operating procedures. So that when it’s time for you to hire or outsource to build this virtual team, it’s not like you bring someone on and it’s like, “Oh, what do I tell them?” Or, “Go read this document.”

A lot of times video, especially if they’re small and succinct, and people are very much visual learners as well, have the written documentation like David said, but I would also say take the video and even have it transcribed. And if you have to update a new video for any updates, you re-transcribe it. But having both helps with tackling different modalities that we have. I think that helps a lot when it comes to building a virtual team.

Finding the Right Virtual Assistants for How You Work

John Lawson: Okay, so most of my virtuals, I hired from the Philippines, and I used OnlineJobs.ph. All right? OnlineJobs.ph versus any of the other ones. I’ve tried other ones, but when it came to actually adding full team members, I found that one to be the best.

One of the things that I do, and I’d suggest everybody do, is that I hide codes inside of my text for the ad for the worker. So what I mean by that is that if I’m looking for a worker, I’ll say, “This is Job #75124,” but I’ll put that at the very end. You have to say job #75124 in your response, and that way I’ll know if they read it or not. Because so many workers like that, whether they’re in five or any other place, they’ll bid on your job, but they’re bidding on everybody’s job and they won’t read the description at all. So if you hide little things like that in, that’s one of the key things that I do.

The other one, this is a big key thing, because like I said, I’m hiring people for my team. These are people I want to depend on. And so I ask one question during the interview, I say, “Where do you see yourself in the next three to five years?” And I ask that question. If they answer to that question, “Well, I see myself being a doctor or a dentist after I finish my school,” I’m not hiring your ass. That’s not who I want. If you answer to me, “I can see me being a team lead and helping you grow your business,” that’s the person I want. So I will see little things like that to really see the intention of the people.

And another thing is if you’re hiring these workers, I just think it’s better to hire a full-time worker than a part-time worker, especially when you’re talking about the Philippines where you’re paying them literally 20%, even 10% of what you would pay a US worker, why not? If you’ve got them, if you’re paying 10% of them, why put them on part time? Put them on full time so they have your… I don’t want people moonlighting. I don’t want people working for two and three clients. You work for me, you work with me. I need your full attention.

Brent Leary: I’ll give you one. I do a lot of transcriptions and Rev is great for me. They can turn around a 15-minute transcription in two hours or less, and it’s really well done. And that’s part of being virtual too. I don’t know the person who’s doing it, I just put my request in and they do the matching of the person who would be the best fit for doing this job, and they handle all of that stuff. So that’s part of, I consider Rev be a virtual team, even if it’s not an individual person. It helps me to get my stuff done.

David Elkins: Honestly, for me, one thing about building a virtual team is if it’s going to be a full-time team where you’re really expecting it to be a very cohesive environment of people, this may not a very satisfying answer, but I find personal recommendation to be really important when building a virtual team. If I’m hiring somebody locally, I know I’m going to be able to sit down with that person, we’re going to build a rapport. There’s going to be trust that’ll build over time.

But when you’re switching to a fully virtual process, especially one that isn’t easy to set clear metrics and benchmarks where it’s like, “I need you to transcribe 5,000 words a day.” That’s easy to measure. Things that are harder to measure, I really feel that that personal connection is important because having a little bit of that rapport, having a little bit of sort of social consequence if that person ends up being flaky or not really stepping up to the job.

I do think that for those permanent teams that you’re building, pulling from social networks, your personal social networks, is really helpful for me. The most successful remote hires that I’ve done have come in through that source.

Anita Campbell: You know, we use our website, so we’ve recruited a lot of freelance writers just by having a link in the footer. It says, “Looking for writers.” You attach it to a form and then have people fill out the form, just ask them a few bits of information, and you can screen people that way. That has worked out really well for us.

Another thing then that we’ve done is we’ve tapped into our existing freelancers also, so if you get one person working with you, you can tap into them. For example, we had someone from Ethiopia who wrote for us for a number of years, and we talked with him and he said, “Yeah, I know several people and I’d love to get them involved.” And he actually recruited other people locally for us to help write, and to do some SEO work and so on. So that worked out really, really well.

Managing Virtual Team Members with Project Management Software

Gail Gardner: Yeah, well, I’ve been working online entirely for over 20 years, and I do work with people in a dozen countries or so, and I’ve had VAs in the Philippines and in India. And the best way I find people is I find one good one, and then they get me other people. Because in those two countries, there are big companies who hire a bunch of people, train them up on a particular skill, and then when their contract with whomever is up, let them all go at the same time. And so it’s pretty easy for you to get one and then have them let you know, “Oh, their contract is going to be up at X time. How many do you want?” And pick them up that way.

And so that’s how I find the people, but the best way for me is they have to communicate the way I communicate. So in my case, I don’t like email. I have so much email it makes my head explode. So they have to use Skype. All my people that I work with, all my collaborators and all of my clients even, and all my VAs, they all use Skype so that I can message them and expect a live response within a reasonable amount of time. Whereas I feel like you email somebody, it drops into a bucket somewhere, and who knows if they’ll ever see it.

So that’s for me, and I also use project management systems. I use Trello, I use Zoho Connect, I use Wrike for different things. Different people and different groups are in different project management systems. And I love project management systems. If you’ve never done one, pick Trello first. It’s free. It’s very visual. You can get your processes very structured and you can make checklists. Like when I get a new person, I have a very detailed checklist. And everything they do, I’ll say, “Okay, start this one. Here’s your checklist. I want you to check it off as you do it.” Then go to the next one. Same checklist is in there, check that off as you do it.

So I know that they are really doing what I’m asking them to do, because if they check it off and I go check and they didn’t really do it, then I know that we’re going to have a come-to-Jesus moment, and they’re going to either learn to do it the way I ask. That’s a problem you’ll run into. They will just decide to stop doing it the way you’ve asked and do it some other way, so you can’t really just delegate and forget.

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This article, “BizSugar Community Roundtable: Virtual Teams Key to Long-term Business Success” was first published on Small Business Trends

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