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theroomofreq · 3 years

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Feb 2021 Fic Recs

I AM JUST REALLY PASSIONATE ABOUT FANFICTION, OKAY.

I didn’t have as much time to read fanfic this month, but I still want to share the stories I fell in love with. There are so so many good fics out there, and I wish I had time for them all! Here is a list of the fanfic that I read this month and truly adore.

A majority of my reading this month was spent on Fem!Jily fics! Which I LOVED. I whole heartedly rec every single one!! There is a collection on AO3 of all of the fics written if you are interested! This list would be AGES longer if I added all of those gems. Trust me they are SO worth it!

Below the cut are 20 wonderful fics. Happy reading my friends!!

Romione Fics

Who He'd Miss Most by @ashotofogdensoldfirewhiskey

T 2k // I CAN’T EXPRESS ENOUGH LOVE FOR THIS FIC. This missing moment is just brilliant. RON is fantastic in it, written so well. The Harry & Ron BROTP gives me too many emotions. The Romione vibes are spot on. I read this three times before I could find words to leave a review. I plan to read this one again and again and again.

A Crown of Violets by katsala

T 2k // A fem!romione story? Yes! Please! I adore the way that Ron, (who is named Ginny) is written in this story. It’s very very very good.

Hinny Fics

The Potters and the Weasleys by @goodlifewrites

G 82k // The latest chapter of this fic dropped while I was brushing my teeth. I immediately sat on the floor and read it, toothbrush still in my mouth. AND ITS FAB. The way this story is written is just next level. The characterization, plot, writing style? Everything is INCREDIBLE. I’m in love.

Am I Your Lockscreen? by @narukoibito

T 1k // The moment I got the email about this fic I stopped everything to read it. I laughed through the entire thing. Not going to lie, I’ve probably read it 5 times since it was posted. The dynamic of the characters is fantastic. Harry in this is just top notch.

Ginevra by @clarensjoy

T 3k // I am really emotional about this story. Every scene in this story hit me hard. I desperately wanted more, but it was so so perfectly transitioned to the next scene. I love my girl Ginny and I ADORE this story.

borrow the moonlight by @could-have-beens

G 700 words // I talked about this fic earlier this month, but it deserves to be rec’d 100 more times. Every time I read it I am super emotional about the way Hinny’s relationship is portrayed. :’)

out the window by @displayheartcode

G 500 words // EVERY TIME ONE OF THESE LITTLE MASTERPIECES IS DROPPED ON ME IT LIVES IN MY HEAD FOR WEEKS. THIS ONE IS AT THE TOP OF MY BRAIN ALL THE TIME. MIGHT ABANDON ALL MY WIPS AND JUST WRITE ABOUT THIS AU NON STOP.

He looks at her and sees the rest of his life by @fightfortherightsofhouseelves

G 700 words// This little gem makes me so emotional about Hinny. I love the way Harry thinks about/describes/loves Ginny. It’s this really powerful little love story that turns me into an absolute sap.

take what i took and give it back to you by fairytiger

T 4k // One of the first stories I read after retuning to fandom last year. I’ve probably read it 7+ times. A favorite go to fic. I came back to it this month because I think about it every other week. Ginny in this story is so clearly written and characterized. OH I LOVE IT.

trouvaille by @gryffindormischief

G 6k // The way that Harry was written in this story stayed with me for long after I read it. It is so so so perfectly Harry that it kills me. Musician Harry? YES PLEASE!

Jily Fics

Shelf Awareness by @ghostofbambifanfiction

M 28k // HOW COME NO ONE TOLD ME ABOUT THIS. WHY DID YOU ALL JUST LET ME STUMBLE ON THIS BY MYSELF. I can’t even begin to talk about this fic. Bookstore AU? Sold. Dorky James? Sold. Pining Lily? Sold. Oh it is so so beyond good. I know I am so so late to this party, but it’s just unreal.

to be always kind and true by @clare-with-no-i

G 2k // You know that moment when you read a fic by an author and then you ignore everything and consume every story they have?? Yeah, I did that after reading this fic. The characterization alone could kill me. Not to mention the writing style. FAB.

they loved. by @mppmaraudergirl

T 400words// I read this little ficlet about 7 times hoping that there would be more each time I got to the end. It always stopped in the same place and broke my heart every time. It’s soooooo gorgeous I can’t stop thinking about it.

bisous, bisous by @clare-with-no-i

G 1k // When you read this fic it’s like you are actually in the story. The atmosphere is so powerful. It’s just this brilliant piece of art that makes want to curl up and read it under a cozy blanket.

The Fabulous Baker Brothers by @frustratedpoetwrites

T 8k // This fic has me running to a bakery every time I think about it. I love the characterization in this story. OH how I love Lily in this fic, she is just wonderful. And of course, I am a huge sucker for a well written Remus.

Summer Girl by @efkgirldetective

E 41k // I dare you to find a more lyrically written first person narrative. NOT POSSIBLE. This story is flat out gorgeous and I am very much obsessed with it. One Sunday night I found out I didn’t have to go into work the next day so I immediately started this fic and didn’t stop until I finished it at 2am.

Earthquake Drills by @efkgirldetective

M 132k WIP// After finishing Summer Girl at 2am, I read this story until 5:30 am. I got 4 hours of sleep and then woke up and read it more. I crave dynamic characters the way Efk wrote them in this story. It is just WOW.

Other Fics

see where you hide by @alrightginger

T 1k // When a George/Harriet fic is posted I RUN. I love love love fiery Fem!Harry. And I love the way that this story pans out, wonderful. Give me all the Fem!Harry.

And We Are In Bed Together, Laughing by nevernevergirl @yorkesteins

T 3k // The Remus/Tonks fic of my dreams. This fic is a collection of missing moments that tells their story. I fell in love with the writing style and the way that these two are written. GORGEOUS.

Miasma by @medric

T 5k // This story hit me so hard, it’s the type that gives you heart ache in the most beautiful way. It’s the story of Remus’ life, the two wars and who he loves. Wolfstar and Remadora. I’ll be thinking about it non-stop for the next month.

#roomofreqs recs #romione fic recs #hinny fic recs #jily fic recs #george x harriet #wolfstar fic recs #remadora fic recs

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venhedish · 3 years

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Ven’s Masterlist of SPN Fic

I write mostly pre-series and early seasons Big Feels™ Wincest fic. There’s a lot of angst and pining here, but plenty of love and devotion mixed in with the darkness.

I always deeply, deeply appreciate likes, kudos, comments, and reblogs!

Wincest Fic

Stand-Alone

Yesterday is a Ghost I Believe In ~4.1k, Teen, Pre-series, Epistolary, Multimedia, Experimental There's an old shoebox under Sam Winchester's bed. It's been there almost as long as he can remember. He doesn't look inside it very often, but when he does, he takes his time. A multimedia collection of letters, journal entries, pictures, and other ephemera from a life on the road. .

That Monster, Love ~2k, Teen, Pre-series, POV Outsider, POV John Winchester, John Finds Out, Angst “You think you’re doing your boys any favors, raisin’ ‘em like this?” .

To Cure My Lonesome Blood ~8.8k, Explicit, Pre-series, Pining Dean, Angst, Bittersweet Ending Dean’s been sick since before either of them was born. The disease is incurable, written into his blood – the same blood he shares with his brother. If he’s not careful, the fever will spread like a fire and consume them both. .

Like Sand, Like Water, Like Sunlight ~1.7k, Gen, Pre-series, Mutual Pining, Angst, Pre-Slash Sea birds circle overhead and Dean wishes he had a camera. Sam looks so young, all of twelve years old, and exhilarated. Dean wants to hold this image in the chambers of his heart, but his pulse just carries it along; time is cruel that way. .

The Space Between Sense and Memory ~4.8k, Teen, Pre-series through Season 1, 5-and-1 Things There are a hundred unwritten rules on all the acceptable ways brothers should touch each other. There are hardly any ways at all to break them. Or; five times they follow the rules and one time they don’t. .

Every Goodbye, all at Once ~900, Teen, Pre-series, Stanford Era, Pining Dean, Angst, Epistolary "Hey, It's Sam. If you're looking for my dad, you can reach him at 866-555-9352. If you're looking for me, leave a message." A series of voicemails Dean leaves at the number Sam left behind. .

Breathe You In (Choke You Down) ~6k, Explicit, Season 01, PWP, Scent Kink, Guilty Dean Winchester Once Sam was gone, Dean missed him in a way that was all-consuming, all the way down – so deep in his bones that he shook with loneliness some nights. And it was the familiar scent of his brother’s hair where it tangled warm against the pillows, his pulse beating under his skin and sending the fear of the hunt wafting off of him in waves that Dean struggled to hold onto the hardest. Dean really likes the way Sam smells.. .

Dawn is Coming (Open Your Eyes) ~5k, Explicit, Season 01, Hurt/Comfort, Getting Back Together In which Sam and Dean suffer new wounds and stitch old ones back together. There’s an awful storm, a dead monster, an injury, and a whole lot of feelings. .

You put the Magic in Me ~9.1k, Explicit, Season 02(ish), Sex Pollen, Porn with Plot, Casefic “This is the weirdest thing we’ve ever done for a case,” Dean says under his breath, leaning into Sam and scouting the crowd gathered around a dozen tables inside the little café. “Dude, relax,” Sam says back, eyebrows raising at his brother’s nervous energy. “I thought this would be, like, your thing.” He gestures vaguely to the women milling around inside. A long, vividly red banner hangs across the open french doors that lead into the space, emblazoned with the words The Oolong Tea Room Presents: Lonely Hearts Club Speed Dating! Feb 11-14th! Or; in which Sam and Dean learn a thing or two about chemistry. .

The Stars are not Wanted Now ~2k, Teen, Season 02, Episode Tag: s02e21 All Hell Breaks Loose, Angst, Death Rituals There was a body on the bed. It had been there long enough that the slanting light of morning crept into the room like an unwelcome invader and washed the world in a dream-shade of palest blue. But there were no dreams here; only death, only memory. The body on the bed was all that remained of Samuel Winchester, who had died in his brother’s arms the night before. .

Demi-Gods and Hungry Ghosts ~5.8k, Explicit, Season 03, Episode Tag: s03e11 Mystery Spot, Dark, Dub-con, Hurt No Comfort This dream-state of living on pause and rewind leads to some interesting avenues of thought that Sam doesn’t mean to travel, but after a certain number of unrelenting Tuesdays, they just become inevitable. If Dean dies every day—if his memories are wiped, or if they never happen at all—what could Sam get away with, if he wanted to? Could he dare to find out? .

In Sanguine Vita Est ~5.2k, Explicit, Season 04, Knifeplay, Dean’s Hell Trauma, Hurt/Comfort Everything was different now. Dean was here—back from the fucking dead—but he was a stranger in his own body. Scars gone, aches from broken bones that hadn’t set right vanished back into the void as if they’d never existed at all. He’d become a stranger to the whole world. He’d become a stranger to Sam. _ Dean asks Sam to help him heal after he returns from Hell. .

All Heartless Spectres, Happiness ~5.7k, Explicit, Season 06, Episode Tag: s06e06 You Can’t Handle the Truth, POV Outsider, Angst, Soulless Sam Lisa Braeden receives an email with the subject line, "You Deserve to Know." It contains a single video file and nothing else. .

The Rungs of Me be Under You ~1.6k, Teen, Gencest, Post-Bunker, 2nd Person POV, Queerplatonic Sam and Dean, Non-Sexual Kink What they share has never been easy to define. Why should this be any different? .

Wincest Series The Top/Bottom Discourse Series (Ongoing) [Each story is canon compliant and listed chronologically, but they can all be read as standalone works.] This series was born originally from a silly meta post I made on Tumblr as a response to some very angry top/bottom discourse I was seeing about how only Sam could truly be A Top™, or how only Dean could truly be A Top™. I personally like to kink and let kink and not drag outdated gender politics into my fandom (Dean can't be a bottom because he's too masculine? Ice cold take, bro), so I wrote a filthy little tongue-in-cheek post about all the ways I think Sam and Dean have fucked each other over the years.

I’m Thinking About Whatever You’re Thinking About ~5.1k, Explicit, Pre-series, PWP, Bratty Sam, Exhibitionism, Fear of Discovery Sam is such a brat, sometimes. .

Shoot to Thrill ~6.7k, Explicit, Season 02, Porn with Plot, Hustling, Getting Back Together It's just like riding a bike. .

Burn Out The Night ~4.9k, Explicit, Season 08, Porn with Plot, Car Sex, Light BDSM, Fluff What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. .

Destiel Fic

Love Made a Martyr of Me ~500, Teen, Season 05, Endverse, Past Sam/Dean, Angst Sam says yes in Detroit, and in the space of a single syllable, there's nothing left in Heaven or on Earth for Dean to love. Cas doesn't seem to care. .

The Sharp Teeth of the One You Love ~2k, Teen, Season 05, Endverse, Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Pining “Quit bein’ a baby, Cas.” Dean’s hands were covered in blood, but they were steady as always while he worked to stitch Castiel back together. “I’m sorry,” Cas growled between gritted teeth. “I don’t exactly have a lot of experience feeling pain.” He hissed again when Dean slid the curved needle back through the eight-inch-long gash that ran deep and bloody down Cas’s bicep. Castiel learns something about what it means to be human. .

Wincestiel Fic

Temerate ~700, Teen, Season 05(ish), Past Sam/Dean, 2nd Person POV, First Time Your brother is sitting in the corner of the motel room. His big hands are worrying at each other; he squeezes them together, fingertips white from the pressure of his grip. He meets your eyes and his gaze is like a lightning strike. .

Dean/John Fic

Cruore ~1.1k, Mature, Pre-series, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Blood, Intrusive Thoughts Bites, Dean could deal with – claw marks and broken bones. But this- ... a bullet was a different kind of monster altogether. .

Supernatural RPF

Il Cielo in Una Stanza ~4.4k, Explicit, Jensen Ackles/Jared Padalecki, Getting Back Together, Prequel-Gate, Polyamory, Non-AU Jared Padalecki receives a present he wasn't expecting at all for his 39th birthday. .

