So I just officially finished Dreamcatcher and I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not gay until the minds touch.

Ignore how beat up it is, i got this copy from my local haunted used bookstore, but here it is being once again relinquished to my Stephen King shelf.

This book has fucked with me many times. It has caused me immense pain. I am way too attached to the characters. I miss Beaver. I have started chewing on toothpicks instead of picking my skin. I am thinking of changing my name to Jonesy. Help. But also don’t help, I am fine. It’s over. The aliens have been defeated.

Goodnight shit-weasels. SSDD.

Have Faith

The last time I set foot in a church was not by choice, but because my mom wanted the whole family to attend the Mother’s Day mass. It was May of 2017, and it was the last place I wanted to be. I had to sit through the whole service, bored out of my mind, unable to focus on anything the priest was saying. I tried to appear somewhat sharp for my mother’s sake, but to no avail. I can’t remember exactly when I decided to drop my affiliation with Catholicism, but it has been awhile since I had much faith in the Man Upstairs.

I sincerely believe that my loss of faith has something to do with the fact that my elementary and middle school education was in a private, Catholic institution. Maybe it was the teachers, or maybe it was my classmates that spoiled it for me, but upon reaching the eighth grade, I started to question basically everything that I had previously believed in under the Catholic faith. I clearly remember one day in late February of  2014 where I had my own little epiphany about my faith, or rather my lack of it. I was walking home from school. It was a particularly warm day in February- at least, as warm as it can be during late winter in Michigan. The sun was shining brightly, and the rays were bouncing off the dripping snow mounds that bordered the pavement. I was at the age of developing my own opinionated and rebellious thoughts, so naturally I was lost in my own mind as I dragged my snowboots across the icy ground. I began to wonder about a lot of things. What makes the snow so white? How does snow collect in such a way? Why is it that the sun rays don’t melt the snow faster? What is the sun? What’s up with our solar system anyway? All these questions, of course, could be answered easily with “God made it so”, but that was not good enough for me.

When I mentioned my questions to my parents at the dinner table, they gave me the expected answer. “Well, because that’s how God wants it. He wants the snow to look like that, so it just does.” This made me even more confused and frustrated. Obviously it could be explained with science, so why did they insist on this deity instead? I tried not to delve into this too much, and focus on what really mattered: my confirmation ceremony. At least, I thought it mattered. I was wrong about that too, but more about that later.

I remember a time when I thought that dropping your religion was something shocking, even scandalous. When, back in my elementary days, my best friend told me that her brother didn’t go to church anymore, I was shocked (and secretly intrigued). I suppose that even then, I felt that “church” was a boring place where I wasted my time. I never paid much attention anyways, no matter how stern the nuns were, no matter how funny the homilies were, no matter how many bathroom breaks I got.

I think it was sometime around my junior year of high school when I completely dropped religion as a part of my life. At 16 years old, I was very sure of this; it was a world “with which I no longer wanted to have anything to do,” as Hermann Hesse stated in Demian. Before this, though, religion was something obligatory for me. What I mean to say is that after my confirmation ceremony, I really did not feel the sense of community that one should apparently be feeling when you get that blessing from the Bishop. In the Catholic religion, the confirmation ceremony is the final step for a child before they become an “adult” in the community, similar to a Jewish bar and bat mitzvah. But I felt no different leaving the church than I did walking in. So much for faith, right?

Something else that I have come to realize is that I never felt that religion was a big part of my life. I had a subconscious set of rules that I followed, which had formed based on my exposure to Catholicism for my entire life, but that’s where the line is drawn. As I mentioned earlier, I never had that special feeling of being “fully integrated into the community” when I got confirmed. I never had that special epiphany. My soul (whatever that is) was neither touched by nor filled with the Holy Spirit. I think that that point in my life was when I really doubted all the things that were being told to me by my teachers, my family members, and the priests.

Going to a public high school really turned my life towards the better. I didn't have to go to religion class. I wasn't tested on how well I knew the 10 Commandments. I didn’t have to memorize the Apostles Creed. I didn’t have to sing questionable hymns in a dimly lit church full of kids who all wanted the same thing: to play outside on the playscape, and then go home. I can still appreciate churches and cathedrals for their architecture, though, and the purposes that they served. Not only a beautiful meeting place for people of a strong community, but also a safe house. Namely, the grand cathedrals in England that served as shelters during the Blitz of World War II, so that’s something.

My decision to be an ex-Catholic (as dramatic as that sounds) has had some negative repercussions amongst my family. My parents, naturally, attempted to support me in my endeavours, and said that they would “try to respect my opinions”. After the first child, it gets easier. My sister, too, is an ex-Catholic. She was more discrete about dropping her affiliation with the religion, though. First, she stopped going to mass. It always starts with that. Then, she just stated that she was no longer Catholic, one day in the summer. It was quite a surprise for my parents, but they dealt with it easily. It was definitely more smooth than me literally answering my mother’s question of “How was your day at school?” with “I’m not a Catholic anymore,” but I digress. Perhaps my sister had something to do with my own loss of interest in religion. I did look up to her, after all. She was the original, and I was the CNTRL C + CNTRL V. Old habits die hard, I guess.

My parents are fine with it now, but there were definite instances where my “atheism was getting in the way”. Evenings at the dinner table were always fun, when they didn’t end up with someone stomping off to the porch to angrily fume in the outside air. We tried to keep the conversations away from anything politics, religion, and/or business-related, but sometimes the conversations were as wild as a mare, and we were unable to control it when it got out of hand.

As I think it over, I’ve come to the conclusion that religion has, in a way, held me back in many aspects of my life. There are certain morals based around Catholicism that I still hold to myself, but these morals have restricted me in building lasting relationships with people. What’s more is that I was very biased against many different kinds of people for most of my childhood. Due to how my parents connected religion to politics, I remember being furious when seeing the final results of the 2008 Presidential Election, only because my dad was angry that a Democrat had won. I did not know a single policy of the government at that time, but since the Church and the State was so connected in my family, I equated one party with good and moral people (Republicans), and the other with the exact opposite (Democrats). This too, has changed for me. In this way, I was held back from realizing my own political views, which are very different from my parents. They now set me apart from all members of my family, which can be very alienating.

I never got the chance to choose my religion, so that could also be a contributing factor to the grand question of why I dropped religion. Do I want to follow a different religion in the future? This is something I have definitely thought about and strongly considered, but to no avail. There are so many options that I could explore and research; but would I be able to find the right one for me? This calls for me to do some reflecting on myself, and what morals I hold close. I could be a Deist, a Wiccan, an Atheist, a Druid, a Heathen, an Agnostic, a Taoist- the possibilities are truly endless. For now, however, I simply wish to leave that part of my life empty. Maybe one day, if something really calls to me and draws me in, then I’ll see where it takes me. Would I ever go back to Catholicism? No. I had quite the ride, but it was not the one for me.

As for myself, I can acknowledge that I fall under the “agnostic” category. Maybe someday, I’ll find a faith that I can follow willingly. Maybe someday, I can be a part of a community that shares the same beliefs, and has utter confidence in those beliefs. Maybe someday, I’ll find a group of people that practice what they preach, and they will accept me into their company. But as for now, I can only twiddle my thumbs and wonder about a lot of things. What makes the snow so white? How does snow collect in such a way? Why is it that the sun rays don’t melt the snow faster? What is the sun? What’s up with our solar system anyway? 

Even now, in all my adult confidence, I have a hard time admitting that I do not follow any religion. I’ve been so used to simply saying “I’m Catholic” that saying anything else still feels odd. I don’t go into details unless someone asks; the story is not that extravagant anyway. It is even more challenging for me to admit that I am an agnostic. It’s less acknowledged than Atheism, but still relevant. The part that really throws people off is how different it is than Atheism, and different still from not following a religion. Agnosticism is, in simplest terms, that the existence of any deity or higher being is unknown. There’s something unexplainable going on, so I couldn’t explain it to you if I had all the time in the world. For now, I am neither denying, nor agreeing with anyone. I’d like to keep it that way for a while.

| Edsel Euler |

Name: Edsel Jack Lincoln Euler

Nickname:  Red

Age: 20

Birthday: December 13th, 2082

Height: 5’10

Weight: 173lbs

Specials: Str  3 - Per 10 - End 8  - Cha 1  - Int  8 - Agi  12 - Luck - 3

Eyes: Hazel gray

Hair: Vibrant ginger, always kept a little long (like his father), and sometimes pulled up into a ponytail.

Body type: He likes to run and climb a lot, so he has toned legs and arms. Over all not particularly strong, kind of scrawny compared to his brother. Still says he is stronger than Elijah. Actually isn’t.

References: Here

Status Pre-War: Not born yet.

Status Currently: Causing chaos and explosions in Appalachia and giving his brother a life long headache.

Relationship Status: Taken

Spouse(s)/Partners: Lena Riggs

Sexuality: Heterosexual

Gender: Male

Ethnicity: Greek/American

Family: Red’s father is Ford Euler, who is the brother of Jack Euler. Ford is mostly ghoulified,  quiet, mild tempered and has severe anxiety. He barely ever leaves their home and if he does, Red’s Aunt Jolene has to come with him. Ford used to be slightly more adventurous before the war, but after the “loss" of his best friend and brother, Jack, and the death of his wife Alyce, his disability became crippling and he can’t do much without falling into a panic.

Red’s mother, Alcyoneus, was a psychiatrist before the war who became a Responder afterwards. She came upon the Euler homestead while searching for survivors and for some reason was immediately smitten with Ford (who was so shy he could barely formulate a sentence when around her). She ended up staying and eventually married him, but died from complications of child birth shortly after having the twins.

His Aunt Jolene and her wife Emma also live with them, along with her daughter Lorna May. Lorna May is Red’s best friend and partner in crime since he was born. They both get into a lot of reckless mischief together and Red has been trying to beat her in a fight for as long as he was able to swing a punch. Lorna May has always won (and broken his nose a couple times), but he still tries.

His twin brother is Elijah Euler. Elijah is Red’s complete opposite. Where Red is full of emotions that are all on the surface, Elijah keeps his locked up deep inside and very rarely shows them. He comes off harsh and aggressive, but Red loves him excessively and smothers him in affection (much to Eli’s chagrin). Despite that, Eli is extremely protective of both Red and Lorna May and even knocked out Lorna May’s vaultie boyfriend for enthusiastically telling Red that he was named after the ugliest car ever manufactured. He also completely destroys anyone who dares to mess with Ford, but he is the only one in their family who doesn’t baby him for his disabilities.

Languages: English

Disabilities/Illnesses/Injuries: Red has scars on his face which are the beginnings of ghoulification. He has panic attacks about it which are completely paralyzing, similar to his father’s brand of anxiety.

Allergies: None.

Scars: Losing the skin across his right cheek up to his ear. Other much smaller spots showing the signs of ghoulification along his chest, right leg, and hips. Tons of scars on his legs and elbows from being extremely clumsy and hurting himself all the time. Burn scar on the front and side of his left shoulder… from playing with explosives.

Physical traits: Red has very large eyes with long dark eyelashes. He has freckles which are somewhat hidden because of the rosacea on his cheeks, his beard, and the scars, and otherwise looks almost exactly like his mother; with a huge mouth and overbite that always looks vaguely like he’s grinning, a very long pointed nose, an unpronounced forehead, and big ears. His twin, looking more like Ford, looks almost nothing like him.

Voice: He always sounds very upbeat and happy, his voice is not very deep and sometimes he talks so fast that his words blend together. He does not have the country accent that Lorna May has, and likes to poke fun at her when she accidentally lets it slip too much (and you better believe he gets punched).

Clothing: More often than anything, Red wears dresses. Eli questions his fashion choices all the time, and there is really no reason, he just likes them. He usually wears a cowboy hat and either the scarf his mother made for Ford covering the lower half of his face, a surgical mask, or an old faded red bandana Lena gave him because he is self conscious about his scars. When it is too cold to wear a dress, he has black military boots he wears with jeans and either just a sweater as a shirt or a ragged fur-lined vest with any variety of shirt under.

Fashion Style/Lifestye: Cowboy in a pretty dress…

Weapon of Choice:  Bolt action hunting rifle (with a silencer) and a clunky old pump action shotgun.

Skills: Red is very good with a rifle and always enjoys hunting. He is extremely stealthy (when he wants to be, otherwise he can be just as reckless as his cousin), even choosing to mostly wear soft-soled sneakers to assist in his preferred combat method. He’s also able to run for pretty much forever and rarely gets tired, much like Lorna May. Very good with explosives, after many failed and painful trials. And he’s a fantastic cook, as long as what you’re hoping to eat is mostly meat.

Weaknesses: Way too emotional a lot of the time, easily gets his feelings hurt, relies on his brother too much. Also has bouts of anxiety like his dad.

Poor skills: Poor depth perception, super clumsy, easily distracted: he falls off of cliffs a lot. Good thing there are stimpaks, otherwise he’d pretty much have broken bones all the time. He’s also not very strong and therefore isn’t too great at hand to hand combat (though he would tell you otherwise). For some reason always thinks leaping off a tall building/mountain is the best way down instead of, y'know… stairs?

Affiliations: Vault 76 dwellers

Former Affiliations: None.

Enemies: None.

Neutral Affiliations: Responders.

Religion: Agnostic

Likes: His family, his brother especially, hunting, cooking, cars (for exploding), setting things on fire, playing banjo (though he isn’t that great), battling Lorna May,  climbing up the tallest things he can find and just admiring the view. And then jumping off.

Dislikes: Jolene and Ford have had their orchard since before the war, and Red’s very least favorite chore is always going out and picking the peaches. He would much rather go out with a pistol and shoot mole rats while Eli does the picking. He also isn’t a fan of snow. He was born in a nuclear winter, he’d be happy to never see snow again (it’s slightly better when Lena is around to enjoy it with).

Hates: His scars.

Friends: Lorna May Euler, Elijah Euler, Jimmy, Lena Riggs, Gilroy O’Niell, Ava (who he also used to have a crush on but… don’t tell Lena, she’s scary when she’s jealous), Daisy Wilson

Acquaintances: Other Vault dwellers he has come upon in his travels

Former friends: After the death of Alyce, Jolene became even more fiercely protective of her family. Elijah and Red were very rarely allowed to associate with outsiders until they were much older, unlike Lorna May,  so they didn’t meet many other humans before the Vault opened.

Enemies: Eli’s pet squirrel. He hates that thing. Plus Eli gives it more affection than he gives him…

Also Chester Sullivan, because he is terrifying.

Pets: None.

Personality: Red is energetic and mostly always happy, but he definitely wears his heart on his sleeve. Despite his very low charisma, he is not really that shy and has a hard time containing his feelings, and he will blurt things out without actually meaning to. He also is definitely an instigator and can pester people about things if he thinks it’s funny to. Despite growing up in complete solitude from other humans, he is very empathetic and always tries to help people even if it is definitely not a good idea to do so.

He is very expressive, loving and completely loyal to those he cares for. Because of his lack of previous socialization, however, he has absolutely no idea how to handle it when he has a crush on someone, and also becomes smitten nearly immediately after meeting them. Where ordinarily he is extremely affectionate to everyone, if he likes someone romantically he’s more of the awkward high-five/thumbs up instead of kiss kind of guy and would take a very long time before getting to anything more than that.

Favorite color: Though everyone assumes it is red because of his nickname, it’s actually pink and purple.

Favorite foods:  He makes some excellent opossum bacon. Also his Aunt Jolene’s pumpkin pie.

Favorite drinks: Mutfruit juice, Nuka Cola Quantum, coffee (not that he needs it), moonshine (which he makes himself).

Favorite Sweets: Blackberry cobbler, peach cobbler, pumpkin pie, just about any baked sweets and pastries.

_____________________________________

Other info: He later has three kids with Lena; their son, Landon Gabriel Adam Euler, and twin daughters, Lindsay Lee Alyce Euler and Winnebago “Winnie” Edsel Angela Euler.

By the time of Fallout 4, Red is still alive and completely ghoulified along with Ford.

Thanks as always @madddraws for the profile layout!

Y’all don’t understand how heated and passionate I get when talking about demons and/or the devil lmao

If y’all want to read my ramblings on the topic it’ll be under the cut

At the risk of sounding like a wild asshole, it’s just a lot of fun to poke holes in all the little stories and logic they have to ‘back’ the mythology... Because first of all nowhere in the actual scripture do they ever actually Say where the demons come from... I know there’s some accepted theory that they fell when Lucifer fell but, again, nowhere in any scripture does it actually confirm that (side note how funny is it that Lucifer used to be Gods favorite angel before he fell like... oh my god...). The other thing I find silly is how some people will start talking about how demons are this constantly dying thing that need our life force in order to survive, thus is why they’re so parasitic and constantly trying to take over humans. Which don’t get me wrong, from a mythological standpoint that’s actually pretty cool and fascinating, but some start applying that to Lucifer too and it’s like???? If these figures really do exist, wouldn’t... that basically be the end of the world??? Because from my understanding God and Lucifer are essentially supposed to be the ‘yin and yang’ of the universe; one can’t exist without the other

That’s another thing why does everyone make Lucifer out to be this horrifically bad character? Because really if you think about it he’s just kinda out to do his own thing, live his own life and make his own destiny and have a little fun while doing it. You try to live the perfect christian life and tell me how happy you are after like.... 20 years on strictly that alone. But I mean he’s also technically punishing the people who really deserve it. So??? Idk I personally have a very hard time understanding why the religious think of him as so bad-- keep in mind I myself am agnostic. 

