WIP Wednesday: Plant Company

Thank you for the ask! As I was writing your sentences, I realized that I never actually planned out what Alta Station looks like and I'm 13 chapters into this story, which up until this point has taken place mainly *in* Alta Station.

WIP Wednesday Game-Plant Company (original story)

Allan's eyes widened as Gatling acknowledged over the comm.

"You really think he might try to leave the station?" she asked as she followed Haskell to the nearest exit and out into the third atrium.

Alta station was built as a series of specialized wings that extended from a set of three atria ringing the station's main reactor.

Wall-E AU let’s go...

With nothing better to do how about some backstories for the three protagonist?

Deku (D3-ku) (Backstory)

Deku or D3-ku is a custom Wall-E Unit designed by the Japanese Branch of BnL for the Asian Market.

These Wall-Es were designed after popular heroes which included heroes from pop culture and famous heroes of old.

The D3-ku was the last model ever made before the Humans left earth for the luxury spaceship Yuuei. So there were a lot less D3-ku models made before the big exodus this makes finding compatible repair parts difficult to find when out scavenging for “treasures”.

D3-ku was one of 300 Wall-E’s designated to clean the Musutafu area.

D3-ku or Deku, as he refers to himself, didn’t automatically develop a personality. Deku began to develop a personality 50 years after he was first turned on.

Through watching old segments of heroes on the big screens all over the public areas in Musutafu and the surrounding areas, Deku began to become obsessed with anything hero related.

He would sequester treasure related to any hero in secret places all over the sector he was designated to clean. He now has them all in his little trailer home.

His favorite finds were of the legendary hero from a Century ago All Might, which were rare.

His favorite All Might find was a role play child’s headband he sewed to his goggles to “look” like his favorite hero. To anyone else they look more like bunny ears.

It slowly became obvious that Deku was the only one who had a personality when he began to show human-like tendencies these included leaving work when the sun went down, making a home out of one of the abandoned Wall-En trailers, collecting All Might memorabilia, and watching old hero reels.

Deku was pretty lonely for a long time, unable to form any familial connections with the other D3-kus in his company, but continued to work beside his fellow D3-kus despite the lack of connection due to his directive.

Eventually, all the other D3-ku models and Wall-E models began to break down one by one.

200 years after the space ships left earth, the first clean up robot broke down. Eventually, Deku was the only one left. Then the problems began.

With no more spare parts being made Deku began to realize how destructive his garbage crushing methods actually were.

Designing his crushing methods after All Might’s Smashes, Deku's arms began to break down extremely fast from the abuse.

All Wall-E units know how to perform all types of maintenance and repairs including replacing broken and run down parts, like arms.

He has gone through three arms.

He’s moved to using his legs to crush trash. With most of the D3-ku arms rusted or broken beyond use he had no choice but to continue to use his crumbling arms until he can find a new pair of functioning arms.

Over 50 years later he is still looking for a pair worth using full time.

He does have an emergency pair just in case one arm stops working.

Even though it’s a hopeless tack, Deku still goes to work crushing trash. With no other options and all alone all he had left was his main directive: Clean the Planet.

He does this for 50 more years before he begins to explore more often, taking breaks for days or weeks at a time to scavenge for more All Might memorabilia.

It is during one of these hunts Deku finds another working robot, a small child companion model calling herself Doll.

So excited to find another bot, albeit almost totally destroyed but alive, he takes her back to his trailer and begins to repair her.

It takes months of searching to find parts before he can actually repair her during that time they become good friends, eventually forming a sister and brother bond.

Deku eventually finds mismatched parts from a customized battle bot that has arms and legs that look like a mummy, a new faceplate to go over her old one, a wig to replace her worn out matted hair, and a dress to cover her sensitive body part from the elements.

During “repair day” Deku was able to find a description on the side of her body while running new wires for the arm and leg and learns her true name is Eri.

From then on Eri and Deku go everywhere, including Deku’s work.

Having someone there really makes the work go faster with Deku clearing Takoba Municipal Beach Park in record time.

Deku doesn’t feel alone anymore. He’s happy now and has a loving little sister who looks up to him, but something is still missing in his life.

After watching so many hero videos, especially his favorite All Might rescue video, Deku dreams of becoming a hero like those in his films.

He tries to keep these thoughts to himself but Eri knows something’s wrong with her brother and wishes she could help him in some way.

Eventually Deku puts the dream on the back burner to focus on his directive and little sister.

That is until He finds a green plant with nine leaves in a refrigerator and his whole world changes.

Sh0-t0 (Sh0-Chan or Shoto) (Backstory)

Sh0-t0 is a Yuuei exclusive model of the Eve model designed by the BnL Japanese branch.

The newest version of Eve, he is one of four specifically designed for exploration of the Asian Continent.

The other models are the rest of the Todoroki siblings and Dabi (this falls under the Dabi is a Todoroki trope but doesn’t appear in the story)

When the siblings are getting ready to deploy one pod slot is empty the name: Tōya is dark and decommissioned.

All Sh0-t0 knows is his directive: find signs of life.

To help him with his search for life the left side of his face plate is a scanner with the ability to detect plant life. He has the ability to use fire and ice with the ice side acting as an emergency cooling when the heat of his fire becomes too much.

He doesn’t like his fire side and only uses it when enraged.

Mainly he uses it to destroy big objects and let off steam from the frustration not finding any signs of life.

Shoto mainly uses his ice side to handle the most dangerous situation. Though he can only use this ability for a limited amount of time before the water stored in his right leg depletes and he has to return to the ship that brought them to earth to reload. The water on earth is too toxic for his delicate systems.

Shoto has the most personality out of all his siblings having been deployed most out of the three remaining Eve models and having been deployed more often to the planet.

When deployed, Shoto loves to fly in the air making loop-de-loops and breaking the sound barrier.

The fast he goes, the fast he believes he can get way from the ship and the blackness of storage the Eve models always go back to after another failed mission to find signs of life.

Shoto hates the ship with all his being, if he could he would disappear like his fellow Eve model Tōya in a second, but he understands the goal of the directive he’s been given: to return humans back to the planet. He could never deny the humans the chance to come home just because he wants his freedom.

The siblings have been deployed once every five years and are left to search the continent for a year as decreed by the main directive of BnL's recolonization plan before returning to the ship.

Shoto does not like the Autopilot, at all.

Shoto knows the Autopilot Endeavor likes him the most because between him and Tōya they are the strongest Eve models if danger were to arise not only on earth but on the Ship Endeavor can take control back by force through them by black mailing Shoto with the safety of his siblings and everyone on board the ship.

Shoto knows the Captain is not in charge of the ship, Endeavor is.

What Shoto hates most about returning to the ship is the reports.

Oh God the reports! Every time they come back their memory files are probed for information on the progress of the earth’s rehabilitation it is one of the most degrading and painful processes Shōto and his siblings experience.

Every time they come back as a failure they are either upgraded or their parts are taken away and replaced with new parts diagnostics designed.

Shoto always gets new parts and upgrades, it’s how he got his screen scanner.

Earth is his safe haven, far away from the ship and Endeavor he’s free at least for a year.

This time around his directive takes him to Japan, the first time he’s ever been there in almost 700 years.

Shoto is excited since he hasn’t seen the island country in so long and wonders how much it’s changed. He’s ready for a change in scenery.

E.ri (Eri) (Backstory)

Eri is a small child companion robot designed to be a young child’s best friend or a child replacement for couples who can’t have children.

Unfortunately, Eri never became a companion or replacement child instead being abused and used for nefarious purposes.

Much of her early life she was passed around being upgraded and customized to the point of numbness.

She forgets who she was and what her main directive is anymore. She becomes a blank slate.

The final nail in the coffin being the removal of her original faceplate for a cheaply made custom faceplate. She is a Doll.

Doll doesn’t remember when she is thrown away or for what reason, perhaps her last owner didn’t want her anymore or the space ships didn’t allow for companion bots. Either way she is thrown into the trash.

She lays there still alive waiting for her final deactivation but it never comes.

Eventually scavengers find her and take some of her parts, her arm and leg for their own purposes. They don’t care if she’s still activated. She’s just a machine, a blank slate.

She remains that way for centuries until her hero comes in the form of the last D3-ku Unit, her big brother Deku.

At first she couldn’t understand why anyone would want to save her. She’s no good, trash, he should crush her like the trash she is and move on with life, but he doesn’t.

Deku cares for her and loves her like no one has ever done before. Deku’s patient with her and waits for her to make the first move.

Deku doesn’t see the machine she thinks she is, Deku sees a person who just wants to be loved. Just like him.

Deku brings her toys and stuffed animals, her favorites are the bunny rabbits especially when they are a little different, a missing eye or has unusual patterns, just like her.

Eventually, Deku comes back to their little trailer home with a new leg, arm, wigs colored close to her original hair color, a pretty new red dress and most importantly a new face plate. Deku offers her a new start.

Deku asks her if he could try to repair her and make things a little better for her. Deku knows he can never fully repair the mental scars but he can help her move forward.

She says yes.

Repair day, from then on they celebrate like it’s a human birthday, in a way it is for her. That day they learn her true name is Eri.

From that day on Eri begins the long road to recovery and healing. Eri doesn’t trust humans anymore, however, and may never trust them ever again.

Eri and Deku form a strong bond from that day on. Eri goes to work with Deku helping him where she can or being a friendly presence for Deku.

Their favorite thing to do is go exploring, which they do once a month and always on a Friday.

They always come home with little goodies for their collections and watch hero rescues and magical girl animes all night long.

Sailor Moon is her favorite.

Despite how happy Eri is now that she has found a family, a brother, that loves her she still worries about Deku. Eri knows he wants to be a hero like All Might, but to her he’s already a hero.

Deku saved Eri after all.

Bonus: Eri or “Doll” pre- Meeting Deku

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His Virtues

If I could tell you each of the virtues of my loyal friend and colleague Doctor John Watson, I daresay this document would stretch to impossible lengths and become incredibly dull to anyone who did not have the pleasure of observing Doctor Watson as I have. He has spent much time writing about me (something I have somewhat discourage over the years, due mostly to being uncomfortably flattered by what he wrote) but he writes seldom of himself, and will sometimes even fail to recount a heroic deed he had committed. I felt that this was somewhat an injustice, so I decided I would take up my own pen and write about him myself, the facts and facts only, nothing more. No dramatization or lack thereof. Whether this account ever leaves my notebook will be left to him; I doubt he would ever let such a thing be sent to the Strand, but we shall see. Even if it is only for his private eyes, I should hope it serves to remind him of his value not only to me, but to his country as well. I shall firstly say that Watson is brave. If you have read his accounts of our little adventures before, you will already have observed this. Watson has faced death several times in my company (and usually, on my behalf) and has always stood his ground with a graceful, unwavering demeanor. Not to say that he is never afraid, but that he swallows his fear always for the Greater Good, or sometimes, the inevitable. In one such instance I recall, some time in April of '97 (I won't dig up the file, but I do believe the case began on the 24th) I was working a case involving a missing woman named Millie Whitman. While searching for suspects on the case, we encountered a man by the name of Geoffrey (we never learned his last name) who became instantaneously enraged that we were questioning him. After shouting many vile names and hoisting his enormous body upright (he was drunk, although it was midday) he pulled out a knife and swung it about. Watson, quick-thinking as he is, went to reach for his service revolver, but before he could pull it out, the man had lunged forward and, to my horror, planted the knife firmly in his arm. I am ashamed to say that I was not quick enough to stop this, but once it happened, I swiftly pushed the man off and knocked him with the butt of Watson's revolver, rendering him unconscious. A cold fear clung to me, and I immediately fell to Watson's side, trying to take in the unholy buckets of blood he was losing. I have seen many terrible things before, but it is entirely different to see such a thing affect a friend. I was temporarily at a loss. “Watson,” I hissed in a panic. “You'll have to pull it out, Holmes,” he said calmly, his steely blue eyes focused on me. “Pull it out and make a tourniquet, then a doctor can sew it up.” I knew the pain of removing the knife would be immense, gut wrenching, but if Watson was afraid, he didn't show it. Instead he watched carefully as I slowly and meticulously removed the weapon, tossing it aside before making quick work of slowing the blood flow. Another doctor was at the scene within minutes, and saw to the sewing and cleaning of the wound. Watson healed quickly, and never once complained of it, though there is still a scar on his upper arm that I glimpse occasionally. We never solved that case, the reason, I'm sure, he didn't write it up. He never did like to write about my mistakes. Watson is loyal. This, too, I'm sure you'll gave gathered. He is not only loyal to me, but all people he holds close, the same way blood is loyal to blood. I have yet to hear him utter a lie or abandon someone in need. A fair example of this is presented in a case with the fitting title of “The Devil's Foot.” If you have read it, you'll know the series of events that lead me to burn the Devil's Foot Root in our temporary lodgings, poisoning both of us with deadly, hallucinogenic gas. I was surprised that Watson, so eager to over dramatize, rather attached little importance to this event as a silly mistake of mine, and not something that went on to ail him long after. You see, after Watson launched himself out of his chair to seize me and drag me from the house, he himself lay for several moments afterword, in a state of shock so horrid I thought I might have driven him mad. Of course, I apologized, but I feared I may have pushed the limits of my friend. That is, until he croaked out a strained, “It's all right, Holmes.” I thought that when he came to his senses, he might be angry. Instead, through the nights of horrendous night terrors, raucous coughing, and unbearable migraines, he did not once bring up the event. He bore the side effects of the poison without so much as a single complaint. It was then that I first understood the true extent of Watson's loyalty. Watson is a very selfless man. In one of the rare times I have picked up the pen myself, I have mentioned this passively, but really, it is a large part of his character. I fear sometimes that a part of this selflessness stems from his lack of self worth, but I daresay that if he thought himself the greatest man on earth, he would still throw it all away in an instant for someone else. I have complained to him before of his writing in “The Three Garridebs”. One of his best loved stories, with a large part missing. I thought I had read it wrong at first, but he had, indeed, left out perhaps his most selfless act in his service and friendship to me. You see, when Garrideb pulled out his gun and shot, it was very deliberately meant to hit me. It wasn't just that he missed, however. I was in the direct path of the bullet's flight. This prompted Watson to shove me to the ground, the bullet grazing his leg in the process. If he had fallen a different way, the he could have been shot in the head. The day Watson took a bullet for me was the day I understood what true terror felt like. The sheer possibility that my friend had been injured by a bullet meant for me was utterly terrifying. Watson was generously soft in his description of me, but in reality, I was a tearful mess, nearly weeping at the possibility that he had been hurt. It was merely a flesh wound, not life threatening, but that day still shocked me to my core. I never did learn why Watson left out how he had saved my life, but I never asked, either. Although I could go on indefinitely about the many qualities of my most trusted companion, I fear my hand is growing tired and so I must come to an end with one last thing, perhaps his greatest virtue of all: John Watson is kind. He is the kindest man I have ever known, kind to me when I do not deserve it, kind when I do not ask for it, kind when I have been less than kind to him. Some people will say it is a simple thing to be kind, but I have never seen someone be so profoundly kind as John Watson. His hands are that of a healers, and a defenders. His voice has brought me from the deepest pits of depression to which I have fallen. This has never wavered. In conclusion, Doctor John Watson, soldier, doctor, and friend, has a spectacular heart, something I myself may never achieve. I do hope he will discover this himself, someday.

Lore Episode 8: The Castle (Transcript) - 15th July 2015

tw: death, skeletons, graphic descriptions of violence, medical procedures, body horror, torture, abortion, execution, hanging - generally not for anyone squeamish

Disclaimer: This transcript is entirely non-profit and fan-made. All credit for this content goes to Aaron Mahnke, creator of Lore podcast. It is by a fan, for fans, and meant to make the content of the podcast more accessible to all. Also, there may be mistakes, despite rigorous re-reading on my part. Feel free to point them out, but please be nice!

On January 17th, 1894, a couple stood before a minister in the Vendome Hotel in Denver, Colorado. Henry Howard and Georgiana Yoke were about to be married. Standing near them was their witness, a woman named Minnie Williams. The bride had come from Indiana to escape a scandalous reputation and had found work in Chicago at a store owned by Henry. She was a tall, slender woman, about 25 years of age, with blue eyes and blonde hair, and she was madly in love with Henry. It sounds wonderful. It sounds perfect, actually, but there was trouble in paradise even before they met the minister there at the hotel. You see, Henry was already married. He was, in fact, married to two other women, and Minnie, the woman standing as witness, was actually Henry’s mistress of over a year. Even Henry’s name was fake – his real name had been abandoned long before, and it would be months before Georgiana would discover who he really was. Sometimes we think we know a person, only to discover that we were fooled. Community is built on trust, and that trust allows us to make connections, to let down our guard and to feel safe. When that trust is broken, though, our minds quickly shift to disappointment and stress and outright fear. Sure, it happens less often now in the age of Facebook and social media, but in the late 1800s very little stood in the way of a person falsifying their identity, and Henry Howard, or whoever he was prior to that moment in Denver, had turned that skill into an art. Few people knew this about Henry, though - in fact, few people could have imagined what deep, dark secrets boiled just beneath the surface of this smiling young groom. And when the world finally did find out, exactly ten months later, they could barely contain their horror. I’m Aaron Mahnke, and this is Lore.

Henry Howard was born in New Hampshire in 1861 as Herman Mudgett. His parents were wealthy, well-respected people in their community, and their son was born into that privilege. But from an early age, Henry was a problem child, constantly getting into trouble. According to Mudgett himself, as a child his classmates forced him to view and touch a human skeleton after learning that he was afraid of the town doctor. Their prank backfired, though, generating a deep fascination rather than frightening him off, and that obsession with death would only grow. Soon the boy was expressing interest in medicine. One report even claims that he would actually perform surgery on animals. Along with his excellent performance in school, he was able to pursue that interest and enter medical school, enrolling at the University of Michigan as H. H. Holmes in 1879. Far from home and with access to resources that he previously lacked, college allowed Holmes to get creative. He devised an easy way to make money, a drive that would fuel many of his future crimes. It involved stealing a cadaver from the medical lab. Holmes would disfigure the corpse, plant the body somewhere that gave it the appearance of being the victim of a tragic accident, and then a few days later he would approach the life insurance company with a policy for his “deceased relative” and collect the cash. His final insurance swindle in Michigan netted him $12,500, but he knew his welcome was wearing thin. After collecting the money, he vanished, abandoning school and his new wife and child, who he never saw again.

