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aurimeanswind · 2 months

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Letter #1: Hello Again, Little Blog

Hello again! If you’re reading this as someone who *only follows me on Tumblr* girl I bet this is gonna be a surprise huh. If not, and you know me from Irrational Passions, or Twitter, or Instagram or something, then welcome back to my little blog. I used to write here every week, a little diddy I called Sunday Chats, where I’d take some questions from Twitter, talk about stuff I was working on, and just flex the writing muscles. It’s been about six years since the last time I did that, which is kind of insane to write out and think about.

Anyway, I’m back, and hey, I’m a girl! That’s cool, right??? This first “letter” is going to be a lot about that, since today is my one year anniversary of starting hormone replacement therapy (HRT), so we’ll get to that. I’m changing up the format, these will be letters from me, written as such, but really they’re just blog posts. I’ll leave up my old chats for a while, but they may get archived at some point, just because I’m not really that person anymore.

Anyway, preface aside, my name is Auri, and it’s nice to see you again. :)

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Dear Friends,

Hello! From a new me. A new life. It’s kind of insane what can happen in a year, ya know? How much happier you can become, how much grief you can experience, how much your wardrobe can change!

I’ve missed writing, and writing to you in particular, so I hope you don’t mind a little self-indulgence. I have a lot to catch you up on, so it feels appropriate to write about it, to jot it down and get it in some more semi-permanent format.

I often think about the question, “what does it mean to you, to be a woman,” as a trans person, and it’s a complicated question, because women are all things and also sometimes very specific things, like sisters, or mothers, or daughters. To me, it’s just who I am. It’s a piece of me that I buried deep down and tried to pretend like it was something I didn’t deserve, that I didn’t belong. It’s something that haunted me, that I thought about being everyday for years. I’d have dreams where I’d do mundane things, like go for walks, do the dishes, but I was a girl. I know this is something I’ve not really talked about online, and I wanted to change that. I wanted to share my experience here, because back in the day, talking about Depression or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome helped people who read here, who would reach out to me and say they appreciated how open I was about these things. Well, now I want to be open about being transgender, because it’s a huge part of who I am, it’s something I am earnestly proud of, and it’s maybe the most difficult thing I’ve ever done in my life.

So when did it start?

Those dreams, or things I’d dismissively call intrusive thoughts, had been with me since my early 20s. When I found out that cisgendered people don’t actually think about being the opposite gender all the time, I was actually pretty shocked. I thought, “oh well I’m sure there are tons of men that think about being a girl all the time,” and yeah, it turns out that isn’t true! And if you’re sitting here reading this and thinking, “wait… really?” well uh, hey! I’ve been there! And I won’t assume anything on your part just like I didn’t on my own, but I want you to know that it’s actually very good and healthy to explore that feeling, to dig deeper and ask yourself what that means to you.

I didn’t do that for the longest time. It started with, “hey, I wish I could just be a girl for a day,” and I thought that everyday for years, and then it became a month, then a year, then a dream, then a wish. “God I wish I could be a girl, just because that’s what feels right to me.” I’d look at pictures of my friends, of people or celebrities I had a crush on and analyze their clothes, wishing I could wear things like that. Turns out this is a form of gender-envy, and was giving me gender dysphoria, which was a big contributor to the very same depression I’d write about in this blog years ago. A fog in my mind, a feeling like I am holding my breath everywhere I go. I would hate looking at myself in the mirror, even when I felt confident, or good. I hated being naked, or changing, and I hated myself, to be quite honest.

So I finally started reflecting. I knew what it was, even if I buried it deep down. The time alone during the throes of 2020 led to a lot of self-reflection, and after dinner one night I asked my rock, my best friend of 20+ years and the best person in my life, Damien, if I could talk to him about something serious. I was so nervous, partly because I didn’t know what Damien would say, and partly because I didn’t know what I’d say! I remember taking him into my room, where I was most comfortable, and curling up in a ball on my couch, feeling the tightness in my chest, and holding so tight to my legs balled up to me, curled in fear of everything, of judgment, of the world. He ended up being more scared than me! Until I finally just said, for the first time ever out loud, “sometimes I think I was born as the wrong gender.”

The journey of self-discovery is a long one, and it all starts with one step. This was mine. After our talk I felt such a lift off my shoulders. It was December 2020, and it’d be years until I really let myself take the next step.

So what is the next step?

I talked to a psychiatrist, I talked to my specialist, and after a year of thinking about it, I finally made an appointment to see an endocrinologist, or a “hormone doctor,” as I have been calling them. I had to make an appointment three months out, which may be because there are a lot of trans folks out there, but also hormones are super important to everyone! Those 90 days were the longest of my life I feel. But I had the support of a small handful of friends behind me. My friend Alyssa was the second person I told, and she was just as warm and welcoming as Damien, allowing me to ask questions, to be myself, to explore what it was to be “she” instead of him.

March 6th 2023. The day I saw my doctor and started my dose of estradiol (estrogen) and spironolactone (testosterone blocker). Just one year ago! I took a picture that day, and looking back on it, I sure do hate looking at it, along with most old pictures of me to be honest. But I knew when I took it that this would (hopefully) be the one I look back on and then look in the mirror and remind myself I made the right decision. And it is, I was right.

Now for point of reference, here is a picture of me today:

In all fairness, I was at a particularly low point of my life, it’d be a few months still before I would even feel myself change and become the woman I was always meant to be. It’s a marathon, not a sprint, and I still have years and years left of changes and breast growth and voice training and hair styling and… well, you get the idea. I’m no “trans-master” and I don’t want to give that impression. Everyday I still learn something new, and grow in ways I never knew I could. I love that.

So what happens next?

Next was some long months of doubt. Sometimes for trans folks, they know for sure, they’re counting the seconds until they can start the proper hormones their body has been craving. I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure until May of 2023, two months being on Hormones, and I was scared, and I just followed my heart.

This may seem “contrary to the trans experience” but I’ve found that the trans experience is very much a moving target. Everyone is different, and everyone has a different timeline in their head of what they think it should look like. I spent a lot of long months thinking I was “too old” to transition (not true) or that because I didn’t think about wearing dresses through my childhood I wasn’t “trans enough” (also, very untrue). I worried that because my dysphoria wasn’t at a certain level or because I didn’t know with absolute certainty that this was the path that I wasn’t really trans, I was faking it out of some identity crisis, which is dangerously close to a very dangerous narrative posited at trans people to discourage them.

Sitting here, one full year into my physical transition, happiest I’ve ever been, realest I’ve ever felt, it seems pretty silly thinking about those things, doesn’t it? But I can’t overstate how scary it is to transition, to change your body in permanent ways, to take the leap of faith, with everything happening in our country, with ideas like “Project 2025” looming over our future like a specter. Right now, especially, it’s in your face, but reflecting on how invisible the struggles of trans rights were even before that gives you perspective, sometimes making it feel like it’s never a good time to transition, but really, it’s the best it has been depending on where you live, and that is a privilege, even if it’s also a nightmare just across a state border.

All these thoughts come from months of self-reflection, and the feeling still translates at times to “years of wasted time,” and I hate that, but I carry on regardless. I’m the happiest I’ve ever been in my life, my brain feels clear and solid and unified in a way it never has before, I’ve learned what confidence feels like, truly, for the first time. When I look in the mirror, I smile, because I love the girl looking back at me. I can’t, in any words, really communicate to you what that is like, what it’s like to look at yourself and feel uncomfortable, then look at yourself and feel a light, and joy, but I can tell you it’s incredible.

So it’s been a whole year.

What’s next? Who knows! Some people might think about surgeries or procedures or things of that nature, and maybe, we’ll see. Right now I am focused on fixing my terrible financial situation, which is generally unrelated to my transition. Focus on my life outside of all of this. I told myself when I started, I wanted to just focus on this for a while, and it’s been a whole calendar year. And it feels incredible. I’ve learned that I’m always going to be focusing on this, on me, but I’m ready to juggle a few more plates.

I have plans to make a safe place for trans people to hangout and chat, specifically in the gaming sphere. I want to put myself out there in a way that I haven’t before, and connect with queer folk in spaces I’ve told myself I don’t belong to for years and years. I want to make new friends and learn of the struggles of other folks, and be more than just an example, but an advocate for kindness and patience in the trans sphere. I want to spread my wings, I guess, and it feels so nice to have found and understand that.

What do I have to say in reflection? I have come back to the phrase, “I didn’t know life could feel this good.” I really didn’t. It’s not about “being a woman,” it’s about living your truth, a phrase I have particularly latched onto in the last couple of years. Being your authentic, true self. I used to carry all this anger in me, and it was a poisoned well that was all I had to drink from. A bitterness and jealousy that haunted me. I wanted to embrace a gentle kindness, and I feel like I pretended to be that person for years. I treated people poorly, I didn’t listen when I should have. Now, I can say confidently that I am living as that person I knew I was. I have embraced her, and told her it’s going to be okay, and we’ll get through this together. I can’t wait to keep being her.

So this is a promise, to return and write again, about these types of things, maybe finish talking about that first year and how it’s been, talk about grief and how I feel like I’ve only truly experienced it for the first time, how I’ve found new closeness and new distance with family, and many more things like that.

Thanks for reading, if you did, and thanks for listening. I hope this helped you open your heart to a girl from Maryland who is grateful for you, and I hope you’ll come back again. Until then, stay positive, it gets better. <3

Love,

Auri

#trans #transgender #transgirl #mtf #personal #transition story #video games #gaming

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causeiwanttoandican · 3 years

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Harry, Meghan and me: my truth as a royal reporter

I've covered elections and extremism, but nothing compares to the vitriol I've received since I started writing about the Sussexes

By Camilla Tominey, Associate Editor27 March 2021 • 6:00am

It is probably worth mentioning from the outset that I never, ever, planned to become a royal reporter. I mean, who does? It’s one of those ridiculous jobs most people fall into completely by accident.

I certainly wasn’t coveting the position when I first found out how bonkers the beat could be after covering Charles and Camilla’s wedding in 2005. Desperate for ‘a line’ on what went on at the reception, journalists were reduced to flagging down passing cars in Windsor High Street and interrogating the likes of Stephen Fry about whether they’d had the salmon or the chicken.

Watergate, this wasn’t.

Yet when my former editor called me into his office shortly afterwards and offered me the royal job ‘because you’re called Camilla and you dress nicely’, who was I to refuse?

Having planned to get married myself that summer, and start a family soon afterwards, I looked to the likes of Jennie Bond and Penny Junor and figured it would be a good patch for a working mother as well as being one I could grow old with. Unlike show business, when celebrities are ‘in’ one minute and ‘out’ the next, the royals would stay the same, making it easier to build – and keep – contacts.

So if you’d told me that 16 years later, I would find myself at the centre of a media storm over a royal interview with Oprah Winfrey, I’d have probably laughed in your face. First of all, only royals like Fergie do interviews with Oprah. And since when did journalists become the story?

Yet as I have experienced since the arrival of Meghan Markle on the royal scene in 2016 – a move that roughly coincided with Twitter doubling its 140-character limitation to 280 – royal reporters like me now find themselves in the line of fire like never before.

We are used to the likes of Kate Adie coming under attack in the Middle East, but now it is the correspondents who write up events like Trooping the Colour and the Royal Windsor Horse Show having to take cover from the keyboard warriors supposedly defending the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s ‘truth’.

Accusations of racism have long been levelled against anyone who has dared to write less than undiluted praise of Harry and Meghan. But even I have been taken aback by the vitriol on social media in the wake of the couple’s televised two-hour talk-a-thon, in which they branded both the Royal family and the British press racist while complaining about their ‘almost unsurvivable’ multimillionaire lives at the hands of the evil monarchy. And all while the rest of the UK were losing their loved ones and livelihoods in a global pandemic.

Having covered Brexit, general elections and stories about Islamic extremism, I’ve grown used to being sprayed with viral vomit on a fairly regular basis, but when you’ve got complete strangers trolling your best friend’s Instagram feed by association? That’s Britney Spears levels of toxic.

Having a hind thicker than a rhino’s, it wasn’t the repeated references to my being ‘a total c—’ that particularly bothered me, nor even the suggestion that I should have my three children put up for adoption. At one point someone even said it would be a good idea for me to drink myself to death like my mother, about whose chronic alcoholism I have written extensively.

No, what really got me was the appalling spelling and grammar. I mean, if you’re going to hurl insults, at least have the decency to get my name right.

Yet in order to understand just how it has come to pass that so-called #SussexSquaders think nothing of branding all royal correspondents ‘white supremacists’ regardless of who they write for, or sending hate mail to our email addresses, offices – and in some cases, even our homes – it’s worth briefly going to back to when I first broke the story that Prince Harry was dating an American actor in the Sunday Express on 31 October 2016. Headlined: ‘Royal world exclusive: Harry’s secret romance with TV star’, the splash revealed how the popular prince was ‘secretly dating a stunning US actress, model and human rights campaigner’.

Despite my now apparently being on a par with the Ku Klux Klan for failing to acknowledge Meghan as the next messiah, it was actually not until the fifteenth paragraph of that original article that the ‘confident and intelligent’ Northwestern University graduate was described as ‘the daughter of an African-American mother and a father of Dutch and Irish descent’.

Call me superficial, but I was genuinely far more interested in the fact that Harry ‘I-come-with-baggage’ Wales was dating a former ‘briefcase girl’ from the US version of Deal or No Deal than the colour of her skin. A ginger prince punching well above his weight? This was the stuff of tabloid dreams. Little did I know then that covering the trials and tribulations of these two lovebirds would turn into such a nightmare.

The online hostility began bubbling up about eight days after that first story, when Harry’s then communications secretary Jason Knauf issued an ‘unprecedented’ statement accusing the media of ‘crossing a line’.

‘His girlfriend, Meghan Markle, has been subject to a wave of abuse and harassment’, it read, referencing a ‘smear on the front page of a national newspaper; the racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments’. Meghan’s mother, Doria Ragland, had apparently been besieged by photographers, while bribes had been offered to Meghan’s ex-boyfriend along with ‘the bombardment of nearly every friend, coworker, and loved one in her life’.

Suffice to say, I did feel a bit guilty. Although I hadn’t written anything remotely racist or sexist, I had started the ball rolling for headlines like the MailOnline’s ‘(Almost) straight outta Compton’ (referencing a song by hip-hop group NWA about gang violence and Meghan’s upbringing in the nearby LA district of Crenshaw), along with her ‘exotic’ DNA (which I subsequently called out, including on This Morning in the wake of ‘Megxit’ in January last year).

Omid Scobie, co-author of Finding Freedom, a highly favourable account of the Sussexes’ departure from the Royal family, written with their cooperation last summer, would later insist that the couple knew the story of their relationship was coming out and were well prepared for it.

I can tell you categorically that they weren’t, since I did not even put a call into Kensington Palace before we went to press for fear of it being leaked. (I did later discuss this with Harry, when I covered his trip to the Caribbean in November 2016, and to be fair he was pretty philosophical, agreeing it would have come out sooner or later. But that was before the former Army Captain decided to well and truly shoot the messenger, latterly telling journalists covering the newly-weds’ tax-payer-funded October 2018 tour of Australia and the south Pacific: ‘Thanks for coming, even though you weren’t invited.’)