Other Supernatural Fic

Bad Things, Better Reasons ~2k, Explicit, Pre-series, Dean Does Sex Work, Angst, Brotherly Love. Dean does whatever it takes to keep the bills paid while John is gone. The kid waiting for him back at the motel room is all the justification he’ll ever need. .

No Was Her Name ~1.3k, Teen, Season 12, Dean/Mary, Light Angst, First Kiss Mary Winchester was alive. She was solid—made of skin and blood and bone—and she existed in the same world as Dean. It wasn’t a dream; she walked and talked and breathed. She ate, she slept, she wandered the halls of the bunker at odd hours. She was a ghost made flesh, and Dean was haunted by her presence. .

#ven creates #wincest #wincestiel #destiel #J2 #daddycest #spn fic #fic masterlist #my fic #long post #sorry #i just wanna be able to link to it in my bio

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mostlysignssomeportents · 3 years

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20 years a blogger

It's been twenty years, to the day, since I published my first blog-post.

I'm a blogger.

Blogging - publicly breaking down the things that seem significant, then synthesizing them in longer pieces - is the defining activity of my days.

https://boingboing.net/2001/01/13/hey-mark-made-me-a.html

Over the years, I've been lauded, threatened, sued (more than once). I've met many people who read my work and have made connections with many more whose work I wrote about. Combing through my old posts every morning is a journey through my intellectual development.

It's been almost exactly a year I left Boing Boing, after 19 years. It wasn't planned, and it wasn't fun, but it was definitely time. I still own a chunk of the business and wish them well. But after 19 years, it was time for a change.

A few weeks after I quit Boing Boing, I started a solo project. It's called Pluralistic: it's a blog that is published simultaneously on Twitter, Mastodon, Tumblr, a newsletter and the web. It's got no tracking or ads. Here's the very first edition:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/02/19/pluralist-19-feb-2020/

I don't often do "process posts" but this merits it. Here's how I built Pluralistic and here's how it works today, after nearly a year.

I get up at 5AM and make coffee. Then I sit down on the sofa and open a huge tab-group, and scroll through my RSS feeds using Newsblur.

I spend the next 1-2 hours winnowing through all the stuff that seems important. I have a chronic pain problem and I really shouldn't sit on the sofa for more than 10 minutes, so I use a timer and get up every 10 minutes and do one minute of physio.

After a couple hours, I'm left with 3-4 tabs that I want to write articles about that day. When I started writing Pluralistic, I had a text file on my desktop with some blank HTML I'd tinkered with to generate a layout; now I have an XML file (more on that later).

First I go through these tabs and think up metadata tags I want to use for each; I type these into the template using my text-editor (gedit), like this:

<xtags>

process, blogging, pluralistic, recursion, navel-gazing

</xtags>

Each post has its own little template. It needs an anchor tag (for this post, that's "hfbd"), a title ("20 years a blogger") and a slug ("Reflections on a lifetime of reflecting"). I fill these in for each post.

Then I come up with a graphic for each post: I've got a giant folder of public domain clip-art, and I'm good at using all the search tools for open-licensed art: the Library of Congress, Wikimedia, Creative Commons, Flickr Commons, and, ofc, Google Image Search.

I am neither an artist nor a shooper, but I've been editing clip art since I created pixel-art versions of the Frankie Goes to Hollywood glyphs using Bannermaker for the Apple //c in 1985 and printed them out on enough fan-fold paper to form a border around my bedroom.

As I create the graphics, I pre-compose Creative Commons attribution strings to go in the post; there's two versions, one for the blog/newsletter and one for Mastodon/Twitter/Tumblr. I compose these manually.

Here's a recent one:

Blog/Newsletter:

(<i>Image: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QAnon_in_red_shirt_(48555421111).jpg">Marc Nozell</a>, <a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en">CC BY</a>, modified</i>)

Twitter/Masto/Tumblr:

Image: Marc Nozell (modified)

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:QAnon_in_red_shirt_(48555421111).jpg

CC BY

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

This is purely manual work, but I've been composing these CC attribution strings since CC launched in 2003, and they're just muscle-memory now. Reflex.

These attribution strings, as well as anything else I'll need to go from Twitter to the web (for example, the names of people whose Twitter handles I use in posts, or images I drop in, go into the text file). Here's how the post looks at this point in the composition.

<hr>

<h1>20 years a blogger</h1><xtagline>Reflections on a lifetime of reflecting.</xtagline>

See that <img> tag in there for frnklogo.jpg? I snuck that in while I was composing this in Twitter. When I locate an image on the web I want to use in a post, I save it to a dir on my desktop that syncs every 60 seconds to the /images/ dir on my webserver.

As I save it, I copy the filename to my clipboard, flip over to gedit, and type in the <img> tag, pasting the filename. I've typed <img src="https://craphound.com/images/ CTRL-V"> tens of thousands of times - muscle memory.

Once the thread is complete, I copy each tweet back into gedit, tabbing back and forth, replacing Twitter handles and hashtags with non-Twitter versions, changing the ALL CAPS EMPHASIS to the extra-character-consuming *asterisk-bracketed emphasis*.

My composition is greatly aided both 20 years' worth of mnemonic slurry of semi-remembered posts and the ability to search memex.craphound.com (the site where I've mirrored all my Boing Boing posts) easily.

A huge, searchable database of decades of thoughts really simplifies the process of synthesis.

Next I port the posts to other media. I copy the headline and paste it into a new Tumblr compose tab, then import the image and tag the post "pluralistic."

Then I paste the text of the post into Tumblr and manually select, cut, and re-paste every URL in the post (because Tumblr's automatic URL-to-clickable-link tool's been broken for 10+ months).

Next I past the whole post into a Mastodon compose field. Working by trial and error, I cut it down to <500 characters, breaking at a para-break and putting the rest on my clipboard. I post, reply, and add the next item in the thread until it's all done.

*Then* I hit publish on my Twitter thread. Composing in Twitter is the most unforgiving medium I've ever worked in. You have to keep each stanza below 280 chars. You can't save a thread as a draft, so as you edit it, you have to pray your browser doesn't crash.

And once you hit publish, you can't edit it. Forever. So you want to publish Twitter threads LAST, because the process of mirroring them to Tumblr and Mastodon reveals typos and mistakes (but there's no way to save the thread while you work!).

Now I create a draft Wordpress post on pluralistic.net, and create a custom slug for the page (today's is "two-decades"). Saving the draft generates the URL for the page, which I add to the XML file.

Once all the day's posts are done, I make sure to credit all my sources in another part of that master XML file, and then I flip to the command line and run a bunch of python scripts that do MAGIC: formatting the master file as a newsletter, a blog post, and a master thread.

Those python scripts saved my ASS. For the first two months of Pluralistic, i did all the reformatting by hand. It was a lot of search-replace (I used a checklist) and I ALWAYS screwed it up and had to debug, sometimes taking hours.

Then, out of the blue, a reader - Loren Kohnfelder - wrote to me to point out bugs in the site's RSS. He offered to help with text automation and we embarked on a month of intensive back-and-forth as he wrote a custom suite for me.

Those programs take my XML file and spit out all the files I need to publish my site, newsletter and master thread (which I pin to my profile). They've saved me more time than I can say. I probably couldn't kept this up without Loren's generous help (thank you, Loren!).

I open up the output from the scripts in gedit. I paste the blog post into the Wordpress draft and copy-paste the metadata tags into WP's "tags" field. I preview the post, tweak as necessary, and publish.

(And now I write this, I realize I forgot to mention that while I'm doing the graphics, I also create a square header image that makes a grid-collage out of the day's post images, using the Gimp's "alignment" tool)

(because I'm composing this in Twitter, it would be a LOT of work to insert that information further up in the post, where it would make sense to have it - see what I mean about an unforgiving medium?)

(While I'm on the subject: putting the "add tweet to thread" and "publish the whole thread" buttons next to each other is a cruel joke that has caused me to repeatedly publish before I was done, and deleting a thread after you publish it is a nightmare)

Now I paste the newsletter file into a new mail message, address it to my Mailman server, and create a custom subject for the day, send it, open the Mailman admin interface in a browser, and approve the message.

Now it's time to create that anthology post you can see pinned to my Mastodon and Twitter accounts. Loren's script uses a template to produce all the tweets for the day, but it's not easy to get that pre-written thread into Twitter and Mastodon.

Part of the problem is that each day's Twitter master thread has a tweet with a link to the day's Mastodon master thread ("Are you trying to wean yourself off Big Tech? Follow these threads on the #fediverse at @[email protected]. Here's today's edition: LINK").

So the first order of business is to create the Mastodon thread, pin it, copy the link to it, and paste it into the template for the Twitter thread, then create and pin the Twitter thread.

Now it's time to get ready for tomorrow. I open up the master XML template file and overwrite my daily working file with its contents. I edit the file's header with tomorrow's date, trim away any "Upcoming appearances" that have gone by, etc.

Then I compose tomorrow's retrospective links. I open tabs for this day a year ago, 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and (now) 20 years ago:

http://memex.craphound.com/2020/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2016/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2011/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2006/01/14

http://memex.craphound.com/2001/01/14

I go through each day, and open anything I want to republish in its own tab, then open the OP link in the next tab (finding it in the @internetarchive if necessary). Then I copy my original headline and the link to the article into tomorrow's XML file, like so:

#10yrsago Disney World’s awful Tiki Room catches fire <a href="https://thedisneyblog.com/2011/01/12/fire-reported-at-magic-kingdom-tiki-room/">https://thedisneyblog.com/2011/01/12/fire-reported-at-magic-kingdom-tiki-room/</a>

And NOW my day is done.

So, why do I do all this?

First and foremost, I do it for ME. The memex I've created by thinking about and then describing every interesting thing I've encountered is hugely important for how I understand the world. It's the raw material of every novel, article, story and speech I write.

And I do it for the causes I believe in. There's stuff in this world I want to change for the better. Explaining what I think is wrong, and how it can be improved, is the best way I know for nudging it in a direction I want to see it move.

The more people I reach, the more it moves.

When I left Boing Boing, I lost access to a freestanding way of communicating. Though I had popular Twitter and Tumblr accounts, they are at the mercy of giant companies with itchy banhammers and arbitrary moderation policies.

I'd long been a fan of the POSSE - Post Own Site, Share Everywhere - ethic, the idea that your work lives on platforms you control, but that it travels to meet your readers wherever they are.

Pluralistic posts start out as Twitter threads because that's the most constrained medium I work in, but their permalinks (each with multiple hidden messages in their slugs) are anchored to a server I control.

When my threads get popular, I make a point of appending the pluralistic.net permalink to them.

When I started blogging, 20 years ago, blogger.com had few amenities. None of the familiar utilities of today's media came with the package.

Back then, I'd manually create my headlines with <h2> tags. I'd manually create discussion links for each post on Quicktopic. I'd manually paste each post into a Yahoo Groups email. All the guff I do today to publish Pluralistic is, in some way, nothing new.

20 years in, blogging is still a curious mix of both technical, literary and graphic bodgery, with each day's work demanding the kind of technical minutuae we were told would disappear with WYSIWYG desktop publishing.

I grew up in the back-rooms of print shops where my dad and his friends published radical newspapers, laying out editions with a razor-blade and rubber cement on a light table. Today, I spend hours slicing up ASCII with a cursor.

I go through my old posts every day. I know that much - most? - of them are not for the ages. But some of them are good. Some, I think, are great. They define who I am. They're my outboard brain.

#pluralistic

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watch-grok-brainrot · 3 years

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your cc is back! how are you doing? my first question for today is: if you could choose your own spiritual weapon in mdzs/cql, what would it be and how would it look like?

(also, yesterday i drank tea and then i had to think about you! 🐇)

how did you even get into mdzs/cql and which adaptions have you consumed? i got into it through a friend, a part of one of my previous fandom started reblogging things from cql and at first i ignored it (oh why??!?!). later friend had a wen qing icon and my bi ass started to freak out bcs !!!!!! and then at one point we were talking about fandoms and she brought it up, saying that i'd love it (which i did). so i thought, why not give it a try? a few months later i'm here and still in love with like.... everything. with that i mean wangxian bcs they're everything. - ❄🐇

oooh! what tea did you drink?

i’m doing ok. took today off from work to burn PTO.

oh god. ok. the thing with choosing spiritual weapon is i’ve had an ideal set of weapons in my head for AGES. Like back when i was a wuxia nut, i knew exactly what i wanted and it hasn’t changed in the last 15-20 years... yeah. it’s been THAT long since i was in middleschool. orz.

Anyway, i wanted a flute made out of a really study material -- so pretty much just like chenqing. jade would shatter too easily. metal probably dent too easily. some sort of high hardness but also not brittle material would be idea... or i would just have to imbue it with enough spiritual energy it doesn’t matter... i love the way chenqing looks so definitely carvings and coloring would be part of my ideal spiritual weapon.

i also wanted a fan with titanium or some sort of mythical metal (yin iron works) backbone and spider silk fabric (this was inspired by me reading that spider silk is stronger by weight than steel wool and decided yeah,that’s what i want... and literally more than a decade after i decided that for my fantasy weapon, some scientists actually made spider silk fabric from golden orb weaver silk. it’s so freaking cool). Ideally there would be a mechanism for retractable blades. Pointy ends good for stabbing. I’m not above using poison but not something deadly. So no thanks tetrodotoxin and no thanks poison dart frog toxins! i think my favorite venom used in wuxia was bee venom. though i’d settle for mosquito spit -- the stuff that makes a person super itch all over.

the flute would be used for blocking attacks and also spiritual energy attacks from the soundwaves. the fan would be used for stabbing but also as a projectile and diversion. idk what image i’d want on the fan. i used to be phoenixes... probably i’d pick something punny and/or tea related now. i think i gave the fan more thought than the flute back in the day. at least the spider silk thing is pretty neat, imo.

as for a sword... hm... who i am now would want something purple and/or blue with silver. lotus motifs are good but maybe a bit too yunmeng jiang. sect specific motifs aside, i’d probably pick something either involving tea, foxes, or water. it would be made for speed and not brute strength.

what about you? have you considered weapons?

so in nov 2019 i went to china for a week for funsies. went to xi’an and beijing. on the way from xi’an and beijing, i was on an overnight train and shared a compartment with two women in their 20s. i asked them for tv show recs and they gave me uh... eternal love and ashes of love. they were on netflix so i watched those. i wanted more chinese shows so after some deliberating, decided to watch cql. i was like, the actors are ok looking. but i really want to know what netflix means by “soulmate”. my not so inner BL shipping fangirl was sold on that one word. I watched it as i watch all shows -- semi paying attention while playing phone games... but i ended up being hooked... and yeah....

i have read the (unedited... oops, i dled an epub and uh didn’t realize there was an edited and unedited version?) version of the novel in chinese, watched cql, caught up with mdzs q, listened to 1.5 seasons of the AD, and watched S1 and maybe a bit of S2 of the donghua and read thru a lot of the manhua but lost track of where i was. so yes. i’ve consumed a lot of it... it kinda took over my soul in late jan into march. i made this account in feb to post the doodles of wangxian i was making to get out my obsession.

pfffft. soulmates. the one thing netflix did right for the show.