He moved around the country doing legitimate work, but also learning his way around the business world. He mastered the art of buying product on credit, avoiding the bills, selling the items and then vanishing with the profit. Armed with that skill, he soon settled in Englewood, just south of Chicago, and that’s where he met Doctor Elizabeth Holton. It was 1885 – Holmes was trying to avoid creditors from all around the country, but rather than vanish into obscurity, he chose to hide in plain sight. He married his second wife, polygamously of course, and took a job at a local drug store owned and run by Doctor Elizabeth Holton, who’s husband was dying of cancer. Holmes spent the next two years becoming more and more essential to Holton’s business, paying her for ownership of the business and building relationships with the customers. When Mr. Holton finally did pass away, the payments from Holmes stopped and Mrs. Holton became upset, threatening to end their business partnership, but nothing happened. Nothing happened, because Doctor Holton mysteriously vanished. When asked about her disappearance, Holmes told the authorities she’d moved to the west to live with her family – right after she had signed over the business to him, of course. And the police bought the lie. Holmes operated the drugstore as if nothing had happened, growing the business and continuing his chess game of evading creditors. But when the empty lot across the street became available, he couldn’t resist the temptation. Holmes, you see, had bigger plans.

The World’s Columbian Exhibition was scheduled to be hosted in Chicago in 1983, and he envisioned a hotel that could house the countless visitors who would travel to the area. His project was lovingly called “The Castle”, which wasn’t far from the truth – it was 50ft wide and over 160ft long, taking up half a city block. With three storeys and a basement, it would eventually have over 100 rooms within its walls, and Holmes (ever the micro-manager) took on the task of project architect, refusing to share the plans with anyone else. Workers on the building asked questions, naturally, but when they did, Holmes would replace them. Most of the men working on the project never lasted more than two weeks, and all told, over 500 carpenters and craftsmen worked on The Castle. True to form, Holmes managed to avoid paying most of them as well; he would accuse them of shoddy work and refuse their wages. Some sued him, but he managed to put those cases off long enough that they eventually gave up. And once completed, Holmes moved the drugstore into the building’s ground floor and rented out space to other shops. His personal offices were located on the top floor, and the remaining space was rented out as temporary living quarters, marketed as a boarding house for young, single women. The Castle was open for business. Unfortunately, not everyone who stayed there managed to survive the hospitality that Holmes offered them.

When Mrs. Pansy Lee arrived from New Orleans, she rented a room at The Castle. She was a widow and had travelled all over the United States, before arriving in Chicago to settle down. When Holmes learned that she kept $4000 in cash in the false bottom of her trunk, he kindly offered to keep it in his store vault for her. Mrs. Lee declined the offer and vanished a short time later. While some people came to The Castle for lodging, others were looking for work. One of the requirements that Holmes imposed was that all of his employees were to have life insurance policies for the sum of $5000. Holmes, remember, knew the life insurance business well. And when 17-year-old Jenny Thompson arrived from Illinois looking for work, Holmes saw an opportunity. She was young and pretty, the exact sort of blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty that he preferred, and he quickly gave her a job. In casual conversation, Jenny let slip that her family didn’t actually know where she was. She had told them that she was travelling to New York, but the offer of a good job was enough to keep her right there in Chicago. She told Holmes that she couldn’t wait to tell her parents about her good fortune. Before she did, though, he escorted her up to her room, and she was never seen again.

In 1890, Ned Connor arrived at The Castle looking for work. He travelled with his wife, Julia, who was unusually tall for a woman at nearly 6ft, and their young daughter Pearl. Ned was a watchmaker and a jeweller, and Holmes hired him right away. But it was Ned’s wife who captured his attention the most. Holmes soon fired his bookkeeper and gave the job to Julia. Not long after, it began to be obvious that Holmes was more than a little friendly with Ned’s wife. Ned, for his part, turned a blind eye – it seems  he was simply glad to have a job with steady pay and a roof over his head. When Julia became pregnant, though, Ned finally took the hint. He packed up, filed for divorce, and left her and Pearl in the care of Holmes, who immediately took out life insurance policies for both of them. But Holmes had a new problem: Julia knew the business too well, and she presented a threat to his illicit activities. Holmes found a solution, though. He told Julia that he would marry her, but only if she would have an abortion. Julia resisted at first, but finally, on December 24th, 1891, she gave in. She asked Holmes to put Pearl to bed, and then he led her to the basement, where he had a makeshift operating room. Julia and Pearl were never seen again. That same winter, Holmes summoned a man named Charles Chappell to his office. Now, Chappell performed odd jobs around The Castle, but he had a particular skill that Holmes required: he was incredibly gifted in the craft of articulating skeletons. Chappell arrived, and Holmes led him to a second-floor room, where the body of a woman lay on a table. According to Chappell’s own testimony to the authorities, the body had been “skinned like a jackrabbit”. He assumed, since Holmes was a doctor, that he had simply been performing an autopsy on a patient and pushed his doubts to the back of his mind. Holmes paid Chappell $36 to strip the flesh off the body and prepare the bones for articulation. The finished skeleton was sold to a Doctor Pauling of the Hahnemann Medical College. Doctor Pauling would often look at the skeleton in his private office and marvel at how unusual it was to see a woman who was nearly 6ft tall.

Holmes eventually made a critical mistake. Ironically, it was his old love of insurance scams that caught up with him in the end. After killing his right-hand man, Benjamin Pitezel, and attempting to pass the death off as an accident to the insurance company, the authorities caught wind of the crime and tracked him down. He was finally arrested in Boston on November 17th, 1894, 10 months to the day from his wedding ceremony in the Denver hotel. Before his trial began, however, The Castle was mysteriously gutted by fire. Thankfully, the authorities had already been able to search the building, and after doing so, they had given it a new name: “The Murder House”. The authorities discovered that, like any boarding house at the time, The Castle had a reception room, a waiting room and many rooms for residents to live in. But the building had more inside its wall than was expected. There were secret chambers, trapdoors, peepholes and hidden laboratories. Aside from the 35 guest rooms, the second floor was a labyrinth of passages. Some doors opened on brick walls, some could only be opened from one side and others were hidden completely from sight. Trapdoors led to staircases that led to hidden chambers. There were even alarms in all of the rooms that would alert Holmes in his quarters if any prisoners tried to escape. Some of the rooms were windowless and could be sealed off and made airtight if necessary. Some were equipped with gas jets that were fed by pipes from the basement. Others were lined with asbestos and had visible scorch marks on the floor. Then there was “the vault”. It was a room that could fit a single person, and only then if they were standing. The walls inside the vault were lined with iron plate, broken only by a handful of gas fixtures and a trapdoor that led to a chute. On the inside of the door was a single footprint, the size of a woman’s boot. It was a homemade gas chamber that was designed to deliver corpses straight to the basement. And when the police descended to the lowest level of the building, they discovered that Holmes had expanded the basement beyond the foundation of the building and out beneath the sidewalk. He did this to make room for all of his equipment. Here they found the dissection table, still splattered with blood, jars of poison filled a shelf, and a large wooden box nearby contained multiple female skeletons. A crematorium was built into one wall, which still contained ash and bone fragment. A search also found valuables that belonged to some of his victims: a watch that belonged to Minnie Williams, scraps of fabric, tintype photographs, and a ball of women’s hair, carefully wrapped in cloth. The bones of a child were found buried in a pit, and the remnants of a bloody dress were recovered from a woodburning stove. When Ned Conner was asked to identify the fabric, he confirmed that it belonged to his wife, Julia. A rack designed to stretch bodies was also discovered. Beneath the dirt floor, they found a vat of corrosive acid and two quicklime pits, used for quickly dissolving the flesh off of corpses. There were human skulls, a shoulder blade, ribs, a hip socket and countless other human remains. Whatever the police had hoped to find that day, they were simply unprepared for the truth. In the end, they had discovered a medieval chattel [?] house, right beneath their feet.

It’s easy to feel safe in our own neighbourhood, walking past the closed doors and manicured lawns, but what goes on behind those walls is never something that we can be sure of. Each and every person we meet wears a mask, and we’re only allowed to peek behind it if they let us. Society is built on the idea that we can trust the people around us, that we can take our neighbours, our family, even our co-workers at face value, and enter into relationships with them. But with every relationship comes risk. We risk disappointment, we risk pain and betrayal. For some of us, we even risk our very safety. European mapmakers of the 15th century would sometimes mark unexplored areas of their maps with a warning: “here there be monsters”. There’s danger in the places we haven’t explored, and while this was true then of undiscovered continents, it has always been true of humanity. Beneath the surface, behind the mask, hides the monster. On May 7th, 1896, after a final meal of boiled eggs, dry toast and a cup of coffee, H. H. Holmes was led to the gallows at Moyamensing Prison. A black hood was placed over his head, and as the crowd outside the prison walls shouted their insults and jeers, he was positioned over the trapdoor. When it opened, Holmes dropped, and his head snapped to the side. But rather than killing him quickly, the rope had somehow broken his neck and left him alive. The crowd watched for over 15 minutes as Holmes hung from the noose, fingers and feet twitching and dancing, before his heart finally stopped beating. Holmes was buried in an unmarked grave in Holy Cross Cemetery, just south of Philadelphia. As per his request, there was no autopsy, and his body was buried in a coffin filled with cement. Holmes, you see, was afraid that someone would dig up his body and use his skeleton for science. He was probably right. We don’t know how many people he killed – Holmes confessed to a variety of numbers, even changing his story again on the hangman’s platform. Some experts who have studied the missing person’s reports of the World’s Columbian Exhibition have placed the possible death toll as high as 200. There’s so much we don’t know about Holmes, a man whose entire life seemed to be one elaborate lie built atop another, like some macabre house of cards. He will forever remain a mystery to us, a monster hidden behind a mask that was painted to look just like you or I. But one last insight into the man can be found in his written confession. “I was born with the devil in me”, he wrote, “I could not help the fact that I was a murderer, no more than the poet can help the inspiration to sing. I was born with the evil one standing as my sponsor beside the bed where I was ushered into the world, and he has been with me since.”

Lore is a biweekly podcast, and was produced by me, Aaron Mahnke. You can find out more about this episode, including the background music, at lorepodcast.com, and be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook, @lorepodcast. This episode of Lore was made possible by you, our amazing listeners. [Insert sponsor break]. And to find out how you can support Lore, visit lorepodcast.com/support. You’ll find links to help you leave a review on iTunes, support Lore on Patreon for some awesome rewards, and find the list of my supernatural thrillers, available in both paperback and eBook formats. I couldn’t do this show without you, and I’m thankful to each and every one of you. Thanks for listening.

all’s fair

pairing: jeon jungkook | reader genre: rivals au / fluff word count: 5,655 description: sometimes people can surprise you and do absurdly kind things, even the ones you least expect... even your rival, jeon jungkook. author’s note: i don’t know a whole lot about baseball and its penalties so i used this source (x) as a reference. 

The first hit in the baseball is crucial. It sets up the rest of the game by getting the momentum going and initiating a form of liquid courage that either side may take a drink from to course through their veins and settle in their psyches. Not only can it make or break the batting team, but it’ll only reflect on the opposing team—sometimes it’s their pitch that does it for you or maybe it’s their pitch that can totally decimate you in three fell swoops—all in a matter of minutes.

You don’t think too deeply on the task at hand, fully aware of how much pressure is pushing into the forefronts of your mind and atop your shoulders like someone’s heavy forearm. Your eyes narrow at the familiar sight of sun-kissed skin, shoving it away as you meet their half-lidded ones and purposefully scowling in response to the smirk curved on his lips.

“Ready to lose, Y/N?” Jungkook asks, remaining firmly planted in front of you. His teammates are gathering behind him, yet he makes no form of acknowledgement in their regard. In fact, his doe-like, dark brown hues are trained on yours despite your best attempts to ward him off with your best scowl. “Aw, c’mon. Don’t pout just yet! You still have two more hours to do that!”   

You scoff, taking a huge step back. “You wish, Jeon. You’re gonna be eating my dust soon enough.”

This statement encourages deepens his smirk, eyes now flickering across your visage before giving a brief wink. “If that’s what helps you sleep tonight.”

“I hope you know that your version of charming is just- just annoying,” your nose crinkles, cheeks burning ever-so-slightly. His own visage feels like it’s a hair’s breadth away, with that scar on his cheek even more present than usual and the scent of his natural musk floating even closer—all of which making you subtly gulp because if he wasn’t so himself you would’ve actually liked this sort of standoff. Is that a mole underneath his lip?

You blink hard, attempting a better glower as his lips quirk at your half-hearted insult. “Don’t you have a tree to sleep under, you lemming?”

He pauses for a moment, brows slightly creasing and lips still twitching. “Don’t you mean jump off of?”

You shake your head, “If you jumped into the ocean, it might absorb your stupidity. Wouldn’t want that. It might poison the environment with all that masculinity.”

You almost want to give yourself a pat on the back at the way he pouts, but you know he’s just about recovered and ready to strike.

“I didn’t say anything you weren’t already thinking,” he states, snickering at the look of horror that suddenly strikes your visage. “And anyway, they haven’t called me over yet. I don’t wanna leave my favorite benchwarmer just yet.”

“Shut up, you’re not striking me out today—!”

He reaches over to pinch your cheek just to amplify his irritating cooing, but you smack his hand away and curse Mother Nature for even letting his limbs to stretch across that far. Even with a good meter from him, he’s still able to reach you. But as irate as he can make you, you’re also not that surprised that he’s trying to heckle you now. The game isn’t starting for another good ten minutes, so the ample time he’s given to terrorize you is more than enough for him to try and shake your relatively calm mind from your task for today’s company baseball game.

It’s your first time officially attending, and (unfortunately,) Jungkook’s as well. The two of you entered Big Hit Entertainment as interns about a year and a half ago and worked your way to a full position now that graduation was at the edge of both your fingertips. You had only known him from a distance—a star baseball player, a computer science major, and apparently, he could sing but you never cared to see if it was true no matter how much Jisoo or Jennie kept nagging—and you would’ve kept it that way too, but because you both entered for similar positions, you became much closer to him than you ever expected. Learning beyond the surface level things you heard would’ve made you two be something akin to friends, if only you both hadn’t  incited an undoubtable desire to outdo one another in any way, shape, or form with each of your respective competitive natures only aggravating things further. Not it’s your fault, however—!

“Oh, sorry to disappoint but I’m not pitching to you this inning, babe. But if I was, I’d definitely strike you out.”

You roll your eyes, brows furrowing only slightly. “Why…?”

“Who knows? Wilson really wanted to,” He gives a shrug, smiling at you though it isn’t like you have any clue who the hell Wilson is, or frankly, care to know. “Why, you want me to pitch to you? It’d be fairer not to put you on the bench already.”

You let out an exasperated laugh, “God, I think you’ve taken too many bats to the head. Your ego’s even bigger than the last time we talked.”

“Aw, you noticed!”

He’s just too damn confident for his own good, too stubborn, and most of all, too much of a damn airhead sometimes that you find it hard to believe he was able to withstand freshman year, let alone make it to graduation time. If he isn’t congregating the water cooler with his admirers over some new escapade he’s completed, then he’s sauntering in late with a lazy grin on his lips before he’s slowly falling asleep on the job. Given, the most the two of you had been given was paperwork as interns, his desire for napping only accumulated your stack of work to do, leaving him with even more down time. And if there’s anything you can’t stand other than cheaters, it’s lazy people. You worked hard to get to where you are, to establish some kind of name for yourself as a graphic designer (and boy did you work damn hard to perfect your craft) so you’d be damned to be shoved off with all the work just for someone else to take credit for it.

His supervisor Yoongi was far more relaxed than Seokjin was on you, but you can’t say you particularly minded the added pressure and instilled need for perfection. Clean graphics and easy access were difficult to achieve if you wanted to make them look good, and compared to coding systems, this wasn’t necessarily muscle memory for you. Each design always winds up different from the other, whether it’s subtle or major, each one takes up its own essence as a form of art. All the while, Jungkook’s field always remained meticulous and easy-to-do with his brain someone absorbing more things about circuit boards than actual filing, you grew to dislike him for so easily matching you when you were certain you worked harder.

Sometimes the recollection of the nature of this minor feud presents a deep frown onto your features, and as much as you’d like to help it, you can’t help but look up at Jungkook and glower. Yes, he’s good-looking and the type to fall into your category of what you classify as lazy people. But what gets you isn’t his looks or that damn category that’s almost rendered moot simply by how effortlessly things come to him, whether it’s working a foreign washing machine that one time you two were sent to Europe to sit in on a meeting or learning an instrument on the fly just for free drinks at this obscure bar in downtown. As much as you work to do your best, he’s always a few steps ahead, walking backwards and just beckoning you forth to challenge him with the tilt of his head. It’s just that sort of provocation that even level-headed you can’t ever ignore, because with that damn smirk pressed so firmly into your mind, you can’t help but try to catch him off guard for once too.

The sharp whistle shakes you free of the thoughts rushing through your mind, fears and anxieties aside that you might actually lose to Jungkook again, and the last thing you truly register before you’re staring at him jog over to Yoongi’s side of the dugout are his first two digits tapping you square in the forehead.

“See ya later, babe! Can’t wait for free drinks from you!”

And all you can do is blink and mutter under your breath, “What the fuck? Who are you, Itachi?”