The royal press pack is the group of dedicated writers who cover all the official engagements and tours on a rota system, in exchange for not bothering the royals as they go about their private business. It was a shame this ragtag bunch, of which I am an associate member, was never personally introduced to Meghan when the couple got engaged in November 2017.

I still have fond memories of a then Kate Middleton, upon her engagement to Prince William in November 2010, showing me her huge sapphire and diamond ring following a press conference at St James’s Palace with the words, ‘It was William’s mother’s so it is very special.’

I replied that she might want to consider buying ‘one of those expanding accordion style file holders’ to organise all her wedding paperwork. (Reader, I had given birth to my second child less than four months earlier and was still lactating.)

Not meeting Meghan did not stop royal commentators like me writing reams about her being ‘a breath of fresh air’ and telling practically every TV show I appeared on that she was the ‘best thing to have happened to the Royal Family in years’.

As the world followed the joyous news of the Windsors’ resident strip billiards star having finally found ‘the one’, the couple enjoyed overwhelmingly positive press culminating in their fairy-tale wedding in May 2018, which we headlined ‘So in love’ above a picture of the bride and groom kissing. I tweeted the wedding front page, along with the original story breaking the news of their relationship with the words, ‘Job done’. Yet, as Meghan would later point out in a glossy Santa Barbara garden, that was by far the end of the story.

According to the Duchess’s testimony before a global audience of millions, the seeds for their royal departure were actually sown by an article I wrote in November 2018 suggesting she made Kate cry during a bridesmaid’s dress fitting for Princess Charlotte.

Claiming the ‘reverse happened’, the former Suits star railed, ‘A few days before the wedding she was upset about something, pertaining to, yes, the issue was correct, about flower-girl dresses, and it made me cry, and it really hurt my feelings.’

She then went on to criticise the palace for failing to correct the story – suggesting that royal aides had hung her out to dry to protect the Duchess of Cambridge.

All of which left me in a bit of a sticky situation. As I told Phillip Schofield on This Morning the following day, ‘I don’t write things I don’t believe to be true and that haven’t been really well sourced.’

Having seemingly been completely bowled over by Meghan’s version of events, Schofe then went for the jugular: ‘I have to say, though, that’s all addressed in that interview, isn’t it, because she [Meghan] couldn’t understand why nobody stood up for her?’

Yet someone had stood up for her, on that very same This Morning sofa: me.

As I told Phil and Holly on 14 January 2019, as more reports of ‘Duchess Difficult’ started to emerge, ‘I think she [Meghan] is doing really well, she looks amazing, she speaks well. She has played a blinder.’

So you’ll forgive me if I can’t quite understand why Meghan didn’t feel the need to correct this supposedly glaring error once she had her own dedicated head of communications from March 2019 – or indeed when she ‘collaborated’ with Scobie, who concluded in his bestselling hagiography that ‘no one cried’?

Moreover, how did the Duchess know a postnatal Kate wasn’t ‘left in tears’? And if she doesn’t know, what hope has the average troll observing events through the prism of their own deep-rooted insecurities?

It appears the actual truth ceases to matter once sides have been taken in the unedifying Team Meghan versus Team Kate battle that has divided the internet.

Make no mistake, there are abject morons at both extremes spewing the sort of bile that, ironically, makes most of the media coverage of Harry and Meghan look like a 1970s edition of Jackie magazine.

It perhaps didn’t help my case that the day before the interview was aired in the US, I had written a lengthy piece carefully weighing up the evidence behind allegations of ‘outrageous bullying’ that had been levelled against Meghan during what proved to be a miserable 20 months in the Royal family for all concerned.

The messages – to my Twitter feed, my email, my website and official Facebook page – ranged from the threatening, to the typical tropes about media ‘scum’ and the downright bizarre. Some accused me of being in cahoots with Carole Middleton, with whom I have never interacted, unless you count a last-minute Party Pieces purchase in a desperate moment of poor parental planning.

Another frequent barb was questioning why the press wasn’t writing about that ‘pedo’ [sic] Prince Andrew instead – seemingly oblivious to the fact that no one would know about the Duke of York’s links to Jeffrey Epstein if it wasn’t for the acres of coverage devoted to the story by us royal hacks over recent years.

It didn’t matter that I had repeatedly torn the Queen’s second, and, some say, favourite son to pieces for everything from his propensity to take his golf clubs on foreign tours to that disastrous Newsnight interview.

Contrary to the ‘invisible contract’ Harry claims the palace has with the press, royal coverage works roughly like this: good royal deeds = good publicity. Bad royal deeds = bad publicity. We effectively act as a critical friend, working on behalf of a public that rightly expects the royals to take the work – but not themselves – seriously.

So when a royal couple preaches about climate change before taking four private jets in 11 days, it is par for the course for a royal scribe to point out the inconsistency of that message. None of it is ever personal, as evidenced by the fact that practically every member of the monarchy has come in for flak over the years.

If Oprah wasn’t willing to point out the discrepancies in Harry and Meghan’s testimony, surely it is beholden on royal reporters to question how the Duchess had managed to undertake four foreign holidays in the six months after her wedding, in addition to official tours to Italy, Canada, and Amsterdam, as well as embarking on a lengthy honeymoon, if she had ‘turned over’ her passport?

While no one would wish to undermine the extent of her mental health problems, could it really be true that she only left the house twice in four months when she managed to cram in 73 days’ worth of engagements, according to the Court Circular, in the 17 months between her wedding and the couple’s departure to Canada?

And what of the ‘racist’ headlines flashed up during the interview purporting to be from the British press, when more than a third were actually taken from independent blogs and the foreign media? The UK media abides by the Independent Press Standards Organisation’s Code of Conduct ‘to avoid prejudicial or pejorative reference to an individual’s race’, as well as by rigorous defamation laws. And rightly so – the British press doesn’t always get it right. But social media is the Wild West by comparison, publishing vile slurs on a daily basis with impunity.

Some therefore find it strange that such a litigious couple would claim to have been ‘silenced’ when they have made so many complaints, including resorting to legal action, over stories they claim not to have even read. There is something similarly contradictory about a couple accusing the tabloids of lacking self-reflection while refusing to take any blame at all – for anything.

In any normal world, informed writing on such matters would be classed as fair comment, but not, seemingly, on Twitter where those completely lacking any objectivity whatsoever are only too willing to virtue signal and manoeuvre.

As the trolling reached fever pitch in the aftermath of the interview, veteran royal reporter Robert Jobson of the Evening Standard called me. ‘Don’t respond to these freaks,’ he advised. ‘It’s getting nasty out there. Watch your back!’

Yet despite my general sense of bewilderment at the menacing Megbots, I can’t say it didn’t appal me to discover a close friend had received online abuse, purely by dint of being my mate. After discussing the lengths the troll must have gone to to track her down, she asked me, ‘Do you ever worry someone might do something awful to you?’ Er, not until now, no.

Of course it’s upsetting, even for a cynical old-timer like me. Worse still are people who actually know me casting aspersions on my profession on social media. Often these are the same charlatans who would think nothing of sidling up to me for the latest gossip on the Royal family, while publicly pretending that reading any such coverage is completely beneath them.

Most pernicious of all though – not least after Piers Morgan’s departure from Good Morning Britain following a complaint to ITV and Ofcom from the Duchess – is the corrosive effect this whole hullabaloo is having on freedom of speech. When you’ve got a former actor effectively editing a British breakfast show from an £11 million Montecito mansion, what next?

I cannot help but think we are in danger of setting race relations back 30 years if people are seriously suggesting that any criticism of Meghan is racially motivated. It’s the hypocrisy that gets me. When Priti Patel was accused of bullying, the very same people who willingly hung the Home Secretary out to dry are now the ones defending Meghan against such claims, saying they have been levelled at her simply because she is ‘a strong woman of colour’.

Of course journalists should take responsibility for everything they report and be held to account for it – but Harry and Meghan do not have a monopoly on the truth simply because the close friend and neighbour who interviewed them in return for £7 million from CBS took what they said as gospel.

If she isn’t willing to probe the disparity between Meghan saying someone questioned the colour of Archie’s skin when she was pregnant, and Harry suggesting it happened before they were even married, then someone must. There’s a name for such scrutiny. It’s called journalism.

The public reserves the right to make up its own mind – with the help of the watchful eye of a free and fair press. But that press can never be free or fair if journalists do not feel they can report without fear or favour. I’m lucky that a lot of the criticism I face is more than balanced out by hugely supportive members of the public and online community who either agree – or respect the right to disagree. Along with the hate mail, I have had many thoughtful and eloquent missives, including those that good naturedly challenge what I have written in the paper or said on TV, which have genuinely given me pause for thought.

I am more than happy to enter into constructive discourse with these correspondents, who are frankly sometimes the only people who keep me on Twitter. I mean, let’s face it, I wouldn’t be anywhere near the bloody thing if this wasn’t my day job.

With the National Union of Journalists this month declaring that harassment and abuse had ‘become normalised’ within the industry, never have members of Britain’s press needed more courage. As Winston Churchill famously said, ‘You have enemies? Good. That means you’ve stood up for something, sometime in your life.’

Who would have thought that the preservation of the fundamental freedoms that we hold so dear should partially rest on the shoulders of those who follow around a 94-year-old woman and her family for a living?

If I’d known then what I know now, would I still have written the bridesmaid’s dress story?

Yes – doubtlessly reflecting sisterly sobs all round. But after two decades in this business, I am clear-eyed enough to know this for certain: whatever I had written, it would still have ended in tears.

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flargablargaart · 3 years

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11, 15, and 23 for the ask meme ^^

Fic ask game

>>11: Which OC of yours do you think is the most similar to you? Which OC is the most different? Why?

Captain, one of my oldest OCs, is probably the most like me, even if I don't want to admit it sometimes. They're the closest to a self insert I've ever gotten, and probably will be the only one close to a self insert I'll ever get. They are stubborn, selfless to an unfortunate fault, chronically ill, gender apathetic... all around just... yeah....

On the flip side, Yasushi Iwasaki, a BNHA OC is the complete opposite of me and I am glad for it. Although he is so fun to write, as most villain characters are, I would pray I would never be like this sonovabitch.

>>15: Which fic that you’ve written relates to you and your personal life the most?

Uh, in all and complete honesty, I don't write anything that relates to my personal life. Or, at least, I haven't really tried to. Writing is kind of an escape for me, and anything that might be tied to a personal thing/might be upsetting to me is usually tackled in an RP with someone I trust.

I suppose, in that way, everything I write is related to my life? In the way that it isn't? A lot of my characters have hard upbringings or interesting outcomes to their stories, and it affects them in said stories. Either having gone through something similar or knowing how that may effect someone in a given situation just makes me feel like I know that character more.

>>23: What’s one piece of advice you would give to anyone who wants to start writing or posting their writing online?

Probably one of the most cliched ones in history but it's true: Just write. The story will never be a story if you don't write it.

#thank you so much for asking!#dash games!#so much fun!#sorry if i ended up rambling!

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saint-hildegard-of-bingen · 4 years

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If you love our country, please read this article, and continue to work to save our democracy. And stay hopeful!

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The despair felt by climate scientists and environmentalists watching helplessly as something precious and irreplaceable is destroyed is sometimes described as “climate grief.” Those who pay close attention to the ecological calamity that civilization is inflicting upon itself frequently describe feelings of rage, anxiety and bottomless loss, all of which are amplified by the right’s willful denial. The young activist Greta Thunberg, Time magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, has described falling into a deep depressionafter grasping the ramifications of climate change and the utter refusal of people in power to rise to the occasion: “If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before?”

Lately, I think I’m experiencing democracy grief. For anyone who was, like me, born after the civil rights movement finally made democracy in America real, liberal democracy has always been part of the climate, as easy to take for granted as clean air or the changing of the seasons. When I contemplate the sort of illiberal oligarchy that would await my children should Donald Trump win another term, the scale of the loss feels so vast that I can barely process it.

After Trump’s election, a number of historians and political scientists rushed out with books explaining, as one title put it, “How Democracies Die.” In the years since, it’s breathtaking how much is dead already. Though the president will almost certainly be impeached for extorting Ukraine to aid his re-election, he is equally certain to be acquitted in the Senate, a tacit confirmation that he is, indeed, above the law. His attorney general is a shameless partisan enforcer. Professional civil servants are purged, replaced by apparatchiks. The courts are filling up with young, hard-right ideologues. One recently confirmed judge, 40-year-old Steven Menashi, has written approvingly of ethnonationalism.

In “How Democracies Die,” Professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt of Harvard describe how, in failing democracies, “the referees of the democratic game were brought over to the government’s side, providing the incumbent with both a shield against constitutional challenges and a powerful — and ‘legal’ — weapon with which to assault its opponents.” This is happening before our eyes.

The entire Trump presidency has been marked, for many of us who are part of the plurality that despises it, by anxiety and anger. But lately I’ve noticed, and not just in myself, a demoralizing degree of fear, even depression. You can see it online, in the self-protective cynicism of liberals announcing on Twitter that Trump is going to win re-election. In The Washington Post, Michael Gerson, a former speechwriter for George W. Bush and a Never Trump conservative, described his spiritual struggle against feelings of political desperation: “Sustaining this type of distressed uncertainty for long periods, I can attest, is like putting arsenic in your saltshaker.”

I reached out to a number of therapists, who said they’re seeing this politically induced misery in their patients. Three years ago, said Karen Starr, a psychologist who practices in Manhattan and on Long Island, some of her patients were “in a state of alarm,” but that’s changed into “more of a chronic feeling that’s bordering on despair.” Among those most affected, she said, are the Holocaust survivors she sees. “It’s about this general feeling that the institutions that we rely on to protect us from a dangerous individual might fail,” she said.

Kimberly Grocher, a psychotherapist who works in both New York and South Florida, and whose clients are primarily women of color, told me that during her sessions, the political situation “is always in the room. It’s always in the room.” Trump, she said, has made bigotry more open and acceptable, something her patients feel in their daily lives. “When you’re dealing with people of color’s mental health, systemic racism is a big part of that,” she said.

In April 2017, I traveled to suburban Atlanta to cover the special election in the Sixth Congressional District. Meeting women there who had been shocked by Trump’s election into ceaseless political action made me optimistic for the first time that year. These women were ultimately the reason that the district, once represented by Newt Gingrich, is now represented by a Democrat, Lucy McBath. Recently, I got back in touch with a woman I’d met there, an army veteran and mother of three named Katie Landsman. She was in a dark place.

“It’s like watching someone you love die of a wasting disease,” she said, speaking of our country. “Each day, you still have that little hope no matter what happens, you’re always going to have that little hope that everything’s going to turn out O.K., but every day it seems like we get hit by something else.” Some mornings, she said, it’s hard to get out of bed. “It doesn’t feel like depression,” she said. “It really does feel more like grief.”

Obviously, this is hardly the first time that America has failed to live up to its ideals. But the ideals themselves used to be a nearly universal lodestar. The civil rights movement, and freedom movements that came after it, succeeded because the country could be shamed by the distance between its democratic promises and its reality. That is no longer true.

Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans are often incredulous seeing the party of Ronald Reagan allied with Vladimir Putin’s Russia, but the truth is, there’s no reason they should be in conflict. The enmity between America and Russia was ideological. First it was liberal democracy versus communism. Then it was liberal democracy versus authoritarian kleptocracy.