I dunno dude, I don’t believe in any of it but like I stated before, from a mythological standpoint I think it’s pretty interesting. Could do with a little less ‘holier than thou’ stigma that it’s grown over the years but that’s just me

Either way I always find it interesting to talk about the actual (arch)angels, demons, and the devil to chill christians/mormons because it’s just? Interesting to discuss such a thing and see the two converging view points. I myself being agnostic and looking at it from a purely mythological standpoint like how you’d view say the Greek Gods or the Egyptian Gods, vs how someone who actually believes in the religion to view it. See what you both agree on, disagree on, etc in a mutually respectful and mature conversation

tl;dr - I like demons and the devil and I think some of the stories in the bible/scriptures don’t make a lick of sense but are still interesting from a mythological standpoint 

Also massive disclaimer I don’t hate people who’re christians/mormons and I’m not telling you your religion is shit lmao. Believe what you want to believe mate 👌😈👌

Where Are the Tech Zillionaires? San Francisco Faces the I.P.O. Fizzle

SAN FRANCISCO — Seven months ago, the Four Seasons in San Francisco sent out a news release announcing the glad tidings that would come soon: New residences for the new money. Builders were hoisting glass and steel into a 43-story tower where residents would have their own on-staff wine concierge, plus Blue de Savoie French marble, German milled Poggenpohl cabinetry and Dornbracht fixtures. The building’s $49 million penthouse would be the most expensive in San Francisco. “Just in time for the coming wave of I.P.O. millionaires in San Francisco,” the Four Seasons said, promising “an elevated sales experience” to cater to “this new class of buyers.” But then the wave of tech initial public offerings — the one that was supposed to mint San Francisco’s new ultra rich — fizzled. The stock of Uber, the ride-hailing giant, has dropped nearly 30 percent since the company went public in May. Lyft shares are down nearly 40 percent. Pinterest and Slack have declined, too. San Francisco has been left as a slightly more normal town of tech workers who got rich-ish, maybe making a few hundred thousand dollars. But that doesn’t go far in a city where the median cost of a single family home is about $1.6 million. “Everyone that came back post-I.P.O. seemed to be the same person. I didn’t see any Louis Vuitton MacBook case covers or champagne in their Yeti thermos,” said J.T. Forbus, a tax manager at Bogdan & Frasco in San Francisco.Private wealth managers are now meeting with a chastened clientele. Developers are having to cut home prices — unheard-of a year ago. Party planners are signing nondisclosure agreements to stage secret parties where hosts can privately enjoy their wealth. Union organizers are finding an opportunity. Everyone had gotten too excited, and who could blame them? The money was once so close: A start-up that coordinated dog walkers raised $300 million. The valuations of the already giant ride-hailing behemoths had nearly doubled again. WeWork, a commercial real estate management start-up that owned very little of its own real estate, was valued at $47 billion. Towers rose across San Francisco to house the money. The marble was polished. The bathroom floors were warm. The private pools were being filled.“The world has changed in a year,” said Herman Chan, a real estate broker with Sotheby’s International. “We expected an upward trajectory at least, and it really kind of deflated. These companies aren’t dying but the cultural zeitgeist, that momentum of I.P.O.s, is gone. You don’t even hear anyone talking about it anymore.”The developers who had fought the odds of regulation and zoning to build their glass residences in the sky had timed their units to the I.P.O.s. But on a recent visit with the Four Seasons sales team, they acknowledged that techie wealth was not what they were seeing. Interest was mostly coming from overseas buyers, young heirs to foreign fortunes and older executives looking for city pieds-à-terre, they said. Also in time for the wave that was not a wave are more luxury towers: The Avery, The Harrison, 181 Fremont, The Mira. “The definition of luxury is scarcity, and there’s so many now,” Mr. Chan said. “Nowadays, my buyers are getting a contingency period and inspectors. Things you would never ask for before. There’s not 10 offers on a house anymore.”Case in point: A full-floor apartment in San Francisco’s poshest neighborhood of Pacific Heights was listed at $21.6 million and advertised that “a sommelier-worthy wine cellar awaits 1,500 of your most prized bottles.” But more than a year later and after a $5 million price cut, it is still on the market. Prices for the top 5 percent of San Francisco area real estate listings — the cream of the crop — rose 7 percent between 2017 and 2018. This year, they have fallen more than 1 percent, according to data prepared for The New York Times by the real estate listing service Zillow. The malaise has spread south into Silicon Valley. A $10.8 million home listing in the town of Portola Valley, Calif., was slashed to $5.7 million. The median sale price for a nearby home in San Jose, Calif., has dropped 10 percent in a year to just under $1 million, according to data from the real-estate listing site Zillow. Before the tech I.P.O.s, Deniz Kahramaner, then a real estate data analyst with the property brokerage Compass, had rallied packed rooms of real estate agents and investors about the bonanza that lay ahead. He had charts and estimates of thousands of new millionaires raising the average price of single family homes in San Francisco above $5 million.Now, he is more muted. “The I.P.O. cash-out hasn’t played out as I mentioned in my original presentation,” he said. Mr. Kahramaner added, hopefully, that it was still early. “People need more time,” he said.

Wealth and Unions

Instead of yachts, tech workers are funding more mundane ventures like college savings plans. “This year brought a lot of people back to reality,” said Ryan S. Cole, a private wealth adviser at Citrine Capital, a wealth management firm in San Francisco. “We’ve had a lot of people fund 529 plans for their kids. Pretty boring stuff.”Some private wealth managers said they were actually somewhat relieved. “At the end of the day, it’s funny money until it’s realized," said Jonathan DeYoe, another private wealth adviser. “I’ve got Uber and Lyft clients that are disappointed. It’s a different house now. It’s a different school situation for the kids. But they’re still by and large in good places. No one’s impoverished.”And so workers who thought they would upgrade from Allbirds to Berluti shoes are remaining, after all, in the Allbirds.As some rank-and-file tech workers realize they might not get rich from company stock, the allure of working long hours without comparable real money pay is also wearing thin, said labor organizers. They have found traction this year in an industry long resistant to unions. “The incentives to take the licks that you do are in the hope of some sort of big payoff down the road,” said Paul Thurston, who focuses on unionizing San Francisco tech workers and is the organizing director at the International Federation of Professional and Technical Engineers. Now, “the engineers and the app designer and the developers are going to be treated a lot more like the employees that they are rather than like partners, which is what they’re told pre-I. P. O.,” he said.Jonathan Wright, the organizing director of Engineers and Scientists of California, said he was in talks to unionize the workers of several big tech companies. “There’s a promise: you work 100 hours a week, you sleep under your desk, and then you’ll be rewarded with the wealth of Bezos,” Mr. Wright said. “That mythology has been fading for years. The day of the unicorn is over.”Where there is new wealth, it’s coming from the older tech companies like Apple and Alphabet, whose stocks this year have soared. And some fortunes are still being made from the I.P.O.s. While Uber’s shares have fallen, the company’s co-founder, Travis Kalanick, has sold off more than $2 billion in stock, according to securities filings. “Especially with things like Uber, almost all the I.P.O. wealth was going to a couple of people,” said Kalena Masching, a Redfin agent in San Jose. “They are not looking to buy a standard house here.”Another bright spot: female-led companies, with more becoming unicorns in 2019 than any other year, according to Aileen Lee, the venture capitalist who coined the phrase “unicorn” to refer to a private company valued at $1 billion or more.And post-I.P.O. parties are happening. They are just secret — and phone-free. “We’re signing a lot more nondisclosures,” said Jay Siegan, who curates party entertainment for corporate tech clients. “A year ago, people would set up social media stations at the party, signs with the hashtag for Instagram. Now we have clients asking guests to check their phones at the door or using those Yondr bags.”These are pouches used to lock phones en masse at concerts and events where someone might be tempted to record.

Self Reflection

However, in public, the tech world is all about reflection and self-critiquing after the year that was. The I.P.O. disappointment has gotten so extreme that two Silicon Valley techies are setting out to do what few have done before: Make fun of themselves. David Cowan, a venture capitalist with Bessemer Venture Partners, which invested in Lyft, and Michael Fertik, the founder of Reputation.com, are launching an online talk show called “The Bubble Report.” It will feature interviews with other tech executives. The point, they hope, is to poke fun at Silicon Valley from within Silicon Valley.Mr. Cowan, either in character or just being very honest, decried the falling stock prices of newly public tech companies as victims of cruel Wall Street analysts.“It should be against the law for unscrupulous analysts to assess stocks based on cash flow and profit, to impugn a company based on eight lines of a financial report,” he joked. “Imagine how much more value we’d have in the stock market if we got rid of that arcane thinking.” Mr. Fertik said his inspiration to mock his industry came in part from realizing how far from reality it had all gotten. “I want people to understand that Silicon Valley is a deeply religious place that thinks of itself as agnostic,” he said. “It has some of the strengths and many of the frailties of organized religion.”For now, most people are waking up to find they are still on Earth. This is good news for those in San Francisco who mostly viewed the tech exuberance as bad news: housing rights activists, first-time home buyers, and renters. “We are excited by any resetting of Bay Area rents that bring them down from their artificially inflated high,” said Fred Sherburn-Zimmer, the executive director of Housing Rights Committee, which fights against evictions. “Eventually all bubbles burst.” Read the full article

Wicca & Whispers: My Unexpected Month as a Pagan Convert

My first and, to date, only, experience of a spiritual revelation happened in the summer of 2017.

Half an hour into a meditation session, eyes closed, legs crossed, I had a startlingly clear image of a gigantic oak tree growing out of the ground in front of me, unfurling its leaves and stating in a deep voice: I am Mother Earth. I am the one true religion. Convert to the Wiccan Faith.

This spiritual revelation, crystal clear in my mind’s eye,  was a little unexpected…not least because that meditation session was part of a Christian retreat. When we went round the circle afterwards sharing any godly moments we’d had during our prayerful meditation I, unsurprisingly enough, kept quiet. Right sort of experience. Wrong religion.

          -----------------------------------------------------------------------

With no small amount of trepidation and some curiosity, I recently asked around my friend group and requested that they describe me in one word. Some responses were:

Focused Self-Assured Unique Creative Warm   Versatile Funny

And, my favourite: “Essa” …Fair enough.

Now, this is a wide reaching list, but there was one word that didn’t make a single appearance from anyone: religious. I am not surprised by this. I am generally known as the cynical one, the sardonic one, the pessimist, the sensible thinker, and rightly so. (I am Scottish, after all.) Essa the logical. Essa the skeptic. Many, if not most, of the people who meet me in my day to day life would probably expect me to be agnostic, even atheist.

And yet.

And yet the institution of the church and Christianity itself has had a profound and far-reaching importance in my life. My mother is a lay-reader, church organist and choir leader. My dad is also a church organist. My Mum’s family are Church of Scotland Elders, My Dad’s folk are Salvation Army, some of them even founding members of the London branch of the institution. My family tree is heaving with religion, my own childhood spent in church buildings and prayer meetings. I was playing violin in the praise band at aged 4, playing the organ and helping run local church summer workshops by age 12, arguing on theological issues with church camp youth leaders by age 13. When people ask what my relationship is with the church, I usually just say, “I grew up in the church and my family is very involved with our local church community” and leave it at that. At that point most folk presume this to mean that I have given up on religion myself and leave the matter be, much to my relief.

And yet.

And yet I do still go to church, when I can. I am a congregation member of a very liberal C of E church in London, the type of church where God is referred to by female pronouns, people don’t guard ‘their spot’ on the pew and metropolitan gay couples bring their aesthetically flawless children with them every Sunday morning. I don’t tend to experience much great spiritual uplifting during the service but I enjoy the sermon, which usually has a disruptive, feminist slant, the sense of community, the feeling that here is a group of people who care about each other and are trying to just generally be nicer to everyone. I’ve told myself for years that there isn’t a need for a powerful sense of the otherworldy, of godliness, to make church worthwhile: surely a sense of that community and a reminder to be kind is a generally good thing, worthy in of itself.  

I was the church organist for this tiny yet friendly congregation in Tayport between the ages of 15-17. They did excellent cups of tea. I’m the one with the ginger hair.  (2013)

And yet.

And yet since I was very small, I have yearned for that ‘aha!’ moment. That euphoric experience of spiritual enlightenment where I would know that God was out there in the world. An unmistakable KA-POW. 

“You just need to send one sign!” I remember fervently bartering late one night when I was about eight during my bedtime prayers. “Just send one sign to show you exist and I won’t ask again and I’ll be extra good!” I was unaware then, in the midst of my doubt, of the irony of my paternal grandmother’s maiden name: Thomas. (Theology joke).

Years passed, and my wish for clear ‘godly proof of life’ faded into the background but didn’t entirely dissipate. From the ages of 10-13 I went to increasingly evangelical church summer camps where everyone else and their pet dog had seemingly had a personal meeting with Jesus, throwing myself into bible study groups and arm-waving to cheesy pop worship songs in the desperate hope that some sort of visitation from the Holy Spirit might eventually happen by Day 9 of camp. Nothing.

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My teenage diaries are filled with fears of a malignant God, or a long-dead God, or a God that simply had decided that I personally was worthy only of being ignored. By seventeen I had given up on God entirely and announced myself agnostic. …This proved to be a very short-lived phase. Homesickness and a wish to find that specific sense of belonging that only churches can truly give led me to my current  liberal C of E church in 2014, but that wish for that ‘just one sign’ was still a background hum.

You can perhaps appreciate my frustration, then, when I finally got my sign in that prayer meeting in 2017. This was it. The visitation I’d been waiting for since eight year old me had laid down the gauntlet, demanding proof. It was just such a shame that it was the wrong bloody religion.

What would you do? On the one hand I was a church goer, who came from a church family, who had been brought up in the Christian faith.

On the other hand I had been wanting a spiritual sign from the heavens for about 14 years by this point and there it was. Ridiculous in nature and almost certainly brought on from a combination of severe sleep deprivation, high caffeine intake and end-of undergraduate-degree existential stress, but there nevertheless.

Reader. I went for it.

As my girlfriend at the time watched in mild, and then moderate alarm, I went out on what can only be described a ‘Wiccan Spree’, where in the space of about three weeks I obtained four spell books and a brand of incense called ‘Dragon’s Blood’, started following about eight different ‘Witchy Aesthetic’ Instagram accounts, watched countless YouTube spell videos, joined a Facebook group called ‘Divine Goddesses’,  signed up for a MeetUp event where you joined a ‘coven’ and casted spells in woods, guilt-read a blog called ‘So You Used To Be Christian And Now You’re Pagan: An Introduction To Your New Faith’, collected leaflets for a Pagan festivals that included activities such as ‘Tree Yoga’, drew my very own pentangle, made a wand and repurposed tea-light holders as containers for random household items that I decided represented the four elements. I was, in retrospect, almost certainly having some sort of small nervous breakdown, but at the time the sense of sudden purpose was truly wonderful. Wonderful, that is, until I got to the chapter about gender roles in my new, shiny Wiccan textbook. 

The enthused, evangelical pages about the powerful, strong energy of men and the sensitive, delicate energy of women left a sour taste in my mouth, particularly when it became clear that male and female energies were always expected to ‘intertwine’ exclusively with each other. I’d thought I was pursuing a fresh, exciting new way to explore my spirituality, a way that left the more archaic views and beliefs of the church behind. It was a disappointment, then,  to discover that heteronormative expectations of gender and sexuality permeated more than just the ‘mainstream’ religions. Wicca wasn’t going to be my ‘true path’, after all. The vision of the tree suddenly seemed like a silly figment of my imagination, and I was glad that I’d kept it mostly to myself. The spell books quietly and sheepishly went to the charity shop.

…And yet.

As I write this here in late 2019, there is still, somewhere in my brain, that eight year old child who is waiting for the moment of indisputable proof of a higher power. I am, of course, in good company, as countless Christians have searched for exactly that proof right from the beginning of the faith: the New Testament is chock-full of disciples needing massive, indisputable signs from the Heavens before they’ll believe practically anything, much to Jesus’ frustration. In John 20:29 a newly resurrected and very irritated Jesus says to Thomas, a disciple so skeptical that he’s known as Doubting Thomas (…told you my earlier Thomas joke was a theological one) and who has refused to believe in the resurrection of Jesus right up until the moment Jesus literally appears in front of him, “ Because you have seen me, you have believed; blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed!”

…A phrase probably written into the Bible for the early Christians, encouraging them in their belief in a Messiah they hadn’t personally met, and a phrase that still holds comfort for Christians around the world today.

It’s one of those deceptively easy-sounding sayings, ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed’.

I’ve always been someone who’s a stickler for facts  - for instance,  I worked out that Santa didn’t exist when I was five and then couldn’t understand for the life of me why everyone else was perpetuating a lie that was, in my mind, simply unnecessary. (It took quite a lot of persuading from my parents for me not to share my newfound knowledge with my friend group. I settled for pitying looks and pointed questions along the lines of, “But how exactly does he get down the chimney, Karen?”)

People who are Fact People don’t like the concept of blind belief. We don’t like it at all. It makes us feel exposed, and icky, and foolish, and like we’re being played for suckers.

I am a Fact Person. I am also not many people’s typical idea of a Christian.

I have tattoos. I am openly queer. I believe abortion and birth control are fundamental human rights, I don’t believe Mary was a virgin or that non-believers need ��Saving’, I consider the Bible to be a fascinating tapestry of sociological history best read with the expectation of cross-culture misunderstandings rather than it being the undiluted Word of God, and I think that in institutionalised religion there is often too much fixating on a possible future Heaven when Hell is already happening now, in this lifetime, to so many people who need Earthly help rather than lofty prayer.

I am, in short, too much of a questioner to ever be a ‘true believer’. Blind Evangelical faith is just never going to come easy for this Doubting Thomas.

And as for my tree vision? My queer, feminist relationship with gender and gender roles stopped me from identifying as Wiccan, the restricted binary expectations making that path an instant no-go.

And yet. I am far from an atheist.

Me (now with blue hair) at a spiritual retreat with members of my current church community (Spring 2019)

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As I move away from my teens and deeper into my twenties, I can slowly feel a subtler understanding of what God might be beginning to lap at the edges of my understanding of the world. Be it Mother Earth, be it the Holy Trinity, be it whatever you want to call it, I have noticed the small things I do in day to day life to honour the unexplainable.