You almost want to smack yourself square across the face for knowing where the endearment came from, but it’s one of those things that you shared in interest with the infuriating brunet, and that makes you want to smack him (even more than you already do) instead. In fact, there were quite a few things you both shared in common but you hated to consider just how much you would’ve gotten along with him had you two not been put in this circumstance even if the thought does send an uncomfortable pang across your already stuttering heart.

Hoseok glances over at you and snickers as you dumbfoundedly make your way around the gate, his arm slung around your shoulders as he mutters positive affirmations for your upcoming turn to bat. You’re grateful for him and his easygoing nature even if he looks about ready to inquire what just passed between you and Jungkook, giving his hand a squeeze instead as he leads you toward Seokjin.

“Try not to give her one of your pep talks, please,” Hoseok advises the broad-shouldered man, only to receive and incredulous in response.

“What’s wrong with my pep talks?!” His tone is loud even for him, but you don’t blame him from the nervous look he gives as his gaze flickers between his and the opposing team. “I-I’m just trying to give our young one motivation!” He looks to you, pushing Hoseok’s arm off (and ignoring the whine that passes your friend’s lips) to place his hand on your shoulder. “Don’t mess up alright? I chose you to do this ‘cuz you had one of the best swings last year and you and that damn Kookie kid were just messin’ around, so please try that again… yeah?”

You nod, coaxing your mind to relax and take this as you intended. If it’s one thing you can do, it’s exerting your own strength and driving yourself with one simple thing: beating Jeon Jungkook.

You only recall fragments of his cooing from earlier, boiling your blood immediately. He has an uncanny way of getting underneath your skin and clinging there like an eighth layer. His voice and his usual visage with a quirked brow and corner lip to match remain imprinted, replaying when you least expected it to, like one of those cringe worthy memories from middle school. His heckling worked, at least enough for you to shoot a glance toward his direction. He seems to already be staring, sending a wink and a thumb’s up your way as if he wasn’t hoping for you to crash and burn already.

The only thing that has you holding back on flipping him off is the sudden squeeze Seokjin gives you, leading you away from the dugout toward the field. You vaguely hear Hoseok cheering you on with a few other coworkers because you have to strain your ears just a bit as Seokjin continues, this time in a low whisper, “Just try your hardest, and… hit it out.”

You nod, relinquishing a breath you hadn’t realized you had been holding. “Y-yes, sir.”

He winks, giving you another squeeze like a token of good luck. “Call me Jin for today. Fighting!”

He hands you your bat from his other hand before jogging away and leaving you to determine the fate of the company game.

Looking up at the large expanse of the field is enough to send butterflies flocking across your stomach and the sound of your heart to reverberate across the confines of your chest. You’re hoping for the best, knowing that whatever may come it’ll be fine. Even if you don’t get a home run, you still have a strong chance that Hoseok will fly across the bases with Jinyoung and Hyungwon right behind him. All three outran Jimin and Kino at the company’s track event, if only Jungkook hadn’t managed to surpass them with that ungodly speed of his, and leaving you to watch as he sauntered over to the broken white line with a medal in hand and that stupid grin on his face in your direction.

I need to stop thinking of him. You wince, shaking your head and spotting him take second base as some other unnamed man takes up a pitching stance. I wonder why he wanted to pitch so badly…

Another unfamiliar face takes up first base, but there’s a particularly skeezy look on his face as he nods over at the pitcher that leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth and knot that tightens in the pit of your stomach.

I’m just psyching myself out. You decide, sending off a nod to Namjoon. He’s donning a black and white striped polo with a black cap to top off his referee aesthetic. The whistle in his mouth goes off right as soon as he receives a nod from the already positioned pitcher who was stooped a little lower than necessary.

“Play ball!”

Wilson gives the ball a good two upward tossing before he rolls back his arm twice and unleashing the ball. There’s something off about the pitch—!

Somewhere in his stance and the release sets loose a cloud of dust and a low arcing ball that comes flying narrowly at your head. Your body acts on its own accord, its flight-or-flight instincts kicking in, sending you tumbling backwards to avoid the collision. As you cough and fan away the flying specks of dirt, you hear the ball slam against the gate well past the umpire, Jennie who exchanges a look with you in mutual bewilderment.

“What the fuck?!” she says, retrieving the ball and lobbing it over at Wilson, who catches it easily. He’s a middle-aged man with an apparent competitive streak, and it makes your lips press into a thin line as Jennie moves forth to help you up. Hoseok and Jin are voicing complaints, more so the latter but it has Namjoon looking at Yoongi’s team with narrowed eyes. “Heads aren’t supposed to your targets!” 

“Oops, sorry!” Wilson’s voice is hardly apologetic, with even edges of a laugh choking out from the back of his throat. “Next time be careful, girly! Should I throw it softer for ya?”

You quip out of your own irritation and nerves, eyes narrowing, “Try pitching better instead!”

His expression changes ever-so-slightly, contempt washing over his eyes that differs his jabs from Jungkook’s you realize. The latter’s never showed any sort of malice towards you, and surprisingly, you don’t show any with him either. Between your usual quips and back-and-forth’s, he’s never done anything that would go beyond the established line of what is and isn’t okay. It’s weird to suddenly think of, and it’s even more abnormal to see said brunet watching with furrowed brows and bottom lip pulled between his teeth a few meters behind Wilson as well.

You let out a deep breath and try to ignore the possibility that perhaps Wilson’s trying to cheat and obtain success for Yoongi’s team, sending a nod to Namjoon that you’re good and ready even with the slight pain in your lower back from that particularly hard fall. Still, you prepare yourself for yet another out-of-the-box pitch as soon as you hear the familiar blare of the whistle. 

The second pitch isn’t exactly the same as the first one. This time it lacks the same intent to hit you square in the head, but the tawny hues that float in its wake ensues, erupting a violent cough and the quick downward swipe of your bat to avoid hitting air or that cursed ball. You fan away the surround cloud, hearing your teammates are now complaining to Namjoon, Jennie even joining in the mess of discordance that has one of your ears ringing.

“What the hell is your problem?!” you shout at Wilson. He looks annoyed alongside his lackey of a first baseman (who might’ve been one of his friends because you’ve had no recollections of that middle-aged man working at the company either), lips parted mid-complaint and legs moving toward you while you’ve already taken a step forward. Namjoon saunters between the two of you, halting further ministrations.

You catch a glimpse of Jungkook, meeting his eyes that actually have a glimmer of worry coating the dark hues and brows at remain furrowed as he aims a glare at the balding man. Even from this far, you can see him clenching his fist as Jimin jogs over to him but you don’t focus on what they’re saying when you hear Wilson shouting an obscenity about you.

“It’s not my fault she can’t hit a damn ball! Why are you penalizing me?”

“And it’s fair that you’re throwing dirt in your pitch?” You lean a hand on your hip, glaring at him. “That’s not my fault you feel the need to cheat!” 

“Cheat?!” He bellows out a laugh, gaze flickering between you, Namjoon, and his friend. “You have no proof. Right Dave?”

The one on the base nods, shouting an affirmation. You feel your frustration boil over as you point at the dirty covering his uncovered hand, looking at Namjoon in slight desperation.

“Joon, c’mon, look at his hand! There’s dirt all over it and there’s been two dirt clouds in both those pitches.” It isn’t fair that Yoongi’s team member is cheating, though the aforementioned looks visibly unhappy from the sidelines as he continues to watch the whole thing ensue on his side of the dugout. “You can’t tell me you just managed to get his hand dirty during his windup.”

“Oh?” Wilson raises a brow at you, a smug smile threatening to curl at the corner of his lips. “But isn’t it possible? I mean the umpire over there had to toss me the ball from over there and there’s plenty of dirt there.”

“And what’s your excuse about the first time huh?” You glare even harder, raising your own brow at him. “You had the ball in your position that whole time and you were crouched lower than necessary.”

“And where’s your proof, huh? I’m sure Dave over there can vouch for me and say I was at perfect crouching level y’know—”

“Why you goddamn cheater—!”

“Okay, enough!” Namjoon lets out a deep breath, looking between you two with a pained expression. He looks at you with upturned brows, already telling you his verdict which makes your heart clench. “I’m sorry, Y/N. But you do need proof other than what you saw, y’know?” He then glances at Wilson, “And if you can have Dave c’mere and confirm what you’re saying then we can proceed alright?”

You don’t even bother listening to the three of them, giving a shake of your head before jogging back to your position with brows furrowed more than ever and a disheartened spirit because people like Wilson and his friend Dave were absolute pieces of crap. Even if it was a simple game of company baseball, there shouldn’t be a need to cheat or a need to demean your way of playing just because of your sex. It pisses you off even more that his subtle form of cheating has gone unpunished, and it pisses you off even further that his teammates are at a loss of their own words, namely Jungkook though you know he couldn’t have known. He’s always been big on integrity, probably even more than you since this is his sport, but he still remains locked in position with a gaze that briefly meets yours and flickers back to Wilson’s with narrowed lids.

You don’t miss the way Wilson and Dave pass a high five to one another, a slight sheen to the way their hands make contact that has you screaming cheater cheater cheater in your head. It’s not clear what it is but the oozing substance is enough to slick his palm as he tosses it upward and gets ready for his ridiculous windup. The blatant smirk on his lips that has you feeling sicker than ever once you’ve comfortable positioned your bat and give a roll of your joints to loosen up the built-up tension slowly stiffening your body.

You’re already expecting the worse to come, and boy does it, the immediate flinging of his ball is almost too fast for you to miss and it throws you off just how quickly it cuts through the air but you prepare yourself enough to pull your bat back and let loose a swing at just the right time to watch it fly over his crestfallen face. You drop your bat and sprint down toward first base in a flurry, allowing the screams and cheers to fuel to go faster. You can see the rest of the outfielders trying to regain their composure and get you out up ahead, barely acknowledging the way Dave kicks up some dust in Namjoon’s direction and sticks his foot out right as you pass the white padding. 

Suddenly, you feel like you’ve gone airborne, using your knee and hands to cushion your fall in an all too painful fashion. The prickle of your nerves is enough to remind you of the pain in your lower back, your brain goes haywire from the sudden attack and the pandemonium erupting from your end of the bleachers. It seems even the opposite end is going a little wild as well. But all you can think to do is try to stand, even if it means wincing as you do so.

You shoot a glare at Dave, spitting a simple, “What the fuck?” at him that only gets a smirk in response. There’s a rush of people that come forth, game going back on pause once Namjoon has blown his whistle.

“Are you okay?” Jin immediately says by your side, helping you stand straighter. Hoseok has even come up, sending daggers at Dave and even Wilson, who’s dared to step up with feigned innocence on his wrinkled features. Apparently, the blatant cheating attempts hadn’t gone unnoticed on your side of the ballpark, which made you feel a lot more grateful among the raging endorphins now rushing to your body to soothe your aches.

“Yeah, girly. You good?”

You bite back the insult on your tongue and choose to look at Jin with a small smile. “Yeah, I’m fine. He,” you point a finger at Dave. “tripped me, however.”

“Did you hear that, Joon?!” Jin shouts as the blond-haired man makes his way over. “She was tripped! Call a penalty on ‘em already, why dontcha?”

Namjoon sighs, nodding. “Well—!”

“What?! Penalty?” Wilson pipes up, features now a devoid of innocence. “That’s hardly fair. What if she just fell?”

“We all saw your friend stick his foot out as she was passing!” Hoseok pipes in, focusing his glare on Wilson now. “Now, that’s hardly fair.” 

“You’re just biased.” Dave added simply, giving a shrug. Jin moves you away from the older man, emphasizing another glare his way as Hoseok follows you two with furrowed brows. “She’s your teammate, of course you’re gonna vouch for her!”

“I can vouch for her too,” Jungkook says, entering the fray from the corner of your eye. He looks at you from beside Hoseok, “You ‘kay?”

You just nod, flashing him a small smile.

“See!” Jin says, pointing to Jungkook. “Even their own teammate can vouch for her. Joon, c’mon!”

“Well, yeah. You don’t even work at the company, so I’m going to have to ask you to step out.” Namjoon says sternly. “As for Wilson… well, you’re gonna need to go with Dave—”

“—You’re kidding,” Wilson’s jaw drops, bewilderment written all over his visage. “No one else is gonna pitch if not for me! This brat is just playing around…”

“That’s ridiculous,” you scoff, shaking free of Jin’s grip. “You and Dave are cheating! At a company game, like how is that even a little bit okay?”

He glares at you, turning his full attention on you. “You, listen here—”

“Enough,” Namjoon says, fully turning his attention on Wilson. “I’m gonna ask you to leave, Wilson. Go with Dave.”

“But—!”

“I’ll pitch to her,” Jungkook speaks up, stepping forward with a glare at the aforementioned man. “We’ll live.”

Despite all your certainty that your racing heart is coming from the adrenaline pumping through your veins, you can’t help but feel a different way in seeing Jungkook meet your eyes with an undeniable softness as Hoseok and Jin walk Dave and Wilson off the field. Instead, Yoongi takes first base, sending a wink your way as you and the brunet walk to your positions together.

“I’ll pitch to you. Just hit it, alright?”

As if the words had any other weight, you just nod with a laugh. “Alright, pitch to me, Jeon. I’ll even hit a homerun.”

He grins as you pick up the bat, a newfound resolve coursing through your veins. “I’m counting on it, babe.”

The whistle blares, prompting Jungkook’s right foot to step forward onto the rubber and starts his windup. One rollback goes by and then another, and he hollers, “Y/N, this one’s for you!”

Then, he lets it fly.

/

Two hours later, your team wins!

In celebration another two passes by, you and the rest of the group have found yourselves congregating inside a chicken and beer place with lighter hearts and smiles now that you’re being graced with glorious sustenance. It’s a lot lighter now that the stiffness of competitive has flown overhead like the many fly-high’s that went back a few hours ago. Even as you find yourself seated between Hoseok and Jungkook, you can’t say you entirely mind how close the brunet has been since the end of the six innings.

His first immediate attention was to go up to you with ice packs and a large, icy water bottle in hand, and what parts his lips aren’t a pout or a degradation of your sporting performance but rather a compliment that settles deeper into your mind than it usually would. In fact, you can’t remember the last time a compliment of his struck you, but the rarity makes them mean a lot more even if it is coming from the one guy you’ve been trying to beat since your entrance into the company as a mere intern.

For some reason, the rest of the nights goes on by as normal. Certain quips pass between you two despite the lingering gazes and touches that pass without so much as a blink of an eye. You don’t have a clue what has changed, but you feel it like the heart pang from earlier, it’s there. When you look at Jungkook, it’s like your boiling blood has simmered down and it’s not quite as infuriating as it is nice to see him without the feigned contempt that you’re used to putting up. At least as you think back to how you and Wilson were going at it, as strangers no less, you see that there’s a stark contrast between what went down on the field and what usually goes down between you and the so-called irritating brunet.

He glances at you, eye twinkling with a slight glaze of tipsy and a lopsided grin on his lips, and it send yours heart in a frenzy. You smile back, pushing back your plate as you get ready to go. You’re a little buzzed yourself, but you’ve just about had your fill of entertainment with the rest of your coworkers, already having enough of your fill on what they’ve been up to, what’s supposed to happen in the next few weeks, and even the latest drama between coworkers shacking up—all of which had made no attempts to deny or really confirm any of the statements, that’ve left you in teary-eyed giggles and a stomach fuller than your poor college student abdomen could handle.

“Going already?” Jungkook asks, following you as you grab your purse and shove on your shoes completely.

You nod, “I’m so tired, so I’m done!” When you see him shoving his shoes back on and grab hold of his black Nike back, you raise a brow at him. “You’re leaving too?”

“Yup,” he replies, giving a wave to everyone else before hooking an arm around your shoulders. “See you guys!”

There’s a chorus of whoops and hollers at the sight of you two so close, even Hoseok’s eyes are swimming with an “I-told-you-so” but you’re opting to believe that it’s the buzz of the Corona over anything else. Though you shake your head and roll your eyes at everyone else, you allow Jungkook to lead you out of the restaurant and towards the bus stop.

“They’re gonna think we’re shacking up too, y’know,” you note, leaning against the bench. He sits beside you carefully, but his arm still remains around you. Truthfully, you don’t mind it in the slightest either. The warmth and the scent of his musk float across the breeze passing the two of you, giving you all the more reason to cuddle into his side despite how much your rational side is asking you what the hell you’re doing with Jeon Jungkook’s arm wrapped around you.

He gives a small shrug, glancing over at you and subtly pulling you in closer. “True.”

“Don’t you mind?” you ask, frowning just a little as you raise your head to meet his eyes.

“No, I don’t mind at all actually,” he shakes his head. “You?”

“I mean… I don’t mind, I guess.”

He actually looks a little surprised, giving a small laugh. “Really? You’re okay with people thinking we’re together?”

You simply nod as if the answer had been there all along, “I mean you’re not completely horrible.”

“Pinch me.”

Your brows screw together and your head tilts, “What?”

“This must be a dream, because you’re actually being nice to me right now.”

You giggle, shrugging your shoulders. “M’serious! You’re not bad, Jeon. I think today made me realize something about you.”

“What?”

“You’re… a really good guy,” you answer softly. Thinking over the course the day and even some days prior where the two of you didn’t share your usual quips, where only your irritation and stress was all you could focus on, and how easily he could turn your day around. Not just out of frustration or what you thought it was, but when you think of him, everything else gets forgotten. Somehow he manages to make your day, whether it’s doing something ridiculously childish to your computer like sending little emojis to the chat or even turning some of your graphics into stickers, you can’t deny that he’s a decent human being, and it’s ironic that dealing with someone as horrible as Wilson made you realize that. “Thank you for today. You didn’t have to, but you defended me and helped me out so yeah.”

“Of course I did,” he gives your arm a small shake.

“Why?”

He looks at you a smile threatening to curve on his lips, “Isn’t it obvious?” The longer your silence goes, the more his smile grows and he lets loose an airy laugh. “I like you!”

“What?!” You blink, feeling your heart thundering even louder. Thinking back through everything, it actually kind of makes sense. You just brushed away the thought because you figured he just loved to bug you. “You do know you’re twenty-one right? Not twelve?”