But Trump’s political movement is pro-authoritarian and pro-oligarch. It has no interest in preserving pluralism, free and fair elections or any version of the rule of law that applies to the powerful as well as the powerless. It’s contemptuous of the notion of America as a lofty idea rather than a blood-and-soil nation. Russia, which has long wanted to prove that liberal democracy is a hypocritical sham, is the natural friend of the Trumpist Republican Party, just as it’s an ally and benefactor of the far right Rassemblement National in France and the Lega Nord in Italy.

The nemeses of the Trumpist movement are liberals — in both the classical and American sense of the world — not America’s traditional geopolitical foes. This is something new in our lifetime. Despite right-wing persecution fantasies about Barack Obama, we’ve never before had a president who treats half the country like enemies, subjecting them to an unending barrage of dehumanization and hostile propaganda. Opponents in a liberal political system share at least some overlapping language. They have some shared values to orient debates. With those things gone, words lose their meaning and political exchange becomes impossible and irrelevant.

Thus we have a total breakdown in epistemological solidarity. In the impeachment committee hearings, Republicans insist with straight faces that Trump was deeply concerned about corruption in Ukraine. Republican senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, who is smart enough to know better, repeat Russian propaganda accusing Ukraine of interfering in the 2016 election. The Department of Justice’s inspector general’s report refutes years of Republican deep state conspiracy theories about an F.B.I. plot to subvert Trump’s campaign, and it makes no difference whatsoever to the promoters of those theories, who pronounce themselves totally vindicated.

To those who recognize the Trump administration’s official lies as such, the scale of dishonesty can be destabilizing. It’s a psychic tax on the population, who must parse an avalanche of untruths to understand current events. “What’s going on in the government is so extreme, that people who have no history of overwhelming psychological trauma still feel crazed by this,” said Stephanie Engel, a psychiatrist in Cambridge, Mass., who said Trump comes up “very frequently” in her sessions.

Like several therapists I spoke to, Engel said she’s had to rethink how she practices, because she has no clinical distance from the things that are terrifying her patients. “If we continue to present a facade — that we know how to manage this ourselves, and we’re not worried about our grandchildren, or we’re not worried about how we’re going to live our lives if he wins the next election — we’re not doing our patients a service,” she said.

This kind of political suffering is uncomfortable to write about, because liberal misery is the raison d’être of the MAGA movement. When Trumpists mock their enemies for being “triggered,” it’s just a quasi-adult version of the playground bully’s jeer: “What are you going to do, cry?” Anyone who has ever been bullied knows how important it is, at that moment, to choke back tears. In truth, there are few bigger snowflakes than the stars of MAGA world. The Trumpist pundit Dan Bongino is currently suing The Daily Beast for $15 million, saying it inflicted “emotional distress and trauma, insult, anguish,” for writing that NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s now defunct online media arm, had “dropped” him when the show he hosted ended. Still, a movement fueled by sadism will delight in admissions that it has caused pain.

But despair is worth discussing, because it’s something that organizers and Democratic candidates should be addressing head on. Left to fester, it can lead to apathy and withdrawal. Channeled properly, it can fuel an uprising. I was relieved to hear that despite her sometimes overwhelming sense of civic sadness, Landsman’s activism hasn’t let up. She’s been spending a bit less than 20 hours a week on political organizing, and expects to go back to 40 or more after the holidays. “The only other option is to quit and accept it, and I’m not ready to go there yet,” she said. Democracy grief isn’t like regular grief. Acceptance isn’t how you move on from it. Acceptance is itself a kind of death.

#rumors and misinformation #dump trump #keep america great

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a-room-of-my-own · 5 years

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Four years ago, I wrote about my decision to live as a woman in The New York Times, writing that I had wanted to live “authentically as the woman that I have always been,” and had “effectively traded my white male privilege to become one of America’s most hated minorities.”

Three years ago, I decided that I was neither male nor female, but nonbinary—and made headlines after an Oregon judge agreed to let me identify as a third sex, not male or female.

Now, I want to live again as the man that I am.

I’m one of the lucky ones. Despite participating in medical transgenderism for six years, my body is still intact. Most people who desist from transgender identities after gender changes can’t say the same.

But that’s not to say I got off scot-free. My psyche is eternally scarred, and I’ve got a host of health issues from the grand medical experiment.

Here’s how things began.

After convincing myself that I was a woman during a severe mental health crisis, I visited a licensed nurse practitioner in early 2013 and asked for a hormone prescription. “If you don’t give me the drugs, I’ll buy them off the internet,” I threatened.

Although she’d never met me before, the nurse phoned in a prescription for 2 mg of oral estrogen and 200 mg of Spironolactone that very same day.

The nurse practitioner ignored that I have chronic post-traumatic stress disorder, having previously served in the military for almost 18 years. All of my doctors agree on that. Others believe that I have bipolar disorder and possibly borderline personality disorder.

I should have been stopped, but out-of-control, transgender activism had made the nurse practitioner too scared to say no.

I’d learned how to become a female from online medical documents at a Department of Veterans Affairs hospital website.

After I began consuming the cross-sex hormones, I started therapy at a gender clinic in Pittsburgh so that I could get people to sign off on the transgender surgeries I planned to have.

All I needed to do was switch over my hormone operating fuel and get my penis turned into a vagina. Then I’d be the same as any other woman. That’s the fantasy the transgender community sold me. It’s the lie I bought into and believed.

Only one therapist tried to stop me from crawling into this smoking rabbit hole. When she did, I not only fired her, I filed a formal complaint against her. “She’s a gatekeeper,” the trans community said.

Professional stigmatisms against “conversion therapy” had made it impossible for the therapist to question my motives for wanting to change my sex.

The “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” (Fifth Edition) says one of the traits of gender dysphoria is believing that you possess the stereotypical feelings of the opposite sex. I felt that about myself, but yet no therapist discussed it with me.

Two weeks hadn’t passed before I found a replacement therapist. The new one quickly affirmed my identity as a woman. I was back on the road to getting vaginoplasty.

There’s abundant online literature informing transgender people that their sex change isn’t real. But when a licensed medical doctor writes you a letter essentially stating that you were born in the wrong body and a government agency or court of law validates that delusion, you become damaged and confused. I certainly did.

Painful Roots

My trauma history resembles a ride down the Highway of Death during the first Gulf War.

As a child, I was sexually abused by a male relative. My parents severely beat me. At this point, I’ve been exposed to so much violence and had so many close calls that I don’t know how to explain why I’m still alive. Nor do I know how to mentally process some of the things I’ve seen and experienced.

Dr. Ray Blanchard has an unpopular theory that explains why someone like me may have been drawn to transgenderism. He claims there are two types of transgender women: homosexuals that are attracted to men, and men who are attracted to the thought or image of themselves as females.

It’s a tough thing to admit, but I belong to the latter group. We are classified as having autogynephilia.

After having watched pornography for years while in the Army and being married to a woman who resisted my demands to become the ideal female, I became that female instead. At least in my head.

While autogynephilia was my motivation to become a woman, gender stereotypes were my means of implementation. I believed wearing a long wig, dresses, heels, and makeup would make me a woman.

Feminists begged to differ on that. They rejected me for conforming to female stereotypes. But as a new member of the transgender community, I beat up on them too. The women who become men don’t fight the transgender community’s wars. The men in dresses do.

Medical Malpractice

The best thing that could have happened would have been for someone to order intensive therapy. That would have protected me from my inclination to cross-dress and my risky sexual transgressions, of which there were many.

Instead, quacks in the medical community hid me in the women’s bathroom with people’s wives and daughters. “Your gender identity is female,” these alleged professionals said.

The medical community is so afraid of the trans community that they’re now afraid to give someone Blanchard’s diagnosis. Trans men are winning in medicine, and they’ve won the battle for language.

Think of the word “transvestite.” They’ve succeeded in making it a vulgar word, even though it just means men dressing like women. People are no longer allowed to tell the truth about men like me. Everyone now has to call us transgender instead.

The diagnostic code in my records at the VA should read Transvestic Disorder (302.3). Instead, the novel theories of Judith Butler and Anne Fausto-Sterling have been used to cover up the truths written about by Blanchard, J. Michael Bailey, and Alice Dreger.

I confess to having been motivated by autogynephilia during all of this. Blanchard was right.

Trauma, hypersexuality owing to childhood sexual abuse, and autogynephilia are all supposed to be red flags for those involved in the medical arts of psychology, psychiatry, and physical medicine—yet nobody except for the one therapist in Pittsburgh ever tried to stop me from changing my sex. They just kept helping me to harm myself.

Escaping to ‘Nonbinary’

Three years into my gender change from male to female, I looked hard into the mirror one day. When I did, the facade of femininity and womanhood crumbled.

Despite having taken or been injected with every hormone and antiandrogen concoction in the VA’s medical arsenal, I didn’t look anything like a female. People on the street agreed. Their harsh stares reflected the reality behind my fraudulent existence as a woman. Biological sex is immutable.

It took three years for that reality to set in with me.

When the fantasy of being a woman came to an end, I asked two of my doctors to allow me to become nonbinary instead of female to bail me out. Both readily agreed.

After pumping me full of hormones—the equivalent of 20 birth control pills per day—they each wrote a sex change letter. The two weren’t just bailing me out. They were getting themselves off the hook for my failed sex change. One worked at the VA. The other worked at Oregon Health & Science University.

To escape the delusion of having become a woman, I did something completely unprecedented in American history. In 2016, I convinced an Oregon judge to declare my sex to be nonbinary—neither male nor female.

In my psychotic mind, I had restored the mythical third sex to North America. And I became the first legally recognized nonbinary person in the country.

Celebrity Status

The landmark court decision catapulted me to instant fame within the LGBT community. For 10 nonstop days afterward, the media didn’t let me sleep. Reporters hung out in my Facebook feed, journalists clung to my every word, and a Portland television station beamed my wife and I into living rooms in the United Kingdom.

Becoming a woman had gotten me into The New York Times. Convincing a judge that my sex was nonbinary got my photos and story into publications around the world.

Then, before the judge’s ink had even dried on my Oregon sex change court order, a Washington, D.C.-based LGBT legal aid organization contacted me. “We want to help you change your birth certificate,” they offered.

Within months, I scored another historic win after the Department of Vital Records issued me a brand new birth certificate from Washington, D.C., where I was born. A local group called Whitman-Walker Health had gotten my sex designation on my birth certificate switched to “unknown.” It was the first time in D.C. history a birth certificate had been printed with a sex marker other than male or female.

Another transgender legal aid organization jumped on the Jamie Shupe bandwagon, too. Lambda Legal used my nonbinary court order to help convince a Colorado federal judge to order the State Department to issue a passport with an X marker (meaning nonbinary) to a separate plaintiff named Dana Zzyym.

LGBT organizations helping me to screw up my life had become a common theme. During my prior sex change to female, the New York-based Transgender Legal Defense & Education Fund had gotten my name legally changed. I didn’t like being named after the uncle who’d molested me. Instead of getting me therapy for that, they got me a new name.

A Pennsylvania judge didn’t question the name change, either. Wanting to help a transgender person, she had not only changed my name, but at my request she also sealed the court order, allowing me to skip out on a ton of debt I owed because of a failed home purchase and begin my new life as a woman. Instead of merging my file, two of the three credit bureaus issued me a brand new line of credit.

Walking Away From Fiction

It wasn’t until I came out against the sterilization and mutilation of gender-confused children and transgender military service members in 2017 that LGBT organizations stopped helping me. Most of the media retreated with them.

Overnight, I went from being a liberal media darling to a conservative pariah.

Both groups quickly began to realize that the transgender community had a runaway on their hands. Their solution was to completely ignore me and what my story had become. They also stopped acknowledging that I was behind the nonbinary option that now exists in 11 states.

The truth is that my sex change to nonbinary was a medical and scientific fraud.

Consider the fact that before the historic court hearing occurred, my lawyer informed me that the judge had a transgender child.

Sure enough, the morning of my brief court hearing, the judge didn’t ask me a single question. Nor did this officer of the court demand to see any medical evidence alleging that I was born something magical. Within minutes, the judge just signed off on the court order.

I do not have any disorders of sexual development. All of my sexual confusion was in my head. I should have been treated. Instead, at every step, doctors, judges, and advocacy groups indulged my fiction.

The carnage that came from my court victory is just as precedent-setting as the decision itself. The judge’s order led to millions of taxpayer dollars being spent to put an X marker on driver’s licenses in 11 states so far. You can now become male, female, or nonbinary in all of them.

In my opinion, the judge in my case should have recused herself. In doing so, she would have spared me the ordeal still yet to come. She also would have saved me from having to bear the weight of the big secret behind my win.

I now believe that she wasn’t just validating my transgender identity. She was advancing her child’s transgender identity, too.

A sensible magistrate would have politely told me no and refused to sign such an outlandish legal request. “Gender is just a concept. Biological sex defines all of us,” that person would have said.

In January 2019, unable to advance the fraud for another single day, I reclaimed my male birth sex. The weight of the lie on my conscience was heavier than the value of the fame I’d gained from participating in this elaborate swindle.

Two fake gender identities couldn’t hide the truth of my biological reality. There is no third gender or third sex. Like me, intersex people are either male or female. Their condition is the result of a disorder of sexual development, and they need help and compassion.

I played my part in pushing forward this grand illusion. I’m not the victim here. My wife, daughter, and the American taxpayers are—they are the real victims.

#Gender critical #Gender #Transgender #Transition #Non binary #Jamie shupe #Mtf

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mylocalofficial · 4 years

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Look Beyond the Review Star Ratings

Review Star Ratings

Is your Review Star Ratings all that you are aiming for? Your customers will dig deeper than that and so should you. What really makes for a great online review?

I wish I could tell you that there’s a “one-size-fits-all” approach to online reputation management.

The reality is that everyone digests online reviews differently.

The woman who’s searching for a new doctor will be looking for different types of information than the man who is deciding on which baby pushchair is best for his 2-year-old.

Online behaviour is a fickle beast. While there’s no denying that people depend on reviews sites more than ever, they are more discerning of the types of reviews that influence their purchasing decisions than they’ve been in the past.

Think about how you sift through reviews when researching a product. If you’re looking to book a reservation at the perfect hotel for your holiday to Bali, what are the important factors that would influence your search?

Some holidaymakers might be focused mainly on price and value, whereas others might require certain amenities or a prime location.

“Review Star Ratings will lure a prospective customer into investigating your reviews, but real persuasion happens in the written content”.

So what constitutes a valuable review for your business?

Here’s what to look for:

★ It has a decent star-rating attached

★ It is substantial, and therefore credible

★ It is recent and corroborated by other, similar opinions

The Review Star Ratings Must Align

Visual Review Star Ratings are quickly processed

It makes sense that review star ratings have the biggest impact on us when we’re browsing reviews. That visual cue is typically the first thing our eyes gravitate towards when comparing different solutions.

The Search for the Great Steak Enchilada

When people read reviews, they typically have a specific need and are either looking for experts to guide their decisions or someone similar to themselves who can inform them on the practical benefits of a product or service.

Imagine coming across a Mexican restaurant listing with 100 reviews, almost all of them with 4 or 5 Review Star Ratings.