#mdzsnet cc #snowbunny asked and haoppo answered #thanks friend this is fun!#long response #Anonymous #mdzsnetcc #apparently i can't type and put a space in the tag and then couldn't find it when i was trying to find my own post #one big midwest ope

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golbrocklovely · 3 years

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My curiosity is getting the best of me so i wonder, just based on interviews and videos Colby has done where he talks about this ex. Do you think his ex girlfriend whom he was in love with and claimed to be clingy with was the same one he cheated on because it seems like different people to me. In one video he said he felt the relationship ended because he was clingy and couldn't see himself not being around her without his day getting ruined. And he said he was so miserable when it ended he wouldnt leave his room. Basically this relationship consumed him. But the girl he spoke of in Sams vid he said he cheated because you could feel the relationship had run its course and they hadnt really been talking...In this last vid he said he's been heart broken twice so could be different people.

Just a thought and a whole lot of curiosity.

oh my god, sorry this is so long but i have a lot to say (and a little bit of proof maybe????)

it's so weird you bring this up, anon, bc i was literally gonna make a post of tweets colby has made over the years that are about love and whatnot, so i've been in the mood to talk about his love life for a while.

at first, i was more incline to think that the girl he cheated on and the girl he broke up with in 2016 were not the same, bc how can you say you're heartbroken from a relationship that you cheated on, you know?? but now, i do think it's the same girl.

let me explain.

looking at his tweets from 2016, you can tell he is in love bc a lot of them are really sweet and lovey-dovey. the tweets start around feb. and even a little bit before in jan., one of them reading “I like your face, that's why I stare” on feb 22. i think somewhere between feb-apr, he meets this girl and they start dating. he starts tweeting things like “I'll be here for you as long as you're always here for me” on march 22, and “All I see is you”, so you can tell he's already headed straight towards Love-ville, you know lol

what i think happened is that he and this girl were in love with each other, but he loved her a lot more than she loved him. he even claimed that he fell really fast in his previous relationship (which i think is this one). so i think what happened is, he fell for her really quickly, and even though she loved him, it wasn't the same or as much as he loved her. and as he had stated in the 'truth or drink' vid he did with sam, things were going downhill for about two/three months before they broke up. in june he's tweeting things like “I need you, don't let me down” on the 6th, and even “Flaky people ..” on june 27, which could be referring to his gf at the time. that same day even he tweeted “Oh my love, can't you see that you're always on my mind ?”, so i think to some extent it was this back and forth of 'i love you, but you keep pulling away from me and i'm tired/hurt from it'.

i think to some degree, he fell too fast and she was uncomfortable with it. so this is when she was starting to take a step back, maybe asking for space a bit, which is what he meant by when their plans would get cancelled, he would be upset. in july he's tweeting 'You don't understand how much you really mean to me' on the 14th and 'I won't let go' on the 30th. i think he could tell they were drifting apart, but he wasn't ready for it to happen.

by august, and no offense to colby if he ever see this, but he sounded kinda desperate but also really upset. i mean i would too if the person i was in love with was pulling away and i wasn't ready for them to leave (bc who the fuck is ever really ready, you know?). he tweeted “It's all because I care too much” on aug. 3, and “Your forever is all that I need” on aug. 13. he was also talking about needing a mental vacation a bunch, and even saying “Get rid of the people in your life who don't treat you right” by aug. 21. what i think is before he went to new york, his gf and him had a bit of a fall out of some sort, where maybe they said they should go on a break, step away from each other bc things weren't working out.

then, by aug 28, he tweets “Well hey NYC, you're looking beautiful tonight”. the next day he tweeted “"I'm no palm reader, but I doubt that's the sign I was looking for"” so i think somewhere within the those days, he might have cheated. also, no joke, on aug. 31, he tweeted “Protect your heart”, so by then, i think he had made his mind up about the relationship. he also had said in the 'truth or drink' vid, that even tho they were already kinda separated since they weren't really talking or seeing each other anymore, it was still cheating bc they were still technically 'dating' and hadn't broken up.

sept. 1, he tweeted "There's no turning back now". sept. 2, he then said "You know where your heart belongs as soon as you step back and just think. Have time to yourself" and "This trip has taught me so much.", so by this point i think they broke up. a couple days later on the 5th he tweeted "I need a girlfriend who's willing to be my best friend. Someone who cares for me just as much as I care for them. Someone who would go on insane adventures with me, and would wanna see the world. Both committed to each other. 100%. Someone who shows that they TRULY care", and then on the 8th "I can be hard to deal with sometimes. I get into bad moods that seem to change me as a person. I'm working on it. Only getting better", and then finally on the 9th "Someone come keep me company".

so to sum it up quickly, they got together early 2016, he fell really fast while she wasn’t falling as fast, she started pulling away and he got hurt by it, they had a fall out/pause in the relationship, he cheated on a trip, came back, and then they broke up.

hopefully this all makes sense. also, looking at his other tweets after this, you can tell the lovey-dovey feelings he once had weren't really there anymore, and he was a lot more closed off then normal. it took until 2018 for him to start opening a bit up again, but even then nothing fully stuck. personally, i think the other heartache is from before LA, like back when he was in hs, but it could have been something a bit more recent. maybe not someone he technically would have called a gf, but maybe someone he was hoping to be with but things fell thru? not sure entirely.

i also think he got his heartbroken first not by a girlfriend, but by a friend of his before he met sam. there a video where it is briefly mentioned and i honestly think that's why he has some trust issues, or at least that's where it started from. but if you want me to talk about that, just ask since this is already way too long lol

#ask #personal #colby brock #colby if you see this #please don't think i'm crazy lol #and also sorry

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thoseindarkness · 3 years

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DtD News Nov 2020

Thank you to anyone who came back for this nonsense. For brevity I have an announcement that I want to make up front. I didn't have room for it last month so I pushed it back, but I can't anymore. I had to make one major revision to the published story. I want people to know about it.

This is the TLDR version. I tell a more in-depth story at the end.

ANNOUNCEMENT

The summary: I had a bad outline walking into writing Mistrust Goes Both Ways. I ran into a problem mid-story. Instead of stopping and taking the time I needed, I challenged myself to creatively solve my way out of my problems. I re-started with about half of what I'd written, published Mistrust Goes Both Ways, and restarting my outline with high hopes. I was proud of myself for rising to the challenge.

Despite my best efforts, it didn't work out. In the end, I had to scrap my outline. I was able to structure the end I was going for and spent the end of 2019 trying to link the first two stories to the ending I wanted. It wasn't working. Then TRoS. Then COVID. Here we are. In June, I started experimenting with scrapping Mistrust and restarting from Read Between.

Mistrust Goes Both Ways will not be part of the finished story when I'm done. I know some of you love it. I love it. I have no intention of taking it down. I might, for a short time, when I'm posting the final story. I'll let you know if that happens and it will go back up afterward. I don't have specifics as there's no point planning for it now.

For right now, nothing is changing on my AO3 account. Feel free to read and comment to your hearts content. I promise it will stay up forever to remind me that some mistakes are worth sharing with others. I learned good lessons from this mistake. It stays.

That being said I think I owe you an actual update on the progress of this story.

WHAT THE HELL I DID THIS MONTH

After my first update I needed to re-integrate with Reylo friends. Funnily enough, that pulled me into another fic. I've been working on that between following this election. Now that it's called I can get back to writing. I tried a couple of times since I voted on Oct 30th, but I knew it wasn't what I wanted to be thinking about.

Thankfully, I've also begun doing more social/political essays lately. I'm not sure what overall form or shape those may take and I haven't published any. Still, I was creative and I did plenty of writing. Interestingly, all this political focus is good for Deceive the Deceiver. Spinning and listening to conspiracy theories is a big part of weaving a world like this one. A great deal comes from my thoughts and perceptions of the real world.

WHERE DTD IS

As of right now I am in the process of first drafting the entire story with Read Between as the starting point. That is, every one of the short stories in the series. What I'm doing is somewhere between a history, an outline and random scene writing. All of these elements are currently strung together in one long, continuous, chronological, first draft. It's everything from the history before Read Between (which starts in the 1930's), all the way to the final scene of DtD.

I'm taking all the good ideas I've created in the last couple of years and re-organizing them into a first pass. It's the skeleton and some of the meat now. I'm slowly building out now that I have a blank-er slate. It's about choosing what works and what doesn't.

I call it accordion writing. It just gets bigger and bigger. This outline will later level up into the first full story drafts for each part. I've got so much history when I finish this I might… I'm getting ahead of myself. Don't want to give too many clues away.

Another interesting thing that's happened recently is I've started pulling bits of other fic ideas that I’m just not gonna finish. A big chuck of the history I stole from a modern/academia AU where Ben and Rey are history students specializing in the ancient Jedi religion. Another was a complication between characters came from a canon story where I wanted to paint the relationship with a new layer. We'll see if I can pull that off.

I spent a lot of time prior to this year focusing on the heroes but my villains hadn't gotten much love. Filling in the history has given me a chance to flesh out the villains. All their moves and countermoves, woven through the bits I already have, are spinning a pretty tapestry. Oh, the villains are so much fun to write!

This other fic came together in the same sort of accordion fashion and it's been fun working through the kinks in the process now that I've seen some of the weak points on a scale like DtD. I think I've mentioned, but this is a writing experiment for me and I'm most invested now in improving my process and clue-threading with DtD. This other fic is helping me test it on a smaller scale.

Not that this needs to get any longer, I'm just going to throw pretense out the window and go with complete vanity. If you don't give a wet shit about my life (and I don't blame you) you have reached the end of your journey. I hope to see you next month. If not, then I leave you with this parting:

May we meet again in our next fandom, through mutes and not as rival shippers.

The following is the ridiculous story of my ups and downs with Deceive the Deceiver. I figure if I explain to you how much I'm invested in this story some of you will stop worrying that I'm going to abandon it. Trust me. I'm not.

This tale stretches from NANOWRIMO 2018 and the prompt that started it, through the ups and downs of 2019 and 2020, to the writing of last month's letter. Buckle up. I love bumpy rides.

DtD: from NANO '17 to COVID-19

This story truly starts in December 2017 when I drenched the seat beneath me during Last Jedi. I'm a TLJ shipper. I got caught on the thirst train. It hit a time when writing was becoming a really big part of my life. I've been writing since I was a kid. I stopped for a while and came back to it. It's a long story. Ultimately, I'd started writing a lot a few years earlier. A mix of fic and originals but I was running into problems so I start reading a bunch of books to get better. TLJ lit the fires. NO joke TLJ came out on the 15th. I have pages of writing from the 20th.

2018 was Reylo year! I was already on Tumblr for my previous fandom (Batman comics). I found Reylo AU week which is in August. I submitted a story for that. It was the first fic I published for Reylo. Fast-forward August to November. I'm in the Writing Den on Discord and someone throws out this spy prompt. People start running with. Throwing ideas around. One of those was the snuggie in Mistrust! I have that conversation saved and story spots for each crazy thing they threw out. Finally, I said I'd do it!

Mind you, this is November 2nd. Nano has just started and the event is about "turning off your internal editor." This prompt consumed me. I was trying to keep up with SpaceWaffleHouseTM that first year. I did, btw. We both crested 100,000. It was my first Nano. Word count is not my problem. Organizing my crazy ambitious ideas is my problem. Some of that 100k was other stories, like Custard which I wrote half of in November and the other half Jan/Feb 2019. Most of it… probably 80k of it… was DtD.

Read Between the Lies is currently 33,710. I wrote at least 20k of that during that first Nano, as well as outlines and scenes for what I thought would be the starting point. I remember wanting to write Read Between to "get into their headspace" by writing their first meeting. I didn't think it would become a whole story. I was just going with it then. Any idea that came to mind.

I took December 2019 off for a few reasons. Some personal. Some burnout. I'm one of those people that can use writing to relieve stress, but I was so exhausted from that month-long writing sprint. By the last week I was dragging to get the final four or five thousand words to hit 100k.

Also, what I had by the end (no internal editor) was a bird nest of ideas that had too many beginnings, not enough middles, and endings to go around. I knew one thing right away: I knew I had more than one story. There were so many fun ideas. I figured, what the hell. I knew another thing right away: the prompt was at the end of the story. Like, the very end. Like, the last short story. Or the second to last short story, at the earliest. That hasn't changed. Ever. That's just where it ended up.

Between January and April of 2019 I touched DtD a few times. I kept coming back to it, reading through it, trying to untangle it. I made new notes on the stories. Expanded ideas. Tried to structure it. I figured out a bunch of good notes, but no real substance. The hardest thing was figuring out where to start! Did I:

(1) Start shortly before the prompt with Ben/Rey's relationship established and fill the story with the history?

(2) Start a lot earlier and build Ben/Rey's relationship from the beginning I'd written in Read Between?

If I'm being honest, Read Between was a lot better than I thought it would be and I didn't want to get rid of it. For a while I was thinking of publishing it last as a "prequel" if people liked the series.