The fact that I knew that lighting a candle and conducting my own small service for the flat I was about to leave after living there for 3 years was absolutely the right thing to do, despite the fact that that building was theoretically just bricks and mortar? Unexplainable.

The fact that I sometimes enter a house and go “yep, this is good” and sometimes am like, “ABSOLUTELY NOT, NOPE, DO NOT WANT TO STAY HERE THIS HOUSE DOES NOT LIKE ME”? Unexplainable…and ridiculous to witness.

The fact that, every so often, in the woods or on a deserted beach, I get a strange sense of flickering connection? A sense of an electric undercurrent that could be sparked into life if only two wires were connected? Unexplainable, unexplainable, unexplainable.

Celtic Christianity, that ancient and now largely forgotten Spiritual meeting-place between Christianity and Paganism, has a term for these moments where the Other can be felt, if only for a half-second: they are ‘thin places’, the places ‘in the world where the walls are weak’.

In the words of 1 Kings 19:12,  

         After the earthquake came a fire, but the Lord was not in the fire.          And after the fire came a gentle whisper.

I’m beginning to suspect that perhaps in all my straining, in all my looking for divine ‘massive earthquakes’ and ‘impressive firestorms’, I’ve missed countless gentle whispers.

My relationship with faith is destined to wax and wane. The only certainty is that it will never stay the same. That, I’m beginning to realise, is allowed. Normal, even. For now, unsure of what the future may bring, I am content to search for those thin places and whisper into the quiet. 

You never know. I might hear a whisper in return.

Steve Cohen’s ‘That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic’

charliethechulo | Shiraz Socialist | March 7th 2017

Steve Cohen (ZT”L) died on 8th March 2009. He had been a member of the Jewish Socialists Group, the International Marxist Group, and a leading campaigner for migrants rights. An outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights, he was nevertheless concerned about the prevalence of anti-Semitism on parts of the left and pro-Palestinian movement. Steve was a prolific writer (we tried to rope him into Shiraz towards the end of his life), but by far his most important piece was That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic, which can be read in full on the website devoted to Steve and his great pamphlet, which we reproduce here in memory of a fine comrade:

An anti-racist analysis of left anti-semitism by Steve Cohen (ZT”L), edited ...

by Libby Lawson and Erica Bunnan:

There Must Be Some Way Out of Here

 In 1984 I wrote a booklet against anti-Semitism. For this I was denounced as a Zionist.

In 2005 I wrote a pastiche poem criticising Zionism. For this I was denounced as an anti-Semite by some people on the Engage website. What is happening here?

It seems to me that one of the things that is happening is that whatever the fundamental political distinction between anti Semitism and anti Zionism (a distinction I see as absolute) yet on an emotional and existential level the two have become hopelessly intertwined—and this itself is political. Something else which is happening is the confirmation as far as I’m concerned of a political analysis of anti-Semitism which in my naivety, strikes me as obvious but which I’ve never seen articulated anywhere else. This is that the Jewish Chronicle and Socialist Worker are both correct. And incorrect. Zionism is anti racist. And Zionism is racist. I cannot see how Zionism in its triumphant form (the Israeli state) is anything except essentially racist. It was founded on the dispossession of the Palestinians. And it continues on the super exploitation and humiliation of the Palestinians as the “other”. To deny this strikes me as fundamentally immoral. I also happen to think that two states, one of which by definition has to be exclusively Jewish is similarly immoral. I think majoritarianism (the legitimisation of an entity through numbers) is immoral wherever it presents itself—it leads at the very least to forced population movement and at its most extreme to ethnic cleansing and all that implies. I’ll leave open to discussion and personal judgement the point on this continuum that Israel may already guilty and at which a divided state would become guilty.

On the other hand it seems to me equally undeniable that Zionism in its inception was anti-racist. It was a reaction against, a way of dealing with, European anti-Semitism. Maybe as a revolutionary socialist writing in Prestwich in 2005 it would not be my way. However as a Jew of whatever political persuasion in Europe after the coming to power of Hitler in 1933 or the defeat of the revolution in Spain in 1939 I may well have had a different position. And if fascism ever took over here and Jews were barred entry elsewhere then I guess I might take a different position. I empathise with the “bolt hole” theory of Zionism. I appreciate the significance of the remarks by Isaac Deutscher, the Polish Marxist ex-rabbi, who wrote in later life “In this controversy (between socialism and Zionism) Zionism has scored a horrible victory, one of which it could neither wish nor expect; six million Jews had to perish in Hitler’s gas chambers in order that Israel should come to life … If instead of arguing against Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s I had urged European Jewry to go to Palestine, I might have saved some of the lives that were later extinguished in Hitler’s gas chambers” (Israel’s Spiritual Climate). I take it as axiomatic that any revolutionary of that pre-war period would have fought for the absolute right of Jews to enter Palestine. To have argued otherwise, to have argued for immigration controls, would have meant support for the British Mandate whose army tried to prevent entry. However the tenets of revolutionary socialism (tenets to which I still hold even in these days of Blair, Bush, Sharon and … Bin Laden) would demand that entry into the then Palestine would/should have lead to an attempt to forge an alliance between Jewish workers and Palestinian workers and peasants against the Zionist leadership, the absentee Palestinian landlords and the British soldiery. Of course the task would have been enormous. But the failure of that historic task has lead to what we have today—Israel the perpetual blood bath.

It is because Zionism is both racist and anti-racist that I call myself an anti-Zionist Zionist. It is also because Zionism is racist and anti racist that there is an even more urgent need to rigorously distinguish anti-Zionism from anti-Semitism. This itself requires a rigorous definition of both—otherwise how is it rationally possible to ever distinguish the two? I do not think there is ever the question of anti-Zionism discourse “becoming” or “sliding into” anti-Semitism. If a position is anti-semitic then it is anti-semitic in its origins—it does not become so. It is nothing whatsoever to do with Zionism. So, fascistic critiques of Israel are not about Zionism. They are about Jews. And this is the point. Anti-Zionism is about solidarity with the Palestinians. Anti-Semitism is about the Jewish conspiracy. Not all critiques of Israel are based on Jewish conspiracy theories. And anti-Semitism is not going to help progress the Palestinian cause. Just as August Bebel famously described the equation of capital with Jew as the socialism of fools then the equation of Zionism with world domination with Jew is the anti-zionism of fools.

It often feels like the wisdom of Solomon is required to know how to deal politically with this grotesque foolishness. One issue is the actual (the “cleansing” of Jews from Jerusalem in 1948, the suicide bombings of today) or threatened (“drive them into the sea”) repression of Israeli Jews which fuels a fortress mentality and to which sections of the left retain an ambivalent or agnostic attitude. Another issue that should be a matter of concern is that anti-semitism masquerading as anti-Zionism drives away those who would otherwise want to give solidarity to the Palestinian cause. For myself, this is what I found unfortunate in the debate over the boycott of some or all Israeli universities. Whatever the motive of those proposing the boycott (and like Engage I’m opposed to exceptionalising Israel) there is still an imperative need to offer real, material, political support to the Palestinians. I think for myself the best way of dealing with any particular proposed boycott is to come to a decision on whether the boycott would help the Palestinians irrespective of its proposers—and organise independently against anti-Semitism. Which perhaps meaning building a movement that simultaneously is dedicated to Palestinian solidarity and opposition to anti-Semitism.

It is apparent from what I’ve said that I also disagree with what I take to be the dominant position within Engage—namely that in our contemporary world anti-Zionism must inevitably equate with anti-Semitism. Paradoxically I also disagree with Engage’s position that in the modern world the form that anti-Semitism takes is through (foolish) anti-Zionism. I think it is worse than that. Obviously this is one form that is taken by the theory of the world Jewish conspiracy. However it seems to me that this is merely concealing more classic forms—Jew as all-powerful (the “Zionist lobby” running the USA), Jew as financial manipulator (the world being supposedly run by trans-national corporations and not imperialist states), Jew as murderer (take your pick—the blitzing of Iraq comes in there somewhere through its constant equation with the repression of the Palestinians). Jew as the subject of the blood libel (ditto but add the surreal accusation that Jews are responsible for September 11th), Jew as the killer of the first born (double ditto), Jew as poisoner of the wells (the anti-urbanisation of much Green politics—with Jews being the urban people par excellence). These images, these world-views, are powerful enough to split off from any anti-zionist base. And they have begun to split off within sections of the anti-globalisation, anti-capitalist movement. It is here that the anti-Zionism of fools emerges with a vengeance but is still subservient to the classic socialism of fools and also to the pre-capitalist feudalism of fools—the real McCoy of jew hatred. This is because anti-capitalism is shared by socialists who aspire to post-capitalist formations and right-wing organisations who hark back to an earlier pre-capitalist age—which is one of many reasons why genuine socialists have to be vigilant against any equation of capital with Jew.

Anti-Semitism on the left has for too long been a taboo subject—probably since the inception of the socialist project itself. I know because in 1984 I was that taboo! I became for a short period a political pariah in sections of the socialist/communist movement (my movement) for daring to raise the subject. Actually when I began writing my book I had no intention of writing anything on anti-Semitism, left or right. I wanted to write and condemn the (latest) Israeli onslaught on Lebanon. I used the left press as source material—and became horrified by what I was reading. And what I was reading was gross stereotyping of the Jew via the stereotyping of Israel as the most powerful force in the universe. All this was redolent of all the old-time European, Christian imagery—just stopping short it seemed of accusations of desecrating the wafer. So I did some research and quickly realised that this left anti-Semitism did not spring from nowhere but unfortunately had a long and dishonourable tradition—going back at least to the successful agitation for immigration controls against Jewish refugees and the 1905 Aliens Act. As it so happened, I was at that time thinking of writing another book just on this agitation—but Pluto Press told me that “Jews don’t sell”. To which I replied that I thought this was what we’ve always been accused of doing too much of. To show Pluto they were not being true Marxists I quoted Marx’s own piece of self-hatred from his On The Jewish Question: “What is the secular cult of the Jew? Haggling”. And then bizarrely I started to come across references and allusions (illusions) in parts of the left press to the wealth and power of Jews, of Jewry, all in the service of Israel—or maybe Israel was in the service of Jews and Jewry. Who knows? It was all rubbish anyway—but extremely dangerous rubbish.

And without managing (with the support of some comrades in the Jewish Socialist Group—the JSG) to keep fixed in my head the absolute distinction between anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, I guess I could have gone schizophrenic. There were two great successive nights when I was evicted from a mosque then a shul. I’m always sorry I never made the hat-trick of our common enemy—a church. The mosque incident involved picketing (along with some Asian youth) some local anti-Jewish ayatollah. The shul incident was wonderful. It was in Liverpool. I went with other members of the JSG to picket a meeting that was being held in support of the invasion (a shul supporting a military invasion? This really was Old Testament stuff). What we didn’t know was that the guest speaker was some Israeli General—we should have recognised him by his ripped jeans and tee shirt. As we were being lifted horizontally, face downwards, out of the shul by the stewards I looked down on a face looking up at me. The face looking up said “Weren’t we at Oxford together?”. To which I replied “I think so—were you at Trinity?” That to me is a classic example of tribalism. Mea culpa. I always regret not screaming out “Let my people go!”.

That’s Funny You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic did create ripples. It managed to split the JSG whose then dominant leadership thought it might offend the Socialist Workers Party. It resulted in some pretty dreadful correspondence over many weeks in journals like Searchlight and Peace News. A pamphlet was written denouncing me as a “criminal”. There was a particular review—in Searchlight—one sentence of which I will never forget. Every Jew on the left will know that terrible syndrome whereby, whatever the context and wherever one is, we will be tested by being given the question “what is your position on Zionism?” Wanna support the miners—what’s your position on Zionism? Against the bomb—what’s your position on Zionism? And want to join our march against the eradication of Baghdad, in particular the eradication of Baghdad—what’s your position on Zionism? And we all know what answer is expected in order to pass the test. It is a very strong form of anti-Semitism based on assumptions of collective responsibility. Denounce Zionism, crawl in the gutter, wear a yellow star and we’ll let you in the club. Which is one reason why I call myself an Anti-Zionist Zionist—at least that should confuse the bastards. Anyhow this particular review, noting that my book actually did attack Zionism, said “It is not enough to trot out platitudes, as he does, about being against Zionism and in support of the Palestinian struggle”. So I’m not allowed into the club even though I fulfil the entry requirements. I’m not allowed in because I recognise and oppose the existence of anti-Semitism on the Left—and this therefore renders all support for Palestinians a “platitude”. Well it ain’t me who’s here confusing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

An accusation greeting the publication of That’s Funny was that even if anti-Semitism existed, it was trivial compared to other forms of oppression—not least that being inflicted on the Palestinians. I find this argument abhorrent. The struggle for communism is not about establishing some equitable scale of oppression and exploitation. It is about smashing all such oppression and exploitation. Switch to Germany 1925—”Comrades why are you harping on about anti-Semitism? It’s trivial. If it ever became significant we will deal with it. Honest”.

But there were positives back in 1984. There were allies out there—for instance the then Manchester and Liverpool branches of the JSG. I discovered that a similar political battle was going on within the feminist magazine Spare Rib and a kind of informal alliance was formed here. I remember that a large debate was organised in the Peace Studies department at Bradford University—where I shared some dope with a member of the PLO. It was Lebanese! And then the three of us who had published the book (we called ourselves The Beyond The Pale Collective) organised a biggish conference in Manchester. And Pluto Press was wrong—we sold a lot of books. We sold enough books to publish another one—on Holocaust Denial by Gill Seidel. This had been accepted by Pluto but then pulped after it had been typeset! I guess this was part of their reality denial.

As far as I’m concerned I’m still prepared to stand behind most of what I wrote those two decades ago. However there is one issue where my position has somewhat changed. And there is a second where I think I missed the plot entirely. First I think the book was, in its critique of assimilation, far too uncritical of the concept of “Jewish culture”. In fact I think it was implicitly far too generous towards Bundism in this respect (though I still support the Bundist championing of political self-organisation). I no longer see Jewish (or any) culture as monolithic. It is fractured and determined by issues of class. I have been in too many situations where the need to fight racism (racist attacks, immigration controls, fascist mobilisations) has been counter-posed by some suggestion about having an “ethnic” evening with “ethnic” clothes and “ethnic” food. It’s got to the stage where, to paraphrase Goebbels, whenever I hear the word multiculture I want to reach for my gun. In particular I am now ruthlessly opposed to denominational schools—be they Jewish, Muslim, Catholic or Church of England. Some of this has been informed by the racist admission practices of the Jewish School in Manchester (no Jewish mother no entry). However the substantive point is that as a militant atheist I am opposed to the state subsidising the garbage of religion—any religion. And anyhow, I’m for the unity of people of all ages not their division. At the same time I’m equally opposed to the (political) drive towards assimilation—I don’t see incorporation into the norms of imperialism as a step forward for humanity. The latest example of this drive towards incorporation is the suggestion by the Home Office Minister, Hazel Blears, following the London underground bombings that ‘minorities should be described as, for example “Asian-British” rather than simply as “Asian”‘. (Times 8 August 2005). The idea of the labelling and re-labelling of human beings as a method of protecting the citizenry of London is as ludicrous as all other justifications used for restricting the free movement of the same human beings. In the past slaves were branded—literally and with fire. Under the modern market economy it is people. This commoditisation of the alien reduces her or him to a piece of capital, to a new form of enslavement – the enslavement of a forced identity within a hostile society ever ready to deport and expel.

Second I come to missing the plot. This is not about what I wrote. It is about what I did not write. In fact it was what I explicitly refrained from writing. So I said “The book says nothing about socialist or liberation movements in the third world, deliberately so, because countries in the third world have not historically been within the grip of Christianity, and thus have no tradition of conspiracy theories. For example within Islam both Jew and Christian were seen as infidels—and certainly there was no constant mythology of universal Jewish domination. If notions about Jewish power entered the third world, then that is a product of imperialistic and Christian penetration”.

Looking back on this from today’s realities it clearly is inadequate. For instance I cannot see any basis for conspiracy theories (i.e. classic anti-Semitism) within Islam historically, however badly Jews (usually alongside Christians) were sometimes mistreated. I guess for this we have to be thankful we never bumped off Mohammed as well as Jesus. However it would be a matter of interesting political investigation to see precisely how conspiracy theories have subsequently entered the Muslim world—to see how they have become the Islam of fools. Moreover whatever the significance today of Left anti-Semitism, its influence and social weight is insignificant compared to that within Muslim communities (an anti-Semitism which is possibly matched by racism within the Jewish community). So the Elders of the Protocols of Zion is a best seller in Arabic speaking countries. So I’ve read how Islamicists blame “world Jewry” for both the New York and London underground bombings. And this junk needs to be challenged. And it needs to be challenged by the Left—and it isn’t. In fact it is encouraged—if only obliquely.

It is encouraged by Israeli exceptionalism—by the constant depiction and caricaturing of Israel as somehow being the pre-eminent world imperialist power. Inasmuch as I might be for some boycott of Israeli universities then I’m equally in support of a boycott of British universities because of their collusion in the institutionalised apartheid of immigration controls—that is either collusion by their silence or by their active co-operation with the Home Office in developing controls (which appears to be the case with University College London). It is encouraged by the emergence on demonstrations against the American invasion of Iraq, of the denunciation of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank—as though there was some intrinsic connection between the two which is not shared with other imperialist interventions. It is encouraged by the sycophantic, uncritical relationship that the SWP/Respect has towards the Muslim leadership as organised, for instance, around the mosques—these Muslim machers are as right-wing and often as anti-Semitic as their Jewish macher counterparts organised around the shuls are anti-Islam. In the beginning was the Board of Deputies? Today there is the Muslim Association of Britain. Macherism, the political reliance on a self-appointed leadership (the macherites) is a political disease which needs to be challenged and destroyed—instead sections of the Left are cultivating it at its most dangerous points.