You think to yourself, “Oh, this place looks good! It’s not too far from me. It’s in my price range. Seems to be universally liked. I wonder how tasty their steak enchiladas are?”

Then, you begin to read what people actually have to say about their experience at the restaurant and you start to see a common theme:

“Great food!”

“This was exactly what I was looking for.”

“Good stuff. Yum Yum.”

Well, they seem to all be positive, but they don’t exactly inform us what’s ‘great’ about the establishment.

More information required than just review star ratings

Has anybody tried the steak enchilada?

I’ve had bad enchiladas before, and I bet I can find a different restaurant that’s known for their enchiladas.

Not all written reviews are created equal. A concrete argument with specific details not only makes the reviewer more trustworthy, in that, you can tell they’ve actually used the product, but a specific detail of the experience might actually help the consumer solve their problem.

In the case of my delicious future steak enchilada, if only I had seen a review specifically mentioning my dish.

“The meat was tender and had a smokey flavour that I didn’t expect! The tortilla was fresh and had a hint of sun-dried tomatoes. Thankfully, they did not skimp on their tangy and spicy chipotle sauce.”

I love chipotle sauce! I’m sold. Blog post timeout. I need to go get some enchilada action.

See how a concrete review had much more value to me than someone simply writing “Yum, Yum”?

One of these things is not like the other

Say you’re looking for the best mini-golf course in town. If you’re going to the coast somewhere, there may be plenty of mini-golf courses to choose from.

You find a local course and see 15 reviews that are all raving about the design of the holes and the creative elements of the course in great detail. Then you see one review that complains about how the course lacks creativity.

People will ignore that one bad review because it doesn’t fit in with what everyone else is saying.

Mini Golf Review Star Ratings

Maybe Happy Gilmore decided to take his aggression online after his evil clown encounter.

You’re likely to think that the 14 similar reviews were onto something, and that one negative review is probably from a chronic whiner, or someone who just had a really bad day and took it out on the poor mini-golf course review listing.

Consistency across reviews adds to the credibility of the golf course. While the outliers might provide a strong argument, and be taken into consideration by consumers, they do not have the same impact on the customer’s perception of the business.

Pro-tip: When you’re prompting a customer for a review, use persuasive copy that highlights the importance of specific reasons why they loved your product.

Good Review Star Ratings but their last review was 3 years ago?

A review from this past week is more important than one last year. There’s nothing more frustrating than sifting through reviews only to realize that the most recent review was in 2017.

A lot can change for a business in one year, let alone three!

A review written after 6 months only has relevance to 16% of people. That means that if you haven’t earned a review in half a year, you’re doing a huge disservice to your business.

Funnelling reviews for your business is an ongoing process. It’s not like you can earn 20 reviews, give yourself a pat on the back, and abandon any efforts to continue to secure online reviews.

Ask and ye shall receive

When companies request reviews, the customer is doing a favour to the business.

Simply asking for a review from a recent customer though isn’t enough. People write reviews to help others, yet the average person doesn’t know what constitutes a good review, let alone how to write one.

Interestingly Yelp gets the best reviews because it forces a minimum number of words. This causes reviewers to really think about what they are are going to say and to describe their experience in more depth.

If you’re asking your customers for reviews, you need to provide a little guidance. By highlighting the importance of the written part of the review, as well as distinctly asking for the customer to address specific attributes of their experience, you’re setting reasonable expectations for your customers to be able to provide valuable reviews.

Do you have any recent reviews that have the type of substance that speaks to potential new customers?

Respond to Reviews to add substance

If there are no recent substantive reviews you may consider fixing that with your response. Most review sites allow you to respond. Going back to the example above, if someone just says “This was exactly what I was looking for”, add information in a response. You could say “We are so glad that you enjoyed our homemade enchiladas and spicy chipotle sauce. In fact, all our ingredients are carefully sourced so that you experience how home-cooked enchiladas should taste.” You can adapt this principle to your own business and introduce terms (keywords) that you want people and Google to associate with your brand.

Did you see our recent post on how to take amazing photos for your business?

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https://mylocal.org.uk/online-credibility/reputation-management/look-beyond-review-star-ratings/

#online visibility #online credibility #marketing #citations

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stringnarratives · 5 years

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An Act of Shelf Discovery

[This post brought to you spoiler free and full of the blogger’s personal experience!]

In my third-ever post on this blog on March 23, 2017, I wrote about making the switch from physical books to e-books. For someone who loved (and still loves) the sensory aspect of physical books, it was a daunting challenge, but a necessary one: At the time, I would go on average 6 months between moves, had three shelves at my consistent disposal, and more books than I could count. Books lived in piles next to my bed, were stored in boxes in the closet, were forced upon my brother (who is also an avid supporter of this blog and probably reading this post: In which case, hi!) under the guise of “recommendations” so they could live in his space instead of mine.

Fast forward two years and that habit has set in hard - I purchase between 85 and 90 percent of my books digitally now, even though some of the circumstances that made it necessary have thankfully expired (For the record, infrequent moving is an absolute joy!). In addition to a more compact, generally cheaper library that I abuse less and finish more, e-books have also contributed strongly to another new book-buying habit I’ve developed: Preordering.

In 2019, I made it a goal to learn more about my own literary consumption by forgoing the majority of traditional book shopping and preordering any new release that piqued my interest. Tracking each of my pre-purchases via color-coded spreadsheet (as one does, and indeed, must), I’ve thrown myself full-force into the new, and learned a lot in the process, both about the function of preorders in the publishing industry and about my own taste in literature.

The Purpose of Preorders

Before this experiment, my main experience with pre-orders had been primarily in relation to video games (I’m a sucker for midnight release downloads directly to my console) or limited edition media that I’m unlikely to procure without being proactive. I didn’t really know much about them beyond the consumer perspective, but being the chronic researcher I (clearly) am, I wanted to know what my new purchasing habit meant in greater context.

To break it down, preorders serve two main purposes in the publishing industry. They are A) a promotional tool for authors and publishers to build hype for a book before it’s released and B) an indicator for stores to properly respond to a book’s demand.

A preorder’s promotional value could come from a few different avenues. As pre-order sales contribute to the release week sales total for a book (as mentioned in this Parnassus Musings post), they can be valuable fuel for books that rocket to the top of bestseller lists. For first time or less well-known authors, having a preorder page automatically create an additional searchable content and feeling of legitimacy for books in the promotional phase. The more people who pre-order the book are also potentially more people who would share about their pre-order with their friends.

For established authors, preorders often come from existing fans of a series or the author themselves, and serve as an indicator as to the activity of the existing fanbase, efficiency of an author’s platform for communicating with fans, as well as their interest in new work.

In 2016, the written script of “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child” became Amazon’s No. 1 preorder for the year, according to CNET, and topped Barnes & Noble’s chart as well, according to Rolling Stone. While the exact number of preorders was apparently not released, it makes complete sense that the number would be a big one. Pottermore (which Wikipedia describes as a “digital publishing, e-commerce, entertainment, and news company from J. K. Rowling” not limited to the popular virtual Hogwarts experience) released a bulletin early last year that over 500 million Harry Potter books had been sold in the 20 years since the first book’s release.

In addition to their promotional function, preorders also serve as an indicator for a book’s popularity upon release. In a 2017 blog post to authors about the importance of pre-orders, Penguin Random House stresses that a high enough preorder number could “lead to retailers increasing their initial orders.” Last November, Barnes & Noble reported former first lady Michelle Obama’s memoir “Becoming” to be the most preordered book of 2018, according to The Washington Post. This article in particular points out how booksellers prepare for a book’s popularity based on a preorder buzz, “bracing” for enormous numbers of books to fly off the shelves by bulking up their orders ahead of time.

Preorders are a function of marketing in the publishing industry - an opportunity to get readers in the door early, and get them to talk about a book before its release. In return, readers get discounts, bonuses, the satisfaction of knowing they’ll be one of the first members of the public to receive the work, and, very occasionally, some insight into who they are as readers.

Getting Shelf-ish

In the four-ish months (at time of writing), around 22 books have come to me through the preorder method. With 13 books total read so far this year, about 7 of them were preorders, both they and the books between them have plenty to tell about how I read.

My taste is more consistent in concept than it is in practice.

Anyone who’s stuck around String Narratives long enough will know that, across mediums, I’m big on a few genres: Science fiction, horror and satire, primarily. When I started preordering books as a part of this experiment, I thought it pretty safe to assume that if a book fell into one of those categories, there was a good chance I’d enjoy it. Which, for the record, probably still holds true.

But one thing that I did notice early on in this experiment and didn’t expect at all was that I very, very quickly get bored with my own taste. I can get ahold of too much science fiction at once, too much horror. Both genres can get absolutely exhausting without a break between them - breaks I took naturally when purchasing books in a more traditional fashion without realizing. So, for all of those winter sci-fi reads I was so excited about started losing their appeal, I found myself turning to much different fare as a palate cleanser: YA fiction, books about food, and biography - three genres much lower on my radar which I ended up enjoying just as much.

Access to books is rarely the thing that keeps me from reading.

It is what it says on the tin. Where I’d previously easily blamed “not having anything to read” (a concept laughable to anyone who knows me, much less has lived with me and my books) for a lack of desire to consume printed work, I have to now own up to my truth. As books are on a similar mid-week release schedule as most other popular media, I get at least one book delivered to my e-reader most Tuesdays, which means there is always something to read. If I don’t want to read, it’s simply because I don’t feel like it. (Which is totally okay! Life happens and we roll with it.)

My library is built from recommendations.

Recommendations and reviews are my bread and butter when it comes to choosing what kind of media I want to ingest, and not always in the way you think. I typically rely on others to help discern the true atmosphere of a work when I’m easily caught up in cover art and promotional images. While books in the promotional stage are less likely to have a significant number of reviews, I still rely fairly heavily on Advance Reader Copy (ARC) reviews to estimate how much I’ll enjoy a book before preordering. Adding onto that, I get a lot of my book news from online outlets specifically dedicated to new book releases, including Verge’s monthly round-up of science fiction books and Book Riot’s whole entire site.

My new release discovery time is anywhere between 1 month and 10 months.

Was I absolutely stoked to find out that my book of the year 2018 - Semiosis by Sue Burke - was getting a sequel? I absolutely was. Did I preorder that sequel nine months and 11 days before it’s projected to come out? I absolutely did. For authors I already know, love and follow, I’m happy to be that fan that lets everyone know I’ve already made the preorder. For authors I’m less familiar with, or who are debuting their first book, that ten month window might actually shrink to something more like ten days. It isn’t a hard and fast rule, but there certainly is something to being in the know when it comes to favorite authors’ upcoming releases - a result of great communication and even better marketing.

The narratives we consume say a lot about us. They speak to our loves, our fears, the places we want to go between the hours of our waking lives. We pass them along to those around us, intentionally or not.

But as we become consistently more aware of how the stories around us shape our lives and mature in our understanding of how they fit into the world, we must also, I believe, recognize something else: The way we acquire narratives says just as much about us as the stories we choose to slip into.

#topics #preorders #books #book #ebooks #topic #preorder #a horrifying pun title

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bountyofbeads · 4 years

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Democracy Grief Is Real https://nyti.ms/2LRLcSL

I have been in a deep depression since Thanksgiving and feel totally defeated and exhausted so I'm heartened to know there's a reason for it. 😭😭😭

Democracy Grief Is Real

Seeing what Trump is doing to America, many find it hard to fight off despair.

By Michelle Goldberg | Published Dec. 13, 2019 | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

The despair felt by climate scientists and environmentalists watching helplessly as something precious and irreplaceable is destroyed is sometimes described as “climate grief.” Those who pay close attention to the ecological calamity that civilization is inflicting upon itself frequently describe feelings of rage, anxiety and bottomless loss, all of which are amplified by the right’s willful denial. The young activist Greta Thunberg, Time Magazine’s 2019 Person of the Year, has described falling into a deep depression after grasping the ramifications of climate change and the utter refusal of people in power to rise to the occasion: “If burning fossil fuels was so bad that it threatened our very existence, how could we just continue like before?”

In April 2017, I traveled to suburban Atlanta to cover the special election in the Sixth Congressional District. Meeting women there who had been shocked by Trump’s election into ceaseless political action made me optimistic for the first time that year. These women were ultimately the reason that the district, once represented by Newt Gingrich, is now held by a Democrat, Lucy McBath. Recently, I got back in touch with a woman I’d met there, an army veteran and mother of three named Katie Landsman. She was in a dark place.

The nemeses of the Trumpist movement are liberals — in both the classical and American sense of the world — not America’s traditional geopolitical foes. This is something new in our lifetime. Despite right-wing persecution fantasies about Obama, we’ve never before had a president that treats half the country like enemies, subjecting it to an unending barrage of dehumanization and hostile propaganda. Opponents in a liberal political system share at least some overlapping language. They have some shared values to orient debates. With those things gone, words lose their meaning and political exchange becomes impossible and irrelevant.

Thus we have a total breakdown in epistemological solidarity. In the impeachment committee hearings, Republicans insist with a straight face that Trump was deeply concerned about corruption in Ukraine. Republican Senators like Ted Cruz of Texas, who is smart enough to know better, repeat Russian propaganda accusing Ukraine of interfering in the 2016 election. The Department of Justice’s Inspector General report refutes years of Republican deep state conspiracy theories about an F.B.I. plot to subvert Trump’s campaign, and it makes no difference whatsoever to the promoters of those theories, who pronounce themselves totally vindicated.

This kind of political suffering is uncomfortable to write about, because liberal misery is the raison d’être of the MAGA movement. When Trumpists mock their enemies for being “triggered,” it’s just a quasi-adult version of the playground bully’s jeer: “What are you going to do, cry?” Anyone who has ever been bullied knows how important it is, at that moment, to choke back tears. In truth there are few bigger snowflakes than the stars of MAGA world; The Trumpist pundit Dan Bongino is currently suing the Daily Beast for $15 million, saying it inflicted “emotional distress and trauma, insult, anguish,” for writing that NRATV, the National Rifle Association’s now defunct online media arm, had “dropped” him when the show he hosted ended. Still, a movement fueled by sadism will delight in admissions that it has caused pain.

But despair is worth discussing, because it’s something that organizers and Democratic candidates should be addressing head on. Left to fester, it can lead to apathy and withdrawal. Channeled properly, it can fuel an uprising. I was relieved to hear that despite her sometimes overwhelming sense of civic sadness, Landsman’s activism hasn’t let up. She’s been spending a bit less than 20 hours a week on political organizing, and expects to go back to 40 or more after the holidays. “The only other option is to quit, and accept it, and I’m not ready to go there yet,” she said. Democracy grief isn’t like regular grief. Acceptance isn’t how you move on from it. Acceptance is itself a kind of death.

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Ukraine’s Leader, Wiser to Washington, Seeks New Outreach to Trump

President Volodymyr Zelensky still needs backing from the administration. He is proposing a new ambassador and weighing hiring lobbyists to build better ties.

By Kenneth P. Vogel and Andrew E. Kramer | Published Dec. 13, 2019 Updated 12:44 PM ET | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

WASHINGTON — Eager to repair their country’s fraught relationship with Washington, allies of President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine have met with lobbyists with close ties to the Trump administration, hopeful of creating new channels of communication.