Funny enough, the turning point happened May fourth weekend 2019…

In the week leading up, I was struggling through another story and decided to take a break for the weekend. I'd start writing again on Sunday when I met with my writing group. I met them through Nano. We used to meet at Panera. Now they meet on Discord. They mostly sprint though and I'm not a sprinter. I miss Panera. Anyway.

May 4th was a Sunday (look it up). I gave myself a writing break for the weekend and marathoned Star fucking Wars. It was nerd weekend. I was going to nerd out. I wore exclusively SW gear all weekend. I remember it well. It was the start of something fucking magical in my life.

Have I mentioned recently I really love this story. Trust me I will fucking finish it. Oh my god the demons won't leave until I do. Get them out of my head…

I had a pretty rockstar weekend. I believe the reason I skipped the PT that weekend was because I'd watched it the month before or so. Right after finishing the Clone Wars animated series (which is awesome and I strongly recommend both it and Rebels). I skipped them and SOLO.

Starting with R1, I went through in chronological order. I stopped at RotJ. I was with my family on Saturday and they were playing RotJ in the living room during the party. We talked about my marathon. My mom came over to my apartment after. We watched RoTJ properly. Then Force Awakens. It was too late by then to watch TLJ. I know I went straight to bed after my mom left on Saturday night.

Somewhere during or right after TFA I started thinking about Deceive the Deceiver. I don't remember what sparked it. I went to bed thinking about DtD. I know this with 100% certainty because I woke up thinking about again on Sunday and I thought it was quite odd.

I dream about this story in a way I have only dreamt about a precious few. Technicolor folks. It keeps me up at night.

I went to my writing group with (a) no plan for what to write, (b) a gordian knot that I had yet to untangle, (c) a sudden urge to re-read it. I opened my notes and read DtD through all our sprints. I read most of it during that writing session. We go about three hours.

That night I had Game of Thrones at my parent's. It was the (spoiler alert) episode where Arya kills the Night King. I remember because two minutes into the episode my brother's car broken down a few blocks from our apartment and we had to go help him. Derailed the whole night (this is foreshadowing).

Side note: I live with my younger brother and he's the best roommate I've ever had in my 35 years of life. Love you, Mo!

The episode was recording so we ran out. Had to leave the car in a parking lot. Someone had already helped him push it out of a puddle but my brother was soaked to mid-calf and the engine was shot. We dropped him off at home and I rode back to my Momma's crib to watch GoT. It was only the beginning of a wild night.

I went to bed late. I had to get up a few hours early to deal with the car before work started for either of us. I guess we were both hoping to avoid taking the day off. That wasn't going to happen. I drove home but I couldn't sleep. That crazy episode and the fact that my brain was already on fire with DtD.

I spent the wee hours finishing my re-read through the rough draft of Read Between the Lies. It saw my starting place. I started writing. I wrote through waiting in a parking lot, for the tow truck, in my car, at 6 am, with no sleep. I did a voice recording as I drove from the parking lot to the mechanic where the driver was taking my brother's car. I thought about it the whole way back. I sat on the sofa a wrote some more when we got home. I went to bed at 11 am and I'd written 10k more words for Read Between the Lies.

Somewhere between the chaos of May 5th and the official publish date on June 5th, Read Between got written. I know it didn't take too long. I remember sending it off to beta (by my amazing beta team on 1 & 2: Em, Jen, and Sai) and immediately pivoting to my outline. I slapped that together far too hastily and kept moving. I was going on holiday in the UK (I'm American and I'm ashamed) in early August so I planned on trying to publish Part 2 when I got back. At the very least I wanted it ready for beta.

Also some to admit, around the middle of 2019 I was fatigued with the fandom. We were hitting a lull. I was psyching myself up for the end and the exit. I was trying to clean house. I wanted to push out unfinished fics. To make them work. There was a lot of that mood from me in 2019. I was trying to make everything work. It's why Read Between came out, and that was a good thing. It's also why Mistrust came out, and that was a bad thing.

With that mentality looming, tough outline in hand, I started writing Mistrust before the end of May. I hit my snag sometime during the period I was publishing Read Between because by the time it was all done I knew I wasn't going to have a finished story by the time I left for London. I would figure it out when I got back. I picked up another project to distracted me from my problems for a little while. That is going to be an original if it's anything. One day…

At some point after I got back I started focusing heavily on problem solving. I had two stories already and a number of plot threads I had to resolve. I have heavy, heavy, heavy notes from September to December of 2019. Lots of possible ways to run this story. It sucks that a lot of that stuff isn't going to make it, but I'm recycling shit every day and I learned so much about the characters/story in that four month period. It really shaped the finished product in an important way.

This period is where I started to look at the bigger structure and how I was going to solve specific plot problems in each short story to bring the whole together. That focus on the different parts is important because it was the last thing on my mind when TRoS happened.

December 20th (the release date) is my birthday. My ass drove up to one of those Reylo-only screenings and I was surrounded by amazing people as I watched a movie that ruined my 35th birthday. Thankfully, I spent it in incomparable company. Thank you to all the hosts and super special thanks to Jen. Not only was she a DtD beta on both, she invited me. Thank you love! You are the reason I still remember that trip with joy.

Side note: I no longer hate TRoS. I've made my peace with it. I'm a far happier person now.

Needless to say, the only Reyloing I did in January of this year was venting frustration. Then I took a few weeks away from the fandom. I'd done my purging into the void. I knew other people still needed the space to vent but I had to get away. Once the toxin is out I couldn't let it back in.

What occurred starting in February of 2020 was a series of situations in which, every time I logged into Twitter I was faced with the kind of vitriol in the fandom that I don't need in my life. Some of it was still TRoS stuff, even as late as May. I'm not judging, I'm just saying, with the world on fire (literally), I didn't need it.

I don't think I have to explain why I've avoided social media like the plague since early this year. I live in America. If you heard anything about our recent President I don't have to explain any further what this year has been like. That has been par for course all over the world.

So here's my secret to happiness. I don't fux with the trolls. Do not engage. Sometimes that means radio silence. I'm breaking that silence because I want you to know 2020 has not destroyed DtD. It's only leveled shit up.

I have pretty much been working on this story consistently since March of this year. I go back and forth with reading, history, documentaries. I'm learning to wield many new weapons. They take time to settle in. DtD is the de-stressor I go to in between the real shit.

Sometime in June I was screwing around with the order of the parts. I had worked out the end but I was trying to bridge the gap between the ending I was certain I needed to get to and the two beginning stories I'd already published. I couldn't bridge the gap. It had been a year since I published Read Between and it wasn't working. Then I had an epiphany.

What if I got rid of Mistrust? Read Between is a pretty blank slate. I didn't want to re-write it and I still don't. I have no intention of getting rid of Part 1. I may clean it up and add some stuff at the very last minute, but it will be right before the new stuff drops as a pre-cursor to the flood of subsequent stories. I may add a few new clues or alter a scene or two, but I have plenty of room to move with it exactly the way it is.

What does that mean for Mistrust Goes Both Ways? To make a long story short, there was no good way for me to continue with what I'd published and still write the story in my head. I'm sure there are cool places to take the existing story, but that's not what I'm trying to do. In truth, I should have left 1 and not published 2 when I hit a snag. Lesson learned.

In June I basically threw Mistrust out and asked myself, "Now what?" I have months of great ideas rife for reshuffling and no restrictions on how to bridge the gap from 1 to the ending I wanted. But the end had shifted.

That brings us up to speed. The last thing I did before taking a much needed break was get through 90% of the history in my accordion outline/draft. I poured the foundation that was missing. I walked away in early October and let it set. I'm going to button up this other fic I'm working on and then go back to DtD and check the foundation I laid.

I'm very confident that not only will it hold, but that with fresh eyes and the fun side stories I've had the chance to lay to rest, I will finally be able to start building the finished products on top of it.

IN CONCLUSION

I'm still as excited as I've ever been for this story. It frustrates me all the time, but that means the medicine for my soul is working its magic. Change it painful, but pain is transformative. I've embrace changed. That ache is just a sign the muscles are getting stronger. Growing pains. As I learn to live with them in my family, my country, and my job, I find that life's lesson's often end up reflecting in every place in our life if we but open our eyes to look.

Growing pains exist in my writing process too. They are as transformative in this corner of my life as they are in every other. They have revealed as much about me as a person in my writing as they have in my politics. They have taught me how to compromise with my family as I learn to compromise with my characters. As I consider how people treat each other I am reminded that struggles in understanding our fictional counterparts may shine a light on our struggles to understand our truer selves.

Take care of yourselves. Once you've got that covered, if you can, take care of each other. Feel free to poke me and say hi. If not, until next month.

Fari.

#deceive the deceiver #reylo #reylo fanfic #reylo fan fiction #modern au #spy au #fan fic #fan fiction

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buyingahomespring · 4 years

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How do these changes influence Real Estate prices?

It’s been many years of a solid seller’s market; prices increasing by double digit returns, homes selling before they were even listed and multiple-offer bidding wars becoming the norm. But this year, Vancouver has finally seen a change. Changes have been imminent for some time, but not everyone was ready for it. Many homeowners are now left wondering what their “forever increasing” Real Estate assets are currently worth.

Is this reason to panic? Of course not. Vancouver is a beautiful city with both domestic and international demand. This is just another cycle and there will always be a market, and a buyer for your home.

What are the main factors driving this market change? Mortgage rules – As of January 1, 2018 the government has made it mandatory for all borrowers to pass a stress test when qualifying for a mortgage. What this means is you will have to qualify for your mortgage at a higher “qualifying rate”. This rate will be the higher of the Bank of Canada 5 year benchmark rate OR the rate you have been offered, plus 2%! Many buyers will now qualify for significantly less, which subsequently filters through reduced ability to purchase and lower demand in the marketplace. Decreased international demand – China is still a “closed” economy and Chinese authorities have now enacted harsher punishments for anyone caught exchanging money outside of official channels. Right now, Chinese citizens are only allowed to exchange equivalent of $50,000 through their own banks. The new restrictions stem from concerns over the Chinese economy and the recent weakening of the Yuan. Foreign Owner Tax / Property transfer tax – As of Feb 21st, 2018, If you are a foreign buyer in Metro Vancouver, then you will have to pay an additional 20% tax of the fair market value of the property. (increase of 5%) City of Vancouver Empty homes tax – each home deemed “empty” (not principal residence or rented for at least 6 months of the year) will be subject to a tax of 1% of the 2018 property tax assessment. BC’s Speculation and Vacancy tax – based on the Dec 31st registered owner, for 2019 and going forward all foreign owners will pay 2% of the assessed value and other Canadians who are not exempt will pay .5% of the assessed value. Increasing interest rates – we at at the highest rates since January 2008, and higher rates mean higher mortgage payments, and decreased affordability. Consumer sentiment – Would you purchase something today if you think it will be a lower price in the future? Probably not. Same goes for how consumers view the new Real Estate market conditions. More people are on the sidelines waiting, and this is contributing to the decreasing demand and prices.

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How do these changes influence Real Estate prices? All of these extra taxes, costs and regulations are contributing to decreased affordability and diminishing demand. It is estimated that the new mortgage stress test alone has decreased affordability on average by 20%. That means that consumers either have to look for a smaller home, a less desirable location, or save more money, before they make their purchase.

This market is confusing to many because it changed so fast – buyers and sellers are getting mixed signals. Some sellers are realistic about today’s value and pricing their home according to current market conditions and demand. Some sellers are still back in 2017 and asking for the price they ‘could have’ received then. Many sellers start out in a 2017 price range and slowly drift towards something that a buyer will pay today.

Most buyers on the other hand are happy to pay much less and are looking for value. We’ve worked with clients that have submitted bids WELL under the fair market value in hopes the seller might take it, given the lack of overall demand.

What data can I use to determine the new value of my home? Assessed value Assessed value is a place to start and only provides an estimated valuation. This major limitation with this method of valuation is timing. You receive notification in January, based on data from July 1st of the previous year…and a lot can change in 6 months! Also, the assessor only looks at actual sales in your area, not your specific property. If you have completed significant renovations or have something special on your property, it likely won’t be accounted for. Assessed value is a better benchmark for condos than it is for detached homes, as condos tend to have more similarities.

Bank Appraisals Have you ever asked for a mortgage, increase or refinance? The first thing the bank does is send an appraiser out to your property to obtain a “lending” value. Usually this value disappoints the homeowner, as it is often much lower than the market value. Remember, the bank is considering lending you money on this property for the long term. They want to make sure that even if the property value decreases, you will still have enough equity in your property to keep your debt in good standing. Canadian Banks are not in the business of buying and selling properties, so they have no interest in repossessing, unless absolutely necessary. Therefore, they will usually lend based on a more conservative, lower valuation.

Comparables Looking at similar, recently sold properties in your area is a great place to start. We need to stress that “recent” and “similar” are key words here. A good comparable is a similar property that has sold in the same market conditions that you are in. When the market is changing rapidly, as it is today, then we wouldn’t recommend looking back more than a month or two. This method is also best for condos or townhouses that have very similar features.

Talk to Tim or Shannon Walters, your local Realtors If you are thinking of selling or are just curious what your home might be worth today, talk to us. (You may be interested for an equity take out, a later sale or just to update your personal balance sheet). We have the experience and expertise you can rely on. Tim has been selling homes in Vancouver for over 23 years. Shannon has valued homes for lending purposes with Canada’s largest chartered bank for over 22 years. Our team reviews new listings on the MLS every day, watching for trends, value and anomalies. We read economic data on the markets; interest rates, growth rates, immigration, government policies and data forecasts, and determine how this will impact current market prices.

We are experts in investment properties and can help put your capital to work for you. Our service includes advise on specific renovations (what adds value and what doesn’t) or finding you a distressed, undervalued property. Ask us anything about the rental market, cap rates or how to make the most out of your investment property.