Is there any way out of this mess? Particularly is there any way out of this mess for socialists in this country trapped politically between the existential linkage of anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism? Is there a wisdom of Solomon? In all humility I think so. Of course we can all have our own politics on the way forward as regards Israel/Palestine. My own vision is of a federated secular and socialist middle east. This maybe is utopic but so is socialism. So is the revolution. So is all meaningful change. However there is going to be no way forward without a recognition of the fundamental block towards any change whatsoever—namely the world wide antagonism between Jews and Muslims. The international nature of this cleavage is central. Only joint and grassroots solidarity between the players in the game can possibly open up any dialogue. In Israel/Palestine this means between the Jewish and Palestinian masses. For instance let there be a march of a hundred thousand Israeli peaceniks into the occupied territories—and let them stay until the Israeli army and the settlers march out (or co-operate with the Palestinians in the sharing of resources—including the opening up of the new townships to Palestinians). Let Engage encourage this with its co-thinkers in Israel!

In this country it means joint activity between Jews and Muslims (and socialists) with the Jewish and Muslim communities. And what this boils down to is joint activity against fascism and racism. I suggested above the necessity to start to develop a movement simultaneously based on struggle for Palestinian rights and against anti-Semitism. This is presently an abstraction. However another real movement does exist against racism which can draw the two communities together in struggle. This is the disparate movement against immigration controls—for whom the Jews were the first and Muslims the latest victims. Of course controls need to be challenged in their own right—not just as a device for unity. However the challenge can also forge a unity which presently seems a million miles away. What is more the history of the last thirty years of struggle by migrants, immigrants and refugees against controls shows something that SWP/Respect have utterly missed. This is that real, meaningful, progressive political activity within the Muslim community (and all third world communities) comes from the grassroots either by by-passing or defeating the community machers. Let Engage become involved in these struggles both because of their intrinsic political importance and as part of its commitment to challenging left anti-Semitism by building meaningful alliances!

It could begin by supporting the campaign of Samina Altaf and her two children to fight deportation. Samina’s is just one of countless stories—though I guess more immediately poignant. Having fled Pakistan to avoid repeated domestic abuse she was refused asylum here. Like all asylum seekers she is outside of the welfare state and has been forcibly dispersed into Salford by the so-called National Asylum Support Service (NASS—a wing of the Home Office). And now as a failed asylum seeker who is refusing to return “voluntarily” to the country from she fled she is being threatened by NASS with eviction onto the streets. And I forgot to mention this—Samina is disabled with rickets. And her children are crippled with rickets. Get involved with the campaign! Write a letter of support to her constituency MP—Hazel Blears that well known re-labeller of third world identity and warrior against international terrorism (address House of Commons, Westminster, London SW1). Blears happens to be a Home Office MP—so terrorise her with letters of support. And invite a speaker from the campaign to one of your meetings—whilst sending money to the campaign (address Samina Altaf Defence Campaign, c/o Bury Law Centre, 8 Banks St, Bury BL9 ODL).

Finally I think that not one iota of the above can ever be resolved through communalism, through tribalism, through uncritically supporting Jews as Jews or Muslims as Muslims. My religion right or wrong! And all due to an accident of birth. I guess I recoil when I read on the Engage website the reflection on being Jewish—”frankly I can’t get enough of it”. Jewish identity as an addiction is not much of an advert for clarity of political thought. I was shocked by a news report I read a few years ago. It is a story that deserves creative fictionalisation. It concerned a guy who was raised in a highly Zionist family (I guess High Zionism is the Jewish version of High Church). He was raised as a conscious racist towards the Palestinians. Dirty Arabs! Until he discovered he was one of them—He was an adopted son. His biological parents were, I think, Libyan. Overnight (or maybe it took a little longer) he became a vehement anti-Zionist—and Jew hater. Dirty Jews! I was struck by two very powerful televisual images during the recent eviction of the Gaza settlers by the (Orwellian entitled) Israeli Defence Force. One was that of Israeli soldiers crying. The Israeli army in tears? One of the most powerful militaries in the world! Why no tears when the Palestinians were evicted? The second image was just bizarre in its tribalism. This was that of the settlers being evicted and the soldiers evicting them temporarily desisting from their civil war and praying together on shabbos—with the evictions resuming as soon as shabbos ended. Compared to this crazy chauvinism the legendary Christmas Day football match in the trenches of World War One between German and British soldiers was a genuine act of internationalism. However there can be no genuine internationalism, no genuine international solidarity, no meaningful working together of ordinary people wherever tribalism or communalism dominates. And at the moment it is precisely these reactionary formations that dominate both Muslim and Jewish communities—and the tragedy is they are hardening. It would be good if Engage put its energy into helping soften them.

Steve Cohen 2005

Next >>

That’s Funny, You Don’t Look Anti-Semitic

Obituary for Steve Cohen (ZT”L)

There Must Be Some Way Out of Here

Why is this book different from all other books ?

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1: The Socialism of Fools

The Socialism of Fools

Anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitism without Jews

Left Anti-Semitism

Socialism, Anti-Semitism, Thatcherism and Fascism

Chapter 2: The Anti-Semitism of English Socialism”s Formative Years

The Background

Immigration Controls

English and Jewish Opposition to Controls

Rich Jew, Poor Jew: The Conspiracy Theory in Practice

Anti-Alienism or Anti-Semitism

Manifesting with Law of Attraction – Step by Step Guide

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Manifesting with Law of Attraction

We read about it everywhere nowadays. Manifesting with Law of Attraction.  However what is Manifestation?

Individuals share stories regarding exactly how they have manifested wide range, success, love and health.

And also they inspire others to utilize their manifestation capacity to develop meeting lives on their own as well. And indeed, the wealth, success and also love are all manifestations, nonetheless, the idea can be somewhat complicated.

While it holds true that we can materialize our wishes, it is very important to keep in mind that we are always manifesting with the Law of Attraction.

Whether we understand it or otherwise we are constantly co-creating our reality– even when we develop what we do not want.

People who are sharing their experiences with manifestation are describing aware. Or intentional manifesting due to the fact that they are using specific techniques to alter their fact.

Manifestation is the name of the process that is occurring when power is changed into issue. Every things, every person that exists in your truth has appeared into type.

    How Manifesting with Law of Attraction?

There is a basic formula. Firstly, you require to choose what you actually desire (or do not desire).

Now you just require to ask the Universe!

Well, exactly how do I do that? Easy.

You belong of that universe. Below are the actions you must take:

Work hard. Count on your job. Receive the help as well as acknowledge it.

Your energetic resonances resemble radio signals. You need to tune your signal to a resonance worthwhile of getting it (read: remain favorable as well as thankful).

  Steps on Manifesting with Law of Attraction

  Step 1: How do you want your life to feel? And what things/experiences allow you to feel that way?

“Knowing how you actually want to feel is the most potent form of clarity that you can have.” — Danielle LaPorte

Have you ever before desired so hard for something– a new car, a various work, an entire new closet– after that you got things and also it really did not please that itch you assumed it would?

This is since we obtain pirated right into believing some point or experience will certainly bring us happiness, yet in truth.

If we have no idea just how we desire to really feel, you can get a personal jet as well as diamond studded sparkling wine groove as well as still really feel poor.

So the initial step in manifesting with the Law of Attraction the life you desire is identifying how you want to really feel daily.

This action is so crucial to me that I created a 10 minute audio workshop to aid you figure this item out, you can obtain it here.

It’s only after you know just how you intend to really feel daily that you can identify what things/people/experiences are mosting likely to make you feel this way.

How do you recognize this? By living your life and also checking the waters and not obtaining sidetracked on your trip.

For instance, I wish to feel freedom to prepare my day just how I desire, I don’t wish to be required to scamper to a job as well as forget my early morning routine.

I want the liberty to make my own choices each day as well as be spontaneous in my life.

To make sure that implies I need to benefit myself.

Having this knowledge, I can then begin building my life as well as figuring out what occupation course or business I can produce that fits the bill.

I additionally wish to have solitude as well as access to nature whenever I desire.

So on the small scale, it indicates staying in a place that I can swiftly access nature whenever I want, and also on the long term scale, it means getting a cabin in the woods.

Initially, find out just how you desire your life to really feel every day, and after that identify what things/careers/experiences/ kinds of people allow you to feel that way.

Be clear to have a great experience manifesting with law of attraction.

  Step 2: When manifesting with law of attraction make a plan of manifestation

“Any ideas, plan, or purpose may be placed in the mind through repetition of thought” ― Napoleon Hill

You recognize the minute you complete your vision board, or your 10, 20, half a century.

Plan as well as then you set it apart and forget it for years till you’re loading up your house to relocate, and also out behind some cabinet drops your huge visions for your life?

Probably crumpled and bound up with dog hair and also dust.

The vision board can be where great desires go to pass away, if you allow it.

” An objective without a plan is just a wish”– Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

The following action in any great manifestation is the strategy.

What are things you desire to examine off earlier? What things do you have to complete before you attain completion result?

However, it’s rather challenging to make $150k in a week with absolutely nothing to supply, absolutely nothing to offer the world for its benjamins.

So merely yearning for it, without having anything to give in exchange, possibly will not work.

For the longest time I was stuck at factor A, watching my eyes as well as blinking thoughtlessly right into the perspective, understanding that point B was around somewhere, yet having no suggestion what that course appeared like.

I simply understood what I wanted, as well as I desired it yesterday, however why couldn’t I get it?

Well, simply, I had not been going to find out my plan of indication. I was stuck in musing setting (and male can I imagine).

This is where the law of attraction and also pasting pictures of mega-mansions on a poster board fails.

The extensively idolized view of attracting what you most want to your life is that if you desire it bad enough, it’ll plop right into your lap.

Social network is filled with quotes about wish, as well as “what you’re looking for, is seeking you,” which holds true, however it’s just half of the picture.

Factors involved

You require factor A1, A2, A3, A4 and more prior to you land at factor B.

And if it’s what you absolutely desire, your only job at this moment is figuring what actions you need to require to arrive.

Just how much cash do you need to make? What profession do you require to have? Where do you require to be living? What kind of people are you bordering on your own with?

Address all these questions about your desire life, and then function backwards, determining what smaller sized things you require to complete initially.

Let this be a loosely held strategy, go in the direction of those goals, however do not be amazed when the wind adjustments instructions and your plan moves to accommodate.

That’s the appeal of co-creating with the Universe, most of the times it has way better points in store for you than you might have dreamed.

But you require to do greater than desire, you should prepare.

    Step 3: Focus on ONE piece of the puzzle at a time

“Always remember, your focus determines your reality.” — George Lucas

This is the piece that motivated this write-up. Yet first, allow me rewind.

She was a 1998 Jeep Grand Cherokee, with peeling paint and a whine that attacked the community birds as well as neighbors alike when I started her up.

With 20 years under her belt and also a shitton of miles, everything was leaking or broken (I had to cover her off with fluids every number of weeks to maintain her limping along).

Whenever I attempted to start her I hoped it would not be the time she wouldn’t.

For a couple of months, I was concentrated on getting a brand-new auto, especially a Toyota Tacoma with the “long bed” so I could be an official mountain woman, and so I could outfit the back for camping trips.

The only trouble? I didn’t have the cash for down settlement and I had no concept where I would locate it.

Keep concentrated

However, I stayed concentrated on my objective, and released my conscious task on figuring out exactly how to locate the money.

I concentrated on SOMETHING, prepared out my budget as well as found out just how much I can pay per month on a new auto and began looking.

After that I relinquished my regular control-freak-death-grip on trying to determine exactly how I would certainly obtain the cash to get a new automobile.

I stopped emphasizing concerning the Jeep damaging down as well as leaving me car-less. I essentially told the universe “Ok, this is what I want, I trust you’re bringing this to me, create I friggin’ need a brand-new car,” (I claimed this while trying to speed up out of a traffic light, waiting patiently for the transmission to capture in the crossway).

A week after the intersection-conversation with the universe, I obtained a call from my people.

They had ultimately closed on my dead Grandma’s home, some 3 years after she had actually passed away and in the closing, I was talented $5, 000.

Now, you can either roll your eyes and think it was just right timing.

Or you can think that the Universeis in fact benevolent as well as wishes to aid you attain as well as get things you dream of.

I used to be the agnostic doubter, but I have actually involved realize that life is way more enjoyable– and plentiful– thinking that Universe is co-creating together with me, helping me with this funny thing called life.

But no matter, the moral of the broke-down Jeep story is to have laser-beam emphasis on what you’re attempting to complete now.

You can’t just repaint a beautiful image of your future life in your mind and also wish for the very best.

You need to concentrate on certain item of that story and job towards accomplishing it.

And remember:

” You end up being a master of your life when you find out how to manage where your attention goes. Value what you give your power and also time to”— Found on Mantra Magazine

It’s only then that the Universe has quality to co-create with you.

So, if you’ve been embeded scatter-shot vision mode, asking yourself why you can’t appear to complete any one of your objectives, try committing yourself to one item of the grand-scheme as well as see what takes place.

Points may just drop from the sky to help you on your means (just make certain you give thanks to the World when it does, manners never ever harm).

Focusing matters when manifesting with Law of Attraction.

  Step 4: Meditate on this goal every day

“It is better to take many small steps in the right direction than to make a great leap forward only to stumble backward” — Old Chinese Proverb

Meditation accelerates manifesting with law of attracton.

Ok, now you have your life drew up by exactly how you want it to really feel, you’ve got your strategy in order to achieve those things, and also you’re active concentrated on the initial step, not allowing your mind wander to anything else up until you’ve accomplished this point.

The following action is meditating on this thing daily, especially in the early morning.

Prior to your mind gets all boggled up with other individuals’s point of views and also negative thoughts from the news and also social media (and perhaps don’t look at either of those things until you definitely have to, just a little tip from me to you).

I’m of the belief that meditation takes several forms and it isn’t entirely reserved for a cushion in a silent area (though I do love this kind of meditation too).

So if standard meditation throws you off, concentrate on this one objective on a daily basis while you function out, while you walk outside, while you shower or drive or cross-stitch or cook a cake.

Focus on your goal

Focus on your goal– and also the feelings acquiring this goal will allow you to really feel– while you do any task that allows you area out a little bit.

My favored point to believe regarding while I run is my objectives. I consider running towards the important things I’m after, which point hurrying towards me.

I feel what it would certainly seem like to have accomplished the important things I’m after now, not allowing my mind to photo who I’ll be once I get that point, as if I am not the person presently who can attain my objectives.

This is a significant item of the challenge, as well as something you’ll find in several individual growth books: visualize like you have your goal right currently, in your present life.

There’s a substantial distinction in between picturing what your life will be like when you achieve the goal, verse picturing what it seems like to accomplish your goal right currently, as you are, in your present life.

The former will make you chase your desire for life, since unconsciously you’re informing on your own you are not the person that can have the goal you seek.

The ladder will certainly help you realize you have everything it requires to attain your goals, and also you will permit on your own to accomplish it too.

The objective is the important things that happens after you have concentrated totally on it’s fulfillment.  You need to do this in order for manifesting with law of attraction.

You must resemble Abraham Lincoln with his axe:

” Provide me six hours to cut down a tree as well as I will certainly invest the first 4 sharpening the axe”– Abraham Lincoln

  Step 5: Align your mind and environment to make it happen

“Success isn’t that difficult; it merely involves taking twenty steps in a singular direction. Most people take one step in twenty directions.” — Benjamin Hardy

In his book, Determination Doesn’t Function, Benjamin Hardy regrets versus using determination to try and accomplish your objectives, arguing that self-control is a muscle that deplets with usage, and if your setting causes you into having to make use of determination to achieve some goal, you will at some point stop working.

Which is why if you’re attempting to consume healthy, you know just how difficult it is to prevent the ice lotion you got for your partner or the cookies for the youngsters, which ultimately you’ll cave and consume the container of ice lotion with the cookies collapsed on the top.

This very same principle relates to whatever in life– including manifesting with the Law of Attraction a life you don’t hate.

Basically, your environment today is arrangement to support the person you are right currently, minus the objectives and dreams you’re working towards.

So if you wish to transform your life, you need to alter your atmosphere to make sure that it sustains the objectives you have.

You have to straighten your environment to make your success inescapable.

Which implies if you wish to make more cash or start an organisation, you need to keep away from people that are lazy and blame the world for not achieving their desires, and also you require to locate people that are business owners and also self-starters.

Make it posible

If you wish to really feel recognized, pleased as well as unwinded in your life, you’ll require to leave the task where your manager weakens your job and demands increasingly more without providing you credit score for your success.

Most people feel upheld their scenarios without understanding they’re the ones making the mindful option to stay there.

Absolutely there are difficult, unreasonable as well as totally shitty circumstances that you may be because maintains you stuck where you go to.

However by just claiming “there have to be a way out of this” rather than “there’s no chance out, my life will never transform,” you are changing your beliefs as well as taking an action in altering your life.

You are permitting the Universe as well as your subconscious to find services to your circumstance.

You’re only as stuck as you view yourself to be. Ask yourself exactly how your atmosphere– things, individuals, situations, work, etc– is maintaining you from achieving your goals.

Are your close friends holding you back with their negative beliefs and also opinions? Is your house always jumbled and unkept, making you feel impatient and undistinct? Is your work draining your imaginative drive?

Be honest and after that start making adjustments to your atmosphere that make your manifesting with law of attraction success inevitable.

  Conclusion

Manifesting with law of attraction just functions when you surpass envisioning and imagining, and launch yourself into development.

Indication isn’t a one method road, where the Universe delivers the goods after you have actually made a poster board as well as created on your own a million buck check, a la Jim Carrey.

