The sheer number of older and more experienced professionals involved in Måneskin introduces a tension between the rock conventions that characterize their songwriting and the fundamentally pop circumstances under which those songs are produced. They are four friends in a band, but that band is inside an enormous machine. From their perspective, though, the machine is good.

The American visitor to Rome arrives with certain preconceptions that feel like stereotypes but turn out to be basically accurate. There really are mopeds flying around everywhere, and traffic seems governed by the principle that anyone can be replaced. Breakfast is coffee and cigarettes. Despite these orthopedic and nutritional hazards, everyone is better looking — not literally everyone, of course, but statistically, as if whatever selective forces that emerge from urban density have had an extra hundred generations or so to work. And they really do talk like that, an emphatic mix of vowels, gestures and car horns known as “Italian.” To be scolded in this language by a driver who wants to park in the crosswalk is to realize that some popular ideas are actually true. Also, it is hot.

The triumphant return to Rome of Måneskin — arguably the only rock stars of their generation, and almost certainly the biggest Italian rock band of all time — coincided with a heat wave across Southern Europe. On that Tuesday in July the temperature hit 107 degrees. The Tiber looked thick, rippled in places and still in others, as if it were reducing. By Thursday morning the band’s vast management team was officially concerned that the night’s sold-out performance at the Stadio Olimpico would be delayed. When Måneskin finally took the stage around 9:30 p.m., it was still well into the 90s — which was too bad, because there would be pyro.

There was no opening act, possibly because no rock band operating at this level is within 10 years of Måneskin’s age. The guitarist Thomas Raggi played the riff to “Don’t Wanna Sleep,” the lights came up and 60,000 Italians screamed. Damiano David — the band’s singer and, at age 24, its oldest member — charged out in black flared trousers and a mesh top that bisected his torso diagonally, his heavy brow and hypersymmetrical features making him look like some futuristic nomad who hunted the fishnet mammoth. Victoria De Angelis, the bassist, wore a minidress made from strips of leather or possibly bungee cords. Raggi wore nonporous pants and a black button-down he quickly discarded, while Ethan Torchio drummed in a vest with no shirt underneath, his hair flying. For the next several minutes of alternately disciplined and frenzied noise, they sounded as if Motley Crüe had been cryogenically frozen, then revived in 2010 with Rob Thomas on vocals.

That hypothetical will appeal to some while repelling others, and which category you fall into is, with all due respect, not my business here. Rolling Stone, for its part, said that Måneskin “only manage to confirm how hard rock & roll has to work these days to be noticed,” and a viral Pitchfork review called their most recent album “absolutely terrible at every conceivable level.” But this kind of thumbs up/thumbs down criticism is pretty much vestigial now that music is free. If you want to know whether you like Måneskin — the name is Danish and pronounced MOAN-eh-skin — you can fire up the internet and add to the more than nine billion streams Sony Music claims the band has accumulated across Spotify, YouTube, et cetera. As for whether Måneskin is good, de gustibus non est disputandum, as previous Italians once said: In matters of taste, there can be no arguments.

You should know, though, that even though their music has been heard most often through phone and laptop speakers, Måneskin sounds better on a soccer field. That is what tens of thousands of fans came to the Stadio Olimpico on an eyelid-scorching Thursday to experience: the culturally-if-not-personally-familiar commodity of a stadium rock show, delivered by the unprecedented phenomenon of a stadium-level Italian rock band. The pyro — 20-foot jets of swivel-articulated flame that you could feel all the way up in the mezzanine — kicked in on “Gasoline,” a song Måneskin wrote to protest Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. From a thrust platform in the center of the field, David poured his full emotive powers into the pre-chorus: “Standing alone on that hill/using your fuel to kill/we won’t take it standing still/watch us dance.”

The effect these words will have on President Putin is unknown. They capture something, though, about rock ’n’ roll, which has established certain conventions over the last seven decades. One of those conventions is an atmosphere of rebellion. It doesn’t have to be real — you probably don’t even want it to be — but neither can it seem too contrived, because the defining constraint of rock as a genre is that you have to feel it. The successful rock song creates in listeners the sensation of defying consensus, even if they are right in step with it.