After more than two months of anxious waiting, Mr. Zelensky finally appears to have won support from the White House for a candidate to fill Ukraine’s vacant ambassadorship to the United States.

And Mr. Zelensky, still deeply dependent on American assistance, has been signaling, in hardly subtle fashion, that he and his officials will not assist in the impeachment process, keeping quiet in particular about the fact that his government knew weeks earlier than it has publicly acknowledged that Mr. Trump had frozen nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine.

Nearly every world leader has struggled to figure out how to deal with Mr. Trump. But few face greater pressure to find the answer — or more hurdles to doing so — than Mr. Zelensky.

Wiser now to the ways of Washington, he and his team are carefully trying to reestablish themselves in a variety of ways as an important ally with a substantive agenda deserving of Washington’s attention and support.

They have a long ways to go. Mr. Zelensky’s team has been discouraged by the absence of expected support from Mr. Trump for Ukraine’s peace talks with Russia, as well as the lack of follow-through from the White House on a promised Oval Office meeting with Mr. Zelensky that the administration had quietly signaled might happen in late January.

Mr. Zelensky’s allies were frustrated further by Mr. Trump’s meeting in the Oval Office on Tuesday with Sergey V. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. And when the president’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani paid an unexpected visit to Kyiv last week in a continued effort to dig up dirt on Mr. Trump’s political opponents, no Ukrainian government officials met him.

Asked by an official at the German Marshall Fund on Friday what the Zelensky administration wants from Washington, Dmytro Kuleba, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister, who has been in Washington this week meeting with administration and congressional officials, said “all we are asking from our colleagues in the U.S. administration is fair treatment.”

He added, “We don’t want to be shamed and blamed.”

The continued push to try to overcome Mr. Trump’s grudge against Ukraine suggests Zelensky administration officials have concluded that impeachment will fail in the Senate and that they will almost certainly need to work with Mr. Trump for at least another year, and possibly another five years if Mr. Trump is re-elected.

“Our relations are not in good shape,” said Olena Zerkal, a former deputy foreign minister under Mr. Zelensky. “I don’t believe in any chemistry between our leaders.”

Mr. Zelensky’s willingness to accommodate the Trump administration has hardly gone unnoticed in Kyiv.

After the White House released a rough transcript of a July 25 call between the American and Ukrainian presidents, Mr. Zelensky was panned in Ukraine on social media for seeming too eager to please Mr. Trump. That included signaling a willingness to pursue the investigations sought by Mr. Trump into political targets like the family of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.

“Monica Zelensky,” the Ukrainian president was called on social media in Kyiv, in a reference to the intern whose sexual relations with Bill Clinton led to the last impeachment proceedings of an American president.

Even a White House visit, if it happens, risks being seen not so much as a triumph for Mr. Zelensky as more kowtowing to Mr. Trump, who could cite it as evidence he never linked such a visit, or American military assistance for Ukraine, to investigations that would benefit him politically.

“In Kyiv, we have to place bets on the current power in Washington,” said Nikolay Kapitonenko, professor at the Institute of International Relations. But outreach to the Republican administration is not risk free, he said, adding, “Zelensky understands that taking any side is dangerous.”

The importance of American support for Ukraine — and the desire for more of it from Mr. Trump — has been on display in recent days.

An American diplomat traveled to Kyiv to express support for the Ukrainians headed into Mr. Zelensky’s first face-to-face meeting with President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia on Monday in Paris.

But Trump administration officials privately told the Ukrainians that Mr. Trump himself would signal support, according to Americans and Ukrainians familiar with the matter, either via Twitter, as first reported by The Daily Beast, or possibly even an invitation for Mr. Zelensky to visit the White House next month. While Mr. Trump posted more than 100 tweets on Sunday, none expressed support for the Ukrainians headed into the peace talks.

The Trump administration had also resisted calls to levy sanctions against a Russian gas pipeline that would circumvent Ukraine. The White House reportedly worked to undermine congressional efforts to block the pipeline, though sanctions language was added to a $738 billion military policy bill that passed the House on Wednesday. And the military assistance that Democrats accuse Mr. Trump of using as leverage to force the investigations reportedly still has not fully reached Ukraine.

Those are among the issues that may help explain why the Ukrainians are considering stepping up their lobbying in Washington, despite potential political and financial costs.

During his campaign and early in his presidency, Mr. Zelensky proclaimed that he had no need to hire lobbyists like the government of his predecessor. “I never met a single lobbyist,” he said. “I don’t need this. I never paid a coin and I never will.”

Yet, in the weeks before Mr. Zelensky was elected in April, his advisers quietly worked with a Washington lobbying firm, Signal Group, to arrange meetings in Washington with Trump administration officials, as well as congressional offices and think tanks that focus on Ukraine-United States relations.

Mr. Zelensky distanced himself from the arrangement, even though Signal Group reported in a filing under the Foreign Agents Registration Act, or FARA, that it was paid nearly $70,000 by Mr. Zelensky’s party through a lawyer named Marcus Cohen. Mr. Cohen, on the other hand, claimed that the money came from his own pocket, not from Mr. Zelensky’s party.

The Justice Department’s National Security Division, which oversees FARA, sent a letter to Mr. Cohen requesting information about the arrangement, then urged him to register as a foreign agent, according to people with knowledge of the situation. One of the people said that the division also audited Signal Group’s filings, informing the firm in a letter in October that the inquiry was closed.

Signal defended its FARA filings as accurate, and referred questions about Mr. Cohen’s representations to him or Mr. Zelensky’s team. Neither responded to requests for comment.

Mr. Zelensky “may find that it is best to be his own spokesperson on this subject for a while to prevent others from interpreting his words for him,” at least until “trust can be rebuilt,” Heather A. Conley, who was a deputy assistant secretary of state in the bureau of European and Eurasian affairs from 2001 to 2005, said in an email.

Ms. Conley, who is director of the Europe program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, was among the think tank officials who met with one Mr. Zelensky’s advisers in April in a meeting arranged by Signal and Mr. Cohen.

They discussed Mr. Zelensky’s anticorruption and economic overhaul plans, Ms. Conley said, adding, “Ukraine faces a fraught landscape in Washington — with or without a lobbyist.”

The discussions about hiring a lobbyist, which are described as preliminary, have divided Mr. Zelensky’s team.

Some are concerned that hiring a lobbying firm with ties to Mr. Trump could jeopardize Democratic support. And some are wary of becoming involved with K Street at all, because of the specter of Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s former campaign chairman, who was sentenced to seven and a half years in prison for crimes related to his lobbying for a deeply unpopular former Ukrainian government.

Yet two of the firms being discussed for possible lobbying engagement have links to Mr. Manafort, according to three people with knowledge of the discussions.

A representative of one of the firms, Mercury Public Affairs, which worked with Mr. Manafort on his Ukraine effort, met in Kyiv last month with a top aide to Mr. Zelensky. The lobbyist, Bryan Lanza, has ties to the Trump White House, and was in Ukraine on unrelated business according to people familiar with the meeting.

It was arranged by an American lawyer named Andrew Mac, who himself registered last month with the Justice Department as an unpaid lobbyist for Mr. Zelensky. Mr. Mac, who splits his time between Washington and Kyiv, was appointed by Mr. Zelensky last month as an adviser responsible for building support among the Ukrainian diaspora.

In a sign of the scrutiny in Kyiv on its new government’s tumultuous relationship with Mr. Trump, and efforts to calm it, secretly recorded video and photographs circulated of Mr. Lanza’s meeting with the Zelensky aide in a restaurant.

In an article featuring the photographs, a Ukrainian news outlet noted that Mr. Lanza helped lift sanctions against the corporate empire of the Russian oligarch Oleg Deripaska, a Kremlin ally. That arrangement was assailed by critics in Washington as a sweetheart deal that represented a capitulation to the Kremlin, while Mr. Lanza also lobbied to help remove potentially crippling sanctions on the Chinese telecom giant ZTE.

Mr. Mac said Mr. Lanza had been “very effective in working for his clients on difficult matters.”

Another firm that was discussed by Mr. Zelensky’s aides, Prime Policy Group, also has a Manafort link — albeit a more dated one. It was started by Charlie Black, a former business partner of Mr. Manafort’s in the 1980s and ’90s. Mr. Black’s firm has represented other clients in Ukraine, including Sergey Tigipko, a Ukrainian billionaire and former official in the government of Viktor F. Yanukovych.

Mr. Black said he had not had any conversations with Mr. Zelensky’s team about a possible contract, but would not be opposed to such an engagement.

Mr. Mac met this month in Washington to discuss Ukrainian energy issues with the former Representative Billy Tauzin, a Democrat turned Republican from Louisiana who is now a lobbyist. While someone with knowledge of the deliberations said Mr. Tauzin was not being considered as a potential lobbyist for Ukraine, he has connections that could be helpful. His congressional staff once included Dan Brouillette, who was confirmed this month as secretary of the Energy Department, upon which the Ukrainian government has relied for help with its power supply during brutally cold winters.

Ms. Conley suggested that Mr. Zelensky would be better served by an ambassador than a lobbyist, but the process of filling that vacancy has not been quick.

At least three names had been floated in recent months, and the Zelensky administration’s current preference for the position, Volodymyr Yelchenko, Ukraine’s ambassador to the United Nations, had been awaiting approval since late September or early October, according to people familiar with the process. They said that the State Department had signed off on Mr. Yelchenko weeks ago, but that the Ukrainians had grown anxious waiting for the White House to do so.

Officials in Kyiv were told that the approval would be formally communicated this week, they said. The White House and State Department did not respond to questions about the approval of Mr. Yelchenko.

Some attributed the delay to a quiet push by some Trump allies for a prospective ambassador who is closely aligned with Mr. Giuliani, Andrii Telizhenko, who had served as a low-ranking diplomat in the Ukrainian Embassy in Washington under the previous government.

He was embraced by Mr. Trump’s allies after claiming that the former American ambassador to Kyiv and other Ukrainian officials worked to undermine Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign. In recent months, Mr. Telizhenko has worked closely with Mr. Giuliani to advance those claims. As part of the effort, the two men traveled together to Hungary and Ukraine last week to record interviews with former Ukrainian officials for a series of programs by a conservative cable channel seeking to undermine the impeachment proceedings.

It is unclear whether Mr. Zelensky’s team ever seriously considered Mr. Telizhenko as an ambassador candidate.

Kenneth P. Vogel reported from Washington, and Andrew E. Kramer from Kyiv.

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The Party That Ruined the Planet

Republican climate denial is even scarier than Trumpism.

By Paul Krugman | Published Dec. 12, 2019 | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

The most terrifying aspect of the U.S. political drama isn’t the revelation that the president has abused his power for personal gain. If you didn’t see that coming from the day Donald Trump was elected, you weren’t paying attention.

No, the real revelation has been the utter depravity of the Republican Party. Essentially every elected or appointed official in that party has chosen to defend Trump by buying into crazy, debunked conspiracy theories. That is, one of America’s two major parties is beyond redemption; given that, it’s hard to see how democracy can long endure, even if Trump is defeated.

However, the scariest reporting I’ve seen recently has been about science, not politics. A new federal report finds that climate change in the Arctic is accelerating, matching what used to be considered worst-case scenarios. And there are indications that Arctic warming may be turning into a self-reinforcing spiral, as the thawing tundra itself releases vast quantities of greenhouse gases.

Catastrophic sea-level rise, heat waves that make major population centers uninhabitable, and more are now looking more likely than not, and sooner rather than later.

But the terrifying political news and the terrifying climate news are closely related.

Why, after all, has the world failed to take action on climate, and why is it still failing to act even as the danger gets ever more obvious? There are, of course, many culprits; action was never going to be easy.

But one factor stands out above all others: the fanatical opposition of America’s Republicans, who are the world’s only major climate-denialist party. Because of this opposition, the United States hasn’t just failed to provide the kind of leadership that would have been essential to global action, it has become a force against action.

And Republican climate denial is rooted in the same kind of depravity that we’re seeing with regard to Trump.

As I’ve written in the past, climate denial was in many ways the crucible for Trumpism. Long before the cries of “fake news,” Republicans were refusing to accept science that contradicted their prejudices. Long before Republicans began attributing every negative development to the machinations of the “deep state,” they were insisting that global warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of corrupt scientists.

And long before Trump began weaponizing the power of the presidency for political gain, Republicans were using their political power to harass climate scientists and, where possible, criminalize the practice of science itself.

Perhaps not surprisingly, some of those responsible for these abuses are now ensconced in the Trump administration. Notably, Ken Cuccinelli, who as attorney general of Virginia engaged in a long witch-hunt against the climate scientist Michael Mann, is now at the Department of Homeland Security, where he pushes anti-immigrant policies with, as The Times reports, “little concern for legal restraints.”

But why have Republicans become the party of climate doom? Money is an important part of the answer: In the current cycle Republicans have received 97 percent of political contributions from the coal industry, 88 percent from oil and gas. And this doesn’t even count the wing nut welfare offered by institutions supported by the Koch brothers and other fossil-fuel moguls.

However, I don’t believe that it’s just about the money. My sense is that right-wingers believe, probably correctly, that there’s a sort of halo effect surrounding any form of public action. Once you accept that we need policies to protect the environment, you’re more likely to accept the idea that we should have policies to ensure access to health care, child care, and more. So the government must be prevented from doing anything good, lest it legitimize a broader progressive agenda.

Still, whatever the short-term political incentives, it takes a special kind of depravity to respond to those incentives by denying facts, embracing insane conspiracy theories and putting the very future of civilization at risk.

Unfortunately, that kind of depravity isn’t just present in the modern Republican Party, it has effectively taken over the whole institution. There used to be at least some Republicans with principles; as recently as 2008 Senator John McCain co-sponsored serious climate-change legislation. But those people have either experienced total moral collapse (hello, Senator Graham) or left the party.

The truth is that even now I don’t fully understand how things got this bad. But the reality is clear: Modern Republicans are irredeemable, devoid of principle or shame. And there is, as I said, no reason to believe that this will change even if Trump is defeated next year.

The only way that either American democracy or a livable planet can survive is if the Republican Party as it now exists is effectively dismantled and replaced with something better — maybe with a party that has the same name, but completely different values. This may sound like an impossible dream. But it’s the only hope we have.

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Donald Trump Wanted Another Roy Cohn. He Got Bill Barr.

EVEN BETTER.

By Caroline Fredrickson, Ms. Fredrickson is the author of “The Democracy Fix.” | Published December 12, 2019 | New York Times | Posted December 13, 2019 |

President Trump famously asked, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” Demanding a stand-in for his old personal lawyer and fixer, Mr. Trump has actually gotten something better with Bill Barr: a lawyer who like Cohn stops seemingly at nothing in his service to Mr. Trump and conveniently sits atop the nation’s Justice Department.

Mr. Barr has acted more like a henchman than the leader of an agency charged with exercising independent judgment. The disturbing message that sends does not end at our borders — it extends to countries, like those in the former East Bloc, struggling to overcome an illiberal turn in the direction of autocracy.

When Mr. Trump sought to have President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine announce an investigation of his political opponent, he likely expected a positive response. After all, politicized prosecutions had been part of Ukraine’s corrupt political culture for years.