Manifestating with law of attraction is a joint-venture with the Universe, and you need to be a hardworking, concentrated and figured out partner.

Visualization belongs to the trick to manifestation, yet it is only one notch in the key.

    Resources:

Doenload our free manifestation guide.

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Also, leave me a comment and let me know what you thought – I love talking to the readers, so hopefully will talk to you in the comments below.

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Transcript of The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One

Transcript of The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: Hey, this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Rev.com. We do all of our transcriptions here on the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast using Rev.com, and I’m going to give you a special offer in just a bit.

John Jantsch: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Jenny Blake. She is a former Career Development Program Manager at Google, and she is also the author of What To Do When You Need To Move Out of Your Parents’ Basement … No, that’s not it, we’ll get back to that one. The book we’re going to talk about today is Pivot: The Only Move That Matters Is Your Next One. Jenny, thanks for joining me.

Jenny Blake: John, thank you for having me. I wish I wrote What To Do When You Move Out Of Your Parents’ Basement, that sounds like a great title.

John Jantsch: I was talking one time about something to do with some sort of newish technology, and some, I’m guessing 25ish-year-old, said, “You’re old, what do you know about that?” So I had to write back to him and say, “Come up out of your parents’ basement before they take away your Atari,” or something like that, I can’t remember. Some snipey remark.

Jenny Blake: Oh my goodness. That, and the alternate title for Pivot is How To Not End Up In a Van Down By the River.

John Jantsch: So before we get into your latest book, what does a Career Development Program Manager do at Google?

Jenny Blake: I was there for five and a half years, and halfway into my time there … During that five years, the company grew from 6,000 to 36,000 employees, and one major issue became retention. You’ve hired all these smart recent grads from Ivy League schools, how do you then keep them once you get them there? That was becoming an issue where these people were hitting plateaus one or two years into their time at the company.

Jenny Blake: And so, under the People Operations Department, they created a Career Development team, and I had been doing side projects related to this. So my biggest project was launching a global drop-in coaching program. But in general, our charge was creating programs that would help people learn and grow within the company and map their next move within the company, so they didn’t feel that their only option was to leave.

John Jantsch: Yeah, it’s funny, I imagine in an organization of that size, which by the way I’ve never even come close to working in, there probably is a whole lot of career moving that happens internally. In fact, probably the day you show up you start thinking about your next move internally.

Jenny Blake: Yeah, and internal mobility is not always an easy nut to crack. At one point, there was a sentiment that it’s easier to get hired here in the first place than it is to move to another team, because there are a lot of variables that have to happen internally. Even just the visibility of what roles are open, and how do I grow into them, and how do I have those conversations with my manager. Because it can be kind of scary to bring this stuff up.

John Jantsch: Yeah, not to mention the politics too, which … We won’t go down a rabbit hole here, but I’m sure there’s plenty of that too, of people who unfortunately don’t want to see people grow beyond where they are today in some cases. But again, like I said, we won’t go down that rabbit hole.

John Jantsch: The term pivot is used quite often today in startups, in fact it’s sort of a joke that you’re expected to come out with your product, and then you realize nobody wants it, and so you now are this kind of company. So you pivot. How are you applying that now to careers?

Jenny Blake: At first, I started to ask, “How can people be as agile as startups?” And then quickly, as I got to writing … And also I wanted a term that was judgment-neutral and gender-neutral when it came to career change. Because previously we’ve just called them a mid-life crisis or a quarter-life crisis, there was no word for this thing that’s now happening every few years, where we’re all asking what’s next much more often than in the past.

Jenny Blake: I recognized that what’s different from the business context of the word pivot is that when startups talk about pivoting, it’s because plan A failed. The original direction didn’t work, and now, as you said, they have to pivot the business. But in our career, pivot is the new normal. It’s not just plan B, that we screwed something up, we hit pivot points all the time.

Jenny Blake: Sometimes we choose to pivot, sometimes we get pivoted, and truly now more than ever, change is the only constant. So I wrote this book to create a method to more efficiently answer the question, “What’s next?”, given that we’re going to be doing it much more often.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and again, you’re not saying it’s a generational thing necessarily, but I see that in my kids that are in their 20s. The balance and scales of what’s important seems to have changed in a way. It was at one time very important that you had this stable job, that it had a title, that obviously it had the money and the perks and things.

John Jantsch: And I see a lot of folks in their under-30s that the idea of, “I want to be really happy, I want freedom, I want to be able to do the things I want to do,” is sort of coming up higher in the decision making factor. Which maybe has some of them saying, “I’m going to change completely what I’m doing because I’m not happy.”

Jenny Blake: Yes, and on the flip side there are 10,000 people turning 65 every day for the next 15 years, and many of them don’t have any plans to stop working altogether, or just go golf for the next 30 years. So you have millennials who saw many of their parents get laid off, or re-orged, or be very unhappy when the recession hit in 2008, and so they kind of stepped back and said, “What am I doing climbing this ladder that I don’t know if I want to be on?” And then again, all the way to boomers who are saying, “I love what I do.”

Jenny Blake: I’m sure for you John, you’ve pivoted your business many times, and I don’t know how you think about retirement, but I just think for so many of us we’re like, “No, I love what I do. I don’t have any plan to cut it off cold turkey just because I turn a certain age.”

John Jantsch: Yeah, and my listeners know I’m 56, so I’m getting up there where some people start thinking about that. And I’ve certainly changed what I do, I take a lot more time to go play and things of that nature. But yeah, the idea that I’m going to just stop? Maybe never. I’ll probably be writing books in my 70s and 80s.

Jenny Blake: That’s how I feel too, and of course we can say it’d be nice if finances were an option at that point, we’re not having to work incredibly hard just to survive. But this creative output … My friend, Neil Pasricha, maybe you know him, he wrote in The Happiness Equation about the Japanese term ikigai, the reason you wake up every day, and working on creative pursuits.

Jenny Blake: So when I talk about pivoting, it is age and stage agnostic. It’s that we’re all constantly wondering what’s next, and that’s not a problem, that’s not a personal shortcoming the way that I think we’ve sometimes viewed it in the past.

John Jantsch: You answered a question I was going to ask, who’s this book for, so you’re really saying it’s for anybody who’s still thinking about what they’re doing that is making a living. A lot of times people don’t even realize they’re unhappy, and they’re just going along, they’re not looking for the next thing. Do people typically have a pivot moment, or event, that kind of says, “I have to change”?

Jenny Blake: It can happen so many ways, I call them pivot points, when you finally realize, “I’m at a pivot point.” For some who maybe have been ignoring the signals, your body starts to push back, and maybe they get sick more often. My friend was getting panic attacks every time she got off the subway on her way to work, that was a clear sign she was at a pivot point.

Jenny Blake: Like you said, for others it’s more subtle, it’s a more subtle boredom or dissatisfaction. Some people are very proactive, they’re just looking for what’s next. And then sometimes we get pivoted. There are layoffs, or a re-org, or we lose our biggest client.

Jenny Blake: So all of these are moments where we can say, “What’s working, how do I double down on that? And what’s next?” I think when we get better at pivot as a mindset, and the method itself, the pivot points are less sharp, they’re less shocking, that we don’t see them coming and we feel blindsided. And that’s when it is a crisis.

John Jantsch: And I think probably one of the biggest challenges for people, even if they know they need to make that pivot, it feels like you’re standing on the edge of a cliff. Maybe you have to quit a job, I don’t know what I’m going to do next. All those things kind of hold people on. I talk to lots of people that are kind of sort of thinking about wondering if they could start a business. But they just can’t jump because, maybe sometimes they’re afraid, but other times there are practical realities about the commitments they have.

Jenny Blake: Yes, I have a whole chapter in the book on pivot finances. Because money is a very real constraint on pivoting, and I would never pretend otherwise. We also, my editor and I, were very, very purposeful in not using language like leap or jump.

Jenny Blake: Actually, by running small career experiments, I call them pilots in the book, and by doubling down on what’s working, people can methodically work toward their next move. And eventually, I call it a launch, eventually there may be a launch moment of quitting your job and starting the business. But by running small experiments, you do reduce risk along the way before you make that final launch decision.

John Jantsch: I have concluded over the years, in interviewing hundreds and hundreds of people, that one of the greatest secrets to success is self-awareness. So this whole idea of doing what makes you happy, I contend that most people don’t know that, and don’t know what that looks like, and consequently don’t know how to find it. Do you have the magic potion?

Jenny Blake: I think that people are clearer than they give themselves credit for. A lot of times when I ask someone, “What do you want, what makes you most excited?”, they first might say, “I don’t know,” and then if I say, “Just guess, what does your gut say?” They always say things, they have so many things to say. So I think sometimes it’s actually just a fear of saying it out loud that holds us back from saying it.

Jenny Blake: So just giving space to admit and explore what success might be, and what might bring you joy, even if you don’t know how to get there yet, that’s really important, separating out the vision piece from the how, the whole how as I call it in the book.

Jenny Blake: And John, I’m actually curious, because we talked offline and a few questions ago you brought up getting pivoted. You and I were talking about when September 11th happened. I’m really curious how you responded in that moment with your business, because there’s a great example where you did not choose that event, none of us would in any scenario ever, and yet it affected so many people, it sparked so many pivots. So I’m actually curious to hear about yours in your business.

John Jantsch: At that point, I was still on the path of what I would call a traditional marketing consulting agency. We had a handful of employees, and a handful of accounts that we did pretty much whatever they said they’d paid us to do. And as you mentioned, 9/11 came along, and I think this happened in a lot of places, it’s not a direct correlation. I think it was partly a lot of things. Change maybe needed to happen, and that was a catalyst.

John Jantsch: But we lost our two biggest clients, partly because of what was going on in their business that was related to some of the downturn in the economy that happened, but again, is probably too complex to try to even figure out. The bottom line was we were sitting there now staring at 60% revenue loss or something overnight.

John Jantsch: I had already been working on this idea of Duct Tape Marketing, this idea of working exclusively with small businesses where I could create a system and say, “Here’s what I’m going to do, here’s what you’re going to do, here are the results we hope to get, here’s what it costs.” And so, to your point about pivot, in a lot of ways I was dragging my feet on that, but when we lost our clients, I said, “That’s what I’m meant to do, so I’m going to go do it.”

John Jantsch: It did actually involve, in many ways, tearing my business back down to me, and starting from scratch for the most part. But I can sell anything, so I knew that wasn’t really going to be an issue. It certainly was a pretty dramatic pivot, but it was one that I actually knew I needed to do anyway, and I really just needed the push.

Jenny Blake: It’s so interesting how, yes, these moments like losing two of your biggest clients can turn out to be a blessing in disguise, even if at the time it’s the most stressful thing you could possibly experience.

John Jantsch: This episode of The Duct Tape Marketing Podcast is brought to you by Rev.com. They are so many ridiculously valuable reasons to order transcriptions. You can write entire blog posts, heck, you could write an entire book, by just speaking it and having Rev put together a transcript that you can then just bring on home. If you want to record a meeting so that you have notes, again, over and over, there are so many good reasons. If you just want to take notes when you’re listening to something, and you just want to record those notes. It’s amazing the reasons you can find for doing this.

And Rev gets those transcripts, as I said, they do our podcast, they get those transcripts back to you lightning-fast. And I’m going to give you a free trial offer. If you go to rev.com/blog/dtm, that’ll be in the show notes too, you’re going to get a $100 coupon to try them out. And I suggest you do it.

John Jantsch: So you do have, in the book … I actually think so many career advice books tell you what you should be doing, but don’t tell you how to do it. And I think you have a really great methodology for how to identify, how to get there, how to figure out what you do that might signal what’s next, like, as you mentioned, how to finance it.

John Jantsch: So talk a little bit about this kinda search for … Let’s say I’m just unhappy and know this isn’t what I was meant to do. How do I start breaking down the hypothesis, so to speak, for what I’m meant to do next?

Jenny Blake: The biggest mistake that I made when pivoting that kept me stuck for a lot longer than necessary, without, by the way, a paycheck to fund this stuck-ness, my bank account was going very quickly to zero, was I spent way too much time looking at what wasn’t working, what I didn’t want, and what I didn’t yet have.

Jenny Blake: My aha moment came to me, I sort of thought about this analogy of a basketball player. When they stop dribbling, one foot is firmly grounded in the floor, it’s very stable, and that’s what I call the plant foot, the plant stage. And then their pivot foot can scan for opportunity.

Jenny Blake: One of the most effective ways to get unstuck is first to look at what’s already working, what are my strengths, what are my interests, and again that question of what does success look like. Now you have bracketed the pivot with where you are now and where you want to end up. Then you can start scanning for options, people, skills, and opportunities that are compelling.

Jenny Blake: It’s when people are scanning … Most people when they think, “I’ve hit a pivot point,” they go straight to scanning what’s out there, and they fall into compare and despair and analysis paralysis, they feel they’re wasting time, and they are because it’s not rooted in anything, it’s not grounded in those plant components. Everything starts from that plant stage, and then you’re scanning.

Jenny Blake: And then a real key is the piloting, small experiments. Because we don’t know, we don’t know. I love metaphors, they just help me, so think about pilots. You have all these racehorses at the starting gate, and you don’t know which of your small career experiments are going to take off and emerge in the lead.

Jenny Blake: So career pilots, because that’s kind of a newer concept, to think about experiments in a career sense, in your business that could be piloting a new pricing structure. It could be piloting a new type of client. It could be taking a class. It could be launching a beta version of a program or workshop before you roll it out to your whole audience.

Jenny Blake: A pilot could be calling your previous clients, which I know, John, is something that you advocate, and asking, “What can I create for you? What do you want?” And then try something in a scrappy way before you pour six months of work and $5,000 into it.

John Jantsch: Yeah, and I think what’s really cool is, in this gig economy or world that we live in, there’s a whole lot of things you can freelance and do on the side even, to maybe finance some of what you’re doing, but probably more than anything else give you a sense of what that would be like. Because I know a lot of people get this idea of, “Here’s what I want to do,” and they jump into it, and then they go, “Oh, that wasn’t what I wanted to do, I’ve figured out now.” There’s so many ways you can test this, aren’t there?

Jenny Blake: Yeah, and I feel like even within the broader career umbrella, let’s say you and I are running businesses, we could still be piloting different income streams within that. Now, you’re the king of this, so I’m curious, what is one pilot or two that you could share, that you’ve got going in addition to the core elements of your business?

John Jantsch: Well, my point of view is that you’re constantly piloting. I learned long ago that if I locked myself in a room and worked on something for six months and then rolled it out and said tada, there was about a 90% chance that people are going to go, “That’s not what we want.”

John Jantsch: So our method for developing any new program or tool or course is to go to people that we know already understand the value we bring and say, “We’re kind of sort of thinking about doing this. What would that look like for you?” And then come back and say, “Here’s what it looks like based on your feedback. How much would you pay for that? Try this out.”

John Jantsch: Anytime we develop anything, it is really with our clients or with a market. And again, there are certainly people that have had tremendous successes creating stuff that people didn’t even know they needed. But I find the really safe route is to go to a market and let them kind of develop and create with you.

Jenny Blake: Yes, I love that too. And then it becomes such a co-creation. You’ve talked so much about that in your books too, it’s having one ear to the ground. That’s one of the things about the scanning stage, it’s not just about trying to guess and pull things out of the ether. It’s about listening and doing, in the design thinking community they call it empathy interviews, which is just getting to know, exactly as you just described, what people actually would love help with.

John Jantsch: And I really think, again, it’s like having these board meetings and planning strategy. You have to actually go out there in the real world and experience strategy, or experience what you’re planning, and then know that it’s going to evolve, rather than to simply throw a dart at a board and say here’s what I’m doing.

Jenny Blake: Yes, and I think any good experiment will test what I call the three Es. One, do I enjoy this potential new direction? Two, can I become an expert at it? And three, is there room in the market to expand? So sometimes a pilot will hit on two, but not the third. If I love underwater basket weaving, and I’m a pro, but nobody wants to buy those classes from me, it’s no good. So I think part of it is just continuing to see what’s really going to catch on all those fronts.

John Jantsch: Is there a risk … I see a lot of folks at organizations that have been there two years and it’s like, “What’s wrong with you? You’re going to get stuck.” Is there a risk of too much of that thinking, to the point where people are just constantly looking elsewhere rather than maybe upping their game where they are?

Jenny Blake: Absolutely, that was something that I thought long and hard about with this book because I don’t advocate just changing willy-nilly, or pivoting, or job-hopping the second things get hard. I have a section where I talk about unrealized gains, and on the other end of the spectrum diminishing returns.

Jenny Blake: Unrealized gains are where you don’t stick with anything long enough to get any value. You’re leaving gains, whether it’s financial, reputation-based, or results-based gains. If I had left Google when I first entertained the thought two-and-a-half years in, it would have been a huge mistake because I wouldn’t have created this global coaching program that’s now mentioned on the cover of my book. I got a lot of experience capital from staying.

John Jantsch: Plus a bunch of stock options.

Jenny Blake: Yeah, a few. Not enough so that I didn’t have to worry about my next pivot in two years. But I know, I wish I had started pre-IPO, maybe I wouldn’t even be on this podcast, I would just be on a beach in Tahiti.

John Jantsch: No, we just would be talking about something different. But you’d want to be here for sure.

Jenny Blake: True, true. So I think that a part of it is also recognizing that we can pivot within our current role. Whether that’s within your own business or you’re working for someone else, pivoting is not always these drastic shifts, it’s just a method to work your way into what’s next.

John Jantsch: So what are some kind of quick, you can make them either dos or don’ts, whichever way you want to go, some quick things for people that either sabotage their ability to pivot or keep the ground fertile at all times.

Jenny Blake: Yeah, one of the biggest pitfalls, again, is not looking at what’s already working. Another pitfall is trying to stretch too far. There’s the comfort zone, stretch zone, but then sometimes people will have a move that sends them into their panic zone where they’re just paralyzed and not taking any action at all. That’s a sign that your experiment is too big, or your turn is too sharp. If we look at the pilot on an angle from where you are now, it’s too sharp. So I’d say those are the biggest mistakes.