The need to feel the rock may explain the documented problem of fans’ taste becoming frozen in whatever era was happening when they were between the ages of 15 and 25. Anyone who adolesced after Spotify, however, did not grow up with rock as an organically developing form and is likely to have experienced the whole catalog simultaneously, listening to Led Zeppelin at the same time they listened to Pixies and Franz Ferdinand — i.e. as a genre rather than as particular artists, the way my generation (I’m 46) experienced jazz. The members of Måneskin belong to this post-Spotify cohort. As the youngest and most prominent custodians of the rock tradition, their job is to sell new, guitar-driven songs of 100 to 150 beats per minute to a larger and larger audience, many of whom are young people who primarily think of such music as a historical artifact. Starting this month, Måneskin will take this business on a multivenue tour of the United States — a market where they are considerably less known — whose first stop is Madison Square Garden.

“I think the genre thing is like ... ” Torchio said to me backstage in Rome, making a gesture that conveyed translingual complexity. “We can do a metaphor: If you eat fish, meat and peanuts every day, like for years, and then you discover potatoes one day, you’ll be like: ‘Wow, potatoes! I like potatoes; potatoes are great.’ But potatoes have been there the whole time.” Rock was the potato in this metaphor, and he seemed to be saying that even though many people were just now discovering that they liked it, it had actually been around for a long time. It was a revealing analogy: The implication was that rock, like the potato, is here to stay; but what if rock is, like the potato in our age of abundance, comparatively bland and no longer anyone’s favorite?

Which rock song came first is a topic of disagreement, but one strong candidate is “Rocket 88,” recorded by Ike Turner and his Kings of Rhythym band in 1951. It’s about a car and, in its final verse, about drinking in the car. These themes capture the context in which rock ’n’ roll emerged: a period when household incomes, availability of consumer goods and the share of Americans experiencing adolescence all increased simultaneously.

Although and possibly because rock started as Black music, it found a gigantic audience of white teenagers during the so-called British Invasion of the mid-1960s (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who), which made it the dominant form of pop music for the next two decades. The stadium/progressive era (Journey, Fleetwood Mac, Foreigner) that now constitutes the bulk of classic-rock radio gave way, eventually, to punk (the Ramones, Patti Smith, Minor Threat) and then glam metal: Twisted Sister, Guns N’ Roses and various other hair-intensive bands that were obliterated by the success of Nirvana and Pearl Jam in 1991. This shift can be understood as the ultimate triumph of punk, both in its return to emotive content expressed through simpler arrangements and in its professed hostility toward the music industry itself. After 1991, suspicion of anything resembling pop became a mark of seriousness among both rock critics and fans.

It is probably not a coincidence that this period is also when rock’s cultural hegemony began to wane. As the ’90s progressed, larger and again whiter audiences embraced hip-hop, and the last song classified as “rock” to reach No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 was Nickelback’s “How You Remind Me” in 2001. The run of bands that became popular during the ’00s — the Strokes, the Killers, Kings of Leon — constituted rock’s last great commercial gasp, but none of their singles charted higher than No. 4. Let us say, then, that the era of rock as pop music lasted from 1951 to 2011. That’s a three-generation run, if you take seriously rock’s advice to get drunk and have sex in the car and therefore produce children at around age 20. Baby boomers were the generation that made rock a zillion-dollar industry; Gen X saved it from that industry with punk and indie, and millennials closed it all out playing Guitar Hero.

The members of Måneskin are between the ages of 22 and 24, situating them firmly within the cadre of people who understand rock in the past tense. De Angelis, the bassist, and Raggi, the guitarist, formed the band when they were both attending a music-oriented middle school; David was a friend of friends, while Torchio was the only person who responded to their Facebook ad seeking a drummer. There are few entry-level rock venues in Rome, so they started by busking on the streets. In 2017, they entered the cattle-call audition for the Italian version of “The X Factor.” They eventually finished as runners-up to the balladeer Lorenzo Licitra, and an EP of songs they performed on the show was released by Sony Music and went triple platinum.

In 2021, Måneskin won the Sanremo Music Festival, earning the right to represent Italy with their song “Zitti e Buoni” (whose title roughly translates to “shut up and behave”) in that year’s Eurovision Song Contest. This program is not widely viewed in the United States, but it is a gigantic deal in Europe, and Måneskin won. Not long after, they began to appear on international singles charts, and “I Wanna Be Your Slave” broke the British Top 10. A European tour followed, as well as U.S. appearances at festivals and historic venues.