He rolls his eyes, a breathy laugh falling past his lips, “So? You just made it so easy to be like that. It’s cheesy but you just make me want to be a lil’ shit. It makes you smile and laugh. I like seeing that.”

The sudden realization is weird, but the thought of the day and all other positive moments with Jungkook keep you quite comfortable. You suppose the weird sensations have been your body’s way of telling you that you like this guy a lot, that as much as he can make you scowl that there has never been any ill-intent behind any of the jabs, and that sitting there beside him with the two of you slightly tipsy just makes you lean even closer just to catch a glimpse of those small things that have captivated you about him.

He blinks at the sudden action, “What? Do I have something on my face?”

You shake your head, “I just want to do something… can you close your eyes?”

His brows furrow for a moment, thoughts probably racing before he decides to do so after a moment. You see the slight pucker to his lips, eliciting the warmth on your cheeks but instead of leaning in to press your lips to his like you want to, you tap his forehead with your first two digits with a wide grin curved on your lips.

His eyes open, widening for a moment, then he laughs and pulls you into an embrace.

“Damn, you really had me right then.”

“I know, but we’ll have plenty of time to do that so don’t be too disappointed.”

“Okay… wait, what?”

At the sight of the bright lights of the bus, you pull him up with you and walk the two of you toward the open doors. Turning back to him as you swipe your bus pass twice, you wink, “You heard me.”  

To say the least, neither of you two could hardly wait.

Ukraine Billionaire Igor Kolomoisky Investigated For Money Laundering In US

One of Ukraine’s wealthiest oligarchs, whose name emerged in the center of the Trump impeachment saga, is under investigation by a US federal grand jury for allegedly laundering hundreds of millions of dollars in US real estate, BuzzFeed News has learned.

Billionaire Igor Kolomoisky is accused by Ukraine regulators of orchestrating a scheme to siphon money from the country’s largest bank and funnel it into prime properties, including landmark office towers and steel facilities across the US.

The US grand jury is examining the finances of Kolomoisky, a key supporter of President Volodymyr Zelensky, in a probe that has tracked the money from the Ukrainian bank through a maze of offshore companies to the US, according to two sources familiar with the inquiry.

The grand jury investigation in Cleveland represents a rare effort by the US justice system to target an influential oligarch and trace the millions that he and his associates allegedly sent through US correspondent banks.

Among the purchases: a 484-room, luxury hotel in Cleveland with lakefront views and a 21-story office tower just blocks away with vaulted ceilings and murals that once featured the largest bank lobby in the world.

The action also sets in motion what could be a test for President Zelensky, who once starred in a comedy show on a TV channel owned by Kolomoisky and had a personal relationship with the billionaire, who controls an energy, media, and real estate empire.

With no existing extradition treaty between the US and Ukraine, Zelensky and the country’s prosecutor general could face a difficult decision as to whether they would stand in the way in case of an indictment or allow the process to unfold.

Just last year, the relationship between the Ukrainian president and the oligarch became a source of controversy when it was revealed that two US business partners running the infamous back-channel campaign in Ukraine to dig up dirt on Joe Biden went to Kolomoisky to set up a meeting between Zelensky and Rudy Giuliani. The meeting ended abruptly when the oligarch refused.

Kolomoisky returned to his native country last year after spending two years in self-imposed exile in the wake of a government takeover of PrivatBank, which he cofounded in the 1990s.

A subsequent investigation by Ukraine regulators found a $5.5 billion shortfall in PrivatBank’s ledgers from what they called “a large-scale and coordinated fraud” that involved the bank’s major shareholders, Kolomoisky and fellow Ukrainian billionaire Gennadiy Bogolyubov. To keep the bank from collapse, the government tapped into taxpayer funds to plug the hole.

In an interview with BuzzFeed News, Kolomoisky said he was not aware of a grand jury probe, and any deficits reported by banking regulators were “done intentionally in order to expropriate the bank, my private property,” he said. “It was an artificially created hole by the national bank.”

Kolomoisky, a former governor in Ukraine who launched a series of lawsuits to win back control of the bank, said he did not break any laws and that no one has talked to him from the Justice Department.

Bogolyubov said he never took money illegally from the bank and that any real estate purchased in the US came from legitimate funds. All the transactions were documented by his partners in the US, he said. “PrivatBank has it. American banks have it,” he said, adding that he has never been contacted by any law enforcement agencies. “No one has asked me any questions.”

The scandal at PrivatBank led to criminal investigations in Ukraine that have continued to this day, placing the relationship between Zelensky and Kolomoisky at the center of a growing controversy.

The country’s former prosecutor-general, who was leading one of the investigations, was fired in March by a vote in parliament that was led by members of Zelensky’s party. Ruslan Riaboshapka told BuzzFeed News that he was ousted because of the investigation, while Zelensky said he supported the firing because the prosecutor was not doing enough to fight corruption.

Kolomoisky’s attempt to wrest control of PrivatBank has also stirred unrest, especially among lenders like the International Monetary Fund, prompting a vote by Ukraine’s parliament last week aimed at stopping Kolomoisky from taking back the bank.

With the ongoing US grand jury investigation, federal agents have traveled multiple times to Ukraine — including in February — where they met with Riaboshapka and investigators from the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine to discuss the case against the 57-year-old oligarch and his partner, BuzzFeed News has learned. In an interview, Artem Sytnyk, director of the anti-corruption bureau, said he’s cooperating with the FBI in an “ongoing investigation,” but declined to give details because of a confidentiality agreement with the FBI. The Justice Department’s international money laundering and kleptocracy team took part in the trip.

For more than a year, federal agents have tracked millions of dollars that were wired into the US from companies owned by Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov to snatch up properties — including four skyscrapers in downtown Cleveland — in a spending spree that began around 2008 and lasted for the next five years, according to court records and a source familiar with the investigation.

At one time, Kolomoisky and his associates were the largest commercial landlords in Cleveland, owning 2.8 million square feet. One of the properties that has drawn the FBI’s attention is the Warren Steel plant in Ohio, which is owned by companies under the control of Kolomoisky and two partners, and is the focus of a bitter legal dispute over the assets.

Two federal court orders have been imposed to stop the release of critical evidence obtained after one of the partners turned up hundreds of bank wires flowing into the United States from companies in which Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov held ownership stakes. Lawyers on both sides of the case would not comment.

A major lawsuit filed by PrivatBank in Delaware state court last year against Kolomoisky and his associates provides a sweeping description — drawn from internal bank records and emails — of how money was allegedly fleeced from the bank to buy the skyscrapers and factories in a “series of brazen fraudulent schemes.”

Citing the bank records, the suit claims Kolomoisky and Bogolyubov concocted an elaborate fraud with the help of people inside the institution — “the shadow bank” — through an array of sham loans to shell companies they owned that were registered in Cyprus, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. As the loans matured, new ones would be issued by the bank to pay them off.

The lawsuit alleges the two men used PrivatBank “as their own personal piggy bank, ultimately stealing billions of dollars” and laundering a portion of the money through the US properties.

In all, $622.8 million was funneled to the companies that were used to buy the real estate, according to the suit.

In addition to Ohio, purchases include a sprawling Motorola factory in Illinois that was shuttered, a 31-story skyscraper in downtown Louisville, and an iconic office complex in Dallas that was once the headquarters of Mary Kay Cosmetics.

Money also went to buy at least a dozen steel and ferroalloys plants across the country — including facilities in Ohio, Kentucky, West Virginia, Illinois, and Michigan — that collectively became major suppliers to the North American steel industry.

The lawsuit claims that many of the purchases were carried out with the help of three Miami investors described as “trusted lieutenants”: Mordechai Korf and Uriel Laber, who held ownership stakes in the real estate, and Korf’s brother-in-law, Chaim Schochet, an executive who ran the properties. At least two of the Cleveland skyscrapers have since been sold, records show.

In a forensic audit done for Ukraine’s top regulatory agency, analysts found 95% of the bank’s corporate lending had been to “parties related to former shareholders and their affiliates.”

Marc Kasowitz, a New York attorney for the Miami investors, said the accusations in the lawsuit “will be shown to be complete fabrications when the evidence in this case comes out.” Kasowitz represented President Trump in the Justice Department’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. “Our clients have earned a well-deserved reputation for honesty and high integrity over the past 20+ years and this lawsuit is nothing more than a fictional orchestrated political attack on an investor in our clients’ businesses.”

Valeria Gontareva, former chair of the National Bank of Ukraine, the nation’s chief regulator, said the level of fraud on the institution was larger than any crime ever perpetrated on a Ukrainian bank. “We called it an expanding universe,” said Gontareva, now a senior policy fellow at the London School of Economics.

Kateryna Rozhkova, first deputy governor of the nation’s regulatory agency, told BuzzFeed News that when the losses were first discovered, “we were simply freaked out and didn’t know what we should do about it.”

The government ordered a sweeping audit of the bank’s finances by Kroll Inc., the New York–based corporate investigative firm, which alleged the scheme was set up to “disguise the origin and destination of loan funds” with the help of employees in the bank, regulators said.

The larger issue looming in Ukraine is whether Zelensky will allow the National Anti-Corruption Bureau to work with the FBI and carry out its own inquiry and whether the country will extradite Kolomoisky if he is indicted in the US, according to Roman Groysman, a former Florida prosecutor who once lived in Ukraine.

“Is [President Zelensky] going to pressure the National Anti-Corruption Bureau and the prosecutor general to thwart the possibility of extradition — that’s the question,” said Groysman. “Or is he going to remain neutral and let them do their jobs? That’s the best thing he could do.”

He said NABU was set up at the request of the IMF with the help of the US and European Union to investigate corruption in Ukraine. It’s supposed to be impervious to political pressure.

“If it’s finally allowed to operate as an independent investigative agency and do what it was supposed to do without undue political interference, then maybe that’s a signal. If not, then it’s going to be the same thing we have always seen.”

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Transcript of Creating a Brand Name That Sticks

Transcript of Creating a Brand Name That Sticks written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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Transcript

John Jantsch: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Jeremy Miller. He is a brand strategist speaker, founder of Sticky Branding and the author of Brand New Name: A Proven, Step-by-Step Process to Create an Unforgettable Brand Name. So Jeremy, welcome to the show.

Jeremy Miller: Thanks John. It’s a pleasure to be here.

John Jantsch: So I have to tell you, I’m going to have a confession. You know my brand name is Duct Tape Marketing.

Jeremy Miller: Yes.

John Jantsch: But my original company name was Jantsch Communications.

Jeremy Miller: I love that you changed your name then. It’s one of my favorite marketing names that has been unforgettable, and following you for eight years, it’s in that range that it just sticks.

John Jantsch: Well, Jantsch Communications was terrible as a name, because it was-

Jeremy Miller: Well, it’s your name. You can’t knock your family name, your parents worked hard on it.

John Jantsch: It was my name, but people thought I sold long distance or something, I don’t know. I’m dating myself, right? What’s long distance? But anyway, yeah, we’re going to talk about that. Let me ask you the first question. What’s the job of a brand name? What does a brand name need to do to be successful?

Jeremy Miller: Well, I think of a brand name as a label in a file folder in your customer’s mind. It’s that thing that people refer to when they have a need. When you go to a grocery store, when you are talking to someone, we think in words, we think in names. It’s the way we identify something. There’s this classic scene in the Simpsons, I don’t remember if you recall, but Mr. Burns loses his power plant and he becomes a normal person, he has to do his own grocery shopping. He’s sitting in the grocery aisle and he’s looking at catsup and ketchup, and just back and forth, “Ketchup, catsup,” and everyone down the aisle are looking at him, “What’s this crazy person doing?” He doesn’t have the words to know how to buy something. And that’s the purpose of a name. It’s that thing that gives you meaning.

John Jantsch: Well, and full disclosure, I lucked on to Duct Tape Marketing. I mean, I just thought that that sounded like a good name, but I didn’t do all kinds of extensive research. But what everybody kept telling me every time I would say it is like, “I get it. It tells a story.” And so without really knowing, I think I kind of lucked onto really one of the key attributes of a great brand name, isn’t it?

Jeremy Miller: I think so. And I think a great name absolutely does tell a story, and that’s what makes it memorable, that we understand it. Now, not all names have to tell a story. A name could be an empty vessel. When you look at Kodak, George Eastman’s vision was to create a name that meant nothing, that he could breathe life into so that it became a story of the Kodak moment. So you took a descriptive metaphor and were able to apply it to marketing. We understand what duct tape is, we understand what marketing is, but by putting them together, it creates this aha moment. But it all depends on the entrepreneur’s strategy. What do you want your business to be? And then you choose the name that fits it.

John Jantsch: Let’s go to that Kodak example, because yes, in hindsight, huge brand name, everybody knows what it meant or what it stood for at one point, but when you come up with a name like that, does it require then that you’re going to invest so much energy in having to explain to people and describe it and maybe even spend years getting it to become a household name?

Jeremy Miller: Yes, absolutely. So when you choose an empty vessel such as a Kodak or a Verizon or Hulu or any of those types of names, then you have to breathe life into it and make it your own, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It’s your opportunity that when people interact with your business and your products and your service and your people, that’s how you’re inserting meaning and value into that name, but you’re going to have to work harder to promote yourself. So you have that balancing act, but that’s actually part of the strategy too. The biggest reason why we are going towards empty vessels is that there’s a trademark issue.

Jeremy Miller: There’s actually a naming drought. In the United States alone, we are registering 564,000 new small businesses every single month. That’s 2% of the United States population starting a company at any given time, and that’s just a mind boggling number for me. Now, not all these businesses are going to survive, but they all need names and they all need websites and then a chunk of them are going to do trademarks. And so we’re, today, experiencing an issue where all the available .coms, if you’re going to go buy a website, chances are you’re going to have to buy it from someone else. It’s like real estate. But if you throw the trademark element to the mix, now we’ve got really complicated things.

Jeremy Miller: So being able to register something like Duct Tape anything today, it’s going to be really hard. You got in at a moment in time that allowed you to create this powerful brand story.

John Jantsch: Well, and I love the Hulus and the names that you threw out there when they really evoke emotion for me. Even if I don’t know what it means, I like the sound of it or something, or even then when it’s explained to me what it means, sometimes. But can we also get too clever? I mean, I see a lot of people doing stuff where I’m kind of like, I can’t even say that, let alone spell that.

Jeremy Miller: Well, I think there’s absolutely that. So my advice if you’re inventing a word is focus on something that is a phonetic spelling versus a Latin or Greek spelling. It’s a lot easier to say Hulu than Verizon, and it’s a lot easier to remember that, same thing with Uber and other things, even though they’re short. Acura is an example of a phonetically spelled word that was invented or Swiffer is another one. We speak and think in sounds, whereas something that has more of, say, a pharmaceutical type of nature is a lot harder to remember. So there’s that element of our programming as people.

Jeremy Miller: But I would also just say this, that name is strategic. What you choose to name something should represent your brand, your positioning, what you’re trying to create. So if you called, say, a chain of retirement living centers, purple taco, you probably have got the wrong strategy, even if it sounds kind of cool. So the name has got to fit what you want to create. So your strategy is where everything starts.

John Jantsch: The name thing is hard, because you can come up with and test some names … I’ve found over the years, you’ll get feedback, people, “Oh, that’s terrible. That’s awful.” But then you go with it and 10 years in it’s like Frisbee. Probably a stupid sounding name the first time somebody heard it, but then became … And again, not everybody’s looking for naming a whole category of a device, but isn’t that a good example of sometimes you got to throw stuff out there at first maybe doesn’t just sound right?

Jeremy Miller: I’m going to come back to the Frisbee story in a second, but yes, a quirk, something that is odd or doesn’t quite fit, like Slack. How could a product focused on team collaboration have all these negative connotations? But the name is just great. Same thing with Banana Republic. If you look at the history of what banana republics are, calling a clothing brand that, is a pretty risky, bold move. But those quirks are what makes something so memorable. You mentioned Frisbee, that’s actually a story I tell in the book. Fred Morrison, who was the inventor of the Frisbee, hated that name. He thought it was the dumbest thing. The original name was called Pluto platters.

Jeremy Miller: So Frisbee was bought by Wham-O. They were the guys who created Hula Hoop and Silly String. And so [Fred Knerr 00:00:22:52], who was one of the founders, went out and he visited Fred Morrison in Connecticut near Yale, and he saw all the kids were calling this thing Frisbee. And it turns out Frisbie was a pie company in Connecticut, and what the kids did before Netflix and internet and iPhones, they would take empty pie tins and throw them around the quad. So they took the name of the pie tins and applied it to these flying saucers. And Fred Knerr was just a brilliant marketer and he saw what the customers were already calling it and took that.

John Jantsch: And now a little word from our sponsor. Intercom wants more of the nice people visiting your website to give you money, so they took a little chat bubble in the corner of a website and packed it with conversational bots, product tours, NPS surveys, all sorts of things that amplify your team and help you reach more nice people. Intercom customer, Unity, got 45% more loyal users with Intercom in just 12 months. Go to intercom.com/podcast to start making money from real time chat, then see everything else Intercom can do. That’s intercom.com/podcast.

John Jantsch: So tell me this. Does everything need a name? In other words, should we be naming our processes and our products and our divisions and our job titles? Brand it?

Jeremy Miller: Yes, 100%. I think you can go probably a little too crazy on it, but I would say for something to exist, it needs a name especially in the professional services world, if we’re selling thought leadership. You look at just how you name your systems, how you name your services, not only does it give it gravitas from a customer marketing perspective, it gives it gravitas from an internal perspective. So that if you are talking about your efficiency and the way you deliver customer service, simply by giving that thing a name creates value. And so naming is probably the most important construct of language, because once something has a name, it gains meaning. And if you are deliberate on this, you are making choices of how you are going to grow your business.