We can help you accurately value your detached home. Not only will we review what your lot and building are worth, we also advise you on the highest and best use. Sometimes this can mean subdividing your lot prior to sale, or looking for the ‘perfect buyer’ to take it over as it is. We also help you get the highest price for your home with proper staging and marketing. Every situation is so unique, but we ensure you understand this market and get the best price. We look forward to hearing from you!

source Article : Brixwork Also Find in https://brixwork.tumblr.com/post/184452071598/vancouver-real-estate-prices-up-down-or-flat

#Homes For Sale Spring #Spring Commercial Real Estate Agent #Commercial Real Estate Spring

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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Europe Confronts Coronavirus as Italy Battles an Eruption of Cases https://nyti.ms/2SPybgt

Europe Confronts Coronavirus as Italy Battles an Eruption of Cases

The country announced more than 150 cases, many in the densely populated region around Milan, as officials closed schools and canceled Venice’s carnival celebrations.

By Jason Horowitz and Elisabetta Povoledo | Published Feb. 23, 2020 Updated 7:57 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted February 23, 2020 |

CASALPUSTERLENGO, Italy — Europe confronted its first major outbreak of the coronavirus as an eruption of more than 150 cases in Italy prompted officials on Sunday to lock down at least 10 towns, close schools in major cities and cancel sporting events and cultural touchstones, including the Venice carnival.

The worrisome spike — from fewer than five known cases in Italy before Thursday — shattered the sense of safety and distance that much of the continent had felt in recent months even as the virus has infected more than 78,000 worldwide and killed more than 2,400, nearly all in China.

The perception of a rising threat was amplified on television channels, newspaper headlines and social media feeds across Europe, where leaders could face their greatest challenge since the 2015 migration crisis.

That surge of people into Europe radically altered the politics of the European Union and exposed its institutional weaknesses. This time, it is an invisible virus from abroad that has slipped past Europe’s borders and presents its bickering coalitions with a new potential emergency.

If the virus spreads, the fundamental principle of open borders within much of Europe — so central to the identity of the bloc — will undergo a stress test, as will the vaunted but strained European public health systems, especially in countries that have undergone austerity measures.

Already, a new nervousness has pervaded Europe.

Austrian officials stopped a train en route from Italy to Austria and Germany to test passengers for the virus. The Austrian interior minister, Karl Nehammer, said the tests came back negative so the train got the “all clear.”

In France, the new health minister, Olivier Veran, stressed the country’s preparedness, saying it would significantly ramp up its testing.

“There is a problematic situation at the door, in Italy, that we are watching with great attention,” he said on Sunday, adding that a Europe-wide discussion between health ministers was in the works.

On Sunday night, an aid ship bringing hundreds of migrants, who had been rescued off the coast of Libya, to a Sicilian port received instructions from the Italian government to remain in quarantine for 14 days as a precaution, according to the ship’s Twitter account.

Fears of foreigners spreading the virus across oceans has already prompted some governments around the world to impose new border or travel controls.

The Trump administration has barred entry to the United States by most foreign nationals who have recently visited China, where the virus first appeared and spread. Much of the world has adopted similar controls, but the virus has continued to spread, most notably to South Korea, where more cases have been recorded than anywhere else outside China, and this past week to Iran, where eight deaths have been reported.

Israel on Monday will block entry to all nonresidents who have visited Japan and South Korea in the 14 days before their arrival. On Sunday, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, which has 602 confirmed infections and six deaths, put the country on the highest possible alert, empowering the government to ban visitors from China and take other sweeping measures to contain the outbreak.

“The coming few days will be a critical time for us,” Mr. Moon said at an emergency meeting of government officials.

Even China — with an authoritarian government that has locked down areas with tens of millions of people in an attempt to stamp out the epidemic — has struggled to contain the virus, which has no known cure.

But the scores of new cases in Italy, mostly in the Lombardy region that includes densely populated Milan, present a new challenge for a country with a wobbly government often paralyzed by infighting.

That government has now become the reluctant laboratory to test whether the virus can be successfully contained in an open European society with a liberal approach to restrictions.

Prime Minister Giuseppe Conte of Italy said on Italian television on Sunday that the country had taken precautions, including barring flights from China in January. These measures seemed to have paid off “even if now it looks like it didn’t,” he said.

He suggested that the surge of Italian cases only reflected Italy’s casting a wider net in terms of testing.

“We cannot exclude that after tests that are equally rigorous, the numbers can go up in other countries,” Mr. Conte said.

Beatrice Lorenzin, a former Italian health minister, said the sharp rise in cases in Italy resulted from systematic checks that discovered a “second generation of contagion.”

She said this was probably caused by infected people who traveled to Italy from China using indirect flights without declaring their original departure point or putting themselves in voluntary quarantine during the virus’ incubation period.

“I hope similar things did not happen in other countries,” she said.

In the Lombardy region, which has reported the majority of cases in Italy, 10 towns were locked down after a cluster of cases emerged in the town of Codogno, about 60 kilometers southeast of Milan.

At least 50,000 people are affected by the lockdown. Residents were supposed to leave or enter the towns only with special permission.

The outbreak in Codogno was detected after a 38-year-old man was admitted to the city’s hospital and diagnosed with the virus on Thursday. But the man had developed symptoms perhaps five days before that, potentially allowing the virus to spread.

Health officials are trying to figure out how he contracted the virus; he had not been to China. Many cases in Lombardy, officials say, may be traceable to that one case.

At least five members of the hospital medical staff and several patients have been infected. Other persons who tested positive include the man’s pregnant wife, some friends, and others who spent time with them. The towns surrounding the ones where the man works and lives have been included in the shutdown.

On Sunday night on a road outside Casalpusterlengo, one of the locked-down towns, police officers in surgical masks waved down cars, asking what business they had in the town. The officers suggested that motorists take an alternate route and urged them against going any further.

Most of the drivers didn’t need much convincing.

Bahije Mounia, a 42-year-old caretaker from a nearby town who wore a surgical mask, turned right back around. She said the government should have let people in the area know how dangerous things were much earlier. With the spike of cases in the region, she said, “It’s almost like we’re in China.”

The exaggeration could be forgiven considering the dramatic turn of events in Italy in recent days.

What had seemed like a contained few cases spread throughout the country’s wealthy north. So did the precautions.

People wore surgical masks in Aosta, which is on the Swiss border. Officials in the Piedmont region closed schools in Turin, and Venice cut its Carnival short. The patriarch of Venice, the Reverend Francesco Moraglia, suspended all religious ceremonies, including Ash Wednesday celebrations that mark the beginning of Lent.

Two elderly people who tested positive for the coronavirus were in intensive care at Venice’s municipal hospital.

In the regional capital of Milan, officials closed museums, schools, its cathedral, and halted religious and cultural events. Many other venues, aside from those providing essential services, have been closed, including most bars and nightclubs.

Fears that the city could be quarantined triggered a run on supermarkets. By 5 p.m. on Sunday, at least one supermarket had run out of fruit, vegetables, meat and nearly all canned food.

Some of the customers wore masks, and they all seemed in a hurry to fill up their carts with whatever was left on the shelves.

Vanessa Maiocchi, 45, said she worried about getting her children enough food. She was also concerned that her brother, who has a weak immune system, might be more vulnerable, especially if his company kept making him go to work.

“At least in these cases,” she said, “the state should intervene.”

So far, the virus has killed three people in Italy, including a 78-year-old man from Veneto who died Friday; an elderly woman who died in Crema on Sunday; and a 77-year-old woman who died in her home in Casalpusterlengo and posthumously tested positive for the virus.

The Italian state, which leads the third largest economy in the eurozone, has not inspired much confidence of late, as it has been consumed by internal machinations. But health experts said they were more worried because the Italian health ministry appeared to have moved aggressively to prevent an outbreak, to no avail.

Francesco Passerini, the mayor of Codogno, said in an interview on Sunday evening that he still had not received concrete logistical instructions from Rome.

“Who is going to bring essential goods here?” he said. “Who is going to take care of provisions and medical transportation?”

Two military structures in Lombardy are being prepared to become isolation camps. A military base in Rome has been housing evacuees from Wuhan, China, where the virus began, and the Italian passengers of the Diamond Princess, the cruise ship that has been under quarantine in Yokohama, Japan.

Lockdown procedures like the ones in Lombardy will be applied to other towns if new clusters emerge, officials said. Quarantine measures will also be applied to anyone who has close contact with someone who has the virus.

Elia Delmiglio, the mayor of Casalpusterlengo, said people continued going in and out of his town for most of the day on Sunday.

“We got the decree, but not a precise schedule for when it will be implemented,” he said.

But by late Sunday night, police began arriving to seal the town off.

“People are worried,” said Paolo Camia, a 55-year-old manager of a software company from Casalpusterlengo, who drove out of town in his blue surgical mask to take some pictures of the police checkpoints. “Basically, we can’t leave.”

_____

Jason Horowitz reported from Casalpusterlengo, Italy, and Milan, and Elisabetta Povoledo reported from Rome. Katrin Bennhold contributed reporting from Berlin, Constant Meheut from Paris, and Emma Bubola from Milan.

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cindylouwho-2 · 4 years

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RECENT NEWS, RESOURCES & STUDIES, late February 2020

Welcome to my latest summary of recent ecommerce news, resources & studies including search, analytics, content marketing, social media & Etsy! This covers articles I came across since the early February report, although some may be older than that. I am a bit behind due to my trip last week and other events, but some things here are a bit time-sensitive so I wanted to release this now.

I am still looking into setting up a new ecommerce business forum where we can discuss this sort of news, as well as any day-to-day issues we face. I need some good suggestions for a cheap or free forum space that has some editing tools, is fairly intuitive for inexperienced members, and is accessible. If you have any suggestions, please reply to this post, email me on my website, or send me a tweet. (I will put out a survey once we narrow this down to some good candidates, but if you have any other comments on what you want from such a forum, please include those too!)

As always, if you see any stories I might be interested in, please let me know!

TOP NEWS & ARTICLES

Since we are seeing more shops closed due to Etsy’s customer service level standards, my blog post on ODR now has major revisions explaining what we have learned, and includes some tips for staying out of trouble and if necessary, appealing a suspension. Please circulate the info widely, as many sellers still haven’t heard about this, and some were closed without having any clue this was possible.

Mobile continues to grow while desktop use is slowly shrinking. It should affect how we design web pages. “Mobile visitors also behave differently from their desktop web counterparts, staying on pages for shorter periods of time, for example.” Other interesting takeaways from this SimilarWeb report: “[Facebook] lost 8.6% of [web] traffic over the past year alone” but increased in app sessions.

The price of domains ending in “.com” will almost certainly be going up soon, and will go up most years after that, unless something changes at the last minute. If you are absolutely certain that you will continue to use the same domain name for your website, blog, ecommerce forwarding etc., then you might consider paying a few years in advance to save a few bucks.

Another article explaining how people are selling thrift store and vintage clothing on Instagram, without setting up a checkout/cart anywhere. (The article focusses on teenagers, but does reference other examples.)

ETSY NEWS

Two weeks ago, Etsy Support posted on Twitter that they were no longer monitoring the account, and asked everyone to use the help page maze instead when they need support. Forum thread here.

Another trend report for 2020 from Dayna Isom Johnson [podcast links & transcript] She leads off with tips on how to get featured: “ so it's incredibly important to see a bright representation that really clearly shows your product...Do be original. I'm always trying to find the latest and the greatest that isn’t already on the shelves...Do be inclusive. ... I'm talking about models of all ethnicities, all genders, all body types, all ages.” Etsy chose chartreuse as their colour of the year: “in the last three months, there's been a 12% increase in searches for green already, and a 55% increase in neon green.” The wedding trends part was mostly already covered in a blog post, but she does also answer a few seller questions.

Website user experience (UX) is a big part of getting people to convert, and an outside group ranks Etsy’s as “acceptable”. Many will be unsurprised that search gets a score of “mediocre” and Accounts & Self-Service get a “poor” grade.

The migration to Google Cloud services is complete, so now Etsy can run more experiments more often, including those involving AI. (Although the forum thread was laughing at the idea of bad reviews helping shops, there is actually some research supporting that, so it is a logical thing to test.)

Etsy sellers in the US, UK & Canada who use Instagram can apply to win a trip to Etsy HQ here, until March 1.

Etsy is launching an Etsy U program which just seems a bit sketchy. Forum thread here.

Reverb (owned by Etsy) named a new Chief Technology Officer on Feb. 18.

SEO: GOOGLE & OTHER SEARCH ENGINES

Google does not confirm every large search update, so this one remains a mystery at the moment, since Google refused to give an answer. That means it’s not a core update.

Another video (with subtitles in several languages) from the SEO for Beginners series from Google, on the basics you need for good website SEO.

If you are interested in “searcher intent”, this 500 person survey asks about what people are really looking for, and what they think of the search results the end up with. Overwhelmingly, they say they prefer organic results to ads, and the majority see targeted ads that they can’t figure out the reason/s behind. “Sixty-eight percent responded that Google adding more ads to the search results would make them want to use the search engine less.” Also, a slight majority preferred text results to images, video, & audio. “When asked which factor had the most significant impact on their decision to click a result, 62.9% responded it was the description, followed by 24.2% who said the brand name, and 13% who said title.” That means that the first part of your Etsy listing description, or the coded meta description on a page on your website, has the most influence on people clicking on your link once they see it.

I usually strongly suggest that people setting up their own websites make sure they do some SEO work & keyword research for their category/shop section pages, and it turns out that there is new research showing I am correct. “Specifically, e-commerce category pages – which include parent category, subcategory and product grid pages with faceted navigation – ranked for 19% more keywords on average than product detail pages ranked for. The additional keywords they ranked for drove an estimated 413% more traffic, based on the keywords’ search demand and the pages’ ranking position. With optimization, those ranking category pages also showed the potential to drive 32% more traffic.”

Semi-advanced: explaining the (seemingly endless) debate on whether subdomains or subdirectories are better for SEO.

SEO study - do you really need to use H1 tags on a page? Maybe not, although some screen readers recognize them as the page title so they help with accessibility. (Etsy & many other marketplaces don’t let you make this coding choice, so don’t worry about it there.)

Confused about how to apply all of these SEO tips I post here to your Shopify site? Good news! Here’s a list of what is most important for Shopify SEO. Note the attention to setting up your category pages, which is something I completely agree with. (it’s by Ahrefs so of course it pushes their tools; you don’t need to pay for that.)