This ascent to stardom was not unmarred by controversy. The Eurovison live broadcast caught David bending over a table offstage, and members of the media accused him of snorting cocaine. David insisted he was innocent and took a drug test, which he passed, but Måneskin and their management still seem indignant about the whole affair. It’s exactly this kind of incongruous detail — this damaging rumor that a rock star did cocaine — that highlights how the Italian music-consuming public differs from the American one. Many elements of Måneskin’s presentation, like the cross-dressing and the occasional male-on-male kiss, are genuinely upsetting to older Italians, even as they seem familiar or even hackneyed to audiences in the United States.

“They see a band of young, good-looking guys that are dressing up too much, and then it’s not pure rock ’n’ roll, because you’re not in a garage, looking ugly,” De Angelis says. “The more conservative side, they’re shocked because of how we dress or move onstage, or the boys wear makeup.”

She and her bandmates are caught between two demographics: the relatively conservative European audience that made them famous and the more tolerant if not downright desensitized American audience that they must impress to keep the ride moving. And they do have to keep it moving, because — like many rock stars before them — most of the band dropped out of high school to do this. At one point, Raggi told me that he had sat in on some classes at a university, “Just to try to understand, ‘What is that?’”

One question that emerged early in my discussions with Måneskin’s friendly and professional management team was whether I was going to say that their music was bad. This concern seemed related to the aforementioned viral Pitchfork review, in which the editor Jeremy Larson wrote that their new album, “RUSH!” sounds “like it’s made for introducing the all-new Ford F-150” and “seems to be optimized for getting busy in a Buffalo Wild Wings bathroom” en route to a score of 2.0 (out of 10). While the members of Måneskin seemed to take this review philosophically, their press liaisons were concerned that I was coming to Italy to have a similar type of fun.

Here I should disclose that Larson edited an essay I wrote for Pitchfork about the Talking Heads album “Remain in Light” (score: 10.0) and that I think of myself as his friend. Possibly because of these biases, I read his review as reflecting his deeply held and, among rock fans, widely shared need to feel the music, something that the many pop/commercial elements of “RUSH!” (e.g. familiar song structures, lyrics that seem to have emerged from a collaboration between Google Translate and Nikki Sixx, compulsive use of multiband compression) left him unable to do.

This perspective reflects the post-’90s rock consensus (PNRC) that anything that sounds too much like a mass-market product is no good. The PNRC is premised on the idea that rock is not just a structure of song but also a structure of relationship between the band and society. From rock’s earliest days as Black music, the real or perceived opposition between rocker and society has been central to its appeal; this adversarial relationship animated the youth and counterculture eras of the ’60s and then, when the economic dominance of mass-market rock made it impossible to believe in, provoked the revitalizing backlash of punk. Even major labels felt obliged to play into this paradoxical worldview, e.g. that period after Nirvana when the most popular genre of music was called “alternative.” Måneskin, however, are defined by their isolation from the PNRC. They play rock music, but operate according to the logic of pop.

In Milan, where Måneskin would finish their Italian minitour, I had lunch with the band, as well as two of their managers, Marica Casalinuovo and Fabrizio Ferraguzzo. Casalinuovo had been an executive producer working on “The X Factor,” and Ferraguzzo was its musical director; around the time that Måneskin broke through, Casalinuovo and Ferraguzzo left the show and began working with the stars it had made. We were at the in-house restaurant of Moysa, the combination recording studio, soundstage, rehearsal space, offices, party venue and “creative playground” that Ferraguzzo opened two months earlier. After clarifying that he was in no way criticizing major record labels and the many vendors they engaged to record, promote and distribute albums, he laid out his vision for Moysa, a place where all those functions were performed by a single corporate entity — basically describing the concept of vertical integration.

Ferraguzzo oversaw the recording of “RUSH!” along with a group of producers that included Max Martin, the Swedish hitmaker best known for his work with Backstreet Boys and Britney Spears. At Moysa, Ferraguzzo played for me Måneskin’s then-unreleased new single, “Honey (Are U Coming?)” which features many of the band’s signature moves — guitar and bass playing the same melodic phrases at the same time, unswung boogie-type rhythm of the post-Strokes style — but also has David singing in a higher register than usual. I listened to it first on studio monitors and then through the speaker of Ferraguzzo’s phone, and it sounded clean and well produced both times, as if a team of industry veterans with unlimited access to espresso had come together to perfect it.