On Monday, when Michael Horowitz, inspector general for the Justice Department, released a report that affirmed the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election was justified, Mr. Barr immediately turned on his own agency in defense of the president.

“The F.B.I. launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” he said.

Similarly, Mr. Barr’s response to the report from Robert Mueller on Russian interference and Mr. Trump’s purported presidential misconduct was to cast doubt on his own staff, questioning their work product as well as their ethics and legal reasoning. Even before he became attorney general, Mr. Barr questioned Mr. Mueller’s investigation of the president for obstruction of justice in a 19-page legal memo he volunteered to the administration.

And where he could have neutrally passed Mr. Mueller’s findings to Congress, he instead took the widely criticized and unusual step of making and announcing his own legal conclusions about Mr. Mueller’s obstruction inquiry. He followed up this Cohn-like behavior with testimony in the Senate, where he insinuated that the United States government spied on the Trump campaign. Mr. Barr apparently has decided that, like Cohn, he serves Donald Trump and not the Constitution or the United States, flouting his oath of office and corrupting the mission of the Justice Department.

In the past, the United States has, however imperfectly, advanced the rule of law and supported governments committed to an anti-corruption agenda. According to George Kent, a State Department official who testified in the House impeachment inquiry, Russia sees corruption as a tool to advance its interests. So when the United States fights a kleptocratic culture, it serves not only lofty humanitarian goals but also our national security. Mr. Zelensky ran a campaign and was elected on a platform that put fighting corruption at the forefront. He should have received extensive and unmitigated support in that effort.

In the former East Bloc countries, despite the hopes of many for a post-Soviet era where democracy would thrive, the parties and politicians in power have consolidated their control in a manner reminiscent of the Communist era.

Autocrats understand that supposedly independent institutions such as the courts and prosecutors are vital to locking in their power. In Romania, a crusading anti-corruption prosecutor who was investigating top government officials was fired at the same time as the government advanced legislation to cabin the ability of other prosecutors to pursue cases against political officials. Poland’s right-wing populist Law and Justice Party has attacked the independent judiciary and has sought to remove judges who do not follow the party line. Hungary has followed suit. Bulgarian politicians have persecuted civil society groups that have criticized their abandonment of the rule of law.

While several United States ambassadors have attempted to support anti-corruption efforts in the region, they have been continuously undercut by the White House. In addition to firing Marie Yovanovitch, who served as ambassador to Ukraine, in part because of her anti-corruption focus, Mr. Trump hosted Viktor Orban of Hungary in Washington over the objections of national security officials who did not want to elevate a corrupt leader with close ties to the Kremlin; furthermore, the president has tried to cut funding for anti-corruption programs.

Mr. Trump’s focus on cultivating foreign leaders who can help his re-election has overwhelmed our national interests in the region. That is certainly a shame for the anti-corruption activists in former Communist countries who have depended on our help and leadership since the end of the Soviet era and who have seen their justice system turned to serve political ends.

But for Americans, we must worry that we face a similar domestic situation: a prosecutor who bends to the political needs of the president. Mr. Trump may no longer be able to call on Roy Cohn, but he now has a stronger ally in the United States’ top law-enforcement official, who thinks that if the president does it, it can’t be wrong.

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How Trump Weaponized the Justice Department’s Inspector General

The president and his allies have turned investigations into a political tool for use against their enemies.

By James B. Stewart, Mr. Stewart is a New York Times business columnist. | Published Dec. 13, 2019, 6:00 AM ET | New York Times | Posted Dec. 13, 2019

In his report on the origins of the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation, and in testimony before Congress on Wednesday, Inspector General Michael Horowitz of the Department of Justice demolished President Trump’s most sensational allegations about the Russia inquiry: He concluded that the opening of the investigation was lawful and legitimate, that there was no improper “spying” on the Trump campaign and that the F.B.I. wasn’t part of some “deep state” conspiracy to overthrow the president.

That hardly stopped Mr. Trump and his allies. The report “was far worse than expected,” the president asserted — after already predicting it would be “devastating.” “This was an attempted overthrow and a lot of people were in on it and they got caught, they got caught red-handed,” Mr. Trump said in the Cabinet Room at the White House.

Attorney General William Barr was quick to pile on, too: “The inspector general’s report now makes clear that the F.B.I. launched an intrusive investigation of a U.S. presidential campaign on the thinnest of suspicions that, in my view, were insufficient to justify the steps taken,” he said in a Justice Department statement.

Media coverage and Senate hearings quickly shifted to the F.B.I.’s procedural failings, which Mr. Horowitz labeled “gross incompetence.” By the end of the week, Americans could be forgiven for thinking that the F.B.I. was indeed part of some sinister coup attempt — precisely the opposite of what Mr. Horowitz had concluded.

So much for the supposedly nonpartisan and independent office of the Department of Justice Inspector General — a position that, before the Trump administration, most Americans hardly knew existed. To a striking degree, Mr. Trump and his allies have turned the post into a potent weapon aimed at his supposed enemies in the federal law enforcement agencies.

Their ability to wreak political havoc with the latest Horowitz report is part of what has now become a clear pattern: Call for an investigation of a favorite Trump target; speculate about the likely outcome; seize on any collateral evidence that emerges; spin the results; then move quickly to the next investigation. Repeat.

The White House and Republicans in Congress insisted the inspector general open an investigation into the origins of the Russia inquiry, even though it was already thoroughly covered in a report from the special counsel Robert Mueller. Investigators armed with virtually unlimited time and budget will nearly always find something (as critics of the special counsel role have long argued).

Mr. Horowitz uncovered some new details, and the irregularities he discovered in the F.B.I.’s FISA application process may well prompt a needed overhaul of the standards for intrusive surveillance of American citizens. But Mr. Horowitz conceded that even if all of those problems had been corrected, he couldn’t say the outcome would have been any different. Nor do they fundamentally change our understanding of how and why the Russia investigation began — already reported in considerable and accurate detail, including in this newspaper and in my recent book, “Deep State.”

But no matter how redundant, such investigations can serve as useful fishing expeditions. Six House committees conducted investigations of Hillary Clinton’s role in the Benghazi attacks. All of them absolved her of any wrongdoing. But it was in one of those investigations that a committee uncovered her use of a personal server for her email correspondence, which led to the F.B.I.’s Clinton email investigation. That provided candidate Trump with his “Lock her up” chant — and arguably cost her the presidency.

Mr. Horowitz, citing requests from members of Congress and the public, spent 17 months examining the F.B.I.’s handling of the Clinton email case. His conclusion: There was “no evidence” that the decision not to seek charges against Mrs. Clinton was “affected by bias or other improper conclusions,” the opposite of what Mr. Trump had been asserting for months.

But during that investigation Mr. Horowitz uncovered hundreds of texts between an F.B.I. agent, Peter Strzok, and an F.B.I. lawyer, Lisa Page, that suggested animus toward Mr. Trump and also revealed that the two had in the past engaged in an extramarital affair — information eagerly disseminated by the Justice Department and Trump allies.

Since then Mr. Trump has tweeted about Ms. Page over 40 times, caricaturing her and Mr. Strzok as “love birds” conspiring to bring down the president, with Mr. Trump often using the most vulgar terms to whip his supporters into a partisan frenzy. At a rally in October, Mr. Trump simulated an orgasm while saying: “I love you, Peter! I love you, too, Lisa! Lisa, I love you. Lisa, Lisa! Oh God, I love you, Lisa.”

Citing that incident as the last straw, this week Ms. Page sued the Department of Justice for unlawfully releasing the texts, which she said had “radically altered” her day-to-day life.

The existence of an investigation provides the president and his allies with unlimited opportunities to speculate about the outcome, while the inspector general is bound by confidentiality restrictions until the report is released. Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, confidently predicted the inspector general’s report would demonstrate a “system off the rails” before he read it.

This may help explain why Mr. Trump, in his efforts to pressure Ukraine’s government to open investigations of Joe Biden and Hunter Biden, didn’t really care whether the Ukrainians actually conducted such an investigation — only that one be announced. That would have given him and his allies the opportunity to speculate about what the investigation was finding to tar the Bidens without any risk that an investigation would exonerate them.

It doesn’t matter if the report itself turns out to be something of an anticlimax. To his credit, Mr. Horowitz didn’t abandon the objective evidence in an effort to please his overseers. He certainly didn’t reach the answers about Russia or the Clinton email investigation for which President Trump and his allies so fervently hoped.

Yet there’s just enough in the Horowitz report to fuel “deep state” conspiracy theories. Mr. Trump has seized on reports from the inspector general to excoriate James Comey, Andrew McCabe and other former F.B.I. employees as “traitors.” Many media reports have focused on Mr. Horowitz’s “scathing” criticism of the F.B.I. rather than his broader conclusions.

Mr. Trump can be confident that few people will actually read the dense, legalistic prose of the Horowitz report — just as relatively few Americans read the entire Mueller report — which shows the F.B.I. largely fulfilling its mission in extraordinary circumstances.

The pattern has already started again. Mr. Trump has moved on to the next Russia investigation being conducted at Mr. Barr’s behest by United States Attorney John Durham of the District of Connecticut. This week Mr. Durham took the extraordinary step of criticizing the Horowitz report, fueling renewed speculation that this time Mr. Trump will finally get a result he wants.

“I do think the big report to wait for is going to be the Durham report,” Mr. Trump said, once again speculating about a report that hasn’t been written. “That’s the one that people are really waiting for.”

James B. Stewart is a New York Times business columnist and the author of “Deep State: Trump, the F.B.I., and the Rule of Law.”

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consulting-celiac-in-the-tardis · 5 years

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6 Things People with Celiac Disease Need More Than Advice

New blog post! When you have a chronic illness, it's pretty common to get a lot of advice on how to feel better - whether you ask for it, or not. Living with celiac disease is no exception. I've been told stories about relatives with celiac disease healed through prayer. I've heard I can only thrive with celiac disease if I eat no grains, only soaked and sprouted grains or only nutritious whole foods. And when celiac left me quite underweight, even strangers gave suggestions of what I should or shouldn't eat.

Most of the time, this advice comes from a very kind and well-intentioned place. But that doesn't mean it's not frustrating - especially if the advice is not nearly as helpful as the speaker believes. That's why I thought it would be interesting to reflect on six things people with celiac disease really need waaaay more than advice! If you have celiac disease and are getting suuuuper tired of relatives' suggested "cures," I hope this post lets you feel less alone - and reminds you of people in your life who actually give you everything you need. And if you know someone with celiac disease and often find yourself giving advice...maybe this post will help you discover even better ways to help them thrive. So without further adeiu...let's dive on in! We - people with celiac disease - really need...

1. Understanding when we turn down dinner invitations or take forever to talk to the waiter about our gluten free meal.

Like I've written about before, we're not trying to be high maintenance when we take forever to talk about a restaurant's gluten free protocol or ask to speak to the manager before ordering our meal. We're also not being rude if we turn down an invitation to eat out.

Sure, I'm super grateful when friends offer to go to a restaurant with gluten free options so I can dine with them. I'm also not afraid to call ahead and ask to bring my own food to a restaurant that can't serve me safely, or eat ahead of time and just enjoy the company. However, sometimes, I just don't feel like going out to be surrounded by a bunch of food I can't eat...and it means the world to me when friends understand and just ask to hang out another time! And I've talked to many other celiacs who feel the exact same way.

2. Time to recover when we do get glutened - and forgiveness if we have to cancel plans.

I'm fortunate to say that I can't remember the last time I was majorly glutened. However, when it does happen, the side effects are anything but fun...and our recovery is a lot easier when we can cancel plans without worrying about letting people down.

(Source)

Everyone's reaction to gluten is different, and everyone will need a different amount of time to recover from being glutened. So the number-one thing you can do if a loved one with celiac disease gets glutened is ask what they need and be flexible with your plans! Sure, maybe y'all can't go on that epic 8-mile hike you planned...but that doesn't mean you can't watch Netflix together on the couch or get together for a delicious (and celiac-safe) homecooked meal. And even if we'd prefer to just sleep our way through being glutened and catch up on plans later, know that your offer to help is still majorly appreciated.

3. Greater awareness that our dietary limitations are not a fad or fodder for jokes.

I try to keep my blog and social media accounts positive and focus on the bright side of life with celiac disease (like all the ways going gluten free has made my life waaaay better). However, it's impossible to ignore the fact that we still have a loooong way to go before the average person on the street is educated and aware of celiac disease. Honestly, raising celiac awareness and connecting with people going through the same struggles and victories as me is the main reason I blog. But here's the awesome news: anyone can help raise celiac awareness in suuuuper small ways.

The next time a co-worker or a friend says gluten free options are "dumb" or "just diet food," remind them that people with celiac disease actually need to eat gluten free to survive. If you hear someone making fun of dietary restrictions or gluten free eaters, tell them their joke isn't actually that funny and move the conversation along. And if you hear someone ask what "the gluten free diet is all about anyway...", don't be afraid to give a short answer! This doesn't mean that you have to turn into a celiac superhero who advocates for the gluten free community every chance you get. But if an opportunity arises and you feel comfortable stepping in...do it. The 3+ million Americans with celiac disease will thank you!

4. More gluten free options...that are actually tasty and celiac safe!

One of my favorite parts about following gluten free bloggers like Erica from Celiac and the Beast or Taylor at Hale Life is that they always seem to have alllll the dirty details about new gluten free products. And when I first heard about Schar’s new gluten free puff pastry or Quinn Snack’s gluten free peanut butter pretzels or Canyon Bakehouse’s gluten free English muffins...I squealed, jumped up and down and immediately texted the good news to my gluten free mom.

‘Cause, yeah, I feel super fortunate with how many gluten free options there are nowadays. But there is always room for improvement. And especially as someone who was diagnosed with celiac disease as a teen, I can say that having access to gluten free alternatives to “normal” foods or old favorites makes life with celiac disease so much easier. So if you see a loved one with celiac disease fangirling over new gluten free products or a new gluten free, celiac-safe restaurant, know they're happy about more than the food. They're happy about having part of their old life back. And if you have celiac disease and feel a little silly getting teary-eyed over a delicious gluten free cookie...know that you ain't alone!

5. Less judgment and more fact-checking in many celiac support groups.

During my journey with celiac disease, there have been times when online support groups helped me learn about delicious gluten free alternatives or safe places to eat. It's also really helpful to be able to post about being glutened or having people not understand your "special diet," and have people respond, "Been there, done that! So get what you're going through!" Nowadays, though, misinformation and judgment can be about as common in online gluten free support groups as gluten in a traditional pizza parlor. Need some examples? I’ve seen people posting about all grains being “poison” to people with celiac disease or that envelopes contain gluten (this is a myth and not true). I’ve seen waaaaaay too many questions that should really be sent to a doctor, not posted for people on the internet. And many posts featuring processed gluten free foods (like corn dogs or freezer meals or cakes) have at least a few comments about how unhealthy those foods are and why people should never include them in their diet.

But here's the thing about eating a gluten free diet - or, heck, eating any diet: everyone thrives on different foods. As I've written about before, people can eat a gluten free diet in so many different ways, like by eating more plant-based foods or by eating paleo or by eating more processed foods. As long as people are eating in a way that's safe and healthy and satisfying to them (celiacs who cheat on a gluten free diet is a whoooole other topic to tackle), I say, "Good for them!" And I hope that in the future, gluten free and celiac support groups offer more encouragement and (accurate) information than judgment or criticism for not living and eating gluten free in a certain "right" way.