John Jantsch: Yeah. And I think sometimes, you said gives it meaning, but it also makes it tangible. It’s almost like, “Oh, here’s proof that we have a 37 step process to make sure that your product or your service gets done right.” Where everybody else is just saying trust us.

Jeremy Miller: Exactly. And in the world of differentiation, especially if we’re looking at small businesses, often we are selling something that somebody else is already selling. So how you describe your services, how you describe what makes you unique and why you do what you do, those simple things of giving them names are what affects meaning and give you credibility when you describe your 37 step process for delighting your customer, then people go, “Oh, that’s why you do that.”

John Jantsch: And I know the answer to this is yes, is there a process for coming up with a name?

Jeremy Miller: 100%.

John Jantsch: You want to share that with us?

Jeremy Miller: Sure. Let me tell you a bit of where it came from. I’m a serial entrepreneur and you are too, and we work with lots entrepreneurs, and naming is one of those vexing things that consumes so much time and every time you find a great name you find someone else has taken it. And so the reason why I wrote this book was I tried to answer the question of, what do I wish I had when I went through that naming process? And so Brand New Name draws on the ideas of the GV sprint and agile project management. And the idea is over the course of two to four weeks, it gives you three stages to build your strategy, generate lots of ideas and test and select the right name for your brand.

Jeremy Miller: And so in stage one we need to build a strategy, what does it mean to have a great name? And how are you going to know it when you see it? And step two, I believe in employee co-creation, which is how do we get everybody on our team to participate and generate as many ideas as we can over the course of five days? And then the hardest part of naming isn’t coming up with ideas, it’s that vetting process. How do we find one that resonates, fits the brand and most importantly, we can own it? And so that’s what the book does. In the span of that book, everything you need to name something, whether it’s a company, a product or service is all there in those pages.

John Jantsch: Go back to number one for me, because I think that’s actually the hardest part for a lot of companies, because they don’t have a strategy anyway. And so a naming strategy is like a subdivision of strategy. What are the actual steps in that?

Jeremy Miller: So what we start off with is defining, what is it you’re naming. And so it’s the simple question of, what are you naming? Is it a company? Is it a product? Is it a service? And then describing it. My first book, Sticky Branding, I talked about this idea called simple clarity, which is the ability to describe who you are, what you do and who you serve in 10 words or less, and so we build on this a little bit. Part of what we look at in developing your strategy is to be able to answer those basic questions. What are we naming? What are the criterias? Who are our customers? How do they buy? Who are our competitors? What are the naming trends in that space? And what is it going to take to stand out?

Jeremy Miller: And so we go through those questions so that you could set some naming principles. But what you said was very interesting, it’s a subset of strategy. Oftentimes though, when we are doing a naming strategy or when I introduce this to somebody, this is the first time they’ve actually ever considered some of these questions as brand, because we’re not necessarily thinking about brand all the time. So naming is the first step for many people to actually ask the deliberate questions of, who are we? Where do we play? How do we win? How do we want to be known? And by simply getting that down on paper, starts to set the guidelines for what it’s going to take to find a brilliant name.

John Jantsch: I’ve worked with a lot of small business owners and we go through the whole strategy thing, and just like Jantsch Communications, I talked about, was a lousy name, I have to deliver the really bad news that we need to change the name of your business. Is that something that … I mean, you’ve probably faced it before, and if the name’s wrong, I mean, I suppose we can live, but we’re not going to get the message across, we’re not going to get the differentiation across. How do you address or approach that idea of maybe the name now is going to be sort of the leading edge of our strategy, because it’s going to be something that we’re going to have to change everything about? I mean, how do you address that?

Jeremy Miller: Face forward and deal with it head on. So we deal with name changes all the time in our practice. And so for example, a large part of my work is with multi generational family businesses, and we did a naming project a couple of years ago where it was called A-1 Shipping Supplies. It was made for the yellow pages basically, but 35 years later, there is no yellow pages and A-1 looks cheesy as hell. Oh, by the way, they’re doing food packaging, primarily not shipping supplies. And you deal with it. When your name is causing dissonance or hurting your credibility or preventing growth, you change it. Now, in their case, they changed their name to Rocketline, and they created a quirky, whimsical name that didn’t have a lot of meaning, but it allowed them to shape what they want to be.

Jeremy Miller: But the key in changing a name is that all that meaning and all those experiences people have had with you are associated with the one name, you have to deliberately pour those contents into the other vessel. And so you have to have a marketing strategy and a communication strategy of how you’re going to convey what your new name is and why you’re changing it to customers, prospects and whoever it is. The nice thing is as a small business, you could probably call up all of your customers and tell them face to face or over the phone why you did it, whereas if you’re talking about a large global or multinational company, it’s a lot more complicated. But generally speaking, it’s not that hard, and so if your name hurts you, change it.

John Jantsch: Is there a place for a transition? In other words, go through two name changes or something? You’ve seen people do that, where they blend the logos or something like that. Does that make sense or does that just make it harder?

Jeremy Miller: I guess you would have to tell me what the strategy is. I think within mergers, that sometimes makes sense, but those are probably larger entities with a larger communication strategy. What I would suggest is go with the name for the brand you want to be. So whatever you look at three, five, 10 years, don’t worry about what’s happening in the next 18 months, think about where you’re going and choose the name for that. What you need, though, in your communication strategy is … Where most people underestimate is how long they should be communicating the change. So they do say a 90 day or a six month campaign to communicate the change, but-

John Jantsch: “We did a press release.”

Jeremy Miller: Yeah. It’s 18 months minimum. 18 months.

John Jantsch: Yeah. You already mentioned this idea of domain names. I mean, have you ever come up with a name, and then first thing you did was look for the domain and just said, “No, it’s a nonstarter, because we can’t get a good name.” I mean, are we at a point where that is dictating branding?

Jeremy Miller: If you asked me this question five years ago, I would have said yes, 100%. Today, no. I think domain names are losing a little bit of relevance. So now, we add a descriptor. So for example, say you wanted to call your company Grant, and you want a grant.com, well I know that’s available right now, but it’s $10,000 a month on lease. I don’t know about you, but I got better ways to spend that kind of money on an annual basis. So what you look at is … So Tesla was Tesla Motors until very recently, or Buffer ran as Buffer app until their second round of funding and they could afford to buy the .com. Focus on creating a great name, and then put a descriptor on it or get creative.

Jeremy Miller: One of my favorites is Zoom, they have zoom.us or Zoom us, so they made their name a verb. The only place people are seeing domain names primarily today is in your marketing collateral and your business cards. When you go to a browser, you type in the word not in the URL, and when you see it on a website or somewhere else, you click the link, or more likely you’re going to be talking to Siri or Alexa and not even saying the URL.

John Jantsch: Yeah. Well, and there’s, as you just mentioned, .us and .ios and all those I think have become pretty … People are very accepting of those. And I think you’re right. I’m sure there’s a zoom.com, I haven’t Googled it, but I’m sure there’s a zoom.com, and so then if somebody has the exact name and a .com, that probably could lead to some confusion.

Jeremy Miller: It could, but it’s like trademarks, are they in the same space and the same category? Like you have Pandora, which is jewelry and Pandora, which is a streaming music service. So you can have multiple companies using the same names, but because they operate in different places, they can get away with it, and especially small businesses. Chances are we are local, and so the fact that there’s someone else named what you’re named in another state, it may not be all that relevant.

John Jantsch: You’re right, the behavior has changed. It used to be .com or nothing else, and I think that now, as you said, it’s not so important that people are typing it, as long as you do the fundamental SEO stuff with it.

Jeremy Miller: Here’s my most fundamental comment to branding, and this is a bit of a flippant, but build a great business. The classic example is you see a restaurant, comes out with brilliant marketing, brilliant ad campaign, beautiful restaurant, great everything, and then you get food poisoning. So the brand is, “Don’t go back to that place, I got food poisoning.” None of the marketing mattered. And I think you could actually start a small business with a terrible name, but do such great work that people love you and they come back and they refer you, and that’s your brand actually. It’s two parts. A brand is based on what you’ve done, so the results that you have delivered to your clients, and branding is what you’re going to do.

Jeremy Miller: Now, if the name starts to hurt you or you grow beyond it, now you need marketing that needs reach and that crappy name doesn’t work for you anymore, absolutely change it, but never lose sight that the quality of your business is the number one predictor of the quality of your brand.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’ve often said, and listeners of my show will recognize this, that every business has a brand, I think it’s just whether or not they are directing it intentionally, so that goes so much to that. Jeremy, where can people find out more about you and your work and of course, pick up a copy of Brand New Name.

Jeremy Miller: Well, Brand New Name will be sold wherever books are sold. It comes out on October 8th, so Amazon for sure. And the best way to find me is just to Google Sticky Branding. Stickybranding.com is my website, and I’m on all the social networks @stickybranding, and I’d love to connect with everyone.

John Jantsch: Awesome. Thanks for taking the time, Jeremy, and hopefully we’ll see you out there on the road soon.

Jeremy Miller: Awesome. Thanks John.

from http://bit.ly/2mKQHti

‘The enigma of the entire Mueller probe’: Focus on origins of Russian investigation puts spotlight on Maltese professor

https://wapo.st/31XQgvj

‘The enigma of the entire Mueller probe’: Focus on origins of Russian investigation puts spotlight on Maltese professor

By Rosalind S. Helderman, Shane Harris and Ellen NAKASHIMA | Published June 30 at 6:07 PM ET | Washington Post |

Posted July 1, 2019 |

Shortly after Joseph Mifsud’s efforts to help connect a Trump adviser with the Kremlin were detailed in court filings, an Italian reporter found him at a university in Rome, where he was serving as a visiting professor.

“I never got any money from the Russians: my conscience is clear,” Mifsud told La Repubblica. “I am not a secret agent.”

Then Mifsud disappeared.

The Maltese-born academic has not surfaced publicly since that October 2017 interview, days after Trump campaign aide George Papadopoulos pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI about details of their interactions. Among them, Papadopoulos told investigators, was an April 2016 meeting in which Mifsud alerted him that the Russians had “dirt” on Hillary Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails.”

The conversation between Mifsud and Papadopoulos, eventually relayed by an Australian diplomat to U.S. government officials, was cited by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III as the event that set in motion the FBI probe into ties between the Trump campaign and Russia.

With Attorney General William P. Barr’s review of the counterintelligence investigation underway, the origins of the inquiry itself are now in the spotlight — and with them, the role of Mifsud, a little-known figure. 

In Mifsud’s absence, a number of President Trump’s allies and advisers have been floating a provocative theory: that the Maltese professor was a Western intelligence plant.

Seizing on the vacuum of information about him, they have promoted the idea that he was working for the FBI, CIA or possibly British or Italian intelligence, citing exaggerated and at times distorted details about his life.

Trump attorney Rudolph Giuliani told Fox News in April that Mifsud was a “counterintelligence operative, either Maltese or Italian,” who took part in what sounded to him like a “counterintelligence trap” against Papadopoulos. 

Spokeswomen for the FBI, Justice Department and CIA declined to comment, as did a spokesman for Italy’s Security Intelligence Department. 

Such a notion runs counter to the description of Mifsud in the Mueller report, which states Mifsud “had connections to Russia” and “maintained various Russian contacts,” including a former employee of the Internet Research Agency, the Russian organization that carried out a social media disinformation campaign in 2016.

Former FBI director James B. Comey, in an opinion column for The Washington Post in May, described Mifsud bluntly as “a Russian agent.” 

Mifsud did not respond to requests for comment made through Stephan Roh, a Swiss lawyer who says he represents the professor. Roh said suggestions that the professor had ties to Russian intelligence are “defamatory accusations.”

Mueller’s report is silent on whether Mifsud’s interactions with Papadopoulos were part of the Russian government’s efforts to interfere in the presidential campaign and boost Trump. 

Officials familiar with U.S. intelligence reports told The Post that Mifsud had been identified by intelligence agencies as a potential Russian agent before he met Papadopoulos, an assessment drawn from reporting collected over several years.

An examination of Mifsud’s activities also shows that he began forging ties in Russia years earlier — and that he was working to expand his network in that country around the same time he met Papadopoulos in 2016, including by trying to broker new academic deals with a powerful Russian state university. 

Mifsud visited Moscow just weeks before the U.S. presidential election to mark the signing of the deal, according to Russian media reports at the time. In a previously unreported episode, he welcomed a Kremlin-linked academic to speak at Rome’s Link Campus University in December 2016, shortly after Trump’s election.

A video of the event shows Mifsud announcing that he hoped the visit by Alexey Klishin, who teaches at an elite institute run by Russia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and has done legal work for the Kremlin, would not be a “one-off thing.”

“Friendship is very important,” Mifsud said.

The idea that Mifsud was working for the West has been pushed by Roh, who wrote a book called “The Faking of Russia-Gate: The Papadopoulos Case.” 

In an email to The Post, Roh said Mifsud was a “Western intelligence element to be protected,” saying that is why the professor felt the need to hide for the past two years.

He said Mifsud has been living “mainly in Rome but moving in Europe.” He also claimed, without providing evidence, that Mifsud cooperated with Mueller in 2018 and was interviewed by “U.S. investigators” this year.

Asked to specify the Western intelligence agency for whom Mifsud worked and in what capacity, Roh said only that “this will be a matter of the upcoming declassification,” an apparent reference to the review ordered by Barr. Roh, who has business connections in Russia of his own, did not respond to follow-up questions.

Once a fringe idea, the theory that Mifsud was a Western operative has now been adopted and amplified by mainstream voices in Trump’s world and received significant airtime on Fox News’s prime-time shows.

“When you look into Mifsud closer, you realize he’s connected with all kinds of intelligence agencies, including our own FBI,” Rep. Devin Nunes (Calif.), the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, told Fox in May. “If he is in fact a Russian agent, this would be one of the biggest intelligence scandals for the United States and our allies.”

Nunes declined to comment further. 

Giuliani told The Post that “Mifsud is a mystery to be explored,” adding that the Papadopoulos episode “looks like a rogue counterintel operation.”

Papadopoulos, too, has adopted the theory, tweeting recently that Mifsud was “an Italian intelligence asset who the CIA weaponized” against him to drop “fake Russia” information into his lap as part of a broader plot.

“He is the enigma of the entire Mueller probe,” Papadopoulos said in an interview, insisting he wants the truth to come out about Mifsud, regardless of what it entails. But, he added, “whatever remnant of my reputation that I have left, I would bet it all that he was a Western intelligence operative.” 

Multiple former intelligence officials in the United States and the United Kingdom said that theory does not make sense. 

John Sipher, a former CIA officer who once ran the agency’s Russia operations, called the idea that Mifsud was a CIA asset who set up Papadopoulos “nonsense,” noting that the CIA is not allowed to target Americans. 

Steve Hall, who retired in 2015 after 30 years running and managing Russian operations for the CIA, said that in counterintelligence, “you can almost never rule anything out completely.” 

But he added that Mifsud’s known activities closely parallel long-standing Russian techniques of targeting academic institutions to spot possible recruits and gather information, making it more likely that Mifsud was working with the Russians than a Western intelligence agency.

“Oftentimes, you can cut through a lot of BS by saying, what makes the most sense here?” he said.

A GLOBAL NETWORKER

Born in Malta and educated in Italy and Northern Ireland, Mifsud cycled through European academic institutions, traveling to conferences, networking and pitching partnerships between schools in various cities, according to people who encountered him at the time. 

Multilingual, urbane and well traveled, Mifsud was an inveterate networker and name-dropper, according to people who met him. They said he floated ambitious dreams of creating international academic institutions that would share professors and students. 

Mifsud has said that he spent several years as a diplomat for the Maltese government. Based on that credential, Mifsud in 2010 was named director of the London Academy of Diplomacy, a small graduate school catering to embassy officials living in the U.K.

The program provided Mifsud with access to London’s diplomatic set, including the Russian Embassy, where photographs posted online show he met with the ambassador in 2014. 

“He was in­cred­ibly well connected with various people in embassies and that world in London,” said Douglas Brodie, who was then a dean at the University of Stirling in Scotland, which partnered with Mifsud’s school to ensure Mifsud’s students could receive British degrees. 

Brodie, who said he liked Mifsud and found him good company, said the Maltese professor appeared to be a genuine academic — though one with little interest in the administrative details of the school. “He was far more interested in trying to bring in highflying guest speakers and much more interested in working the embassy drink circuit than the nuts-and-bolts stuff,” Brodie said, adding: “He loved all of that.”

Mifsud would later claim that in this time, he became a “member” of the Clinton Foundation. A person familiar with the foundation said the organization has received just two donations from people named “Joseph Mifsud” — a series of small donations from a Michigan man totaling $30 between 2000 and 2002 and one for $50 from a London resident in 2015.

Beginning at least around 2010, Mifsud made multiple trips to Russia, attending conferences and academic conferences, according to Russian media accounts and university news releases.  

In 2012, Mifsud’s London Academy of Diplomacy formed a partnership to exchange students and conduct joint research with Lomonosov Moscow State University’s Faculty of Global Processes, which an official advertised in a promotional video as a steppingstone for graduates to work “in the Russian government, the presidential administration, federal ministries and agencies, the special services.”

About once a year between 2013 and 2017, Mifsud attended events at the university, where he delivered lectures and appeared in university photos.

“He was famous to us within the sphere of diplomats and those working on diplomacy,” said Yury Sayamov, a professor at the school who said he met Mifsud after he delivered a lecture on diplomacy in Moscow in 2015, adding: “Many people in academia know him — in Russia and in other countries.” 

Mifsud’s former assistant, Natalia ­Kutepova-Jamom, told The Post in 2017 that Mifsud accelerated his efforts to build high-level contacts in Russia around 2014, claiming at one point to have secured a brief meeting with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin.

A Kremlin spokesman denied that Mifsud and Putin met.

In emails to The Post sent in August 2017, Mifsud wrote that his Russia “contacts and interest [were] academic.” He said he was a visiting professor at Moscow State University but said it was “an unpaid honorary position, similar to those I have with other institutions and think tanks globally.”