The sheer number of older and more experienced professionals involved in Måneskin introduces a tension between the rock conventions that characterize their songwriting and the fundamentally pop circumstances under which those songs are produced. They are four friends in a band, but that band is inside an enormous machine. From their perspective, though, the machine is good.

“There’s hundreds of people working and talking about you and giving opinions,” De Angelis said at lunch. “So if you start to get in this loop of wanting to know and control and being anxious about it, it really ruins everything.” Here lies the conflict between what the PNRC wants from a band — resistance to outside influences, contempt for commerce, authenticity as measured in doing everything themselves — and what any sane 23-year-old would want, which is to have someone with an M.B.A. make all the decisions so she can concentrate on playing bass.

The other way Måneskin is isolated from the PNRC is geographic. Over the course of lunch, it became clear that they had encyclopedic knowledge of certain eras in American rock history but were only dimly aware of others. Raggi, for instance, loves Motley Crüe and has an album-by-album command of the Los Angeles hair-metal band Skid Row, which he and his bandmates seemed to understand were supposed to be guilty pleasures. But none of them had ever heard of Fugazi, the post-hardcore band whose hatred of major labels, refusal to sell merchandise and commitment to keeping ticket prices as low as possible set the standard for a generation of American rock snobs. In general, Måneskin’s timeline of influences seems to break off around 1990, when the rock most respected by Anglophone critics was produced by independent labels that did not have strong overseas distribution. It picks up again with Franz Ferdinand and the “emo” era of mainstream pop rock. This retrospect leaves them unaware of the indie/punk/D.I.Y. period that was probably most important in forming the PNRC.

The question is whether that consensus still matters. While snobs like Larson and me are overrepresented in journalism, we never constituted a majority of rock fans. That’s the whole point of being a snob. And snobbery is obsolete anyway; digital distribution ended the correlation between how obscure your favorite band was and how much effort you put into listening to them. The longevity of rock ’n’ roll as a genre, meanwhile, has solidified a core audience that is now between the ages of 40 and 80, rendering the fan-versus-society dimension of the PNRC impossible to believe. And the economics of the industry — in which streaming has reduced the profit margin on recorded music, and the closure of small venues has made stadiums and big auditoriums the only reliable way to make money on tour — have decimated the indie model. All these forces have converged to make rock, for the first time in its history, merely a way of writing songs instead of a way of life.

Yet rock as a cluster of signifiers retains its power around the world. In the same way everyone knows what a castle is and what it signifies, even though actual castles are no longer a meaningful force in our lives, rock remains a shared language of cultural expression even though it is no longer determining our friendships, turning children against their parents, yelling truth at power, et cetera. Also like a castle, a lot of people will pay good money to see a preserved historical example of rock or even a convincing replica of it, especially in Europe.

In Milan, the temperature had dropped 20 degrees, and Måneskin’s show at Stadio Giuseppe Meazza — commonly known as San Siro, the largest stadium in Italy, sold out that night at 60,000 — was threatened by thunderstorms instead of record-breaking heat. Fans remained undaunted: Many camped in the parking lot the night before in order to be among the first to enter the stadium. One of them was Tamara, an American who reported her age as 60½ and said she had skipped a reservation to see da Vinci’s “Last Supper” in order to stay in line. “When you get to knocking on the door, you kind of want to do what you want,” she said.

The threat of rain was made good at pretty much the exact moment the show began. The sea of black T-shirts on the pitch became a field of multicolored ponchos, and raindrops were bouncing visibly off the surface of the stage. David lost his footing near the end of “I Wanna Be Your Slave,” briefly rolling to his back, while De Angelis — who is very good at making lips-parted-in-ecstasy-type rock faces — played with her eyes turned upward to the flashing sky, like a martyr.

The rain stopped in time for “Kool Kids,” a punk-inspired song in which David affects a Cockney accent to sing about the vexed cultural position of rock ’n’ roll: “Cool kids, they do not like rock/they only listen to trap and pop.” These are probably the Måneskin lyrics most quoted by music journalists, although they should probably be taken with a grain of salt, considering that the song also contains lyrics like “I like doin’ things I love, yeah” and “Cool kids, they do not vomit.”