CONTENT MARKETING & SOCIAL MEDIA (includes blogging & emails)

Some businesses say social media doesn’t work, but maybe they aren’t doing it right. See if you are making one or more of these three mistakes. “Understanding who your target audience is - what they want, what they need, where you fit in, etc. - is critical to maximizing your social media marketing performance.”

Email marketing also works better if you do it right, so here are 5 things you might be doing wrong. And if you like a quick read, here’s an infographic on the psychology of email marketing.

8 ideas for getting more interactions on Facebook (detailed infographic).

More fourth quarter reports continue: Pinterest’s 4th quarter revenue was up 46% but they lost $1.36 billion, and they are introducing a verified merchant program. “Almost all (97%) of the top searches on Pinterest are unbranded, according to the company, giving merchants a chance to stand out.”

Want to tap into that Pinterest traffic? You should because “90% of weekly Pinterest users log in to make buying decisions.” Here are 10 ways to get more attention, followers, and pins.

Like almost all social media, Twitter has an algorithm that mediates what users see (although you can turn it off, or use apps such as Tweetdeck to get around it as a reader). Ranking factors include recency, engagement, media and activity. The article includes a few tips on how to make it work for you, but then slides into promoting its app as the solution - you can just skip that part.

ONLINE ADVERTISING (SEARCH ENGINES, SOCIAL MEDIA, & OTHERS)

Google search ads get more results than Facebook and Instagram, simply because more people who see them want to buy something. “Less expensive products tend to sell better than more expensive ones on Facebook and Instagram, per the study.”

If you are running ads where you can choose your keywords, don’t forget to examine your organic search results and impressions for new words to advertise. Google Search Console is a great source.

If you found Instagram ads too expensive, check out this post on how the ads are priced, which can help you make decisions on your spend.

ECOMMERCE NEWS, IDEAS, TRENDS

Amazon has nearly 40% of the US ecommerce market, according to a report by eMarketer. Etsy is not in the top 10; eBay is 3rd behind Walmart.

Sales on Shopify sites during the Black Friday-Cyber Monday long weekend went up 61% to $3 billion in 2019. They claim that the “direct -to-consumer” approach can be successful for both big & small brands.

Japanese authorities are going after Rakuten for the ecommerce company’s push to make its sellers offer free shipping.

eCommerceBytes’ annual Sellers Choice survey placed eBay first out of the online marketplaces that were rate. Note that this is not a scientific survey and largely covers the site’s readership only. Bonanza was the most improved & Etsy showed the worst drop (from 1st to 5th place).

A review of that article last month that says ecommerce sites should have info pages as well as product pages, if only for SEO reasons. The author approves.

The CBC show Marketplace did a large test buying branded items on AliExpress, Amazon, eBay, Walmart and Wish. It turns out that most were fake.

Facebook’s cryptocurrency plans (Libra) finally have a partner: Shopify. The potential benefits include no credit card processing fees.

BUSINESS & CONSUMER STUDIES, STATS & REPORTS; SOCIOLOGY & PSYCHOLOGY, CUSTOMER SERVICE

Younger people (think Gen Z) expect to see gender treated expansively and beyond traditional stereotypes, and they expect this from companies and advertising. “Half of women and four in 10 men in the U.S. now believe that there is a spectrum of gender identities, according to a recent Ipsos poll titled "The Future of Gender is Increasingly Nonbinary." An additional 16% of those surveyed said they know a person who identifies as transgender”

MISCELLANEOUS (including humour)

Google employees are pushing back against the sea change in the company’s culture and values - and some are being fired.

Turns out that the “Peleton Wife” ad might not have hurt them as much as you might think. However, their stock dropped 12% after the fourth quarter report showed a 77% increase in revenue that still managed to be below market predictions. Interesting discussion around going viral in a negative fashion.

#Cindylouwho2newsupdates #seo #search engine optimization #search engine marketing #Etsynews #etsy #social media #Contentmarketing #Content marketing #ecommerce #Smallbiz #Seotips #Customer service #Ppc advertising #onlinemarketing #ecommercetips #EmailMarketing #socialmedianews

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iluxia · 5 years

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This mug is trending in my hospital right now. Legit it's more popular than me. I am sharing it this morning, post-shift and full of matcha latte, as a part of my effort in fulfilling my civic & professional duty of getting you all to just

GET THE DAMN FLU SHOT!!!

If you have insurance, it will be free somewhere (CVS, Walgreens, the grocery store, or your doctor’s office if you haven’t done anything that prevents you from showing your face there). If you don't have insurance, vaccinefinder.org can get you to somewhere that won't cost you an arm and a leg. Alternatively, here is a table of how much it'll cost you at the usual places in the US for the quadrivalent formulation as an uninsured consumer.

As for my vaccine spiel: I’m sure you’ve read all the articles swimming around in media about this, so I won’t go into the usual why’s. (Yes, for those outside of the USA, here people debate about something as elementary as why should we vaccinate.) I will, however, pull apart a few excuses anti-vaxxers use as shields, excuses I have personally heard before. (Full disclosure, I am a physician.)

"The flu shot makes people sick immediately after vaccination because the vaccine introduces the flu virus into the body, so it actually impedes the immune system from working properly! It doesn’t work!”

This shows very poor to non-existent understanding of how vaccination & the immune system works. The flu vaccine contains inactive, dead virus parts. It introduces your immune system to what the virus looks like; remember the third Harry Potter movie, where they posted pictures of Sirius Black the Death Eater Fugitive on pamphlets to warn the wizarding world about him so they know what he looks like? It’s exactly that. The faster the immune system can recognize an intruder, the faster it can kill it.

“The flu shot has other ingredients in it (like mercury) that cause various side effects from depression and memory loss to cardiovascular disease, ADHD, and autism.”

The flu vaccine used to contain a preservative called thimerosal (ethyl mercury), which is NOT the same as methyl mercury (the toxic kind). Let’s review a little chem here, as painful as those long-buried memories are. Thimerosal is a stable preservative that has been in use in tons of things since the 1920s. There is more mercury in breastmilk than there is in a single flu shot, guys.

A dude named Andrew Wakefield and a few of his buddies published a whack case series in the Lancet in 1998 suggesting that the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine, preserved using thimerosal, predisposed behavioral regression & developmental disorders in children. But the sample size was 12 patients. Twelve. That is negligibly tiny. Obviously they didn’t do their power calcs. And it was a case series - the least reliable type of research you can publish because a case series is anecdotal. Their “data” did not show strong correlation between the MMR vaccine and autism; indeed, their analytical model wasn’t even constructed to examine that hypothesis. Multiple epidemiological studies followed hot on the heels of this paper, refuting its wild claims, but the damage was done & the publicity was already on fire. It sparked a huge anti-vaxxer movement that is responsible, frankly speaking, for the recurrence of eradicated diseases such as measles, which is deadly to little children. [ You can read more about this whole debacle here. ] It was all about the MMR vaccine at first, but “MMR” disappeared and eventually it became “all vaccines cause autism.” This is what happens when you combine poor health education, an irresponsible publishing journal, and an immoral media. The Lancet only formally withdrew this paper from publication in Feb 2010. To this day, I find it difficult to trust the Lancet.

The studies that came after Wakefield’s stupid one all refuted Wakefield’s claims with stronger data, proper analyses, systematic reviews, and actual fucking power calcs, like actual fucking researchers.

Finally, we don’t even fully understand autism. How can you definitely claim that one specific thing can cause it? Remember: correlation =/= causation.

“The CDC promotes flu vaccines because they have financial ties & get kickbacks from Big Pharma. It’s all big business. The flu vaccine doesn’t work.”

Bars and clubs will promote alcohol to you because they get kickbacks from the breweries. It’s all big business. Does that mean that the alcohol doesn’t work?

Why are you okay giving Big Pharma your money for vitamins you don’t really need (most people don’t really need multivitamins, it just makes your pee expensive) but you can’t give them money for life-saving, pandemic-fighting vaccines that COST LESS?

And since we’re talking about business, you should know that vaccines are actually not profitable for pharmaceutical companies, because they have to make entirely new batches EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR. The overheads on that must cost $$$$, I mean, they have to pay the researchers a living wage, and it takes months to make the vaccines. Come on, we all know the real money is made with ridiculously expensive life-saving medications such as insulin and the EpiPen. Duh.

Health is worth more than money, honey. Spend a day in a hospital hooked up to a ventilator with tubes coming out of every orifice and you will never deny this.

“I still get sick after the flu shot. It doesn’t work for me.”

The flu has various strains every year, and the vaccine is only made with the strains they (the researchers) predict will be the most widely distributed across a certain population. It involves a lot of statistics. Does this mean that you should skip the shot? No. Statistically, your chances of getting the most virulent, widely distributed strain is HIGHER than your chances of getting a different strain the vaccine isn’t made with. That statistics course really matters, you know.

Yes, you get a different type of flu vaccine depending on where you are in the world. The northern & southern hemispheres get different vaccine formulations because they typically get different strains. This is also why a flu strain from, say, southern China or India is fucking TERRIFYING for Europe or the US, because we likely will not have any immunity to that shit. (And vice versa.)

The flu virii evolve every year. They get more virulent, more adaptable, and more insidious every time. And do you know how they evolve? Because some asshole somewhere had partial/augmented immunity and the virus evolves under these conditions. This asshole was sick with a different strain of the flu before, but doesn’t believe in the flu shot, so he doesn’t get the one issued this year. He then gets maybe mildly sick with the new flu strain, while his wife is still sick with the previous flu strain he carried. The two strains are exposed to each other and under these conditions, the virus can evolve by mutation or genetic reassortment. Cross-exposure to other viral strains (antigenic drift) is a mechanism for viral variation & results in newer, deadlier strains that both partially immune people (infected before with other strains) AND vaccinated people cannot fight off. Then it spreads to their kid, who spreads it at the daycare, and those kids give it to their parents, who spread it at work... this, folks, is how you get an epidemic.

Vaccination really only works to eliminate a disease when you unilaterally vaccinate the entire population across the board. (As best as you can, anyway.) The vaccine will never work 100% - there is always a margin of error - but if you cover the entire population, your margin becomes more acceptable. Whereas if only some people get vaccinated, then you open up chances for viral mutation.

By the way, you might FEEL sick immediately after the flu shot, but you aren’t sick. That’s your immune system sucking your entire body dry of resources, making your muscles ache & giving you fatigue as it revs up & prepares brand new antibodies for this new virus. This takes a toll on your body, but you can combat the “sick” feeling by exercising lightly, hydrating very well, eating clean, and getting some sleep.

“My child already has a disease that lowers their immune system. If I give them the shot, that’ll completely deplete their remaining reserve. They might get a different infection and die!”

Again, a poor understanding of immune biology. 100% wrong. I give flu vaccines to immunodeficient patients with HIV, transplant patients who are taking immunosuppressants, and patients who are taking meds like Humira (immunosuppressing side effect). In fact, I prioritize the vaccine for them. They, above everyone else, need to be prepared for the coming strains of flu. I am giving their immune system time to prepare. - Of course I will monitor them closely & take appropriate precautions to prevent them from contracting other infections. I’ll support their physiological needs while they convalesce. But immunosuppression is no excuse. (That being said, have a conversation with your physician. Dosing, type, and timing of the vaccine can vary depending on your individual situation & condition.)

“Evidence now suggests that ingredients in flu shots can actually cause serious neurological disorders, like Guillain-Barre syndrome or similar neuromuscular diseases thought to be of autoimmune origin.”

In 1976, the CDC published that there was a risk of Guillain-Barre syndrome happening after a patient got a flu vaccine IF they have had the swine flu vaccine before. The risk was calculated to be 1 in 100,000 people who got the swine flu vaccine. The Institute of Medicine (IOM) did a scientific review on this issue in 2003 and concluded that the people who got the swine flu vaccine in 1976 were at increased risk, but otherwise, there has been no significant change or increase since then. Did you get the swine flu vaccine in 1976? No? Okay, go get the flu shot.

It is true that there have been observed cases where neuromuscular disorders like Guillain-Barre or chronic inflammatory demyelinating polyneuropathy (CIDP) seems to be triggered, or occur after the patient gets the vaccine. We don’t fully understand how or why. I have treated these patients (they are relatively rare, I see maybe 1-2 every year) and they recover well provided competent care at a good hospital. Look out for research on this, but until we definitively know a causative link, it’s foolish to skip a perfectly safe, proven, and highly recommended vaccine to avoid a very narrow “maybe.”

If you have questions, guys, I will answer. Drop me an ask or PM me. But please, please spread the word and get vaccinated.

If you get scared or doubt your decision to get the shot, remember that the only reason we are not all dead from smallpox (it was an epidemic) and cholera (a pandemic) and rabies (from all your pets) and typhoid (also a pandemic) and the fucking black plague is because of that 5ml of liquid in that tiny little syringe.

Vaccines do not cause autism. Vaccines cause adults.

GET. THE. SHOT.

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mostlysignssomeportents · 4 years

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Pluralist, your daily link-dose: 24 Feb 2020

Today’s links

How “Authoritarian Blindness” kept Xi from dealing with coronavirus: Zeynep Tufekci in outstanding form.

The Snowden Archive: every publicly available Snowden doc, collected and annotated.

Key computer vision researcher quits: facial recognition is a moral quagmire.

My interview on adversarial interoperability: you can’t shop your way out of late-stage capitalism.

81 Fortune 100 companies demand binding arbitration: monopoly and its justice system.

I’m coming to Kelowna! Canada Reads is bringing me to the BC interior, March 5.

A flat earther commits suicide by conspiracy theory: conspiracies are comorbid with corruption.

This day in history: 2019, 2015, 2010, 2005

Colophon: Recent publications, current writing projects, upcoming appearances, current reading

How “Authoritarian Blindness” kept Xi from dealing with coronavirus (permalink)

Xi Jinping’s refashioning of the Chinese internet to ratchet up surveillance and censorship made it all but impossible for the Chinese state to use the internet to detect and contain Corona Virus, writes Zeynep Tufekci in The Atlantic. Tufekci talks about “authoritarian blindness,” where people too scared to tell the autocrat the hard truths makes it impossible for the autocrat to set policy that reflects reality.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2020/02/coronavirus-and-blindness-authoritarianism/606922/

(Cue Mao telling China to “eat 5 meals a day” because his apparats were too scared to warn him of impending famine, then selling off the nation’s food reserves for foreign currency because he thought it was surplus. Food production collapsed.)