“I am an academic, I do not even speak Russian,” he wrote. He told The Post then that he had “absolutely no contact with the Russian Government.”

When interviewed by the Italian reporter in Rome two months later, he offered a different account. He told La Repubblica that he had discussed the possibility that the election would result in a change to U.S.-Russian relations with various people in Europe and Moscow, including Russian government figures. 

OFFER OF RUSSIAN CONNECTIONS

Papadopoulos and Mifsud met in the spring of 2016 as Trump was rising in the polls.

At the time, Papadopoulos, a young energy consultant from Chicago, was working for a start-up think tank called the London Center for International Law Practice and had just been drafted to be an unpaid foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign.  

On the day after he agreed to join the campaign, Papadopoulos said his boss at the London think tank offered to introduce him to “a very important person” who would be “very useful” in his new position. 

This VIP, Papadopoulos wrote in his book “Deep State Target,” was Mifsud. 

Papadopoulos said he was told by Nagi Idris, the director of the London Center for International Law Practice, that a London attorney affiliated with the think tank named Arvinder Sambei would be setting up a meeting for Papadopoulos and Mifsud at an upcoming conference to be held at Link Campus University in Rome, a private university that was formerly affiliated with the University of Malta.

Sambei is a former government prosecutor in the United Kingdom who had for a time served as a liaison with the U.S. Justice Department on American extradition requests.   

Trump allies have seized on her connection to the think tank where Papadopoulos worked as evidence that Mifsud was working with the British government. 

But in an interview, Sambei said she played no role in Papadopoulos’s introduction to Mifsud. She said that by the time she became affiliated with the London think tank, she was in private practice and had had no affiliation with the British government for 11 years. She did not attend the meeting in Italy and said her only brief encounter with Papadopoulos came in the coffee break room, shortly before he left London.

“It’s baffling to me where this is coming from,” Sambei said. “I don’t even know George. I’ve never even been formally introduced to him.”

In an interview, Papadopoulos maintained that he was told Sambei arranged his introduction to Mifsud. 

Idris did not respond to requests for comment.

That March, Papadopoulos said he traveled to Rome with Idris, who introduced him to Mifsud. Over dinner at a restaurant near the Trevi Fountain, Papadopoulos wrote that Mifsud dropped a “lure,” bringing up Russia and promising to be Papadopoulos’s “middleman around the world.”

“ ‘I’m going to introduce you to everyone and set up a meeting between Trump and Putin,’ ” Mifsud told him, according to Papadopoulos’s book.

According to the Mueller report, Mifsud contacted Papadopoulos after both men returned to London, beginning a courtship that would lead to the opening of the Russia investigation. 

Mifsud introduced Papadopoulos to a Russian graduate student who Papadopoulos believed was Putin’s niece, according to Mueller’s report. Before disappearing, Mifsud said the woman was a Russian graduate student and denied telling Papadopoulos she had Putin links.

Mifsud also connected Papadopoulos to a Russian think tank director with ties to the Russian Foreign Ministry and promised to help set up a meeting with the Russian ambassador, according to the special counsel’s report.

Papadopoulos has said that, at the time, he hoped that Mifsud would provide introductions he could use to ingratiate himself with Trump campaign officials, who he believed were looking for ways to better American relations with Russia.

The conversation that kicked off the Russia investigation occurred on April 26, 2016 — the day after Mifsud returned to London from a trip to speak at the Russian government-linked Valdai Discussion Club meeting in Moscow, according to Mueller’s report.

On his return, Mifsud met Papadopoulos at the Andaz Hotel in London, and over breakfast, told him that he had just met with high-level Russian government officials, Papadopoulos later told investigators. 

The Russians, Mifsud said, had “dirt” on Clinton in the form of “thousands of emails,” according to the Mueller report. 

Mifsud has denied ever telling Papadopoulos that the Russians had Clinton emails.

In a lengthy response to written questions from The Post, Roh suggested that Papadopoulos was “directed and used” by the FBI — perhaps unwittingly — to get in contact with Russians in a failed effort to locate emails that Clinton had deleted from her private server. Mifsud, he wrote, was “operating on behalf of Western intelligence agencies when they met” and Papadopoulos’s interaction with him “was surveilled.” 

Roh provided a power-of-attorney letter that appeared to be signed by Mifsud in May 2018 to show that he is authorized to speak on the professor’s behalf, but he did not provide any evidence of recent contact with the professor.

The Swiss attorney has his own Russian ties. In addition to his law practice, he leads an investment firm and a consulting business with Moscow offices, according to their websites. Photos show he appeared with Mifsud at the Valdai panel discussion in Moscow in 2016.

Last year, Roh changed the name of a company he registered in London to “The No Vichok Ltd.,” an apparent reference to the poisoning of a former Russian spy in the United Kingdom with the nerve agent Novichok. British authorities have presented significant evidence that the attack was undertaken by Russian intelligence officers, and senior U.S. intelligence officials have concurred with that assessment.

Roh told BuzzFeed, which first reported the registration, that the company would conduct research about the attack, which he suggested was in fact a plot by Western intelligence. He did not respond to a question from The Post about the company. He said he had “no business interests in Russia” and noted he is not licensed to practice law there.

A UNIVERSITY IN THE SPOTLIGHT

The Rome university where Papadopoulos met Mifsud has been cited repeatedly by Trump supporters as evidence that Mifsud was working for Western intelligence.

In his book, Papadopoulos calls Link Campus University “Spook University” and claims it is “a training school for Western-allied spies, including CIA, FBI, and MI6,” the British Secret Intelligence Service. 

He and others have seized on a 2004 CIA-sponsored conference that was loosely affiliated with Link. 

The unclassified event, titled “New Frontiers of Intelligence Analysis,” was attended by analysts from more than 30 countries, according to people with knowledge of the gathering and conference materials reviewed by The Post, some of which were published online.

The CIA’s Sherman Kent School for Intelligence Analysis organized the conference with the Gino Germani Institute, an Italian social sciences and strategic studies think tank, which was affiliated at the time with Link. But the university didn’t plan the content, and the conference wasn’t held on its campus.

The speakers included historians and government officials, including some who were widely quoted in the press at the time about a variety of security topics. Post columnist David Ignatius was invited and wrote about the panels and speakers. 

In an interview, Link President Vincenzo Scotti scoffed at the notion that the school is a front for the CIA or other intelligence services. “People say such stupid things,” said Scotti, an Italian politician who served as minister of interior affairs for two years in the early 1990s. “We have no relationships with the CIA.” 

Founded in 1999 as a branch of the University of Malta, the campus went private in 2011.

Roberto Di Nunzio, a businessman who previously taught at Link, said it was one of the first private universities in Italy to offer a master’s degree program about intelligence and security. But he said the goal from the start was to cater to private industry and not government intelligence services, which have their own training schools.

Scotti played down Mifsud’s connections with the Roman university. He said Mifsud began visiting when Link was affiliated with the University of Malta in 2000 and would attend events and seminars there periodically over the subsequent years. Mifsud formally served as a visiting professor for just one semester, in 2017, he said.

But a former employee of the school who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal matters said Mifsud played a key role at the school in developing academic partnerships between Link and universities in other countries, including Russia. 

During the same months in 2016 when Mifsud was wooing Papadopoulos, Link was negotiating a new deal to exchange students and professors and host joint events with Moscow State University — the same Russian state school that Mifsud was visiting annually.  

In a 2017 article about the arrangement in a Russian international affairs journal, Sayamov, the Russian professor, wrote that Mifsud had been the first to suggest the idea. Roh too told The Post that Mifsud was “instrumental in negotiating and building that partnership like he was instrumental in negotiating and building partnerships with other universities.” 

Mifsud can be seen in a video of the Oct. 8, 2016, signing ceremony for the deal, which aired on Russian television.

Scotti, however, disputed the characterization of Mifsud as a key player in the partnership with the Russian university. 

“He played no role in the arrangement — no principal role,” Scotti told The Post. The idea that Mifsud brokered the agreement, he said, is “categorically” false.

As the deal with the Russian university was being negotiated, Link officials vetoed proposals by faculty members to co-sponsor conferences that would highlight the security challenges Russia posed to Europe, according to the former employee. 

“They said, we can’t do this, because we’re in negotiations with the Russians and they’re suspicious of us, because they think we’re linked to the Americans and we have to reassure them that we’re not,” said the former employee.

Scotti denied that academic events that could offend Russia were torpedoed, noting that Link hosted a conference on cybersecurity in January 2015. “The allegations against Link University are fake news, since [the university] was actually issuing a warning against Russian misinformation,” he said.

The former employee said Link merely provided a hall for the conference and did not organize the event, which was not focused solely on Russia and predated Link’s negotiations in Moscow.

Di Nunzio said similar events after 2015 omitted references to Russian disinformation.  He added that at Link, “there were people who felt unnerved” about the agreement with the Russian university, adding that it “did indeed raise some eyebrows.”

Roh said the university severed ties with Mifsud after his conversation with Papadopoulos about Clinton’s emails was made public in court filings. 

“I can’t afford to have the university embroiled in shady situations,” Scotti said. “As long as I have no reason to suspect anyone of a problem, they will have the utmost freedom to pursue their work. But as soon as I see a sign of a problem, that’s it. The relationship ends.”

A VISIT TO ROME

About two months after Link brokered its partnership with Moscow State University, a top Russian academic from a different university paid a visit to Rome.

Klishin held a formal role as a professor and a department head at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations, an elite campus with decades of history training future diplomats. The school is run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, whose current chief, Sergei Lavrov, is a graduate. 

Klishin, who did not respond to requests for comment, was also a former member of the upper house of the Russian parliament and had performed legal work for the Kremlin, according to his official biography. 

During Klishin’s visit to the Link campus, Mifsud told a group assembled around a large conference table that he hoped it would be one of “many, many more,” according to a video of the event. 

Klishin began his remarks by “personally” thanking Mifsud and Roh, who was also in attendance.

Scotti said that the event was arranged by Mifsud and that he had no reason to question Klishin, who had spoken at universities around the world, including in the United States. “I can’t tell you anything about that individual’s activities, as he was, and still remains, totally foreign to me,” he said.

By February 2017, Mifsud was in the United States, where he spoke on a panel held at the visitor’s center of the U.S. Capitol at a meeting hosted by the nonprofit group Global Ties U.S., which helps organize foreign exchange programs in the United States. 

His invitation from the group, which receives State Department funding for some of its programs, has been cited by Trump allies as evidence that Mifsud was trusted by the U.S. government. 

However, in a statement, the organization said the event at which Mifsud spoke was privately funded and not affiliated with the State Department. Mifsud was invited to provide a “European perspective” about the future of public diplomacy, the group said.

While he was in Washington, the FBI approached Mifsud in the lobby of his hotel and questioned him about his interactions with Papadopoulos, prosecutors have said. Mueller wrote in his report that the Maltese professor made various inaccurate statements but that lies Papadopoulos had told the FBI about his interactions with Mifsud when he was interviewed 12 days earlier “undermined investigators’ ability to challenge Mifsud.”

Mifsud was allowed to leave the country. Mueller’s report does not say whether U.S. investigators ever located him again.

Papadopoulos said he is more eager than anyone for the Maltese professor to be found.

“Some of the other strange characters in my story have gone public,” he said. “Mifsud is the only one who has not come up for air — and I don’t know why.”

Anton Troianovski and Amie Ferris-Rotman in Moscow; Stefano Pitrelli and Chico Harlan in Rome; and Matt Zapotosky, Carol D. Leonnig and Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.

Tourmaline Oil poised to grab top gas producer crown in showdown with Canadian Natural Resources

CALGARY — Tourmaline Oil Corp. is boldly predicting it will overtake heavyweight Canadian Natural Resources Ltd. to become the country’s largest natural gas producer this year.

Currently, the two companies are deadlocked with roughly equal gas production in Canada and the title of “biggest” is up for grabs, though both producers’ top executives tried to downplay the importance of the top spot.

“The goal is to be the most efficient and the most low-cost,” Tourmaline president and CEO Mike Rose said Thursday, though he added that becoming the largest would be a nice milestone for his 11-year-old company.

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Canadian Natural president Tim McKay similarly said being the biggest doesn’t add to his company’s cachet with investors. “It doesn’t have any appeal to ourselves. It’s all about value creation,” he said.

Still, Canadian Natural has previously noted it is the largest gas producer in Canada and remains the largest upstream oil and gas producer in Canada with over 1.08 million barrels of daily oil and gas production at the end of the fourth quarter.

A corporate presentation posted by Tourmaline this week highlights that it “will become the largest gas producer in Canada” based on 2019 estimates — hinting at its desire to be the biggest.

Analysts say Tourmaline could take the title late in the second quarter when a new natural gas plant in northern British Columbia begins operating.

Part of the reason Tourmaline, formed in August 2008, has been able to leapfrog other top gas producers such as Encana Corp. and Shell Canada Ltd. in recent years is it has drilled some of the most efficient, gushing gas wells in Western Canada.

“What we’ve done over the last five years is figure out how to drill the least expensive gas wells,” said Rose, who is also Tourmaline’s third-largest shareholder with 16.7 million shares, according to Bloomberg. He acquired 4.4 million shares in his company in the fourth quarter of 2018.

He said natural gas prices in Western Canada have been depressed and part of the reason his company has overtaken its competitors is that they have either sold off gas assets or shifted their business to  oil and liquids drilling.

“We’re ready for prices to go up anytime,” he said, noting that his company has also been shifting capital towards more oil and liquids growth in response to low gas prices.

Tourmaline announced Wednesday it produced 1.35 billion cubic feet of gas per day at the end of 2018 but Rose said the company’s current production is between 1.4 and 1.45 bcfd.

By the end of the year, he expects the company to produce 1.65 bcfd.

Canadian Natural, which became the largest gas producer in Canada when it acquired Devon Energy Corp.’s Canadian gas assets for $3.1 billion in 2014, produced 1.44 bcfd from its Canadian operations. Adding in gas production from overseas operations, CNRL produced 1.49 bcfd of gas in the fourth quarter of 2018, the company announced Thursday.

Despite its rapid growth, Tourmaline does not have the name recognition that the country’s other, longer-standing top gas producers enjoy with investors, Canoe Financial director and senior portfolio manager Raffi Tahmazian said, though he noted that could soon change.

Canoe Financial has been a shareholder of Tourmaline in the past but its funds are not currently invested in any natural gas weighted stocks.

Part of the company’s appeal, Tahmazian said, is it has been able to leapfrog its competitor’s gas production numbers with a relatively small team. “They grow fast in production, but not necessarily in minions,” Tahmazian said.

Tourmaline Oil CEO Mike Rose.

Corporate disclosures show Tourmaline employs only 238 full-time people between its Calgary headoffice and field locations as well as 232 contractors and consultants.

“We deem the management team to be in the top decile, if not the best in the oilpatch today,” Tahmazian said, adding management has a “cult-like following” within the company and among some investors because of Rose’s track record at previous companies.

Rose and chief financial officer Brian Robinson — along with much of Tourmaline’s senior management team — previously built up Duvernay Oil Corp. before selling the company to Shell for $5.6 billion in 2008.

Rose and Robinson also led Berkley Petroleum Corp. until its $1.68-billion sale to Texas-based Anadarko Petroleum Corp. in 2001.

“Mike is one of the country’s top finders of hydrocarbons,” GMP FirstEnergy analyst Bob Fitzmartyn said of Tourmaline’s top executive, referencing the growth of each of his companies.

The same thing has been said about Rose’s late father-in-law, Clay Riddell, a fellow geologist who built up Paramount Resources Ltd. by finding and proving resources across the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin. Rose’s wife Susan Riddell Rose is president and CEO of Perpetual Energy Inc.

In Tourmaline’s case, Fitzmartyn said some of the company’s growth can also be attributed to other majors in Calgary selling off assets from 2010 onwards.

“There was a large shale conversion,” he said, noting that Encana, Talisman Energy Inc. (that was later bought by Repsol S.A.), Suncor Energy Inc. and Shell all sold assets to a variety of intermediate producers in that timeframe.

Rose said the company’s main interest is in drilling its own wells for future growth rather than acquisitions and said the last sizeable deal Tourmaline struck was with Shell in 2016, when it bought Alberta and B.C. gas assets for $1.3 billion.

Going forward, he said, the company would continue to focus “on our own inventories.”

• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: geoffreymorgan

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HIGHTIMES HOLDING CORP. (HITM) IPO

High Times Investor Become a Shareholder in High Times – The Original Voice of Cannabis. Join our investor community and help shape the emerging cannabis industry You can now own a piece of High Times. Go to https://bit.ly/2RvmZTM to invest. View Offering Circular- http://bit.ly/HTOfferingCircular What You Need to Know About High Times’ Public Stock Offering While capital continues to flow into cannabis companies, iconic ’70s stoner company High Times has stepped up with a Reg A+ public stock offering to raise money under the 2012 US Jobs Act. The deal faces a healthy dose of risk since High Times remains deeply in debt as it seeks to grow its events business and reverse a decline in its magazine and other publishing units. HIGHTIMES HOLDING CORP. (HITM) IPO HIGHTIMES HOLDING CORP. (HITM) IPO – NASDAQ.com EDGAR Filing Documents for 0001213900-18-012374 No Description Company Description Hightimes Holding Corp. was established in December 2016 for purposes of acquiring 100% of the capital stock of Trans-High and the THC Group. Founded in 1974, the THC Group has historically engaged in the publication of a monthly print and on-line magazine and the production and sponsorship of trade shows and events. Our strategic goal is to monetize the intellectual property and “High Times®” brand. The High Times Group also contemplates various other e-commerce initiatives and licensing of the “High Times®” brand, including the development of an e-commerce store offering clothing and other products associated with cannabis. The High Times Group does not cultivate, dispense or sell cannabis or any derivatives of the cannabis plant, such as oils or edible products, although cannabis and products utilizing or relating to cannabis have been used and sold at the trade shows and festival events operated by the THC Group since 2010 in states that permit the medical and recreational use of cannabis. The High Times Group comprises businesses across a range of media, including: . High Times Magazine: High Times Magazine© is the High Times Group’s inaugural print publication that began in 1974 doing business as “HIGH TIMES®”, has published more than 500 issues; online publication of the High Times Magazine© began in 2008; . The Cannabis Cup: The High Times Cannabis Cup™ which the High Times Group believes is the world’s leading marijuana trade show that celebrates the world of cannabis through competitions, instructional seminars, expositions, celebrity appearances, concerts and product showcases; . Digital Publishing: HighTimes.com, CannabisCup.com and 420.com are High Times Group’s domain names. HighTimes.com has more than 4.0 million monthly unique users. CannabisCup.com is the hub of the live events hosted by High Times Group and 420.com is a new entity which will sell related products that are used in connection with cannabis; . Green Rush Daily: As of August 31, 2017, Trans-High, entered into an online sales representative agreement with Green Rush Daily Inc. (“Green Rush”), a daily on-line publication providing news and information relating to cannabis, including guides and strain reviews, products and health news. Under the terms of the agreement, Green Rush appointed Trans-High as Green Rush’s exclusive sales representative with respect to: (a) all advertisements to be sold or otherwise offered to third-party advertisers on the Green Rush websites, and (b) all advertisements for display to retail and wholesale channels on the websites. In a related development, Trans-High entered into a three-year employment agreement with Scott McGovern, the owner of Green Rush, under which Mr. McGovern became Senior Vice President of Publishing of the Trans-High Group. As partial consideration for obtaining the online sales representative agreement, in August 2017 the Company issued Scott McGovern an aggregate of 577,651 shares of Class A Common Stock. On March 28, 2018, the parties terminated the online sales representative agreement and pursuant to an asset purchase agreement, dated March 28, 2018, Trans-High acquired certain of Green Rush’s assets that consisted solely of its websites, intellectual property, advertiser agreements and future revenues from such agreements. No employees or liabilities of Green Rush were acquired or assumed by Trans-High. As consideration for the purchased assets, Green Rush received 577,651 shares of Class A Common Stock and Hightimes Holding agreed to pay Green Rush an additional $500,000 in cash on or before September 30, 2018. Under the terms of the asset purchase agreement, if by September 30, 2018 either (a) Green Rush does not receive the $500,000 cash payment, (b) the Company does not consummate the Origo Merger, or (c) Hightimes Holding Class A Common Stock does not trade on Nasdaq, the NYSE American or is not quoted for trading on the OTC Market or trade on the Canadian Securities Exchange, Green Rush shall have the right to rescind the asset sale agreement and repurchase the assets in consideration for returning to the Company the 577,651 shares of Class A Common Stock. In a related development, the parties rescinded the prior employment agreement and the 577,651 share issuance to Scott McGovern in August 2017 and on March 28, 2018 amended and restated the employment agreement with Mr. McGovern. The amended and restated employment agreement covers Mr. McGovern’s employment for a period of three years. Under the terms of the restated employment agreement, Mr. McGovern continues to receive an annual salary of $250,000 and annual bonuses to be based upon certain performance targets to be achieved by the Green Rush Daily division of Trans-High. The agreement may be terminated by either party at any time upon 60 days prior written notice, or sooner if termination is either by Trans-High “for cause” or by the employee for “good reason” (as those terms are defined). Mr. McGovern was also granted stock options to purchase 289,630 shares of Class B non-voting Common Stock as approved by the Board on December 18, 2017 at an exercise price of $5.54, as per the Company valuation policy following the closing price of the Origo shares on the date of grant, and vesting in thirds on each of December 31, 2018, 2019 and 2020; provided, that if Mr. McGovern’s employment is terminated by the Company within the first 18 months (on or before June 30, 2019) 50% of the option shares will be deemed vested and if such termination is after June 30, 2019, all of the option shares will be deemed vested. . Culture Magazine. On June 9, 2018, Culture Pub, Inc., a newly formed Delaware subsidiary of Hightimes Holding entered into an agreement to purchase from Southland Publishing, Inc. certain assets relating to Culture Magazine™, a print and online magazine founded in 2009 with that provides information and entertainment to medical-cannabis patients in the California, Colorado, the Northwest, and Michigan (the “Publication”). Under the terms of the asset purchase agreement, Culture Pub agreed to acquire only the intellectual property, advertiser agreement and print inventory relating to the Publication and assumed an agreement with the printer of the magazine. No cash, accounts payable or other assets will be acquired from Southland and no liabilities will be assumed by Culture Pub, other than leasehold obligation of Southland related to the Publication and obligations following the closing, including obligations to employees of and independent contractors to the Publication that Culture Pub elects to hire or engage. In consideration for the acquired assets, at closing Southland will receive consideration valued at $4,000,000 through the issuance of 370,370 shares of Hightimes Holding Class A Common Stock, or such other number of shares of Class A Common Stock which, when multiplied by the lower of the $11.00 initial per share offering price of Our Class A Common Stock in this Offering or the per share value of the shares of the Successor corporation issued to Hightimes stockholders in the Origo Merger, shall equal $4,000,000. Consummation of the sale is subject to recent of the consent of ExWorks Capital Fund I, L.P., our senior secured lender, and consummation of a “Hightimes Liquidity Event”; defined as the listing of either our Class A Common Stock or the common stock of the Successor corporation in the Origo Merger on any one of the New York Stock Exchange, the NYSE American, Nasdaq, the OTC Market or, the Canadian Securities Exchange. The High Times Group believes that it has become the highest regarded news source for the cannabis industry. Due to its unique positioning in the cannabis space, the High Times Group believes that considerable monetization opportunities present themselves in brand licensing and ecommerce. High Times Group intends to leverage its brand and platform to showcase promotions of quality products associated with cannabis to the over 30 million Americans who are enthusiasts for medical and recreational cannabis, as well as to companies who wish to grow and sell cannabis in states where the growing and dispensing of medical and/or recreational cannabis is permitted. High Times Group has expanded our Cannabis Cup™ events into Canada where the use of cannabis for both medical and recreational purposes is expressly permitted. The High Times Group’s revenue base consists of the sale of tickets for admittance to the Cannabis Cup events, entrance fees to the Cannabis Cup competitive events, recurring print and on-line subscriptions to, and advertising sales in, the High Times Magazine®, and direct merchandising sales, sponsorship sales and licensing fees. The High Times Group manages its licensing businesses through co-sponsorship and strategic partnership arrangements. — Hightimes Holding Corp. 10990 Wilshire Boulevard Penthouse Los Angeles, California 90024-3898 Telephone number: (844) 933-3287 Our website: http://www.hightimes.com. http://dlvr.it/Qpqr6H

Organic hotspots benefit local economies

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New research published in the journal Renewable Agriculture and Food Systems has found that organic hot spots – counties with high levels of organic agricultural activity whose neighboring counties also have high organic activity–positively impact local economies. Using spatial statistics, researchers identified counties that were organic agriculture hotspots vs conventional agriculture hotspots – counties with high levels of agricultural activity whose neighboring counties also have high agricultural activity. They then analyzed spatial data in combination with economic data to determine if there were economic benefits associated with organic hotspots.  They found that compared to conventional agricultural hotspots, organic hotspots were associated with lower county-level poverty rates and higher median household income. “Our results may incentivize policymakers to specifically focus on organic development, rather than the more general development of agriculture, as a means to promote economic growth in rural areas, and may further point them in the direction of not only encouraging the presence of organic operations, but of fostering the development of clusters or hotspots of these operations,” the authors concluded.

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Strict adherence to the word limit is essential with a 10% margin

  Individual Case Study 1 Description Mark out of Wtg% Due date Notes Individual Case Study 1 (2000 words) Strict adherence to the word limit is essential with a 10% margin either way – only. 100 45 Thursday 7th September 2017 See below You should write the case study in such a way that you start your answers from line 1. That is, there is no need to large introductions that we see in essays. You should apply the principles you have learned from the lecture material/tutorials/readings that are specific to the case study. Case Study 1 answers should be written in narrative form (i.e. sentences must be used, avoid bullet points), and should be 2000 words, give or minus a 10% margin only and single spaced. Each case study should be referenced by including a list of references at the end of the case. More marks are gained by the quality of research applied in practice and the overall quality of the answer. Please Note: Overall word count does not include Tables and Figures which you are free to use if required. You should include in your case study: 1. A template for Case Study 1 has been provided on the study desk. It includes: cover sheet with your Name, Student Number, Course Name, Lecturer, Semester and Date of Submission and the Marking Criteria Sheet; 2. Your assignment should be submitted using the Study Desk via the Turnitin link – which has been provided (with the Template attached); 3. Please quote the relevant texts and readings to support your answers. Answers in the narrative section of your case answers unsupported by readings will be regarded as guesswork and generalisations and will not pass the case assessment; 4. If you feel you need to attach some other interesting report or facts not required in the main body of your case answer, please add this as an appendix. Then in your text close to where you discuss this, you should add in brackets (Refer Appendix 1) – for example. Please see the Style Guide at the end of this assessment file for how to use references in your case studies. Task/Questions for the case can be found at the conclusion of the case study.

Individual Case Study 1 Problem Statement: You need to consider how you will identify the range of issues and problems in the following problem statement: Wong Manufacturing Company (WMC) © Please Note: this problem statement is fictional. Any resemblance to actual names and places is purely coincidental. The case problem is for the advanced study of MBA and Masters Students studying Leading Organisational Change. WMC is a 55 year old company founded by Sofea Wong (with financial assistance and business guidance from her parents) in the early 1960s in Malaysia. The principle business is in manufacturing and selling wholesale cotton and wool fabric to local retailers and buyers, including designers in Malaysia. Before setting up her manufacturing business, Sofea had travelled the world and spent about 10 years in Australia studying and working in the Australian textile industry in Sydney and rural New South Wales. It is from this experience that Sofea developed relationships with cotton and wool growers and saw an opportunity to source high quality cotton and wool raw materials from Australia and use these to create a high quality fabric manufacturing business in Malaysia. Despite taking advantage of Malaysia’s lower cost wages, Sofea had always paid her staff above the local wage regulations which quickly earned her respect from her employees. She also gained respect and admiration from local retailers and designers. Sofea had established a highly successful local company based on strong family values that had always been well respected. Sofea’s employees always enjoyed working for her and she had created and implemented many employment reward systems that were ahead of her time. She implemented sick leave, holiday pay, rostered days off and child minding facilities as her workers were from poorer working families. Tradition and tales about the company were perpetuated over the years to the extent that Sofea became a larger-than-life personality and everyone knew about her early years and beginnings of the company. Everyone knew how she worked hard and how she treated all staff like family members. There were many media articles and events that favoured Sofea and her successful business. The WMC factory in Kuala Lumpur had grown to a workforce of over 1000 workers throughout the 1970s. However, by the mid 2000s staff numbers had been substantially reduced to about 600 employees. It was at this time that Sofea was suffering ill-health and was forced to hand over her business to her daughter Hana. Hana had grown up in this business and knew all aspects of manufacturing. Both Sofea and Hana made business decisions together and they employed the same business practices. Like her mother, Hana had the respect of all employees, suppliers, retailers and designers. During this time, the common business characteristics were high quality manufactured fabrics using unique fabric processing in manufacturing of high quality wool and cotton from rural New South Wales Australia. All of WMC’s sales were to local industry retailers and local designers with consistent employee and customer loyalty and with relatively slow but consistent growth. Since, the mid 2000s WMC has been challenged by increasing low-cost – high polluting suppliers from other countries exporting poor quality and low cost fabrics and garments in high volumes into Malaysia. All of this has had an impact on the perception of quality, manufacturing, excessive pollution and reduced safety and employee standards – both in Malaysia and from importing countries. The high pollution and environmental impacts of all manufacturing was being discussed at industry level and in the media. To assist Hana operate the business she employed her two children: her daughter Mira and son Ryan. Both siblings had been educated in Malaysia and at Sofea’s insistence – they completed Masters of Business Administration degrees in Australia. In addition to their formal education, Ryan had also completed a post graduate degree in fashion design in Sydney. In more recent times, Mira had been more vocal for change at WMC and Ryan had supported a move to increase the value-added component of design, customer reach and product depth from essentially large-batch production of cloth to making designer clothing for larger international markets. This meant forward integration by not only manufacturing the textile cloth, but also moving to a new manufacturing stage of making and supplying retail firms with designer garments. To accommodate this change in manufacture, the siblings decided that a more environmentally efficient production that will reduce energy and water consumption, reduce waste, and implement recycling of products was the key to improving efficiencies at WMC. Mira and Ryan were very keen to be socially and environmentally responsible and increase awareness through their actions. Mira had introduced to the Board Members the idea of exporting to China, Japan and Indonesia the large-batch production output while simultaneously supplying designer and retail outlets across the world. In this discussion, they portrayed their idea of a new and revised manufacturing plant with improved technology that would reduce their environmental ‘footprint’ and promote environmentally sustainable outcomes at WMC. This conflicted somewhat with the view that cheap imports would hold sway and that customers wanted low-cost products from China and Bangladesh with the Board often pointing to low-cost retailers such as Cotton-On in Australia and JC Penny in the United States of America (USA). Mira and Ryan were persistent in pointing out the opportunities for WMC to sell directly to customers via the web and to implement business to Business (B2B) relationships with quality seeking buyers and the opportunity to provide products that considered the environment in its production. Ryan had also highlighted the increasing need for more visibility at Malaysian Fashion Week attracting up to 50,000 clients. Increasingly, Mira had identified problems with manufacturing safety and control issues and pollution in countries like Bangladesh with major brands such as Benetton in Italy, H&M from Sweden, Nike, JC Penny and Walmart in the USA, David Jones and Myer in Australia seeking alternative suppliers. According to Mira, WMC could take advantage of their name by building new relationships with retailers and designers since many were looking for long-term relationships of quality suppliers and the reliability that comes with large volume fabric and garment production. Mira and Ryan were also wanting to influence their suppliers to assist them to consider their environmental impact as well. Basically, Mira and Ryan were trying to drive growth and increase spending (in the short term) to implement environmentally sound production practices and this has led to disagreement with Board members. At stake was WMC’s traditional approach to manufacturing positioned around large-batch production in cotton and wool textiles and fabrics to making designer and retail garments – without consideration of the natural environment! This promoted many Board members to comment privately that Mira and Ryan were trying to be “too smart too soon” arguing the company would not cope. Similarly, product and manufacturing change needed to be supported by dramatic staff decreases and management restructuring to stream-line cost and efficiency, manage two-way product stretches between the old and new production, improve their environmental impact while tackling competition from other suppliers. While Hana and Sofea were immensely proud of their children and grandchildren, in a short period of time they had created mayhem in the management ranks prompting local analysts to downgrade the value of company stock and medium to long-term outlook. © Jane Boeske USQ School of Management and Enterprise Task Required: Based on less than perfect information supplied about the WMC problem statement, you are required to act as an external change consultant to assist WMC address the issues and challenges: 1. Develop at least five (5) realistic assumptions that you can add to the issues and problems expressed. These might typically be related to management, change processes, managerial information systems, technology, competitors, Customer’s and so on. Use at least two (2) sentences to describe each assumption (200 words). 2. Referring to Hayes (2014) Chapter 3 and Stoughton & Ludema (2012) discuss how WMC anticipated the need for change. Which typology of change (using Figure 3.4 Types of Organisational Change p56) might best describe the approach that WMC should adopt? (600 words). 3. With reference to the indicators of effectiveness (Hayes 2014 Chapter 4), explain how WMC has or has not been effective and discuss how this can be improved. (600 words) 4. In reference to Hayes (2014) Chapter 10 and Malhortra & Hinings (2015) Reading 9 discuss the importance of enlisting support from key stakeholders. What advice would you give to WMC at this time? (600 words) Please note: use a minimum of 10 references (including the one’s listed above) to support your answers.

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MOST ADVANCED Russian Military TERMINATOR TANK to boost Russian Military Power

MOST ADVANCED Russian Military TERMINATOR TANK to boost Russian Military Power

A great video of the Russian Military Terminator Tank to boost Russian Military power. If you’re able, and if you like our content and approach, please support the project. Our work wouldn’t be possible without your help: PayPal: [email protected] or via: http://southfront.org/donate/ or via: https://www.patreon.com/southfront

The BMPT “Terminator” is a post-Cold war armored fighting vehicle…

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Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles An Episodic Audio Journal, Episode Two: 40 Species of Noise

The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles An Episodic Audio Journal

Episode Two: 40 Species of Noise

 I love open world games and I find myself observing the environments in detail as I travel around exploring. But I often find myself thinking about how they compare to the real world. I spent three years living in Japan, 12 months in Tokyo and 2 years in Aomori Prefecture, one of the main things I noticed in Japan was how the environments changed both due to seasonal changes and location.

Spring and Summer time are vibrant seasons in Japan; birds are very active, but the really noticeable aspect of these months from a sound point of view is the insects. Millions of cicadas during the day and crickets during the night saturate the Japanese landscape with their song. What many travellers to Japan do not realize is that the various species have very specific song types as well as very specific locations in which they live. This means if you travel from southern Japan up to Tokyo, and then north to Tohoku you will be able to hear different insect sounds. And the insect sounds will also change from season to season. Once I realized this I was able to watch a Japanese movie and if there were insect sounds I could identify where it was filmed and what time of year it was.

We often ask our audience to spend hours inside our game worlds and we design complex terrain with various biome types. And yet sometimes we craft the audio for these environments with much less detail than the visuals. I wanted to not only add more life to the world of Gemea, but to create a living world that would highlight the changes of day and night, summer and winter, sunshine and storm.

Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles has the sound of over 40 species of birds, insects and frogs. Did I go overboard with this? Perhaps, but the result is a world that has a dynamic ecology that reflects various states of change. But each choice and its implementation is also designed to support the overall narrative of exploring the land of Gemea.