“Kool Kids” was the last song before the encore, and each night a few dozen good-looking 20-somethings were released onto the stage to dance and then, as the band walked off, to make we’re-not-worthy bows around Raggi’s abandoned guitar. The whole thing looked at least semichoreographed, but management assured me that the Kool Kids were not professional dancers — just enthusiastic fans who had been asked if they wanted to be part of the show. I kept trying to meet the person in charge of wrangling these Kool Kids, and there kept being new reasons that was not possible.

The regular kids, on the other hand, were available and friendly throughout. In Rome, Dorca and Sara, two young members of a Måneskin fan club, saw my notebook and shot right over to tell me they loved the band because, as Sara put it, “they allow you to be yourself.” When asked whether they felt their culture was conservative in ways that prevented them from being themselves, Dorca — who was 21 and wearing eyeglasses that looked like part of her daily wardrobe and a mesh top that didn’t — said: “Maybe it turns out that you can be yourself. But you don’t know that at first. You feel like you can’t.”

Here lies the element of rock that functions independently from the economics of the industry or the shifting preferences of critics, the part that is maybe independent from time itself: the continually renewed experience of adolescence, of hearing and therefore feeling it all for the first time. But how disorienting must those feelings be when they have been fully monetized, fully sanctioned — when the response to your demand to rock ’n’ roll all night and party every day is, “Great, exactly, thank you.” In a culture where defying consensus is the dominant value, anything is possible except rebellion. It must be strange, in this post-everything century, to finally become yourself and discover that no one has any problem with that.

firstly, congrats on finishing She Said the Word!!! I've enjoyed it from start to finish and I've been reading it since almost the very beginning so it's been super fun to see it come to an end!!! Would you ever consider writing that "emotional" obi-wan and satine reunion after their respective stints in jail?? I can't find it at the moment but I feel like I remember you writing something about that??? :eyes emoji: anyway!! just thought I'd ask :)) hope you have a great day!!!

Thank you for this inspiration! And sorry it took a bit of time. I definitely had wanted to include this scene in the story itself, but sometimes you have to leave stuff out for the sake of pacing and mood. So, essentially, it’s a “deleted scene” (even if I wrote it after the fact).

If anyone else wants to offer up a prompt, either from this AU or one more aligning with canon, just send it my way! I will admit, I am not always fabulous with prompts, but if I think I can wrangle it, I will.

This contains spoilers up through chapter 65, Aftermath, of “She Said the Word,” so I will put the story below the break. Hope you enjoy!

Home

Any other time, it would seem like a fairly normal visit, Satine thought as she was bustled through the Senate building, surrounded by Coruscanti Guard. But this time the guards weren’t protecting her; they were guarding her, like some criminal mastermind or fearsome warlord.

In a strange way, Satine thought wryly to herself, she supposed she was some sort of warlord now.

 Beside Satine rushed her longtime aide, Kayla, who had finally bullied her way onto a transport from Mandalore, bringing with her endless apologies on Lily getting away from her, clothes appropriate for the family to wear in the Senate, and news from home, which she now hurriedly half whispered to Satine in an odd mix of Mando'a dialects in case of eavesdroppers. The petite woman had more than made up for Lily's escape, though Satine hardly blamed her for the girl's delinquency. Somehow, through sheer force of determination and grit, Kayla had kept the government from imploding or following its duchess and Mand'alor into a foolhardy rescue attempt. 

The troopers stopped at a door, and Satine had to reach out and grab Kayla's arm to keep her from running straight into the trooper, distracted as she was as she shared nearly two weeks' worth of news and relayed, from memory, messages from clan leaders and house heads. 

The door slid open, and troopers moved to allow Satine to pass. Kayla went to follow, but was stopped. "Prisoners only."

Kayla pushed against the soldier. "But I need to speak with the Duchess. I have more news to-" 

"Prisoners only," he said again, stepping more solidly in her path. She looked up at Satine, who had stopped beside her.

"Your grace…"

"It will be alright, Kayla. You have done good work thus far, and I have no doubt you will continue to do so." She squeezed the woman's hand when she saw her eyes well with tears. "K'oyacyi, my dear friend. Mandalore will persevere. We will persevere."