Before Xi, a certain amount of online dissidence was tolerated because it helped root out dangerously corrupt local leaders before they could do real damage. It’s always hard to make autocracies sustainable because corruption and looting leaves them hollow and brittle.

When Xi took power in 2012, he restored “one man rule” and began a series of maneuvers, including purges, to consolidate power for himself. The rise and rise of China’s mobile internet made this far more effective than at any time in history.

“Authoritarian blindness” kicked off the Hong Kong protests because the state so badly misjudged the cause and severity of the grievances there. The same thing happened in Wuhan when doctors and netizens faced retaliation for describing early virus outbreaks.

The reality-debt built up by official denial always results in reality bankruptcy, eventually – so finally, the reports of the virus were so widespread and alarming they could no longer be suppressed. But by then, the virus had proliferated. This is an important point: “the killer digital app for authoritarianism isn’t listening in on people through increased surveillance, but listening to them as they express their honest opinions, especially complaints.”

That’s how you stabilize the unstable: by using digital authoritarianism to fine tune the minimum viable amount of good governance to diffuse public anger. It’s how you maximize your looting without getting strung up by your ankles.

The Snowden Archive (permalink)

The Snowden Surveillance Archive collects “all documents leaked by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden that have subsequently been published by news media.”

https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/cgi-bin/library.cgi

It’s indexed and searchable, created by Canadian Journalists for Free Expression and the Politics of Surveillance Project at the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto. (Canada is a “Five Eyes” country that partners with the NSA on global mass surveillance)

There’s a “Portable Archive” version – a tarball with all the docs so you can create your own mirror:

https://snowdenarchive.cjfe.org/greenstone/collect/snowden1/portablearchive.html

They provide instructions for turning this into a kiosk they call a “Snowden Archive-in-a-Box.” Costs about CAD120.00

Key computer vision researcher quits (permalink)

Joseph Redmon is the creator of YOLO (You Only Look Once), a key Computer Vision technology. He’s just announced his resignation from computer vision work, citing ethical concerns with Facial Recognition.

https://twitter.com/pjreddie/status/1230523827446091776

His thread is really important, calling out the gap between what ML researchers SAY they want to do about ethics and how they actually deal with ethical issues: “basically all facial recognition work would not get published if we took Broader Impacts sections seriously.”

“There is almost no upside and enormous downside risk.” That’s some serious Oppenheimer stuff right there. The kicker? “For most of grad school I bought in to the myth that science is apolitical and research is objectively moral and good no matter what the subject is.”

My interview on adversarial interoperability (permalink)

The Firewalls Don’t Stop Dragons podcast (which offers information security advice and analysis for non-technical people) just posted part 2 of our interview on Adversarial Interoperability, Right To Repair, and technological fairness.

http://podcast.firewallsdontstopdragons.com/2020/02/24/adversarial-interoperability-part-2/

Part one went live last week:

https://twitter.com/doctorow/status/1229842619380858885

In this one, I try to explain how John Deere’s war on farm-based repairs is connected to Apple’s war on independent repair, and how consumer choices can’t solve either problem — but collective action can!

It’ll take a movement, not individual action. Thankfully, such a movement exists. EFF’s Electronic Frontier Alliance, a network of groups nationwide working on local issues with national coordination. It’s the antidote to individual powerlessness.

https://www.eff.org/electronic-frontier-alliance/allies

81 Fortune 100 companies demand binding arbitration (permalink)

Binding arbitration was originally created as a way for giant corporations to resolve their disputes with each other without decades-long court battles costing tens of millions of dollars. SCOTUS ratified the principal in 1925: firms of similar size and power could use binding arbitration as an alternative to litigation.

http://www.onthecommons.org/magazine/we-now-have-a-justice-system-just-for-corporations

In the century since, corporations have eroded the idea of arbitration as something reserved for co-equals and have turned it into a condition of employment and of being a customer.

In an era of both monopoly and monoposony, it can be hard to find a single employer OR vendor who will conduct business with you unless you first surrender the rights your elected lawmakers decided that you are entitled to.

Today, the largest corporations in the world require you to “agree” to binding arbitration before you can conduct business with them: your monopolistic ISP or cable operator probably does.

As do Walmart, Uber, and Amazon (and not coincidentally, all three have crowded out all the competitors you might choose to take your business to if this strikes you as unfair).

In 2019, SCOTUS ratified the practice.

https://www.cnn.com/2020/02/13/business/binding-arbitration-consumers/index.html

81 out of the Fortune 100 non-negotiably require binding arbitration if you want to conduct business with them. “Arbitration is often confidential and the outcome doesn’t enter the public record” – if you get screwed you won’t know if it’s a one-off or a pattern.

This is especially pernicious in the realm of US health care. There is ONE pain specialist in all of Southern California that my insurer covers who doesn’t require binding arbitration. When I took my daughter to the ER with a broken bone, they threatened not to treat her unless we signed an arbitration waiver – and that ER is now owned by a PE firm that bought every medical practice in a 10mi radius and now they all do it.

We are literally replacing public courts with private corporate justice, where the “judge” is paid by the company that maimed you, or ripped you off, or killed you.

I’m coming to Kelowna! (permalink)

I’ve never been to Kelwona, BC or anywhere in BC apart from Victoria and Vancouver, so I am SO TOTALLY EXCITED to be appearing in Kelowna for Canada Reads on Mar 5. Please come and say hello! (it’s free!)

https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

The event is a collaboration between the Kelowna Public Library and CBC Books, and I’m being emceed and interviewed by Sarah Penton. It’s going to be recorded for airing later as well (I’ll be sure to fold it into my podcast, which you can get here: http://craphound.com/podcast/)

A flat earther commits suicide by conspiracy theory (permalink)

A(nother) flat-earther has tried to prove that the Earth is disc-shaped by launching a homemade rocket. This one (“Mad” Mike Hughes) killed himself by pancaking into the desert.

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/daredevil-mad-mike-hughes-dies-homemade-rocket-launch-filmed-tv-n1141286

This is awful. Jokes about “Darwin Awards” don’t change that.

When you scratch a conspiracist, you generally find two things:

Someone who knows chapter-&-verse about real conspiracies (e.g. “If you think antivax is so outlandish, let me tell you about the Sackler family”)

Someone who has been traumatized by conspiracies (belief that the levees were dynamited during Katrina to drown Black neighborhoods are often embraced by people whose family were flooded out in 58 when the levees in Tupelo were dynamited to drown Black neighborhoods).

A belief that the aerospace industry engages in coverups and conspiracies is not, in and of itself, irrational. Aerospace is the land of conspiracies and coverups. Look at the Boeing 737 Max!

Conspiracies are an epiphenomenon of market concentration. “Two may keep a secret if one of them is dead”: the ability to conspire is a collective action problem, wherein linear increases in the number of conspirators yield geometric increases in the likelihood of defections. When an industry is reduced to 3-5 giants, the likelihood is that every top exec at each company worked as a top exec at one or more of the others (to say nothing of the likelihood of intercompany friendships, marriages, etc). Moreover, an industry that concentrated will almost certainly be regulated by its own former execs, as they are likely the only ones qualified to understand its workings.

Many of us were appalled by the sight of the nation’s tech leaders gathered around a table at Trump Tower after the inauguration.

But we should have been even more alarmed by the realization that all the leaders of the tech industry fit around a single table.

We are living in both a golden age of conspiratorial thinking and of actual conspiracies. The conspiracy theories don’t necessarily refer to the actual conspiracies, but “conspiracy” is a plausible idea with a lot of explanatory power in 2020.

We spend a lot of time wondering about how we can fix the false beliefs that people have, but some of our focus needs to be on reducing the plausibility of conspiracy itself. Make industries more competitive and diverse, make regulators more accountable.

Put out the fires, sure, but clear away the brush so that they don’t keep reigniting.

I strongly recommend Anna Merlan’s REPUBLIC OF LIES for more.

https://boingboing.net/2019/09/21/from-opioids-to-antivax.html

This day in history (permalink)

#15yrsago: Labour MP Brian Sedgemore excoriates his own government’s terror laws in the speech of his lifetime: https://web.archive.org/web/20050227035611/http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200405/cmhansrd/cm050223/debtext/50223-21.htm

#10yrsago: How ducks, Nazis and themeparks gave America its color TV transition: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2010/feb/23/digital-switchover-bbc-spectrum

#5yrsago: Alex Stamos, then CSO of Yahoo, publicly calls out then-NSA Director Adm. Mike Rogers on crypto backdoors: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/yahoo-exec-goes-mano-a-mano-with-nsa-director-over-crypo-backdoors/

#5yrsago: A chronology of the Canadian Conservative Party’s war on science under PM Stephen Harper: https://scienceblogs.com/confessions/2013/05/20/the-canadian-war-on-science-a-long-unexaggerated-devastating-chronological-indictment

#5yrsago: Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’s movie about Edward Snowden, wins the Academy Award for best documentary: https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/edward-snowden-congratulates-laura-poitras-winning-best-documentary-oscar-citizenfour

#1yrago: Every AOC staffer will earn a living wage: https://www.rollcall.com/2019/02/22/alexandria-ocasio-cortezs-call-for-a-living-wage-starts-in-her-office/

#1yrago: Richard Sackler’s “verbal gymnastics” in defending his family’s role in killing 200,000 Americans with opiods: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/02/sackler-behind-oxycontin-fraud-offered-twisted-mind-boggling-defense/

#1yrago: German neo-Nazis use Qanon memes to signal-boost their messages: https://www.thedailybeast.com/how-fringe-groups-are-using-qanon-to-amplify-their-wild-messages

#1yrago: French courts fine UBS €3.7b for helping French plutes dodge their taxes: https://www.thelocal.fr/20190220/breaking-french-court-hits-swiss-bank-ubs-with-37-billion-fine-in-french-tax-fraud-case

#1yrago: Apple to close down its east Texas stores to avoid having any nexus with America’s worst patent court: https://www.macrumors.com/2019/02/22/apple-closing-stores-in-eastern-district-texas/

#1yrago: Small business cancels its unusably slow Frontier internet service, Frontier sticks them with a $4,300 cancellation fee: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2019/02/frontier-demands-4300-cancellation-fee-despite-horribly-slow-internet/

#1yrago: Fast food millionaire complains that social media makes kids feel so entitled that they are no longer willing to work for free: https://amp.news.com.au/finance/work/careers/muffin-break-boss-fury-over-youth-who-wont-work-unpaid/news-story/57607ea9a1bbe52ba7746cff031306f2

#1yrago: Apps built with Facebook’s SDK shovel incredible quantities of incredibly sensitive data into Facebook’s gaping maw: https://www.cnbc.com/2019/02/22/facebook-receives-personal-health-data-from-apps-wsj.html

#1yrago: Super-high end prop horror-movie eyeballs, including kits to make your own: https://fourthsealstudios.com/

#1yrago: EU advances its catastrophic Copyright Directive without fixing any of its most dangerous flaws: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/02/european-governments-approve-controversial-new-copyright-law/

Colophon (permalink)

Today’s top sources: Four Short Links (https://www.oreilly.com/feed/four-short-links), Slashdot (https://slashdot.org), Naked Capitalism (https://nakedcapitalism.com/”).

Hugo nominators! My story “Unauthorized Bread” is eligible in the Novella category and you can read it free on Ars Technica: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-near-future-tale-of-refugees-and-sinister-iot-appliances/

Upcoming appearances:

Canada Reads Kelowna: March 5, 6PM, Kelowna Library, 1380 Ellis Street, with CBC’s Sarah Penton https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/cbc-radio-presents-in-conversation-with-cory-doctorow-tickets-96154415445

Currently writing: I just finished a short story, “The Canadian Miracle,” for MIT Tech Review. It’s a story set in the world of my next novel, “The Lost Cause,” a post-GND novel about truth and reconciliation. I’m getting geared up to start work on the novel now, though the timing is going to depend on another pending commission (I’ve been solicited by an NGO) to write a short story set in the world’s prehistory.

Currently reading: I finished Andrea Bernstein’s “American Oligarchs” this week; it’s a magnificent history of the Kushner and Trump families, showing how they cheated, stole and lied their way into power. I’m getting really into Anna Weiner’s memoir about tech, “Uncanny Valley.” I just loaded Matt Stoller’s “Goliath” onto my underwater MP3 player and I’m listening to it as I swim laps.

Latest podcast: Persuasion, Adaptation, and the Arms Race for Your Attention: https://craphound.com/podcast/2020/02/10/persuasion-adaptation-and-the-arms-race-for-your-attention/

Upcoming books: “Poesy the Monster Slayer” (Jul 2020), a picture book about monsters, bedtime, gender, and kicking ass. Pre-order here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781626723627?utm_source=socialmedia&utm_medium=socialpost&utm_term=na-poesycorypreorder&utm_content=na-preorder-buynow&utm_campaign=9781626723627

(we’re having a launch for it in Burbank on July 11 at Dark Delicacies and you can get me AND Poesy to sign it and Dark Del will ship it to the monster kids in your life in time for the release date).

“Attack Surface”: The third Little Brother book, Oct 20, 2020.

“Little Brother/Homeland”: A reissue omnibus edition with a very special, s00per s33kr1t intro.

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rainbow-filmnerd · 5 years

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FEB Cosplay Update #4 + Date

Ugh, I wanted to wait until we got more guest announcements, but I think the ones we have now are all we're gonna get. This does give me more time to wander around, but a few things are likely set in stone after seeing the draft schedule. The final schedule will be posted on the 6th, so I'll see what is to be expected to happen on the day I go. Earlier this week, my Dad got two tickets for SATURDAY!