Jenny Blake: And then another mistake is taking a pivot personally. We talked about this a little bit at the start, but seeing a career plateau as a problem, or a personal shortcoming, when actually it’s fine. Maybe some of your listeners know about the S-curve, which often we refer to in terms of innovation cycles. There’s this natural tapering that happens, and then you start over.

Jenny Blake: I’m sure even everyone who’s self-employed, you’re in a growth spurt, and then it tapers because of your success, not because of anything you did wrong. You just hit these natural plateaus.

John Jantsch: Yeah, in some ways it’s probably important to continue to look for things that excite you, if nothing else, because if you’re going to put in the work, why not enjoy it?

Jenny Blake: Yeah, absolutely.

John Jantsch: So where can people find out more about Pivot and the pivot method?

Jenny Blake: The website is pivotmethod.com, and then they can also listen to the Pivot Podcast, anywhere you subscribe to casts. John Jantsch has been a guest on my show, so that will be coming out soon. I’m on Twitter @jenny_blake.

John Jantsch: And of course, the book can be gotten wherever people get their books.

Jenny Blake: Yes.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Well, Jenny, thanks so much for stopping by today, and hopefully we’ll see you soon out there on the road.

Jenny Blake: John, thank you so much for having me, and a big thanks to everybody for listening.

from http://bit.ly/2YH8qiw

17 Plugins, Tutorials, and Resources for Gutenberg

The WordPress community officially has Gutenberg fever. While there has been some grumbling (and not without some cause), the blocky little editor that could, has gone mainstream. People have been building, writing, collating, and generally just adapting to the changes, and I’m here to show you some of what they’ve done… Enjoy!

Plugins

As is usual, the WordPress community has gone wild, and has already developed loads of plugins for the new editor; we can’t possibly list them all. Besides, so many of them add pretty much the same new blocks, or very similar blocks, so I’ve decided to list only the ones that caught my eye.

For more complete lists, see the “Authority Sites and Directories” section below.

Block Gallery

A photo gallery plugin that does what it says, and doesn’t come with a thousand other blocks. What more could you ask for?

  Block Options for Gutenberg

Block Options for Gutenberg allows you to show or hide blocks based on a number of factors, including:

What device is being used to view the site;

Whether the user is logged in or not (great for calls to action, perhaps?);

Based on field values in Advanced Custom Fields;

And based on custom conditional logic you might set up yourself.

Coblocks

There are already lots of plugins that aim to turn Gutenberg into a full-on page builder, but Coblocks is the one I currently have my eye on. Sure, they’ve got plenty of layout options and features, but they’re mostly kept light and simple as opposed to overly animated. They seem largely style-agnostic as well.

They don’t use JavaScript on the front end when they don’t have to, and they provide quite good controls for custom typography. Overall, I’m quite impressed.

Disable Gutenberg

Disables Gutenberg. Doesn’t expire in 2022. ‘Nuff said.

Google Maps Gutenberg Block

While this one not the only plugin that provides a map block, it’s one of the few that only provides a map block. Again, does what it says, and doesn’t bloat the menus. I’ll be a fan of these single-purpose block plugins until there aren’t quite so many of those “ultimate block collection” plugins.

Gutenberg Manager

The Gutenberg Manager plugin allows you to enable or disable Gutenberg for posts, pages, or custom post types as you see fit. Basically this allows you to use another plugin in its place for some content types (such as a proper page builder plugin), without disabling Gutenberg completely.

Those looking for flexibility in their content editing experience will want to grab this one.

Jetpack

Yes, that Jetpack. As of November 27th, 2018, Jetpack features a few blocks of its own, including a Markdown-enabling block, payment buttons, maps, and a full-fledged contact form.

It should be noted that some of the blocks, like many Jetpack features, require being on the Jetpack premium plan.

WooCommerce Blocks

Made by Automattic themselves, WooCommerce Blocks provides Gutenberg integration for (you guessed it!) WooCommerce. There are blocks for product grids, featured products, hand-picked products, best-selling products, hand-picked products, and much more.

Combine it with your favorite layout plugins for Gutenberg for the best effect, and you’ve got yet one more way to turn WordPress into a hand-crafted store.

Tutorials and Guides

Gutenberg wasn’t even properly out yet when people started writing tutorials and guides. People from all over the industry wanted to be ahead of the curve, and we’re all reaping the benefits. Here are some of the best I’ve found so far:

Adding Gutenberg support to WordPress theme – What it says in the title. This’ll get you started.

Create Style Variations for WordPress Gutenberg Blocks: Part 1 and Create Style Variations for WordPress Gutenberg Blocks: Part 2 – This two-part series is for when you’ve already learned how to build a custom block, and want to give your users some extra options.

Getting Started With Gutenberg By Creating Your Own Block – From our friends at Smashing Magazine.

Gutenberg Handbook – This is the official developer’s handbook from WordPress themselves. Obviously it’s not exactly meant for beginners.

How to Build Gutenberg Blocks Using JSX – This one’s for you React developers out there, specifically.

Styling the Gutenberg Columns Block – An older tutorial from CSS-Tricks that deals with one specific block, but can be used as a starting point for customizing all block-related styles.

Working with Editor Styles in Gutenberg – Lastly, we have a tutorial on adding custom styles to the editor so that what the users sees in the back end is more or less what they get on the other end.

Authority Sites and Directories

Gutenberg Hub

Gutenberg Hub aims to be the one-stop shop for all things blocky in WordPress. They’ve got massive lists of themes and plugins, their own tutorials, and even a section for Gutenberg news. Whether you just want to learn how to get started, or go full on obsessive about a content editor (there is no shame in that), this is probably the place to start.

WP Gutenberg

WP Gutenberg is a resource hub that focuses heavily on a listing style of content, and forgoes editorial. They have tons of plugins and Gutenberg-supporting themes listed, more than we could reasonably put in an article here on WDD.

The only problem is that at the time of this writing, the site is a bit bugged. Clicking on any listing will take you to a 404 page, so you might just have to copy/paste titles into Google to find the resources listed.

I’ll make the joke for you. It’s buggy like Gutenberg. See? it wasn’t that funny.

  Featured image via Unsplash

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Source p img {display:inline-block; margin-right:10px;} .alignleft {float:left;} p.showcase {clear:both;} body#browserfriendly p, body#podcast p, div#emailbody p{margin:0;} 17 Plugins, Tutorials, and Resources for Gutenberg published first on https://medium.com/@koresol

17 Plugins, Tutorials, and Resources for Gutenberg

The WordPress community officially has Gutenberg fever. While there has been some grumbling (and not without some cause), the blocky little editor that could, has gone mainstream. People have been building, writing, collating, and generally just adapting to the changes, and I’m here to show you some of what they’ve done… Enjoy!

Plugins

As is usual, the WordPress community has gone wild, and has already developed loads of plugins for the new editor; we can’t possibly list them all. Besides, so many of them add pretty much the same new blocks, or very similar blocks, so I’ve decided to list only the ones that caught my eye.

For more complete lists, see the “Authority Sites and Directories” section below.

Block Gallery

A photo gallery plugin that does what it says, and doesn’t come with a thousand other blocks. What more could you ask for?

  Block Options for Gutenberg

Block Options for Gutenberg allows you to show or hide blocks based on a number of factors, including:

What device is being used to view the site;

Whether the user is logged in or not (great for calls to action, perhaps?);

Based on field values in Advanced Custom Fields;

And based on custom conditional logic you might set up yourself.

Coblocks

There are already lots of plugins that aim to turn Gutenberg into a full-on page builder, but Coblocks is the one I currently have my eye on. Sure, they’ve got plenty of layout options and features, but they’re mostly kept light and simple as opposed to overly animated. They seem largely style-agnostic as well.

They don’t use JavaScript on the front end when they don’t have to, and they provide quite good controls for custom typography. Overall, I’m quite impressed.

Disable Gutenberg

Disables Gutenberg. Doesn’t expire in 2022. ‘Nuff said.

Google Maps Gutenberg Block

While this one not the only plugin that provides a map block, it’s one of the few that only provides a map block. Again, does what it says, and doesn’t bloat the menus. I’ll be a fan of these single-purpose block plugins until there aren’t quite so many of those “ultimate block collection” plugins.

Gutenberg Manager

The Gutenberg Manager plugin allows you to enable or disable Gutenberg for posts, pages, or custom post types as you see fit. Basically this allows you to use another plugin in its place for some content types (such as a proper page builder plugin), without disabling Gutenberg completely.

Those looking for flexibility in their content editing experience will want to grab this one.

Jetpack

Yes, that Jetpack. As of November 27th, 2018, Jetpack features a few blocks of its own, including a Markdown-enabling block, payment buttons, maps, and a full-fledged contact form.

It should be noted that some of the blocks, like many Jetpack features, require being on the Jetpack premium plan.

WooCommerce Blocks

Made by Automattic themselves, WooCommerce Blocks provides Gutenberg integration for (you guessed it!) WooCommerce. There are blocks for product grids, featured products, hand-picked products, best-selling products, hand-picked products, and much more.

Combine it with your favorite layout plugins for Gutenberg for the best effect, and you’ve got yet one more way to turn WordPress into a hand-crafted store.

Tutorials and Guides

Gutenberg wasn’t even properly out yet when people started writing tutorials and guides. People from all over the industry wanted to be ahead of the curve, and we’re all reaping the benefits. Here are some of the best I’ve found so far:

Adding Gutenberg support to WordPress theme – What it says in the title. This’ll get you started.

Create Style Variations for WordPress Gutenberg Blocks: Part 1 and Create Style Variations for WordPress Gutenberg Blocks: Part 2 – This two-part series is for when you’ve already learned how to build a custom block, and want to give your users some extra options.

Getting Started With Gutenberg By Creating Your Own Block – From our friends at Smashing Magazine.

Gutenberg Handbook – This is the official developer’s handbook from WordPress themselves. Obviously it’s not exactly meant for beginners.

How to Build Gutenberg Blocks Using JSX – This one’s for you React developers out there, specifically.

Styling the Gutenberg Columns Block – An older tutorial from CSS-Tricks that deals with one specific block, but can be used as a starting point for customizing all block-related styles.

Working with Editor Styles in Gutenberg – Lastly, we have a tutorial on adding custom styles to the editor so that what the users sees in the back end is more or less what they get on the other end.

Authority Sites and Directories

Gutenberg Hub

Gutenberg Hub aims to be the one-stop shop for all things blocky in WordPress. They’ve got massive lists of themes and plugins, their own tutorials, and even a section for Gutenberg news. Whether you just want to learn how to get started, or go full on obsessive about a content editor (there is no shame in that), this is probably the place to start.

WP Gutenberg

WP Gutenberg is a resource hub that focuses heavily on a listing style of content, and forgoes editorial. They have tons of plugins and Gutenberg-supporting themes listed, more than we could reasonably put in an article here on WDD.

The only problem is that at the time of this writing, the site is a bit bugged. Clicking on any listing will take you to a 404 page, so you might just have to copy/paste titles into Google to find the resources listed.

I’ll make the joke for you. It’s buggy like Gutenberg. See? it wasn’t that funny.

  Featured image via Unsplash

Add Realistic Chalk and Sketch Lettering Effects with Sketch’it – only $5!

Source from Webdesigner Depot https://ift.tt/2GZl73g from Blogger https://ift.tt/2Tt6zPj

Reading the Market Trends…and Responding

At first glance, Bob Eidson’s path in the real estate business may look a little circuitous. But upon closer inspection, it was exactly the route needed to bring him to where he stands today, ahead of the curve on one the industry’s most up-and-coming opportunities: the investment property/Airbnb model. Here, Eidson shares how his frontline experience in the recession-era mortgage space readied him for real estate success back in his hometown of Lexington, Ky., where he tapped into his passion for creating urban infill development and read the signs on where the market was headed next. 

Maria Patterson: Your background in real estate is very varied, but let’s start at the beginning. How did you first get started? Bob Eidson: I bought my first two properties when I was 19. After school and military service, I started as a young analyst with a West Coast hedge fund that specialized in complex real estate debt assets. Those guys understood the collateral better than anyone I’ve ever known. I then joined a group out of business school where the emphasis was placed on avoiding foreclosure and keeping people in their homes. We partnered with the California Association of REALTORS® and Prospect Mortgage, and started training REALTORS® in short sales. And on the nights/weekends, I was volunteering with Los Angeles Neighborhood Housing Services to help counsel those facing imminent foreclosure. Those two experiences opened the door for me to then jump into the largest opportunity to make a significant impact to millions of homeowners: join Bank of America and grow their short sale business 100 times.

MP: That’s when the industry was trying to wrap their minds around HAMP/HAFA, right? BE: Correct. Bank of America wanted to massively increase their short sale business, so I joined a Corporate Strategy group tasked with increasing short sales 100 times. Bank of America had acquired Merrill Lynch & Countrywide, and had the nation’s largest portfolio (about 13 million mortgages). I spent two years on the strategy side coming up with the people, processes and technology for how to go from being the worst bank at doing short sales to being the best. Bank of America went from last place to first place in the HAFA (Home Affordable Foreclosure Alternatives) short sale program. Last I checked, they still held that first-place position.

MP: So what led you back to Kentucky? BE: Bank of America right-sized its portfolio, so I left and got into commercial real estate and development. I moved back to Kentucky, where I had ownership in a bar and the Bourbon Review (a publication covering the world of Bourbon and American whiskey). I immediately started two real estate funds for urban infill redevelopment in tier-two and tier-three markets in the Southeast, Emerge Property & Emerge Development. We focused more on downtown core redevelopment opportunities. All of our developments offered affordable housing as well as market-rate housing. I was looking for opportunities where we thought predominantly millennial and service-based employees wanted to live, in and near the core of a downtown. These are places with high walkability scores. Further, we looked for locations that were close to or adjacent to a greenway transit corridor.

MP: Why was it important for you to develop in these types of walkable communities? BE: You have to interpret the trends and embrace them. I happen to believe that people want a lot more development around transit routes. While working for Bank of America, I moved to Uptown Dallas, and the Katy Trail opened the month I moved there. I watched this trail become a vein of energy for all walks of life and all socioeconomic backgrounds. So when I moved back to Kentucky, I wanted to develop our real estate based on similar opportunities. We believe that the future is brighter if we get people out of gated communities and living amongst each other in or near walkable areas.

Shipping containers are recycled as multifamily housing units.

MP: I understand you’ve made some innovative use of shipping containers… BE: Yes, we have completed six construction projects using old shipping containers. We just finished a multifamily concept for Emerge Development. This marks our third year of doing a project with shipping containers, and the knowledge curve has been steep! Our most recent project features four bedrooms in each of four shipping containers. The building has a stick-built core, which synthesized our evolution in thinking about shipping containers. We realized penetrations were costly, so this project features some floor-to-ceiling windows on the second floor, which will offer a stunning view of Lexington’s skyline. Further, the roof makes the structure look like a futuristic race car in a 3D view. Almost everyone grew up with Legos, so the use of them is so intuitive. One thing we’ve learned the hard way is that a little container goes a long way!

MP: Speaking of staying ahead of trend, tell us about your foray into the Airbnb market. BE: A year or so ago, a REALTOR® told us we might want to look into Airbnb. We were building affordable, rental and luxury townhomes with which we could serve multiple segments of the Airbnb market. We put one of our properties up on the site, and within the first 24 hours, we completely booked a 12-plex—12 one-bedroom apartments.

Within a week, we had 60 dates booked and we could never have imagined all the use-case scenarios. Right away, someone booked for all of October, November and December while they were renovating their home. We had a traveling nurse who came to town every other week to work four days in a row, and booked those dates for six months in advance. Corporations are using them purely as a place for people to bring clients to for entertaining as a third corporate space. We have an Airbnb that’s being rented to six guys who work for a FinTech start-up. They congregate here at random intervals; one is in Cincinnati, one is in Chattanooga, and one in Louisiana. None of them live here, but they come and go as needed.

MP: What implications does the Airbnb model have for the rental market? BE: I love this question! I think the 12-month lease will go away 10 years from now, as there will continue to be more specialty situations. The duration of median stay will extend. We’re at a tipping point where we’re all using something like Airbnb, whether it’s Uber/Lyft/Turo—everything makes sense to go to that peer-to-peer platform. Also, the shortage of time for everyone is becoming more acute, and the days of filling out clunky paperwork are ending. Everything needs to be seamless. There will be a further aggregation of the labor economy and the housing economy, and those will start to work in parallel.

MP: Do you see any other parallels between Airbnb and the rideshare ecosystem? BE: It’s funny, I just gave a keynote speech on this. The legacy hospitality business was different from the legacy cab business; the service standards were quite high, in a relative sense. When Uber/Lyft came along, the customer experience was 1,000 times better than what it was before. Think about it: Hasn’t your worst Uber/Lyft been better than your best cab ride? Now, compare the contrast with Airbnb and the legacy hospitality business. I think Uber/Lyft were such a force multiplier, in terms of value perception, that people switched almost overnight. With Airbnb, there are still people who prefer to use credit card points, or their favorite corporate hotel brand, when they’re booking travel. The adoption curve has been steep, nonetheless. I see the legacy hospitality business losing marketshare to Airbnb, slowly, over the next 10 years.

MP: How does your connection to the bourbon business tie in to your real estate business? BE: The frontier of our tourism economy is experiences. Half of the Airbnb guests are coming here for bourbon. I understand what the bourbon consumer, tourist and traveler wants. We’re listening and doing focus groups and the applications are all hyperlocal. That is part of the cool factor with Airbnb. Our most successful Airbnb unit is simply called “Bourbon, Bourbon, Bourbon!”