Kayla pressed her lips together, clearly willing herself from letting her tears fall. She squeezed Satine's hand then bowed her head. "Yes, your grace. Oya manda," she whispered, then stepped back, letting the party cross the threshold into the room beyond.

Satine crossed through the antechamber of the conference room turned holding cell and stopped short in the archway, relief sweeping over her at the sight in front of her. Korkie and Ahsoka sat in a corner, heads close together, speaking in hushed tones, while Anakin stood near the floor to ceiling window, speaking with Fenn Rau, Greer Eldar, and Ursa Wren. At the expansive table sat Obi-Wan, methodically fixing tea for he and Lily, who sat beside him, watching him work.

At some point in her relationship with Qui-Gon Jinn, probably on one of her many heartsick nights, her mind clouded and stormy with grief and uncertainty, he had set about making them all tea, in his quiet, methodical way. He offhandedly mentioned that making tea could almost be a form of meditation. She knew Obi-Wan often thought about that, as did she. She wondered, as their daughter watched him carefully, if he had told her the same thing, to ease her fragile heart and still her frantic mind.

Satine watched them all quietly for a long moment, everyone too caught up in their own worries to notice her. That was fine. She wanted to take them all in for a heartbeat; her beautiful, strong children and her kind, brave husband. She just needed that beat to drink them in before the world crashed back down around her and she had to remember they were criminals in the mind of the Republic.

The moment paused for her, just enough, and then ended when Obi-Wan happened to glance up and caught sight of her standing there. His face passed from quiet contemplation to delighted surprise to joyous relief, and he leapt from his seat, bounding across the distance between them, and swept her into his arms. For the first time in over ten days, Satine felt like she was home. Though they were hundreds of lightyears from their physical home, locked in a conference room, treated like war criminals and treacherous beasts, this man was the living embodiment of home.

“Stars, Satine,” he breathed into her hair, and she was caught by the silly thought that she was glad Kayla had been unable to fit her normal headdress within her tight packing guidelines. “Master Windu told me time and time again that you were alright, but I’m just so glad to see it for myself.”

His arms were warm and strong, and she wished for him never to let go. She buried her head into the crook of his neck more, breathing deep. His skin smelled of the same industrial soap she had used to shower in the detention center, but the tunic Kayla had seen to him getting still held traces of the subtle warm scent of his preferred cologne. He smelled like home. 

She tried to speak, but found that no words would come, only a quiet sob of relief and fear and uncertainty that she hadn’t known she had been holding for days. “You are alright, aren’t you?” he whispered into her ear when her body trembled against him with the silent sob.

She didn’t trust her voice, so she merely nodded against his shoulder. “Good,” he said again, tightening his hold on her, rocking her gently. In turn, she wrapped her arms about his neck, holding onto him as if he could float away at any moment. 

She wasn't sure how much time passed as they stood like that, gently swaying, but he stirred her back to the present when he finally spoke again. "Everything will work out, my love. Be brave. Yes?"

She nodded against him again. "Yes," she agreed, finally managing to find her voice. She allowed herself to pull loose of his embrace, and found Lily standing beside her. She pulled the girl into her arms, hugging her tight, kissing the top of her head. "Are you well, little warrior?" she asked. Lily nodded, sinking into Satine's embrace.

"I missed you," Lily said. 

"And I missed you. But now we're together again." 

"All of us."

Satine looked up to find the other three had come over. She opened her arms and they entered the circle of her arms, trapping Lily against her. She hugged them all as best she could, her little warrior, her kind little jetii girl, and her two big Mando'ade boys. It wasn't just Obi-Wan who was home. This was home. These children. Her husband. Their love. This was her safe harbor. Her rest. Her joy.

Obi-Wan approached, and she felt the soothing weight of his warm hand against her back. "We must all be brave, now," he said softly. "There will be those who will see us fall, but we must be strong against them. Trust in the Force, my darlings. We will see this through."

Someone cleared their throat behind them, and Satine reluctantly let her children go. She turned, hand reaching out for Obi-Wan's and finding it, to find Bail Organa waiting, Padme brushing past him to come to Anakin. 

"It is time, my friends," he said, his voice somber. 