6. A cure...or at least improved protection against cross contamination. (And this need really is on the way to being fulfilled!)

A few weeks ago, I was talking with my boyfriend when he asked me: "If they invented some drug and you could suddenly eat gluten again...would you?" And even though that was not the first time I heard that question, I didn't have an easy answer. At this point in my life, I don't think I'd ever go back to eating gluten all the time. But one thing I really do want is protection against cross-contamination, and for my children (if I have any...and if they inherit celiac disease from me) to have fewer worries and more freedom with their food. And I know that many people in the gluten free community are equally torn but also excited at the prospect of progress in celiac disease treatments - or even a cure.

From my blog's Facebook page...

Which is why articles about therapies that could help people with celiac disease tolerate gluten again - like this one or this one - are blowin' up on my blog's Facebook page! So if you hear a loved one with celiac disease getting excited about the prospect of a vaccine, get excited with them! And until a new "cure" to celiac disease is available...help us thrive on the only "treatment" we have right now: a gluten free diet.

The Bottom Line of What People with Celiac Disease Really Need

Seeing a loved one suffer or struggle is not easy. So when you see someone with celiac disease not thriving on a gluten free diet (like I initially didn't) or struggling to deal with the social aspects of eating gluten free, it's a natural instinct to offer them advice on how to feel better or live more happily. And, yes, sometimes this advice is helpful - even life-changing! However, at least in my experience, I'm not looking for loved ones to "solve" my celiac disease. At least for now, celiac disease is a chronic, lifelong condition. And beyond that, everyone's body is different, so a diet or exercise routine or *insert any other piece of life-changing advice here* may work wonders for one person...but do nada for the next. Here's what we - people with celiac disease - really DO need from our friends and family. Things like:

Support.

Encouragement.

Flexibility.

A willingness to learn.

Understanding (or, at the very least, attempted understanding!)

Love.

And I can say from experience. Even giving us one of those things is soooooo much more powerful and helpful than hours of advice will ever be. What's one way someone has helped you thrive with celiac disease? Or what's one piece of "advice" about your health that you'd be happy to never hear again? Tell me in the comments! via Blogger http://bit.ly/2TaxpIT

#Blogger #college #celiac #gluten free #coeliac #celiacs #paleo #primal #foodporn #foodart

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magicalworldweb · 5 years

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Welcome to Interview with the Author! This week I’m proud to present Mark Carnelley, one of the first few authors I met on Twitter. I was really excited when he told me that he would interview, because I had an inkling that he would have some interesting stories and perspectives to tell. I was right, and I’m grateful to have crossed paths online. But first let me tell you about his books.

Mark Carnelley has written two books, with more on the way. I read The Time Detective last year, and then his Omega Chronicles this year. The Omega Chronicles, which was his first book, follows Cole as he adapts to the destruction of the world. I like honesty in books, and you’ll find his actions are very true. They gave me a laugh, and made me want to make sure I’m on Mark’s team if the world ever ends. The details and thought that go into survival are fascinating! (And I loved the ending.)

Of the two, The Time Detective was my favorite. It’s got the usual murder mystery, which was intriguing and disturbing (and therefore good), but it also builds on that with the twist of time travel. Solving cases is one thing, but doing it between two different time periods is epic! Reading before bedtime is cautionary, and up to you.

Now that you’ve had a chance to look his books up, let’s get to know Mark better!

Introduce yourself. Name. Nickname. Good morning Amy. My name is Mark Carnelley and I write under this name as well. As far as nicknames go, only at school I used to be called Nelly or Nelson. I am 59 yo, married since June ’83. I have 5 fantastic kids, (4 boys, 34, 23, 21 and 19 s & 1 girl 25) and 1 gorgeous munchkin of a granddaughter who is 3 ½. I retired at the end of 2014 and wrote my first 2 books. Circumstances have now dictated that I work again and unfortunately this makes further writing a tad harder, though I have a few WIP’s on the go. Hopefully in the next few years they will be completed.

If your Wi-Fi name was a reflection of you, what would it be? Dreamer

What personality trait has gotten you into the most trouble? That’s an easy one. My mouth. I tend to say what I think. That pretty much led to my ‘retirement’ 4 years ago.

What genre (or collection) do you write in and why? I haven’t settled on a particular genre at the moment. Though in saying that, my novels do have a SciFi leaning. I don’t honestly know where my ideas come from. One day they are just there in my poor ol’ brain. Bursting to get out.

Who is important to you? My wife, Jeanette. She is my rock and my conscience. She is the voice of wisdom. If it wasn’t for her, I don’t know where I’d be.

Where do you call home? Victoria, Australia is our home now, even though I was born and bred in England. Mum, Dad, sister & myself came to the lucky country in 1963 (as 10 pound poms)

What books are/have you written? I have written and published two books. First published was “The Time Detective – Discovery”, even though it was the second to be written. The next published was “The Omega Chronicles” and being the first book I wrote, it does hold a special place for me.

If you are having a rotten day, what do you do to conquer that? I wrote my two books whilst suffering from depression. It was an escape for me. Allowed me not to think of all the shit I was going through. I still suffer now, but not, I think, to the extent it was before. I retreat into my shell a lot, becoming very quiet and whilst not recommended, it helps if a take a ‘shot’ or two of bourbon, which helps mellow me out.

If you were invisible for a day, what would you do? I would get inside of the next rocket that heads off into space. This would be my lifelong dream-come-true.

Your life is made into a musical. What is the title of at least one of the songs? Once bitten, twice shy.

What are your sleeping habits? Irregular at best. It’s rare to get a good 3-4 hours at one time. I generally wake half a dozen times during the night. The neuropathy in both feet due to diabetes doesn’t help. Nor does the chronic arthritis in both knees.

What would you name your boat? Starship.

What’s your biggest kitchen disaster? I’m actually not a bad cook, now. From memory, I think I once tried to make a Scotch Egg. But it was more of a loaf with the eggs and a lot of the meat, in the middle, still raw. I have never tried that one again!

Tell me about one of your characters. Would you get along in real life? My MC from The Omega Chronicles is Colton Lee Steele or Cole to his friends. His vulnerabilities are mine but he has true Aussie Grit. I think he is the personification of all I wanted to be when I was growing up. Adventurer and pilot. We��d be two peas in a pod.

If you were arrested with no explanation, what would your friends and family assume you had done? Murder. To those that have wronged me, or my family, I am not one to turn the cheek.

What are your favorite clothes to wear? Tracksuit pants or shorts, tee-shirt or singlet and bare feet. These are my comfy clothes.

If someone asked to be your apprentice and learn all that you know, what would they end up learning? The value of loyalty, honesty and integrity. And what not to do.

What are your future writing plans? My main WIP is book #2 of the Time Detective series. I also have two children’s series which my daughter is currently illustrating for me. I also have the bare-bones of 4 other novels. (1 para-normal, and 3 SF)

What’s one thing you absolutely adore in life? Watching my kids and granddaughter grow in to fantastic, beautiful people.

What is one of your pet peeves? In one word? Idiots. There’s far too many of them, especially in positions of power.

You’re in the middle of a wizarding duel. What animal do you transfigure into? As I just love flying and tigers. It would have to be a tiger with wings. (Well, we are talking wizardry here)

Would you survive if you were a character in your own books? Absolutely. I have utter belief that I will “live long and prosper”. I’ve told my kids that I’m immortal anyhow.

You are putting on a dinner party. What do you serve and who do you invite? A few finger nibblies first. Then my home-made pumpkin soup with warm buttery rolls. Main is a roast lamb with all the trimmings. Neil Armstrong, Douglas Bader, Robin Hood, Robert the Bruce, Shakespeare, Beethoven and The Beatles.

Would you rather relive the same day for 365 days or lose a year of your life? That’s easy. Relive the same day for a year. (This’ll be my Groundhog Day, the possibilities are endless)

You are transported to one of your favorite books. Where are you? I’ve read the Joe Pickett series by C. J. Box which is all about a Game Warden in Wyoming. The country there just seems to call out to me.

Thanks, Mark, for interviewing with me! Your answers were intriguing, and I enjoyed the opportunity to get to know you better. Also, I really want to be a fly on the wall at your dinner party. I look forward to your next Time Detective book, (tell me when it’s ready!) as well as your other, future books!

Live Bravely, Love Strongly, AEM

Interview with the Author: Mark Carnelley Welcome to Interview with the Author! This week I'm proud to present Mark Carnelley, one of the first few authors I met on Twitter.

#author #books #interview #writer

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absolutelyalyssa · 5 years

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I haven’t logged into this account in a while. I think it’s been over a year at least, but in the grand scheme of things, that’s not such a long time.

That being said, a lot of things have changed in that span of time. The first thing is that I finally graduated from college. Not without a ton of student debt, but I’m planning on consolidating most of my loans together so I don’t have to worry too much about it. At least for the time being, I have the money to pay for it.

I have a job. It’s not much--just a receptionist position at a small insurance firm based out of Boston--but I don’t mind it and I get paid well for what I do (literally just answering phones and sorting/distributing mail). Most of the time I have nothing to do and I just surf the web. I felt bad about it at first but then I saw my boss on Facebook in his office the other day and I realized it’s pretty normal. I actually recently learned that flash games (those crappy online games) were literally made for people like me who are bored all the time. I digress.

Being bored all the time prompts me to think a lot. I’ve been trying to engage more with the world and learn new things when I can. Often times I lack the motivation and I end up on Reddit, but sometimes I learn things there, too. For example, why is nobody talking about the fact that Russia is literally trying to create cyber warfare in Ukraine?

I’m still with Patrick. We’re pretty good. Things have changed a lot and our relationship is significantly healthier than it was. We aren’t perfect but no couple is, and that’s something I’ve come to accept. I have to admit lately I’ve been getting jealous of him because he’s currently in grad school on the track towards becoming a tenured professor, and I’m over here with a dead-end job that earns me less than 40k a year. I’m only 23 though, so I’m trying not to beat myself up over it. I am still considering going back to grad school next fall. If I can figure out how to realistically pay for it without either overworking myself or taking out more loans, I would already have applied, honestly.

Patrick wants to be a professor, like I said, and personally I’ve been warming up to the same idea. Having just graduated from college less than a year ago (December 2017), I know that sometimes people aren’t necessarily made to be teachers, but they teach anyway and they get away with it. I think that could be a very real possibility for me, mainly because although I’m socially awkward and not so confident, these are adults I’ll be teaching, and for the most part they’ll be engaged in the subject. It’s not like I’ll have to discipline too much, and I’ll be making 6 digits from the get-go. That would be ideal. Not saying it’ll be easy, though--supposedly these jobs are VERY tricky to get. You have to know the right people. Still, I’ll get there when I get there. There’s such an emphasis on getting life moving as soon as possible here in the U.S., but to be honest I prefer the lifestyle in Europe where everyone takes their time. I hear that people usually even take a year off from high school before going to college. If things were different, maybe I would have done that.

I don’t know why I’m updating my blog when there’s nobody here to read it. I don’t think any of my followers are active/real at this point. That makes me feel better, though--talking to the void is sometimes nice because there’s less judgment. Only myself to judge, that is.

So I think that summarizes the way things are going now. Same, but different. I’m much more mentally stable but it really depends on the day. I just think depression is a chronic sickness that you have to keep fighting, a cancer that keeps coming back. Hopefully these Vitamin D supplements will help me fight it as the winter draws closer. The winter is always a bad time of year for me.

Right now I’m just trying to get more motivated. I have so much free time now that I don’t have homework and my work day is super boring. I should start writing again, but I am at a loss as to WHAT to write about. Everything requires extensive research, which is so damn tiring. It’s ironic because if I want to be a professor, I need to learn how to get back into research. I have so much time to get into good habits but I’ve felt so lazy. I’ve had this job since April but I’ve never felt less motivated and I’ve never felt more tired. I don’t know how to get that motivation back. Besides, I have had writer’s block for...7 years now? Almost a third of my whole damn life, I haven’t REALLY written, unless you count poetry. If I ever hope to become a professor (they apparently need to publish several works, research-related, throughout their career) I need to get on that and pad my portfolio with actual content. Not to get ahead of myself, but I could even consider submitting my work somewhere, provided it actually gets written to begin with. But first, I need an idea.

Not much else to say, I guess. I’m done being an edgelord about Tumblr--I’ve accepted that I’ll always be a slave to this fucking website. I mean, I first got on about 8 or 9 years ago, and I’ve taken hiatuses, but I’ve always returned. I don’t know why. It seems like the general population has changed--there are a lot more LGBTQ mentally ill 16-year-olds than I remember (not even trying to be hateful, it’s true)--but maybe it was always that way and I was just part of it at the time. But I am back now, and I don’t care too much about what people have to say to me. Mainly because I don’t think they’ll take too much notice or say anything, anyways. It’s not like I’ve these crazy world views...I’m just calling things as I see them. I’m just here to reflect and recall my former life and try to be a better person.

I’m voting today. I don’t even know many of the representatives and I am planning to mostly vote for incumbents because they’re all democrats and I’m left-leaning. I’m just glad I’m doing my part and voting...it also feels good that I’ll have some input on our 3 questions this year, which are actually pretty important (Q3 in Massachusetts concerns the status of transgender individuals which is totally bizarre to me--I cannot believe we’re still arguing about human rights in 2018 in a liberal state). Anyway, so tonight I’m going to burn my entire evening waiting in line at the town hall but that’s okay with me. At least I’m participating.

Life keeps chugging onward--I’m just trying to stay on the train.

#the fabled return is finally upon us #you're all welcome #i'm trying to be more positive #personal #update

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humanoid-lovers · 6 years

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Procrastinating does not mean doing nothing, nor is it the worst flaw a person can have! ***** "Everyone procrastinates sometimes, but 20 percent of people chronically avoid difficult tasks and deliberately look for distractions--which, unfortunately, are increasingly available. Procrastination in large part reflects our perennial struggle with self-control as well as our inability to accurately predict how we'll feel tomorrow, or the next day."--Psychology Today Go to Amazon

Fun Read But No Real Value We're all procrastinators. Rarely do we find ourselves in moments of high productivity, especially centered on the tasks most pressing at the time. Even now, writing this review (which I should have written days ago), I'm distracted by the constant buzzing of my phone. Go to Amazon

Fun book that works I read this book as a way to avoid doing my taxes. Now the book is finished and I just have to make a phone call and visit my bank to finish my taxes. Maybe I'll do that tomorrow. Go to Amazon

This is a great little book! Right off the top of my morning checklist, I am reviewing this book - how's that for not procrastinating? Or at least following best practices of structured procrastination? You will get this after you read this "short and sweet" volume. It's well written, packed with good advice, and even covers, as an example, the procrastination involved in buying a printer (my industry), and stresses the importance of finding time to watch Jon Stewart and David Letterman (two of my favorites). It was a fun, entertaining read which really did offer some good advice, as well. Go to Amazon

Funny and encouraging This book is quite funny. Having read the original essay online some time ago, I've been meaning to read this book for a while and, true to form, have now done so as a way of putting off other, more important reading and writing. This was quite a good little diversion, and did indeed make me feel somewhat better about my own habit of procrastinating. I recommend it to any procrastinator looking for a fun little read and self-esteem boost, but not to any wishing to learn how not to procrastinate anymore—it's not at all that kind of book. Go to Amazon

From easy reading to easy living The most motivating and optimistic guide I've ever read. It's not about changes you have to make to become descent at last, but it suggests the most productive way of looking at things for those who feel constantly depressed about any necessary organization. Just a few tips on how to trick yourself into doing stuff written in very attractive language. Go to Amazon

Pithy, funny, effective The author likely wrote this book instead of doing something else. I read it instead of doing something else. That’s pretty much the moral of the story. Go to Amazon

I could have sworn I wrote it. If I didn't know better, I would think John Perry had been following me around. Haven't finished it yet but I'm already feeling the pressure being lifted from my Guilt Glands. I may even LOOK for ways to "structurally procrastinate" in order to accomplish what I have on my mental and hard copy to-do lists. Thank you, Mr. Perry. There is obviously a segment of society that doesn't need this book, but I don't know any of them anyway. However, it is recommended for all the rest of us. I may get around to doing that..... Go to Amazon

Great fun book Guilt-Free Procrastination! Five Stars Structured Procrastination! Four Stars Five Stars Extremely funny and easy to read and made me feel a ... Five Stars Seaweed rope-skipping pictures pls good book!