That's right, in two weeks from tomorrow, I'm going to FanExpo Boston 2019! I'm super excited to go! I honestly don't know what is officially expected to happen then, but one thing is for sure; I'm going to meet Sean Astin! There is also a Twisted Toonz panel scheduled to possibly happen on Saturday (the reading is for Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. Never was interested in the 1971 movie, but I know the story enough via buzz on the film and the Tim Burton remake to understand the context), and also a Stranger Things themed escape room my Dad and I might try out. I don't know what else is set to happen, but I'll play it by ear as the 17th draws closer.

As for my cosplay, I've been working on the cape for the past few days, and it's a time consuming process. The new material I have isn't long enough on the sides, and my arms stick out. However, I have been using scraps from that material as well as my first cape to panel the sides and make it longer. I have finished working on the blue, and I started on the red today. Since I have next Monday-Friday off from work, I'll most likely be able to finish sewing the cape in that week. I have already completed the collar, and I just need to sew it on the completed cape, stitch on a hook and eye and sew on the buttons and chain (my Dad offered to help shorten the chain).

I have no pictures this time, but I will present the final product once I finish the cape.

#fanexpo boston #fanexpo #fan expo boston #boston comic con #comic con #kimmy's rambles

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jennygoeseastbay · 5 years

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2018 in Review

So I used to do one of these every year on my Livejournal, and I completely blew it off in 2017 because I kind of abandoned that medium, and because the last month of that year was complete consumed with packing and moving. I’m not entirely certain I want to get more active on here, but for now this is a good place for me to post this, simply to have the written record of my existence that I need in order to process all that has happened and reflect on how it has helped me to grow and improve as a person. If I’m feeling really ambitious, I might even backtrack and do one for 2017 next week, because I like to be complete in my self-documentation. ;)

01. What did you do in 2018 that you'd never done before? Visited Washington DC for the first time.

Visited the Los Cabos region of Mexico for the first time.

Closed a major gift from someone who had not already had decades of cultivation from their University.

Visited even more areas of California that were new to me, including Anaheim, Santa Barbara, Santa Maria, Pismo Beach, Paso Robles, and Lake Tahoe (I guess that also includes Nevada since we stayed in Carson City)

Visited Ashland Oregon for the first time.

Sold a piece of real estate. Phew!

Practiced Yin Yoga. (And walking meditation!)

Engaged in a yoga hike!

Also tried yoga with goats!

Attended WonderCon

Attended a county fair.

Road a bicycle somewhere other than a residential street

Tried kayaking

Ran a trail run race

02. Did you keep your New Years' resolutions, and will you make more for next year?

I never really make concrete resolutions, just some general proclamations about eating better, and putting more time into fitness and writing. Of these three things, the one I was most successful at this year, surprisingly enough, was eating better. In September I realized that it was time for a physical tune-up, and so I rejoined WW after a long time away, and though I still have a few pounds to go, I’ve been happy to have gotten a bit sleeker after dialing back the bread and cheese. I also attended a writing group called Shut Up and Write a couple times, and I’d like to become more of a regular at their cafe sessions in 2019, because I’ve found that their method (literally a concentrated hour of shutting up and writing) has been helpful the two times I’ve gone.

03. Did anyone close to you give birth? My dear friends Drew and Kelly had their first child in September. And my friend Lynn had her second child, a little girl, just a couple weeks ago. 04. Did anyone close to you die? Not super close, but a professor at UC Davis who I had worked with closely, passed very unexpectedly right before Halloween. 05. What countries did you visit? Mexico! Finally broke in my current passport with a new stamp! 06. What would you like to have in 2019 that you lacked in 2018? Good novel progress. Or more discipline on some other fiction and an essay that I just started tinkering with. A legit boyfriend. 07. What date(s) from 2018 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?

January 2 was my first day on the job at UC Davis.

January 7 was a super fun evening at the Museum of Ice Cream in SF

January 13-15 was a wonderful weekend in Seattle where I got to meet my nephew Apollo for the first time and photograph his first swimming lesson for his parents.

January 20 was my second Women’s March outing in Sac with my friend Jade and her little ones.

January 27 was a day when I got to play tour guide for my friend Gricel and her husband when they were in SF visiting for the first time.

Feb. 10 and 11 was a fun weekend in Berkeley and SF, being silly and singing loudly with my former Cal colleagues who had become dear friends.

March 23-25 Was my whirlwind Anaheim weekend at Wondercon, and I got to catch up with my friend Mike, whom I’d not seen in a couple years.

March 30-April 1 was an epic road trip weekend, the first of what my friend Maya and I now call our Girls Gone Sensibly Wild excursions. We drove to Santa Barbara and visited the deserted UC campus there (it was closed for spring break) and also enjoyed an amazing live show featuring Dave Hause, Dan Andriano, and Cory Branan, among others at the Cold Spring Tavern. And then got a joint membership at Peachy Canyon Winery on our way back, because it was one of the few establishments open on Easter Sunday.

April 22 was Earth Day, and prompted me to venture out to Marin for an impromptu yoga hike at Rodeo Beach.

May 14 was my first appointment with a new hair stylist who would also unexpectedly become a trusted friend.

May 24 was my first time seeing Depeche Mode live, and it was incredible.

June 8-10 was my second of two hit it and quit it Chicago trips (although really, the first one wasn’t so much Chicago as it was Joliet) this year, and allowed me to reconnect with my dear friends Drew and Kelly (Drew finished his PhD at UChicago and I attended his commencement and hooding), have a day at the zoo with my friend Dawn, and also road trip to WI with my friend Mary for a beautiful and moving Lights Festival experience together.

June 30 was the day I attended my first ever CalShakes performance with Maya and our mutual friend Paola (Girls Gone Sensibly Wild continued!), and Maya also got me on a bike for the first time in ages, thanks to LimeBikes being available at the Pleasant Hill BART station. We took a short, wobbly, but fun ride down the Iron Horse Trail.

July 1 was the day I learned to kayak and surprisingly got myself through 5 miles of the Russian River without tipping over or running out of steam.

July 26 saw me reuniting with my dear pals Shannon and Glenn, when they were visiting the Sac area for a wedding.

July 27-29 was the weekend I drove up to Ashland to enjoy some time with my friend Debbie and to experience the Oregon Shakespeare Festival for the first time.

August 3-6 was when I somewhat unexpectedly had the delight of hosting my friend Clarise for a weekend visit. We drove down to Pacifica for the International Dog Surfing competition and I schooled her in the ways of California wine as much as I could with my limited knowledge.

The following weekend, August 9-13, I had a lovely time hosting and touring around with my 16 year old niece, and got to introduce her to the joy that is Santa Cruz. And yoga with goats!

August 30-Sept. 4 was when I hosted (this is a recurring theme in August, isn’t it?) my Aunt Sherrie for local sightseeing and a road trip up to Lake Tahoe.

Sept. 22-24 saw me heading down to L.A. for my cousin Katie’s wedding and some work meetings. It was the first time in ages that I got to connect with that specific branch of my family, and get to know them a bit better.

Sept. 29 was my first AFSP walk in Sac. And i was joined by Jade, her visiting mom, and her three little ones.

Sept. 30 was the really long hair session with Mason that helped solidify that we were legit friends (and included a shared sunset from the window of his hair studio!) and a quick follow up appointment on Oct. 3 allowed us to enjoy a rainbow and storm together.

Oct. 19-21 saw Maya and I doing another Girls Gone Sensibly Wild road trip. Back to Peachy Canyon to pick up some wine, and also Pismo Beach and Santa Maria for our first visit to a really lovely winery called Foxen.

Oct. 26 was quite possibly my all-time favorite Brian Fallon performance. It was just him alternating between his acoustic guitar and an electric piano, and he was joined by Craig Finn from The Hold Steady, who also did his own acoustic set.

Oct. 27 I got to introduce my new friend Torrey to the Old Sugar Mill in Clarksburg, and we did a fun wine and Halloween candy pairing and some epic day drinking.

Nov. 3 saw me reuniting with my Cal crew and a sprinkling of East Bay friends at Fillmore Karaoke, for an epic night of loud singing as an early celebration of my 40th bday. So much wine. Actually too much, but for a birthday, that’s acceptable!

Nov. 4-6 I was in Indianapolis for work, and though the work part wasn’t particularly memorable, I was super honored and thrilled that my BFF Dawn drove all the way down from Joliet IL with her two boys to have dinner with me on my first night there.

Nov. 9 was an epic Local H show in Sac. Also a welcome break in the midst of a period of forced solitude, after the Camp Fire residual smoke prompted my whole office to work from home for about a week to protect us from the terrible air quality.

Nov. 18 was the day we had the beautiful service honoring the life of a beloved professor who passed.

Nov. 24-29 was my trip to Cabo with my Aunt Sherrie, and was also my official bday celebration.

Dec. 9-12 was my DC trip, which also allowed me to catch up with my friend Max, who lives in Baltimore, and my friend Stacey, who also happened to be there for her own work purposes.

Dec. 15 was my full day of yoga retreating at Green Gulch Ranch in Marin, and then I drove to the East Bay to catch up with Maya at Calicraft, which is one of our favorite craft distilleries in the area.

Dec. 16 was a white elephant celebration in Pleasant Hill that allowed me to unexpectedly meet a new, interesting friend.

08. What was your biggest achievement of the year? So far, meeting all expectations at my new job and closing a major gift earlier than is required. Also not losing my shit during the condo selling process, even though there were a lot of reasons to do so.

09. What was your biggest failure? I wrote VERY little fiction. But I did dip my toe back into writing in general, so I guess there’s that. 10. Did you suffer illness or injury? I took a tumble at home that left my tailbone a bit tender about a month ago. But otherwise, no, pretty healthy, even after getting rear-ended in my car! 11. What was the best thing you bought? Various travel tickets, both air and rail. A beautiful new necklace that I found at the holiday market in D.C. All the concert tickets that provided soul-fueling live music.

12. Whose behavior merited celebration?

Mine! I adjusted to a new job and an unfamiliar setting and managed to acquire a few new friends while also maintaining the East Bay friendships that meant the most to me. 13. Whose behavior made you appalled and depressed? Who else but certain immediate family members? 14. Where did most of your money go? Rent. Travel. Wine, and to a lesser extent, craft beer, now that I’ve picked up a taste for stouts and sours. 15. What song will always remind you of 2018?

Anything off of Sleepwalkers by Brian Fallon

Anything off of Be More Kind by Frank Turner

Chariot by Gavin DeGraw

Tall Green Grass by Cory Branan

16. Compared to this time last year, you are: Thinner and sleeker, weight-wise

More willing to make room for others and open my life and space to them (friend and lover both) Still as sleep-deprived as ever 17. What do you wish you'd done more of? Novel writing, as always. Flirting. And kissing. 18. What do you wish you'd done less of? Angsting over adulting-related things that were either beyond my control or that ended up working out just as they should.

19. How will you be spending/did you spend Christmas?

I’m driving to Santa Cruz on Xmas Eve and treating myself to an overnight stay so that I can indulge in my happy place and a sunset hike. Also get to celebrate Boxing Day for the first time with my friend Jade and her brood back in Sac.

20. How will you be spending/did you spend New Year’s Eve? Original plan was to hang at my friend Jade’s place with her kids, movies and snacks. But just learned the wee ones are ill, so now I’m not sure what I’m doing. That was how I spent last year (the original plan, that is), with the main difference being that last year I also went to a two-hour yin workshop beforehand, which was how I discovered my current yoga studio, and discovered how much I enjoy yin practice in general. 21. Did you fall in love in 2018?

No. But I made more effort to pursue it, and had more options than I think I’ve ever had in a single year. Which was kind of encouraging even if each one was relatively short-lived.

22. How many one-night stands? I always laugh when I read this question. How about I just wink knowingly and say a lady never tells? 23. What was your favorite TV program? Supernatural. iZombie. To a lesser extent, Riverdale, even though I’m still pretty behind on that one. Sons of Anarchy (which I know is old but I’m playing catchup via Netflix and Hulu) And as a guilty pleasure, Total Divas. And of course, I'm still casually following WWE on the WWE network, though the only thing I’m finding compelling aside from the women’s matches are the Brits featured on the UK specific programming. 24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year? No, I don't think so. 25. What was the best book you read? I finally got into the Harry Potter series and I’m really enjoying it. I just finished the Order of the Phoenix, and have the next installment requested from the library. 26. What was your greatest musical discovery? Not entirely new, but my appreciation for Cory Branan was reinforced and amplified after seeing him in Santa Barbara. And I’m also on a rediscovery tear with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Cold War Kids.

27. What did you want and get? Reassurance that this move to Sac was the right next step, after I settled in to my new role relatively easily. 28. What did you want and not get? Romantic love for an extended period. More down time. 29. What was your favorite film(s) of this year? Bohemian Rhapsody, even though I know it had some historical inaccuracies.

A Quiet Place was hard because of the ending, but decent as well.

And the latest Halloween was hella satisfying, especially since I caught it after needing an escape after learning about the passing of the professor I mentioned earlier.

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you? I prepped for my Cabo departure, went exploring at the Cosumnes River Trail, which is also a bird sanctuary, and caught the movie Widows with my work friend Christine. Then she took me to Panera for dinner. Couldnt’ do much more than that since I had a 5 am flight the following morning. I turned 40.

31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying? Love, as always. 32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2018? Activewear as much as possible. But never enough. 33. What kept you sane? My friends. The various trips I took and rock shows I attended. Junk food. Wandering in nature.

34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most? Jensen Ackles. Tom Hiddleston. Charlie Hunnan. Idris Elba. My taste doesn't change much. 35. Who did you miss? Dawn. Becca. Kelly and Drew. Stephanie and Scott. Rob. Elspeth. Mike K. Jason. 36. Who was the best new person you met?

Ellen

Mason

Torrey

Anthony

37. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2018 Never underestimate my own ability to adapt to new situations, and to handle my own shit like a boss. I had a few challenging things thrown at me, namely the condo selling process, and the logistical gymnastics that followed after having to bring my car in for a bumper repair following a recent rear-ending, and though I felt tested by both of those situations, I ultimately succeeded at navigating both of them to a positive end.

38. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:

I’m always starting over....

I don’t wanna waste the nights in my life

But I never fit in, or felt home in my skin.

I’m waiting on a big love, baby.

--Brian Fallon, “Her Majesty’s Service”

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