"Thank you, Bail," Obi-Wan said, straightening his back, as if preparing for a battle. Satine supposed that this was just one more battle for them. He looped her hand in the crook of his elbow, and went to lead their family toward the door, when Lily stopped them. 

Reaching up, the girl pushed a loose pin back into Satine's hair, trapping a wayward curl back where it belonged. She smoothed her hand across Satine's hair.

"That's better. Now you're ready," Lily said quietly, smiling softly. Satine kissed the top of her girl's forehead, running her hand through her long hair, left loose and brushed smooth by Padme. 

"Thank you, verd'ika. Now I am ready for anything."

With that, she allowed Obi-Wan to lead her out, holding her head high, ready to fight for her home.

Speak the Truth--not mine, sharing from the link

https://speakthetruthj2.weebly.com/intro--start-here.html

"What we’ll do for each other, how far we’ll go, they’re using that against us"Everything from this site has been taken from the wonderful Speak The Truth on Storify-- HERE

Do you know your J2 history? The story of Jensen and Jared is an epic one. It is at first deceptively simple. But with a wider view, this seemingly small story tells a much larger, more universal one. In that way, it's also an important one. It's one that spans a time of unique change in American culture as social media tools grew, TV became King, fandom ways were integrated into public lexicon, HW powerhouses rose and fell, and a new hope for true equality in Obama's America supplanted the country's long history of intolerance. It's one that showcases how the role of PR can build over time to consume all levels of actors lives, even two guys who first set out to avoid exactly that. It's one that reveals the widening sphere of PR with the advent of social media, celeb blogs, and online fandoms. Fans are no longer immune to being used by PR as tools in the role of creating an illusion and selling an image. Only together in one place do cracks in the veneer and patterns of PR tactics suddenly emerge as the larger picture focuses into sharp view. It's also a story that I hope one day can be told in full by the people who lived it instead of mere spectators who watched from the cheaper seats and speculated from afar. However, human interest pieces begin with a subject. So here it is. I've been a fan of this show for eight long years. As someone with a "librarian mind", I have saved and documented a lot throughout that time, as have others who have helped me along the way. Supernatural, the TV series, I believe, speaks for itself. 160+ episodes have been produced, aired, and immortalized on DVD. However the larger story that encompasses the show, the actors, the crew, the fans, the HW machine, and the subject of its time, remains hidden if not completely erased from documented fan history. Yet it is one that has enraptured many (even those who won't quite publicly admit it). I believe that counts for something. In other fandoms, I am indebted to other fans who came before me who archived events as they occurred for other fans like myself who came along later. As I leave Supernatural fandom for good, I worry that these details, as we observed them, may be lost. There will be other fans, of the show and of the Js, that will come after me. They should know how it went down all those years ago. This here is merely my small act of scrawling on the cave wall of the internet. As far as I know, there exists no complete record of what a J2 fan has experienced in all the years of the show. So what follows is a timeline summarizing the events of all eight years of Supernatural surrounding its two lead co-stars. It's meant to serve as an J2 archive or library, detailing each event with a date, info, pics, tweets, article, links, videos, and quotes. Most of the focus is on J2 and the players around them, but it will cover show changes and larger HW shakeups in later years as it becomes necessary. If a tiny splash of "Time Capsule" feel snuck in, it's because we all have our experiences and sometimes they feel worth telling. There has been an incredible erasure of fan/show history the last couple years, an act that is rather ironic in a fandom built on the concept of urban legends coming to life. In its wake are attempts to rewrite J2 history. There are some people that have worked very hard to make sure this story is as inaccessible as possible to others. They'd rather see it replaced by their own "revisionist" history that best serves their own interests. But this stuff happened. Records of it are out there. Fans experienced it. And in many cases, J2 or other people directly connected to them responded to it. Denying said part of J2 fan history is disingenuous. Believe what you want to believe in the space between, but events that happened have happened. I know some people will not be happy I have put this together. I struggled with the thought myself. Ultimately, I believe their story in between the lines and cracks of this cobbled together timeline is endlessly iconic. It's a story that shouldn't be lost in the dust of internet time. Because its not just them, even though their unique relationship is quite remarkable. It's that their story has something to tell us all. We all have something to learn in the space in between. You read through the cracks of eight years, follow along detail by detail, and it however small allows you to step in their shoes, no matter who you are, or what you originally thought. Just think, how scared does someone have to be, how many pressures