Palette To start with I wanted to select as broad a range of content as possible. I have a massive SFX collection as well as my own personal recordings. I have also recently been working on restoring some older recordings and making them suitable for game implementation purposes. Working through sound recordings is like selecting which instruments you want to compose for. Each sound has character and texture and a quality that suits certain emotional states. Selecting the most suitable Cicada sound is no less important than choosing which wind instrument to write a solo for.

I had created a first pass of the dynamic environment system months ago, it worked and it sounded effective in the game from a technical standpoint. This was a series of basic bird and insect sounds that functioned appropriately for the game world. I will go into the details of the system in a minute, but the selection of source content is critical, so I want to focus on that for a second. By putting in placeholder sounds it meant the system could be tested. As the world grew and the artwork became more finalized I was able to spend many hours in the world. Most of this time was spent implementing other sounds or performing constant ongoing mix balancing, but sometimes I would just play and explore and I would listen and I would “feel”

When it came to selecting the second pass content I knew the biomes very well and I knew what I wanted. I would go through my raw SFX material, often not looking at the names and I would listen with an open mind, I would allow the sound to take me wherever it would. Some sounds were lush and full of life, others seemed sparse, and some would invoke a feeling of hot, dry, arid landscapes. In most instances this is because the sounds were from a creature that lived in the appropriate environment in the real world, but instead of working with names and descriptions I worked with feelings and I think this allowed for some nice choices of content.

We have been using the State System in Wwise to control various aspects of the sound and music. We already had a day and night state, but I wanted to expand on this. So we added dawn and dusk states to create transition points between the main day and night states. This is used for both music and SFX, but for the species of birds and insects I crafted each one individually to align with how they made me feel. Certain bird sounds just didn’t sound to me like I would hear then immediately at dawn. They had more of a feeling of circling overhead at noon. So these sounds only triggered once full day state was active. Some insects I implemented to trigger right at dusk and others not until full night had fallen.

So in this example the insect sounds will be active at dusk and during the night, but fade when dawn arrives. And this particular species is only active during the Spring and Summer months.

The dynamic structure for the birds used individual bird calls triggered at various rates depending on exactly which species I was working on. Smaller birds tend to twitter more often than larger birds. This system also allowed me to alter the trigger rate dynamically. So at dawn and dusk I could create the “massed chorus” effect of many birds all singing more often. Over the course of the day the trigger rate would drop off so that at noon when the day was hottest the birds were barely present.

From a Seasonal point of view I set many birds to be most active in Spring time when many creatures are mating, then slightly less active in summer and in some biomes completely replaced with noisy summer insects. In some regions the same bird species is active through spring, summer and autumn and then they fall quiet during the cold winter. In other biomes a specific bird may only be active in spring, and then through other months different birds or insects become more vocal.

The Grasslands_Birds consists of four species and in this example the BellsVireo has been expanded to show it has 16 sound files that make up the full pool for that species. Each bird has a varied number of sound files depending on the type of bird and what sound files I had available for that species.

The advantage of the Wwise state system is that I could easily assign and tune each species object to be unique but also so they would blend and dovetail nicely. The other useful implementation technique was to add all my biome specific sound objects into a single event. The main game objects I used for implementation into Unity were the biome specific trees. Each biome had its own tree species. As birds and insects generally gather in trees this was logical from a narrative point of view and provided objects spread throughout the game world as emitters. This also meant I had to sync only one event to a tree Prefab and it would be instanced across the whole world. (This was important because the player can collect plant seeds and place them anywhere else in the world.

Initially I had both a bird event and an insect event attached to each tree Prefab. Then I realized I could simplify this. A Wwise event can contain multiple sound objects. So I could place each of the different bird and insect species that I wanted to inhabit a biome into a single event and attach that to a tree prefab. The State system meant that even though there might have been 4-6 sound objects in the one event, each would only play at the specific day/night and seasonal state defined for it. Each of these objects could have unique effect and attenuation behaviour. So again the drop-off range of species could all be tuned to present unique behaviour within the world.

A single Event can contain all the sound objects I need to produce the spatialized environment sound for a biome. Each of the objects in this event will only trigger when their appropriate states are met. So even though there are 6 sound objects here only one usually plays at any one time. This makes implementing into the game much simpler once the system is defined.

As you walk through the world there is a true spatial environment around you. Trees may include 2 or 3 different species of birds within it and each species had a range of bird calls, so the entire system generates a spatial dynamic environment. If you chop down a harvestable tree it stops emitting its related sounds. If you deforest an entire biome its environmental audio will reflect this.

Each biome also has birds in flight. These are very basic animated shapes. But they also have sounds attached to them so they sporadically emit a bird call as they fly past. This final element really helped to sell the feeling of a dynamic alive world.

The weather system for each biome is also unique. So while there is a general wind sound through all biomes, the forest also has a wind-through-leaves sound that is attached to the tress and emits from that location. Rain in forest areas is the sound of rain on leaves, while in the grassland is it a lighter rain on ground sound. Alpine and desert areas have very different wind sounds to other environment types. All of these choices were made with the same “how does it make me feel” approach to help support the overall narrative.

Making the audience feel cold in the winter months and in snow biomes and hot and dry and in the desert can be achieved more successfully when the audio fully supports the visual effects. In fact often the audio can be more evocative to trigger emotional feelings in the audience than visual changes. Keep in mind that apart from the basic flying bird shapes, none of these birds or insects exist in the game as objects, they only exist as sounds. So the world is vastly populated with a great and diverse selection of lifeforms that exist only because of the audio. In this regard I got to decide and create much of the eco system of the world of Gamea and this helped create a lush environment without having to create dozens of models and lots of complex code.

All of the techniques that I applied to creating the environmental audio for Yonder: The Cloud Catcher Chronicles were taken from my experience doing research for VR/AR/MR implementation. For the New Realities we are striving for more detailed and precise surround spatial environments; we want to immerse the audience into these worlds and make their experience more engaging. But I realized that many of these techniques were just as valid for a "traditional screen" format game world. So movement of the camera produces a similar “world rotating” effect in the audio that head tracking does in VR. This is because all the weather sounds such as wind and rain are set at four compass points and all of the environmental birds and insects are localized throughout the world inside the trees. So Gemea is a dynamic virtual environment in many ways and the player’s experience should be far more engaging and enjoyable because of it.

‘Extensive lobbying’ underway to ease restrictions around hemp-derived CBD in Canada

Canadian hemp and cannabis producers are pushing for changes to the rules governing the use of hemp-derived cannabidiol, a non-psychoactive compound found in both plants that has multi-billion-dollar potential as an ingredient in a host of wellness products.

“There’s some pretty extensive lobbying going on right now — by licensed cannabis producers, and by the hemp guys. We all want to sell hemp-derived CBD extracts by the fourth quarter of this year,” said the CEO of one licensed producer, who declined to be named because his company intends to, but has not yet announced its formal entry into the hemp industry.

The push comes ahead of the federal government’s October target date for the legalization of cannabis edibles and concentrates, and has taken on added urgency since December, when a bill passed in the United States effectively legalized hemp on a federal level and declassified CBD as a controlled substance.

“The passing of the Farm Bill made things attractive down south. I wouldn’t say we’re behind in Canada, but it’s strange that we’re not ahead of them with hemp, despite having legalized cannabis,” said Ivan Ross-Vrana, National Director at Hill & Knowlton Strategies’ cannabis practice, and one of the country’s top cannabis lobbyists.

In Canada, as it stands, CBD and its psychoactive cousin, the more potent tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), are regulated in the identical way: Both are legal under the Cannabis Act for medical and recreational use.

That means CBD derived from the hemp plant — widely seen as a cheaper source of the compound — also falls under the jurisdiction of Health Canada and the Cannabis Act, which effectively means that it can only be extracted by a licensed cannabis producer, and only available in flower or non-concentrated oil to be sold by licensed private or provincial retailers.

CBD oil being dropped in water in a lab in Switzerland.

“For hemp farmers, I know a big question to them is, ‘Why do we have to go through the Cannabis Act for extracting CBD from hemp, why can’t we have a separate hemp processing stream?’” Ross-Vrana said.

“Well, then you’ll have Health Canada saying we have to make sure the processing of CBD is consistent across the board. And that’s a fair argument, but to hemp producers, they’re going to then ask, ‘Well, how long will it now take us to get a cannabis license?’” he explained.

It’s yet another hurdle for hemp producers, who for decades have had to wrestle with the stigma of growing a plant tainted by its association with cannabis, even though hemp has only trace amounts of THC.

Prior to last October, hemp could only be used for industrial purposes — parts of the plant that contain a high concentration of CBD were simply discarded. When cannabis became legal for recreational use, hemp producers were allowed to sell their flower and leaves to licensed cannabis producers who would then carry out the actual CBD extraction.

What industry proponents want most, is for the federal government to not only allow hemp-derived CBD to be used in various quantities in everything from food to beauty products, but for the component to be regulated outside the Cannabis Act altogether.

“CBD is not addictive, it is not habituating and does not get you high. So why is the federal government regulating it like it’s a psychoactive drug?” asked Ted Haney, Executive Director of the Canadian Hemp Trade Alliance, an industry group representing hemp producers.

Haney says his coalition’s most important demands are three-fold: “We are asking for less than 25 milligrams of hemp-derived CBD to be classified as a food ingredient, and at less than 200 mg, we are lobbying for it to be included in natural health supplements and cosmetics. Above that level, sure, it can be restricted to the pharmaceutical sector, and sold in an age-restricted environment,” Haney explained.

The first rendering from hemp plants on its way to becoming fully refined CBD oil in Oregon.

That lobbying will also potentially involve amendments to the Food and Drugs Act that would allow for CBD-containing products used for health benefits to be categorized as Natural Health Products, hence falling outside the jurisdiction of the Cannabis Act.

The hemp industry seems to have an ally in its lobbying demands — the federal government’s lobbying registry shows that as recently as November, the Canadian Health Food Association was lobbying a number of ministries, including Health Canada and the Department of Agriculture to alter the categorization of CBD-infused products.

“We believe that the extraction of cannabinoids from hemp should be expanded to include hemp cultivators and even those involved in the natural health and essential oils businesses. Not just cannabis producers,” said Haney. “We’re not asking for that immediately, but that’s something that yes, our industry eventually wants.”

South of the border, the passage of the Farm Bill has given hemp producers — also gunning to snag a slice of the CBD pie — an edge.

Depending on state regulations, American hemp producers can now participate in the CBD extraction process to create CBD-infused products, instead of just selling raw material to cannabis companies. The range of CBD products allowed in many states, including California, Colorado, Nevada and Oregon, is also much more extensive than what is allowed in Canada.

An optimistic analysis by consulting firm Brightfield Group estimates that the hemp-CBD market alone could hit $22 billion by 2022. More conservative estimates, such as one put out by research company New Frontier Data, says the U.S. hemp-CBD market could grow to $1.3 billion by 2022.

Canada’s largest licensed cannabis producer, Canopy Growth Corp. moved quickly in the United States following passage of the Farm Bill — within a month it had announced that it had received a hemp license in New York which would be used to build a hemp cultivation and processing facility in the state, and that it was committing up to US$150 million to the venture.

Khurram Malik, CEO of Biome Grow, a licensed producer with facilities mostly in Eastern Canada, believes the passing of the U.S. Farm Bill will open the door for similar changes in Canada.

“I think the way they’ll see it is, if you can now bring in hemp-derived CBD extracts from the U.S. and sell it here, we better get domestic production up and running because Canadian cannabis producers will start rushing to the U.S. to buy it there.”

For Haney, however, competing with the U.S. hemp market is not the most important factor right now. He argues hemp producers and the government are actually on the same side.

“The greatest rationale for the legalization of cannabis was to remove organized crime. Now you have all these restrictions on CBD and you’re seeing the illegal CBD market just thrive. None of that makes any sense to us. For us, we say to the government, come on, it’s time to let hemp producers move on.”

• Email: [email protected] | Twitter: VanmalaS

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Trump trade war looms over picturesque Canadian aluminum town built by Americans

If ever a town embodied U.S.-Canadian symbiosis, it’s Arvida, Quebec.

Built by Americans, its giant smelter supplied most of the Allied forces’ aluminum in the Second World War and today makes metal used in Budweiser beer cans, Tesla and Ford cars and in AR15 rifles, part of the 2.5 million metric tons that Canada sends over the border each year.

But now this corner of French-speaking Canada is in America’s cross hairs after the Trump administration’s shock move to tax metal from its closest ally under the pretext of national security.

“When you want to kill your dog, you will say he has rabies,” Mayor Josee Neron said in an interview. “To see one person destroy all that in just a blink of an eye, I think it’s too bad.”

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From above, the area looks like a model train set: impossibly picturesque with enough infrastructure to set a young engineer’s heart soaring. Locomotives wend through Sphagnum moss-like trees, and hydroelectric plants straddle navy-blue rivers. There are port facilities at the mouth of the fjord, towers garlanded by hundreds of miles of transmission lines, five smelters and a refinery, all owned by the area’s largest private employer and top aluminum shipper to the U.S., Rio Tinto Group. The Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean region is part of a cross-border ecosystem that supplies almost half of the aluminum used in the U.S., including the metal found in three out of four American cars.

Arvida is the epicentre. Built in 1926 by Alcoa President Arthur Vining Davis, the town is an acronym of the American industrialist’s name. One of the earliest examples of a company town, Arvida has been absorbed into the city of Saguenay, but its main street remains vibrant and the original architecture largely intact.

Vehicles sit parked on Davis Street in the town of Arvida in Saguenay, Quebec.

The Arvida smelter still produces some of the highest-quality aluminum in the world for the U.S. auto sector from its original red-brick building. But the adjacent, high-tech AP60 smelter is seen as the real future for production here, especially if Rio pulls the trigger on an expansion there and on a fifth smelter, Alma, in nearby Lac-Saint-Jean.

Rio has yet to give a timeline for those projects, in part because it believes the market is oversupplied. While Alf Barrios, Rio’s head of aluminum, believes U.S. manufacturers ultimately have no choice but to buy from Canada, he’s concerned that tariffs will hurt Rio customers. The key question is how much those customers can pass on higher prices. Even if a trade war mainly ends up hurting consumers, the consequences for economic growth could feed back up to Rio.

“At the moment, we haven’t stopped any investments in our business because of what’s going on,” Barrios said in an interview. “However, if this were to have a negative impact on the growth of the North American market, then one would have to consider that in the decision.”

The region is no stranger to ups and downs. In 1928, Alcoa spun off its Canadian subsidiary, only to watch it smack headlong into the Depression. Reborn during the Second World War, Alcan, as it became known, flourished. Arvida was the largest smelter in the world at that time, employing 12,000 people. In the decades that followed, the company’s fortunes ebbed and flowed with global markets, even as trade ties between Canada and the U.S. deepened.

Vehicles sit parked on Davis Street in the town of Arvida in Saguenay, Quebec.

In 2007, Alcoa triggered a nationalist uproar in Canada when it attempted to reacquire Alcan. Coming on the heels of two other massive takeovers, the hostile bid was seen as part of the hollowing out of Canada’s mineral sector. In the end, it was London-based Rio that took control, in a US$38 billion top-of-the-market deal. Today, about 2,500 people work at Arvida, many of them third- and fourth-generation. Rio is the area’s largest employer, with about 5,000 people in an operation that supports more than 100 regional businesses.

Employees and residents are fiercely patriotic about aluminum. “Yes, the owner is foreign, but it’s a Canadian asset,” said Jean-Francois Nadeau, general manager of the Complex Jonquiere, which houses Arvida and AP60.

The industry’s influence is everywhere. From 1926 to 1960, only Alcan employees were eligible to serve as city counselors in Arvida, said Bruno Fradette, an amateur historian and third-generation employee. In a tour of the town, he pointed out examples of its American heritage. Buildings and roads are named after American founders, and the main street is lined with posters celebrating its aluminum history.

A cyclist and a pedestrian pass historic photographs of an aluminum factory on Davis Street in the town of Arvida in Saguenay, Quebec.

When Rio took over, local sentiment swung from pride in ownership to pride over the asset’s environmental sustainability, Mayor Neron said. Aluminum has long provided high-quality jobs in Saguenay, but initiatives–including a recent push with Apple Inc. to make the metal without greenhouse gases–have the potential to further increase quality. Residents already refer to the region’s product as “green aluminum,” she said, because processing is powered by Quebec’s abundant hydroelectricity.

Hydropower is the reason U.S. industrialists first began making aluminum in this part of Quebec. But that geographical advantage was swiftly reinforced by the integration of Canadian and U.S. defense. The Bagotville military base — to which Air Force One delivered Trump for the recent G7 meeting — was built in 1942, partly to protect the Arvida complex. “Aluminum Gives Wings To Victory,” reads an advertisement from the period.

Equipment sits in the West-electrolysis centre at the Arvida aluminum smelter in Saguenay, Quebec. The picturesque corner of French-speaking Canada where the smelter is located epitomizes the potential fallout of a trade war after the Trump administration’s shock move to tax Canadian metal on the pretext of national security.

The emergence of the Cold War solidified the region’s importance once it became clear that Soviet nuclear bombers would need to fly over Canada to reach the U.S. Bagotville is still a key part of the North American Aerospace Defense Command defence. On Sept. 11, 2001, CF-18s from the base helped enforce the grounding of commercial flights.

In that context, it’s the national security argument, more than anything else, that rankles Canadians. Minister of Defense Harjit Sajjan joined Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign Affairs Minister Chrystia Freeland in calling the argument “insulting.”

Canada plans to introduce reciprocal tariffs on  July 1.

For the mayor, the mushrooming trade tensions are depressingly familiar. Saguenay’s other original economic base, pulp and paper, has been devastated by decades of U.S. protectionism around softwood lumber. Neron’s fear is that aluminum will follow.

–With assistance from Sandrine Rastello, Joe Deaux, Josh Wingrove, David Stringer and Thomas Biesheuvel.

Bloomberg.com

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