#Lollygagging and Postponing: John Perry: 9780761171676: Amazon.com: Books

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thedietian · 6 years

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An Athlete's Guide to Chronic Knee Pain – Anthony Mychal

Product Name: An Athlete's Guide to Chronic Knee Pain – Anthony Mychal

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Description:

Got patellar tendonitis? Jumper’s knee (patellar tendonosis)? How about patellar mistracking? Chondromalacia? Or maybe your knees are just always in pain for reasons you don’t quite know yet?

I’m going to tell you two things you should know if you’re an athlete with chronic knee pain, but let’s start with a story.

You have a friend named Kong. Kong likes touching hot things. Don’t ask me why. That’s just Kong. He’s a weird guy.

You’re a good friend. You don’t want Kong to burn himself, so you get rid of every potentially hot thing in his house.

Kong lives happily ever after, right?

Not really. Because Kong is limited to a fabricated world. If he ever returns to the real world, he’s gonna’ get burned.

The root of Kong’s problem is his wacky tendency to touch hot things, not necessarily the pain he experiences as a result of his strange behavior.

Pain is just a single piece to a much larger puzzle.

You can’t run. You can’t jump. You can’t squat. Even standing up from the toilet makes you wince. Your knees are in shambles.

And there you are. In bed. Waiting for a miracle. Waiting for the physiology gnomes to tap your knee with a magical star wand.

Because, well, that’s everyone recommends. Rest. Rest. Rest some more. Rest. Rest. Rest. Rest. Rest.

But “rest” is the cheap answer.

Most rehab theories are based on an arbitrary concept of being damaged one day, resting for a little bit, then being magically healed overnight.

This is true and false at the same time. Your body is amazing. It can heal itself. But as long as you still have the behaviors that forced the damage, you’re going to continually breakdown.

This is the Kong paradox.

You can eliminate the pain (feel healthy) without fixing the root of pain.

And if you continually ignore the root of the pain? Your short-term inflammation (knee pain, tendonitis) turns into long-term tissue degeneration (jumper’s knee, tendonosis).

The first thing you need to know is this: rest isn’t going to permanently fix your knee pain. You have to fix the root of your problem, and the root is (not surprisingly) the second thing you need to know.

You can’t make the following mistake in logic:

Thinking your knee is the thing that’s broken because the knee itself is the thing in pain.

Take a look at the pictures below. I cropped them out of some random YouTube videos.

Both of these guys are doing vertical jumps. The guy on the left claims a 30″ vertical jump. The guy on the right, 50″. (Which is very high, so let’s just say 40″ to account for internet inflation.) Honestly, the output doesn’t matter much.

Aside from the raw numbers, there’s a difference between the two:

I consider one a knee pain candidate, and the other a knee pain conqueror.

Below are more still shots from YouTube, but with NFL combine athletes (a little less random than, well, random YouTubers).

Notice how their body positions are more similar to the guy on the right in the first picture? It’s no coincidence. (Rule 39: There is no such thing as coincidence.)

Where there’s smoke, there’s fire. You’ve heard that saying before, right? Makes sense. But if you focus on the fire, you arsonist running out of the back door and breaking for the woods.

Chronic knee pain is a global phenomenon, so you have to zoom out and see beyond the knee itself.

But before I do that, I want to tell you about who I am and how I know all of this.

My name is Anthony Mychal. I’ve written for some fitness magazines and websites, like T-Nation, Schwarzenegger.com, Greatist, Elite FTS, Onnit, and STACK.

Some of the articles I wrote were��about knee pain. But I’m not here to tout my credentials. I’m here to show you something.

One of the questions I’m asked most: do your knees still make that noise? And I get asked this because back in 2009 I put a video on YouTube of my snapping, crackling, and popping knees.

I was Googling for answers. I was posting on forums. I had just about every chronic knee pain possible. Tendonitis. Jumper’s knee. Tracking problems.

Here’s the part where I’m supposed to smile and say, “And I haven’t had an knee problems since I’ve found this magical cream!”

But that’s not true…I still struggle with knee pain because I ignored my initial tendonitis. I thought I could fight through the pain.

Pshhhh. Ain’t nothing gonna’ stop me from playing my sports and lifting. I’ll get through this pain. Yeahhh. Only the weak care about pain.

And then my tendonitis turned into tendonosis. In other words, my short-term inflammation became long-term tissue degeneration.

If you love your sports and activities, the goal is simple: keep playing. That’s why you play through pain. But when you play through pain you cause long term problems that put you out of the game.

The kicker in my story? It wasn’t like I totally ignored my pain.

I followed most highly touted advice, like resting, popping pain pills, and icing. One doctor even told me that my knees would never be quite “right” ever again.

I even tried to train my way out of my pain with leg extensions and leg curls. If you’re in as deep as I was, you’ve probably also done your fair share of terminal knee extensions.

All of these things made my knee worse.

Your leg is made up of a ton of muscles and is controlled by three main joints: the hip, the knee, and the ankle. Anytime you move, force flows through these three joints. Up the chain, down the chain. The knee is the middle man.

So picture an assembly line. Three guys. You’re the middle guy. What happens when the guy to your right stops working? All his load gets thrown onto you. What happens when the guy to the left stops working? All the work you’re trying to do piles back up onto you.

There’s one equation you gotta’ remember. (Even if you hate math.)

And it just so happens that athletic ability follows a similar equation.

Hips + Feet = Athleticism

Remember those pictures from above? The body positioning? Stud athletes have similar body positions during exercises because they drive movement from similar muscles and structures. And those muscles and structures are also key in chronic knee pain.

This doesn’t just happen. You have to make it happen. You have to retrain your body. And this is what An Athlete’s Guide to Chronic Knee Pain is all about: a program designed to fix chronic knee pain that delivers a pleasant athletic side effect.

An Athlete’s Guide to Chronic Knee Pain is actually two programs smashed together.

The first is Theories and Solutions for Patellar Tendonitis, Jumper’s Knee, and Patellar Tracking Problems. It digs deeper into the relationship between the ankle, knee, and hip.

The goal is to kick muscles and movement patterns into gear that’ve long since been sleeping, and then build a ton of endurance to be able to maintain ability in those muscles forever and ever, no matter how fatigued you are.

The second is Increasing Strength and Explosiveness Through Barbell Exercises, Leaps, and Bounds. It transitions the newly found endurance and activation patterns into barbell exercise and athletic movement.

It builds positional awareness and correct activation patterns within those positions. It also teaches you how to absorb and propel force within those same positions. This second program is full of linked up videos to help you learn.

Both of these programs are crammed together. No dual fee. No leg extensions. No leg curls. No bed rest. Just a seriously comprehensive reconstruction of athletic and pain free lower body movement from the sand to the sky. 180 pages filled with information, pictures (exercises, stretches), and videos.

And some more bullet points because bullet points are cool:

(P.S. You’ve spent more on video games or on a night out at the bar.)

So consider what your knees are worth to you. Seriously. Think about it. What does your knee let you do that you love doing? How does it feel not being able to do it?

When I was unable to move and trick and lift, I lost myself. Don’t lose yourself. Give your knees the care they need so that you can do whatever makes you feel alive. So that you can do the things you love doing — the things that form your identity as a person.

That expensive treadmill is nice…if you’re healthy enough to use it. That monthly gym membership? Those kettlebells and barbell you just bought? All nice. But only if you can use them.

Don’t worry, you’re protected under my No Ass-to-Risk Guarantee. My No Ass-to-Risk Guarantee is in place to prevent you from being misled or mistreated from online business malpractice. Everything that others choose to hide within asterisks at the bottom of pages are stated below, in addition to who exactly this product isn’t for. It’s all in an effort to better serve you.

First, An Athlete’s Guide to Chronic Knee Pain is a digital product. You buy, you download instantly. The file is readable by Adobe or any other PDF reader. No shipping fees, so you save some bucks.

Second, your satisfaction is my guarantee. You may return this product if it doesn’t meet your expectations. Anytime. Anyplace. Even if my retailers refund period has expired (my retailer is ClickBank and they have a 60 day refund policy), I’ll handle it in house.

Third, An Athlete’s Guide to Chronic Knee Pain is for those with chronic knee problems (tendonitis, tendonosis, tracking issues), that want a better understanding of how chronic knee problems are created, that are willing to work hard to conquer their pain, looking to learn how to put less stress.

It’s not for those with serious internal injuries (ligament damage, meniscus injuries), those not ready to put in time and effort to fix their problem, and those that aren’t ready to do progressive bodyweight exercises.

Fourth, you have to be ready to work. This program is demanding. I’m not here to baby you. I’m here to fix you, and there’s a hard dose of reality with this. You’ve been moving the wrong way for a long time. You have to hit this hard to fix it.

Fifth, in regard to typical results, I always give the same disclaimer with any digital product: one of two things will happen when you buy my products.

But don’t listen to me. I think I’ve talked enough anyway.

When I developed a knee tendinopathy by tricking, I spent the next two years googling for crumbs on anything I could find on the topic and experimenting with self therapy. Anytime I’d find something I’d wonder if it was really applicable to my own situation. Much later, I felt I had gathered something likening to puzzle pieces, and was able to put these together to see a puzzle image take form. While I can make out the image of knee problems more clearly today, Anthony’s eBook is the finished puzzle with a clear image formed. I hate him for having finished this puzzle after I had suffered my own knee problems! But I will forgive him, because I learned some really neat, and new knee tips in this book I didn’t know, and haven’t seen elsewhere!

Me and Anthony did some video correspondence about my jumpers knee and he gave me a lot of good exercises and stretching techniques. He provided a great push forward to having no major problems and these days I’m back to tricking on my left knee with no big problems. (Picture provided by: Nanna Ward.)

The orthopedist probably would have recommended another surgery. But without Anthony I would still be a lost little puppy just trying lots of things with half assed effort. Getting consultation from him (who I sincerely believe in and really look up to when it comes to this) really motivated me. Contacting him was the smartest thing I’ve done for my training!

I played college hoops at a small college and never had any injuries until I turned 30. I started having knee tracking issues 3 years ago after I got an athletic pubalgia injury while playing flag football. That was a very painful injury to my groin area. After that “healed” (resumed activity to early) I started getting pretty serious knee pain while playing basketball due to compensating from the hip injury. I had lost control of my hip and my knee was making up the difference. I also have a very significant anterior pelvic tilt which contributed to both injuries I’m sure.

Anyway, because of your info I am able to play basketball again pain-free and my knee has drastically improved. This knee tracking pain had been nagging me for over a year and it was very frustrating. I am not quite 100% yet in terms of strength and confidence but will get there. My goal is to completely eliminate discomfort and doubt in the knee and eventually dunk a basketball again.

Thanks so much. I have bought a lot of fitness and nutrition crap and your stuff is legit and truly improved my life.

I tweeted that I loved your book before I had even finished it. Today, I viewed all the videos, completed it and I am stunned at how comprehensive and exhaustive this is. I can’t believe the knowledge you have at your age. You have covered every angle there is and intercepted all manner of backsliding and “executive decision” modifications that many will try to make. I would think it would have taken many years of observing personal sabotage to acquire this foresight. Don’t take this the wrong way, but I remember looking at your photo on T Nation and thinking, “What the fuck, he’s just a kid” However, it’s obvious from the methodical thought process and well crafted writing that you are wise beyond your years.

I just finished your book. I was having patellar tendon pain EVERY TIME I stood up from a chair. I’m now extending the hips similar to the way you described in your RDL chapter, and the pain has disappeared. I’m already impressed. Now to translate this to Olympic weightlifting…

Just wanted to say the Athletes guide to chronic knee pain is an AWESOME resource & a must for anyone with legs! Can’t wait to implement this stuff to my own rehab of some banged up legs!

Q: Is this program for a beginner?

A: Yes, it can be used by someone that has no formal training. I will say that a background in barbell training is useful to pick up on the terminology, but it’s not life or death requirement.

Q: Is there an age requirement?

A: No, absolutely NONE. All exercises begin at bodyweight and are progressed in a sequence. There is NO heavy loading in the initial program, and the second book (that has heavy loading) is optional. The book, however, is written for athletes — so keep that in mind.

Q: How long is the program?

A: It lasts forever. Don’t think I’m kidding. The initial rehabilitation program is eight weeks long, but the principles you learn will carry with you for the rest of your life. This is one of the reasons behind the effectiveness of the program. The second half of the rehabilitation (strength part) takes places after.

Q: How often are the workouts?

A: Every day. Or five days per week. We’re reprogramming the body. It takes time and frequency. If you can’t handle this, then this product isn’t for you. I’ll say it again, if you’re not willing to put in the work, this system will not work for you.

Q: How long do the workouts take?

A: They shouldn’t take more than an hour and can be done in the convenience of your own home. The only equipment needed is an exercise band during the first eight weeks. After, a sequence of progressions is used with a barbell and those workouts will take longer. It’s the nature of the beast.

Q: Does this come in the mail?

A: Nope. Once your payment is received, an electronic copy of the book is sent to your e-mail address.

Q: Can I still do lower body exercises while on the program?

A: Sadly, no. Squatting and deadlifting will have to take a back seat for the duration of this program because we’re reprogramming the body. You can’t heal yourself if you continue to expose yourself to pain. The movements will be reintroduced gradually and sequentially.

Q: What separates you from everyone else?

A: I use a unique approach that focuses on every joint in the lower body, except the knee. I fully believe that the knee pain is a victim, not a culprit.

Q: What if the program doesn’t work for me?

A: Consider it free. I’m willing to put my reputation on the line. You pay for quality work, and if it isn’t up to your standards you’ll get a full refund. ClickBank handles all returns within 60 days of purchase. After that, I’ll handle returns “in-house.”

Q: I have some more questions. How do I get in touch with you?

A: Want to know something? Ask me: anthony /at/ anthonymychal dot com

Click here to get An Athlete's Guide to Chronic Knee Pain – Anthony Mychal at discounted price while it’s still available…

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