Look at the big-box hotels. All the trends are toward delivering a local theme…and they’re doing a mediocre job at it. People want to stay like a local. No one says, “I want to stay in some agnostic hotel and eat at a restaurant in a strip mall.” People want to stay at a hip place and go to a hipster coffee joint or a funky burger place. Localism is driving consumer preference and there’s a massive opportunity for disruptors to find authentic ways to do that. Airbnb is such an efficient marketplace for expressing creativity, and the best operators are able infuse the localism with good service.

MP: So what advice would you give for real estate professionals wanting to tap into the Airbnb movement? BE: Understand what your area is known for. It’s the age-old adage “Play to your strengths.” For us, it’s also University of Kentucky athletics, the equestrian industry and Keeneland, and, lastly, medical tourism. Lexington has excellent hospitals and people come from all over Kentucky for healthcare reasons. Nurses come for employment and patients come for treatment. I bought a townhome close to a hospital as a place that patients could rent as an Airbnb.

You also have to find people that understand hospitality and service—you have to start there. You have to be ready to answer questions within 5-10 minutes, even if the question is “Do you have any Q-Tips?”; and messaging through the Airbnb app is critical. Responsiveness 24/7 is a must—and you need someone who is going to walk each unit before a new guest checks in.

You also need to build to scale. I started with one unit and that went great, so I added another unit, and grew from there and needed additional scales, like three subcontractors to do the cleanings, or “turns” as their known amongst Airbnb operators. We used to manage 5-6 units; now we’re managing 68 of our own Airbnb units across five geographic locations, and we manage another 115 Airbnb units for other people, as well.

MP: Can you give us some numbers, for the analytical readers out there? BE: Yeah, sure can. We had 80 percent occupancy in the third quarter. That was an all-time high for us, and we won’t do that every quarter. But it’s averaged 67 percent for the trailing 12 calendar months. In the beginning, when I was modeling the likely revenue scenarios, I never imagined occupancy numbers over 50 percent.

MP: OK, but what about the expenses? Don’t you have at least double the operating expenses? BE: The increased OpEx (operating expenses) we have seen is 93 percent. In some cases, you can actually reduce some OpEx categories. We compared utility bills of the same building that was previously a short-term rental to what the current utility usage has been during its time in service as a short-term rental—we reduced utility expenses by 8 percent year-over-year. So with nearly a 200-percent increase in revenue, and about a 100-percent increase in OpEx, you have effectively doubled your profit. Now every sub-market performs a little differently, but we see similar numbers across our portfolio, which spans five different markets. 

MP: So what should someone do if they’re thinking seriously about converting a unit, or buying a unit, for the short-term rental market? BE: For the average person reading this thinking, “I don’t have time to change sheets or answer questions at all hours of the night,” I would say the following: Get in the game! Soon! There are best-in-class management companies emerging in this space at the local and national level. We are exploring a relationship with Evolve, which is one of the nation’s fastest-growing short-term rental management companies. Further, there are some super-intuitive “bolt-on” technology solutions to help automate much of this. We use TurnoverBnB.com to help coordinate turns with independent contractors. We also use Smartbnb to automate our messaging. Guests receive check-in/check-out instructions, and greetings on their second day of a stay with an offer to provide some local guidance on places to eat/shop. If guests ask a question about traveling with a pet, then Smartbnb has some AI features that will copy/paste information about your pet policy to the guest in the form of a direct message through Airbnb.

Take my advice: Get in the game. Rent out a spare bedroom, or your lake house or beach condo. Don’t get a value photographer, by the way—getting a professional photographer with experience in vacation rentals or other staging applications is recommended. They can optimize the light and really help you to promote what makes your property unique. It’s all about authenticity.

For more information, please visit www.linkedin.com/in/successhacker/.

Maria Patterson is RISMedia’s executive editor. Email her your real estate news ideas at [email protected]. For the latest real estate news and trends, bookmark RISMedia.com.

The post Reading the Market Trends…and Responding appeared first on RISMedia.

Reading the Market Trends…and Responding published first on https://thegardenresidences.tumblr.com/

It’s 2018 trainer season, and Tacx has updated their flagship trainer. The Tacx Neo 2 has been developed as a result of engineering feedback from the Tacx NEO Smart Bike and a deeper understanding of the complex magnets which go to give the unique characteristics of the Tacx NEO 2. So let’s see what is going on

Tacx NEO 2 Smart Trainer and Tacx NEO Smartbike – Preview

I headed over the Netherlands earlier this year to get some saddle time with forthcoming Tacx Neo Smartbike which was originally shown off at Eurobike in 2017 – let me be very clear, the unit seen in Germany was essentially a design mockup. Things have changed dramatically since then.

Unsurprisingly, I survived the flight – now whilst I don’t have an issue with flying per say, after an incident in Africa with a prop plane, I’m always a touch… wary when I see that my flying aluminium sky tube has propellers!

Things are going very well for Tacx as company to the degree that they have run out of factory space, and as a result are currently in the process of building a new factory just down the road in order to house their factory facilities, which with the number of products they are manufacturing has now become a little cramped

Tacx is relatively unique in the turbo trainer industry in that the whole widget is produced on site – everything from the plastic moulds to the metal tubing, and wiring looms

I’ll be honest; I was a little hoodwinked by Tacx – during our meetings, there was a huge amount of discussion on the Tacx Flux S and Tacx Flux 2, which obviously we had a poke about the inside of as well.

Once or twice there was the mention that there was a Tacx Neo 2 coming later in this year, but that it was not for public discussion, and that they were not able to show me a production version as yet. I was however asked to give my impression on a new colour change to a Tacx Neo which was sitting in the corner. “Yup I like it, now about those new Tacx Neo 2 changes you were saying…” 

Ha. Ha. Very Funny. Well, now we know that I WAS looking at a Neo 2, with its new blue underwear (you can actually see it in the back of the Tacx Neo Smart bike video). I still stick to my original opinion, however – that I do really like the new colour addition. Only small, but it does refresh the overall appearance. Although that might just be my brain going “Ooooo new shiny thing.”

The same blue underside will be seen on the Tacx Flux 2 when that launches shortly

Tacx NEO 2 Preview

When the Tacx Neo first came out, there were a few gremlins in the system. Let me be clear, since the end of 2016 those gremlins have been well and truly put to bed. Reinforced by no significant issues being seen with the last iteration. Thus it seems entirely reasonable to consider that since we are talking about refinements, along with improvements to the internals, the Tacx Neo 2 should be even more polished from a reliability side.

The Tacx Neo 2 is NOT a revolution, but has taken more features from other products – specifically where pedalling is concerned. The internal cadence calculations have been improved, along with the addition of left/right balance calculations from the internal power meter. These features dovetail nicely with the new pedal stroke analysis – which I’d imagine will be a draw for people using power meters which do not support these features – the update to the Tacx Desktop App allowing 3D course generation will be the first place people will be able to access this data

Tacx has always been a company lead be the engineers, rather than the accountants. As a result, there are a LARGE number of prototypes in storage which have never seen the light of day. I remain particularly enamoured by the turbo trainer which could return excess power to the national grid! “Darling, I want to put the washing machine on, do a couple of laps of Watopia would you?”

The Tacx Neo gave everyone a nice surprise when a firmware update brought Road Feel vibrations to the turbo – admittedly a rather love-hate feature, but still, the ingenuity is there. The new Tacx Neo 2 as “added internals” for functionality which has not been revealed yet.

I don’t think we’ll get something as significant as Road Feel, but we may see additional training tools such as the Isokinetic and Isotonic features which can be accessed from the Tacx phone App – we’ll just have to wait and see

Visually I’ve always found the Tacx Neo to the most visually pleasing of the big five. Now I appreciate that can be a very subjective thing. I couldn’t really follow the logic the other day of someone choosing a particular pedal type over another, as one brand “Just looks ugly”. It’s probable that many people will view their smart trainer in the same way — something to put under the bike and ignore.

The Tacx Neo has always been “The comparator” when it comes to turbo trainers. The KICKR vs Neo, Drivo Vs Neo, Hammer vs Neo. That isn’t to say that it is the Neo is a benchmark design, but that it is sufficiently different compared to the other units as to be the “other option” for most people 

For winter 2018 the team in the Netherlands have gone over their flagship turbo, tweaking, and tucking, resulting in the new Tacx Neo 2. The competition has moved on very far this year –  with the new Elite Drivo II; Elite has come out batting hard with improved accuracy and responsiveness on Zwift. So has the Tacx Neo 2 advanced far enough to keep in the fight We’ll have the wait for the full Zwift Gear Test for that!

The case is EXACTLY the same as previously, so if you have been unable to get your bike of the Neo previously then things will not have changed with the Tacx Neo 2. Conversely, that does mean that the stability the previous unit has been known for, will also remain unchanged with the Tacx Neo 2

Tacx have managed to improve the cadence data from the Tacx Neo 2 by producing a new sensor type inside the Neo. That in itself doesn’t sound particularly entertaining. However that technology is being adapted for another purpose within Tacx – currently embargoed – but suffice to say it is the sort of out of the box thinking which Tacx and Martin Smits are well known for!

Don’t worry though, Tacx realises that indoor cyclist is a very platform agnostic person – as such they have made the pedal analysis available to third parties. So whilst Tacx only support it with their own apps, Garmin is working on an update to bring Tacx pedal analysis data to their Garmin Edge units, which will massively increase its utility

Tacx NEO 2 – Specifications

Communication: Bluetooth, ANT+™, ANT+™ FE-C, BlueTooth Smart Trainer Protocol – both ANT and BLE can be used simultaneously

Max Slope Simulation: 25%

Built-in sensors: Power, Speed/Cadence, Advanced pedal analytics, Left/Right balance

Max Wattage: 2200w @40kph

Freehub: Shimano, 9/10/11 speed compatible – no cassette in the box

Power Accuracy: +/- 1%

Flywheel: 125kg

Max User Weight: 125kg

Weight: 21.5kg

Other Bits: Road Feel, Front LED power indicator lights

Compatibility notes: bikes with 130, 135, 142, and 148mm width rear fork Quick release adapter for 12mm x 142, 12x 142 thru-axle hubs

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Elite Drivo II Review – Using the device

Tacx NEO 2 Manual

Tacx Neo 2 user manual can be found HERE 

I do think there is a small element of spec sheet polishing going on here, with the Tacx Neo 2 just edging out the Elite Drivo II with 25% vs 24% Max Slope Incline.

Tacx NEO 2 – It’s all in the slope

That is a relatively important point, as Tacx are trying to change how specifications for trainers are reported. The crux of this argument is that the Elite Drivo II has a wattage rated as 3600Watts @60kph whereas the Tacx Neo 2 is 2200W @40kph. In both cases the spec sheet numbers look brilliant HOWEVER you are not going to get normal people holding these wattages at these speeds. So the numbers actually have very little relevance to what the trainer is capable of, and for the rider, what they will actually experience.

The engineers would like some of these figures to be replaced with slope profiles, showing the speed that a rider has to be at in order for the trainer to simulate a set gradient.

Unfortunately, Tacx wouldn’t allow me to take copies of the trainer curves shown that day due to other products on the graphs, which they don’t want public as yet. So let’s look at an OLD trainer resistance curve to get an idea as to what I’m going on about

So the maximum gradient that the i-vortex was able to hit was 7%. BUT that 7% gradient was only possible at certain speeds. Each trainer will have a profile showing the minimum resistance, or gradient simulation it is able to hold at a certain speed. So on the above graph, the i-Vortex can produce a 7% resistance, up to about 23kph, and 270 watts. However, this is where the strength of the brake, the amount of inertia the unit can produce, comes into play. On the i-vortex the brake was an electromagnetically generated 11.81kg, so with the above graph, if you went over about 300 watts, you’d overcome the limited brake strength. By about 500 watts, the unit would only be able to generate 3% gradient.

So going back to the Tacx Neo 2, the electromagnetic brake is 125kg, hence being able to produce a gradient of 25%- but the question is, at what wattage is it able maintain this force, and what speed does the rider have to be doing?

Again, I don’t have the graphs from Tacx, but changes to the internal components on both the Tacx Neo 2 and the Tacx Flux 2 have meant an improved power curve so that more resistance is available at lower speeds.

As the accuracy of the Tacx Neo is already considered to be <1%, so the power curve has been a big focus over the last few years in order to improve the realism of the simulation for riders. This has been tested both on the workbench, and will hopefully see riders finding that when running GPX file routes on the Tacx Neo 2 that their simulation will have moved to mimic the efforts they experienced in real life.

Will this, however, have a noticeable effect on Zwift? As I’m pretty sure my legs would be the limiting factor going up Alpe du Zwift

So it makes sense that I try to work out the Tacx Neo 2 in a short, clearly subjective test, to see if I can discern a difference from the original going up the Watopia classic KOM. We’ll have to see if there is anything else needed during the full Zwift Gear Test – On which note, it will be a week or so before the full Zwift Gear Test comes out, as we all know that the temperament of a smart turbo is more than just what is written on the spec sheet!

One report that I can give so far – after doing Alpe du Zwift as the maiden ride for the Tacx Neo 2 is that the sound that the unit makes seems to be at a slightly lower pitch than the original unit, making for a better sound profile. But again, more actually testing is needed before I can make that firm statement.

On which note, time to wipe off the sweat and get back to testing.

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So there is the preview to the Tacx NEO 2 – What about the Tacx NEO Smart Bike?

Tacx Neo Smart Bike PREVIEW 

Ok, first things first. The Tacx Smart Bike is not finished yet. However, I was still allowed to have a play on the near production-ready version Tacx had out that day.

People have been talking about smart bikes and Zwift for quite a while, but it was Tacx that was the first to show their hand at the 2017 Eurobike with what could best be described as a design study.

But now the team under Martin Smits are nearly ready to push their Frankenstein turbo trainer, exercise bike, Neo hybrid out of the door. Here’s a little bit of internal intrigue for you – Tacx chief engineer didn’t like it. He didn’t want to work on it. Yet now it is one of his proudest pieces of work.

You know what. I understand that completely. I thought the idea of a smart bike was a waste. Going backwards even. We’ve had exercise bikes before; they just became washing lines to dry clothes on. A turbo and your own bike, your own steed is a much better idea.

I’m a big enough man to say that I was wrong, as you can see in the video below

But why do I feel this way? It is an amalgamation of products that works. I’m currently hard pressed to say which bit is my favourite. It is going to be a toss-up on the fan, which can be speed linked, power linked, or get this heart rate linked. That makes the possibility of training so much better.

Due to the fans being quite close in proximity to the rider, they can project a tighter column of air, being both more effective and quieter than larger fans. They have both vertical and horizontal tilt, and can also be angled closer to the rider, or removed all together if desired

Each fan on the Tacx NEO smart bike is about a quarter of the size of the two fans that I use at home. However, I’m not going to really be able to give an opinion on how they are until I’ve been flat out in a full Zwift Race on the bike.

The internals of the Tacx NEO Smart Bike are basically the same at the new Tacx NEO 2 – but now using a belt drive connected to the crank for zero maintenance and further reduced noise profile. BUT, because there is now no cassette, Tacx is able to use the 32 Neodymium magnets (now you know where the name comes from) inside the unit to simulate different gearing setups

The benefit here being if you want to do a classic ride such as Alpe D’Huez, but have never undertaken something like that before with the Tacx NEO Smart Bike you can load up the GPX file, try the route AND with a couple of switches within the Tacx app, change your cassette. Then next time you do the training ride, try out a different cassette so that you find the optimum gear setup for your fitness level.

The electronic shifters allow you to control both the gearing, but also resistance levels and ALSO act as brakes. Something which is not currently integrated into Zwift, but that could make for a significant impact on races!

As there is no cassette or front gear setup now, Tacx has intentionally simulated the feeling of gear changes coming through the drive train, as they found that simply having imperceptible changes in gearing didn’t sit right with test riders.

The screen pretty much renders the need for an additional cycling head unit null and void. Especially as the LEFT/RIGHT pedal balance and the other pedal analytics data we have in the new Tacx NEO 2 are present in the Tacx software, and are available to other third parties – come on Zwift, give us pedal doughnuts!

But perhaps the winning aspect for me… that you can run the Tacx NEO smart bike without power if you don’t mind forgoing the downhill simulation. But even with the power unplugged, you STILL get road feel simulation; you’ll still get the full adjustable fans. But that isn’t the winning aspect for me. Hiding around the front of the unit are two 2 amp USB-A charge ports, which will allow you to cycle and charge your tablet or phone at the same time

There have previously been some mutterings that Zwift has taken an ecological, non-carbon form of exercise, and slapped a massive electricity bill to the back of it. The Tacx NEO smart bike takes the end user part if that electricity bill off the table.

The bike fit setup covers everything you’d really expect from a smart bike which is supposed to be able to fit as many people as possible. Crank length, Q angle, seat position, stem height. If you can get comfortable on a bike, you should find the right fit here.

So that is pretty much the Tacx Neo Smart Bike preview. I genuinely cannot wait to give this thing a full Zwift Gear Test now, but as yet, it is looking like the very end of 2019, probably Q1 of 2019 when Tacx will be releasing their new mechanical horse. Until then, we can dream that it will come in under the £2500 price tag people have been throwing around

What are your thoughts on smart bikes, given that we’ve seen the offerings from Elite with the Elite Fuoripista and now the Tacx NEO smart bike? Drop your thoughts in the comments below!

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Elite Drivo II Review – Using the device

Tacx NEO 2 Smart Trainer & Tacx NEO Smartbike – Preview It's 2018 trainer season, and Tacx has updated their flagship trainer. The Tacx Neo 2 has been developed as a result of engineering feedback from the Tacx NEO Smart Bike and a deeper understanding of the complex magnets which go to give the unique characteristics of the Tacx NEO 2.

The Weekly Ration; Issue #1

Welcome to Working Title!  This is a Rip-Off (read rip-off) of FlyDay by Sean Callahan.  After he announced he was taking a break on Friday, I did feel a little blah about it and a minuscule amount of "oh shut up Sean" about it.  To be fair, he's felt that way about me on multiple occasions and we'd never tell each other this till month's after the event because we are passive aggressive gentlemen.  Anyways here's a piece I worked on that really hurt me because I had to research the subject matter.

Investigating the Trash Heap that is the douche-fuck, steroid chugging, centrist bait for unfunny fuck bois at open mics,  piece of shit Joe Rogan with no ad-hominems (toward Joe Rogan) except the title where I get to berate his stupid fucking face.

Ad-hominem.  In philosophy and debate it is told to us that as soon as you use an Ad-hominem you lose the argument.  The theory is as soon as you get into name-calling you become too passionate with hate or distaste that your stand-points fall apart because they are based in anger.  You can have an argument solid with foundations, truths, and thought out research but as soon as you call someone a poopy head you lose.  You get nothing.  Good day sir.  I personally think this old standpoint is invalid as a passionate argument coming out of the mouth of someone who isn't a robot has more umph to it.  But this is the driving force of these kind of argument freelancers.  With the title out of the way that clearly shows I lose, I present the rest of this article that hurt me and I'll show you on the doll.

Let's begin by explaining what a Joe Rogan is.  A Joe Rogan is a 51 yr. Comedian, MMA Commentator, Actor, and Podcast Guru.  He has a high ranking podcast with a very impressive record of being no. 1 or in the top 5 on Itunes and several other podcast streaming sites continuously for years.  On his podcast he goes into depth with interviews with people of all different walks of life ranging from angry white guys to angrier white guys.  To his credit, I'm only 80% jesting.  To his credit he is a good interviewer for the type of podcast he is presenting.  He's had some interviews that made me see perceived monsters as human and golden gods as flawed specimens.  In the rare times I've checked out his podcast, his interview with fucking angry red-tinted moron and fuck face Alex Jones (see title) actually had Alex Jones out-of-character and being a fairly down-to-earth alright guy.  Until he called liberals pyschic vampires (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MkMnwFZyNrw&t=23s), but I imagine doing a show like InfoWars will irreparably have long lasting side effects.

As does doing The Joe Rogan Experience.  Joe Rogan is very into hallucinogens and will appear on his show stoned numerous times, more than not.  He talks about their mental health benefits and existential properties that have helped him and recommends them to his guests, audience, and everyone in the world essentially.  I am very in favor of the good hallucinogens do and support that narrative.  He even talks about the benefits of a deprivation tank which I want to try for myself and encourage anyone to as well.  However, the goal of most "trips" is to destroy your own ego and perceived world view so as to attain a higher plateau of thought.  Joe ignores that side of the journey and with child-like wonder just says "whoa dude".  I mean, it is pretty "whoa dude", but that's not the end goal of those journeys.  You want to come out changed, your perspective advanced, and less depressed.   Joe fails to go past the "oh shiny" phase of trippy drugs, even DMT and Ayahuasca which puts most people on their ass and forever humbled to reality.  His blase approach to taking "whoa dude" drugs has even lead to him emboldening contrarian, damaging viewpoints.

Joe Rogan is essentially a libertarian,although if asked he says he is not affiliated with any political party.  This stance is held-up by many of his viewers/listeners and is basically the "well I'm not them" argument.  It's having your cake and giving it to the 1%.  That stance makes him and many with this worldview, see themselves as bullet-proof and hyperbolic Supermans who can give a platform to any sort of ideological monstrosity because "well I'm not them", "whoa dude", or "I don't know about all of that."  Interviewing Milo Yolopoopmouse (read YolilelaleeTrump) and "hearing him out" as he talks about "Daddy Trump"(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vZ8KSh9bd6w)without calling out Milo's fascist viewpoints only makes more Milo YugiOh!cards.  This is where Joe gains so many followers.  Joe Rogan, who "doesn't affilate with any political party" finds himself emboldening centrists.   

Centrism is the agnosticism of politics with much more dangerous, physical, and desperate real world applications.  Agnostics question, compare and contrast while Centrists, at least of late, are just stirring up ill-will and trying to come out of as the better person.  The "I don't give a shit" approach to something like an existential question of God ultimately doesn't have nearly the same impact of seeing an Anti-Fa Militant and a Proud Boy fighting with the response "both sides are bad."  Fence sitting on God, fine.  Fence sitting on the abject horror of quickly rising fascist dictatorship, not fine.  Very not fine.  One of the least fine things you can be doing in this or any other year.

This centrism has found him an allegiance of militant fans who take what he says and doesn't say to the extremes.  Because Joe is so dismissive or non-argumentative with the ideologues he brings on his show it empowers his viewers/listeners to continue their movements.  Joe may hate Trump like any other breathing person with a speck of human decency, but he has Trump fans who have more blood push into their sexual organs when Alex Jones and Milo are guests.  Joe may hate racism, but "hearing out" a radical racist gives entitlement to NRA supporters who have wet dreams of home invasions.  Joe may think you need to get laid,  but having an Incel rant about outright misogyny leads to an asexual self-made eunuch plot his revenge.  Take a fucking stand is what I'm saying.  Just because you yell a lot on your show doesn't mean you're arguing.

I avoid arguing about Joe Rogan as much as I can, however, I am a comedian as well.  I go to open mics regularly, get booked on shows, and want to basically not work so I do comedy.  I've been doing it for over 4 years now, and I love every moment of it.  No surprise, when I first got into comedy I found Joe Rogan endearing and "sticking it to the soy boy beta cucks" (that exact term is from It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia.  Obviously 4 years ago it wasn't really around but I'd be sure to say that phrase if it existed back then).  But as with numerous examples in this article and more I can't type as my eye is already twitching enough, I found definite faults with Joe and didn't see him as the hilarious contrarian I once did.

Because I realized he's not even contrarian, he's opinion-lite.  He's centrist.  He's straw man argument.  If this or the rest of this article (obviously disregarding the title) feel ad-hominem now, my only excuse is I'm not very good at this and this is my first time writing one of these articles in several years.  Something that makes me chuckle to this day was a clueless, middle-aged guy trying comedy for his first time.  He came up to the deck, trying to bond, form a connection with us.  His opening remarks were "Wow, Joey Coco Diaz and Joe Rogan are here on the same night!  HOW DO I CHOOSE?" which didn't lead to the glad-handing and praise he wanted but a quick "Joey Diaz" from most of the deck.  We returned to staring at our phones and avoiding eye contact with eachother.  We're comics, we're anti-social weirdos who want to be loved by strangers but only when we have a mic in our hands.  He felt crushed while simultaneously thinking we don't like comedy, which is only true of most of us.  

If you want the anger and passion you hear from Joe Rogan but with a punch and bravado I suggest Doug Stanhope.  Doug Stanhope "doesn't give a shit" but he has real umph and vigor.  He has a contrarian viewpoint to almost anything, is hyperbolic, and hypocritical.  He's everything Joe Rogan wants to be but far more in-depth, entertaining, and outright funny.  Contrarian and definitely not a centrist trying to hide centrism with yelling and looking cool.  Now if you excuse me I have to run away from these new comics.

Hope you enjoyed the first of many of these weekly installments.  If you are interested in becoming part of TheWeeklyRation Comrades you can email me at [email protected] to get the weeks installment two days earlier on Friday as part of the mass-mailer.  Otherwise you can continue following this blog where it’ll be posted on Sundays.  This is a project of mine that I was directly inspired to do by Sean Callahan, my best friend and wonderful writer who did a weekly mailer called “Happy Flyday”.  Thank you for your interest!

And so Mort came at last to the river Ankh, greatest of rivers. Even before it entered the city it was slow and heavy with the silt of the plains, and by the time it got to The Shades even an agnostic could have walked across it. It was hard to drown in the Ankh, but easy to suffocate. Mort looked at the surface doubtfully. It seemed to be moving. There were bubbles in it. It had to be water. He sighed, and turned away. Three men had appeared behind him, as though extruded from the stonework. They had the heavy, stolid look of those thugs whose appearance in any narrative means that it's time for the hero to be menaced a bit, although not too much, because it's also obvious that they're going to be horribly surprised. They were leering. They were good at it. One of them had drawn a knife, which he waved in little circles in the air. He advanced slowly towards Mort, while the other two hung back to provide immoral support. 'Give us the money,' he rasped. Mort's hand went to the bag on his belt. 'Hang on a minute,' he said. 'What happens then?' 'What?' 'I mean, is it my money or my life?' said Mort. 'That's the sort of thing robbers are supposed to demand. Your money or your life. I read that in a book once,' he added. 'Possibly, possibly,' conceded the robber. He felt he was losing the initiative, but rallied magnificently. 'On the other hand, it could be your money and your life. Pulling off the double, you might say.' The man looked sideways at his colleagues, who sniggered on cue. 'In that case —' said Mort, and hefted the bag in one hand preparatory to chucking it as far out into the Ankh as he could, even though there was a reasonable chance it would bounce. 'Hey, what are you doing,'said the robber. He started to run forward, but halted when Mort gave the bag a threatening jerk. 'Well,' said Mort, 'I look at it like this. If you're going to kill me anyway, I might as well get rid of the money. It's entirely up to you.' To illustrate his point he took one coin out of the bag and flicked it out across the water, which accepted it with an unfortunate sucking noise. The thieves shuddered. The leading thief looked at the bag. He looked at his knife. He looked at Mort's face. He looked at his colleagues. 'Excuse me,' he said, and they went into a huddle. Mort measured the distance to the end of the alley. He wouldn't make it. Anyway, these three looked as though chasing people was another thing they were good at. It was only logic that left them feeling a little stretched. Their leader turned back to Mort. He gave a final glance at the other two. They both nodded decisively. 'I think we kill you and take a chance on the money,' he said. 'We don't want this sort of thing to spread.' The other two drew their knives. Mort swallowed. 'This could be unwise,' he said. 'Why?' 'Well, I won't like it, for one.' 'You're not supposed to like it, you're supposed to – die,' said the thief, advancing. 'I don't think I'm due to die,' said Mort, backing away. 'I'm sure I would have been told.' 'Yeah,' said the thief, who was getting fed up with this. 'Yeah, well, you have been, haven't you? Great steaming elephant turds!' Mort had just stepped backwards again. Through a wall. The leading thief glared at the solid stone that had swallowed Mort, and then threw down his knife. 'Well, – – – – me,' he said. 'A – – – – ing wizard. I hate – – – – ing wizards!' 'You shouldn't – – – – them, then,' muttered one of his henchmen, effortlessly pronouncing a row of dashes. The third member of the trio, who was a little slow of thinking, said, 'Here, he walked through the wall!' 'And we bin following him for ages, too,' muttered the second one. 'Fine one you are, Pilgarlic. I said I thought he was a wizard, only wizards'd walk round here by themselves. Dint I say he looked like a wizard? I said —' 'You're saying a good deal too much,' growled the leader. 'I saw him, he walked right through the wall there —' 'Oh, yeah?' 'Yeah!' 'Right through it, dint you see?' 'Think you're sharp, do you?' 'Sharp enough, come to that!' The leader scooped his knife out of the dirt in one snaky movement. 'Sharp as this?' The third thief lurched over to the wall and kicked it hard a few times, while behind him there were the sounds of scuffle and some damp bubbling noises. 'Yep, it's a wall okay,' he said. That's a wall if ever I saw one. How d'you think they do it, lads?' 'Lads?' He tripped over the prone bodies. 'Oh,' he said. Slow as his mind was, it was quick enough to realise something very important. He was in a back alley in The Shades, and he was alone. He ran for it, and got quite a long way. Death walked slowly across tiles in the lifetimer room, inspecting the serried rows of busy hourglasses. Albert followed dutifully behind with the great ledger open in his arms. The sound roared around them, a vast grey waterfall of noise. It came from the shelves where, stretching away into the infinite distance, row upon row of hourglasses poured away the sands of mortal time. It was a heavy sound, a dull sound, a sound that poured like sullen custard over the bright roly-poly pudding of the soul. VERY WELL, said Death at last. I MAKE IT THREE. A QUIET NIGHT. 'That'd be Goodie Hamstring, the Abbott Lobsang again, and this Princess Keli,' said Albert. Death looked at the three hourglasses in his hand. I WAS THINKING OF SENDING THE LAD OUT, he said. Albert consulted his ledger. 'Well, Goodie wouldn't be any trouble and the Abbott is what you might call experienced,' he said. 'Shame about the princess. Only fifteen. Could be tricky.' YES. IT is A PITY. 'Master?' Death stood with the third glass in his hand, staring thoughtfully at the play of light across its surface. He sighed. ONE so YOUNG. . . . 'Are you feeling all right, master?' said Albert, his voice full of concern. TIME LIKE AN EVER-ROLLING STREAM BEARS ALL ITS. . . . 'Master!' WHAT? said Death, snapping out of it. 'You've been overdoing it, master, that's what it is—' WHAT ARE YOU BLATHERING ABOUT, MAN? 'You had a bit of a funny turn there, master.' NONSENSE. I HAVE NEVER FELT BETTER. NOW, WHAT WERE WE TALKING ABOUT? Albert shrugged, and peered down at the entries in the book. 'Goodie's a witch,' he said. 'She might get a bit annoyed if you send Mort.' All practitioners of magic earned the right, once their own personal sands had run out, of being claimed by Death himself rather than his minor functionaries. Death didn't appear to hear Albert. He was staring at Princess Keli's hourglass again. WHAT is THAT SENSE INSIDE YOUR HEAD OF WISTFUL REGRET THAT THINGS ARE THE WAY THEY APPARENTLY ARE? 'Sadness, master. I think. Now —' I AM SADNESS. Albert stood with his mouth open. Finally he got a grip on himself long enough to blurt out, 'Master, we were talking about Mort!' MORT WHO? 'Your apprentice, master,' said Albert patiently. Tall young lad.' OF COURSE. WELL, WE'LL SEND HIM. 'Is he ready to go solo, master?' said Albert doubtfully. Death thought about it. HE CAN DO IT, he said at ast. HE'S KEEN, HE'S QUICK TO LEARN AND, REALLY, e added, PEOPLE CANT EXPECT TO HAVE ME RUNNING AROUND AFTER THEM ALL THE TIME. Mort stared blankly at the velvet wall hangings a few inches from his eyes. I've walked through a wall, he thought. And that's impossible. He gingerly moved the hangings aside to see if a door was lurking somewhere, but there was nothing but crumbling plaster which had cracked away in places to reveal some dampish but emphatically solid brickwork. He prodded it experimentally. It was quite clear that he wasn't going back out that way. 'Well,' he said to the wall. 'What now?' A voice behind him said, 'Um. Excuse please?' He turned around slowly. Grouped around a table in the middle of the room was a Klatchian family of father, mother and half a dozen children of dwindling size. Eight pairs of round eyes were fixed on Mort. A ninth pair belonging to an aged grandparent of indeterminate sex weren't, because their owner had taken advantage of the interruption to get some elbow room at the communal rice bowl, taking the view that a boiled fish in the hand was worth any amount of unexplained manifestations, and the silence was punctuated by the sound of determined mastication. In one corner of the crowded room was a little shrine to Offler, the six-armed Crocodile God of Klatch. It was grinning just like Death, except of course Death didn't have a flock of holy birds that brought him news of his worshippers and also kept his teeth clean. Klatchians prize hospitality above all other virtues. As Mort stared the woman took another plate off the shelf behind her and silently began to fill it from the big bowl, snatching a choice cut of catfish from the ancient's hands after a brief struggle. Her kohl-rimmed eyes remained steadily on Mort, however. It was the father who had spoken. Mort bowed nervously. 'Sorry,' he said. 'Er, I seem to have walked through this wall.' It was rather lame, he had to admit. 'Please?' said the man. The woman, her bangles jangling, carefully arranged a few slices of pepper across the plate and sprinkled it with a dark green sauce that Mort was afraid he recognised. He'd tried it a few weeks before, and although it was a complicated recipe one taste had been enough to know that it was made out of fish entrails marinated for several years in a vat of shark bile. Death had said that it was an acquired taste. Mort had decided not to make the effort. He tried to sidle around the edge of the room towards the bead-hung doorway, all the heads turning to watch him. He tried a grin. The woman said: 'Why does the demon show his teeth, husband of my life?' The man said: 'It could be hunger, moon of my desire. Pile on more fish!' And the ancestor grumbled: 'I was eating that, wretched child. Woe unto the world when there is no respect for age!' Now the fact is that while the words entered Mort's ear in their spoken Klatchian, with all the curlicues and subtle diphthongs of a language so ancient and sophisticated that it had fifteen words meaning 'assassination' before the rest of the world had caught on to the idea of bashing one another over the head with rocks, they arrived in his brain as clear and understandable as his mother tongue. 'I'm no demon! I'm a human!' he said, and stopped in shock as his words emerged in perfect Klatch. 'You're a thief?' said the father. 'A murderer? To creep in thus, are you a tax-gatherer?' His hand slipped under the table and came up holding a meat cleaver honed to paper thinness. His wife screamed and dropped the plate and clutched the youngest children to her. Mort watched the blade weave through the air, and gave in. 'I bring you greetings from the uttermost circles of hell,' he hazarded. The change was remarkable. The cleaver was lowered and the family broke into broad smiles. 'There is much luck to us if a demon visits,' beamed the father. 'What is your wish, O foul spawn of Offler's loins?' 'Sorry?' said Mort. 'A demon brings blessing and good fortune on the man that helps it,' said the man. 'How may we be of assistance, O evil dogsbreath of the nether pit?' 'Well, I'm not very hungry,' said Mort, 'but if you know where I can get a fast horse, I could be in Sto Lat before sunset.' The man beamed and bowed. 'I know the very place, noxious extrusion of the bowels, if you would be so good as to follow me.'