must be put on someone from all angles, your advisers, your bosses, your family, your friends, to agree to these measures over time. When an erasure of a genuine human story happens, we all lose. We, ourselves, as a culture lose. Progress loses. (And what are we here for, if not for progress?) That erasure robs us of that example to learn and grow, improve and teach others. Because no one's life is just their own. We all have a part to play in each others' lives. We all have things we can teach and things we can learn. That's never been more true than the global age of the internet. Thus, as someone who has been in a unique position to watch a lot of these events unfold, I couldn't leave fandom in good conscience without leaving this footprint. They say history is written by the winners. Well, that was before the internet. So fair warning, I will use spn_g links in later years. It is impossible to do an exhaustive archive of J2 without it. Like it or not, it's part of J2 fan history and quite an archival resource when so many LJ links have since been deleted. Careful consideration has been given to the source. Priority is given to the most reliable information. Events (e.g. things we've seen with our own eyes pics, videos, quotes, tweets, etc) are all primary, and denoted by a header font and date. All anon ITK ("In-The-Know") info is considered secondary, and only becomes more or less probable depending on how it fits in with the overall timeline. Thus, some events with "more probable" secondhand information, are noted as an addendum by the phrase, "*rumorhasit:". Unsubstantiated gossip has been left out. This archive is done with the utmost respect for both parties. In a way, it is only in the details that the more real human context emerges. This is something lost in the day-to-day celeb gossip and fandom life. It's easier to make snap judgments about an image than about a fully fleshed out person. My hope is that in seeing the totality of their story, readers can find some form of compassion for the subjects at hand. I've taken great pains to make sure that the record that follows is all of public events only. If they've been released on the internet in a public place, and talked about by fans, they are included here. I've written this in a way that I hope can be a resource for all, both for J2 fans who lived it and those who have yet to make sense of the whole story. In the act of putting this together, even I have learned details that I had forgotten or missed. It's almost a decade of details, it's a lot to keep straight, but I hope that in this timeline format, the clearer picture emerges. If it's the first time you're reading this, just take it in stride. But if you're a fan who lived all of this once already, pay special attention to the timing of events and larger patterns. Watch how appearances and big personal news tend to go together with big professional news like movie casting and season renewals. Notice how players like publicists and managers fit into the story along side girlfriends and fiancees and wives. This is how this industry functions, even with a fledgling show on a netlet. It's in this industry that two guys who initially claimed privacy start indulging fans with stories of their personal life. It's in this climate that a TV show built on two actors' chemistry suddenly tampers said chemistry down to nothing in the middle of its seventh season. There are many threads that pop up here, partly why this story is such an important one. Some things are rarely as they appeared at first glance. Other things are exactly how they appeared at first glance. Decide on your own which ones are which. One can look at this as an archive with two distinct parts. The first four years are more a tribute to the little glimpse we got of two guys with an instant bond that captured us all. The next four years are more a testament to how despite an actor's best intentions, HW can still grab you by the shirt collar and suck you dry. Never forget where the real power of any show lies. Not with the people whose creative work you watch every week. It's those at the top. And they are not as "tolerant" or "liberal" as people might like you to believe. The story of J2 is an epic one, but that's not the only reason why it's important. They're also not the first or last to deal with these extreme machinations. As we proceed into 2013, we are reminded over and over again how much our culture has changed since 2005. Since 2008. Even since 2011. How much longer will it take for HW to catch up with the rest of us? I'm indebted to all the fans who helped me in amassing this record, adding their contributions, holding my hand, listening to my complaints, and overall sharing in the J2/Supernatural obsession for good times and bad. This has been simultaneously the easiest and hardest show to be a fan of. But it would have been impossible to follow for eight years if not for the community of amazing people that I shared it with. Some of them may not understand this, many of them will probably not even read this, but I hope that they still know my thanks and appreciation. Schmaultz aside, we've got 8 years of history to get to! So without further ado!

Draft for "Chef's Kiss"

Chapter 1: Meetings

"There you go! All you have to do know is create a screen name and, well, you know the rest," Wylla said as she returned Arya's cell phone.

Arya looked down at her phone to see the anonymous dating app appear on the screen. After months of tireless working through countless renovations, Wylla, her business parter, thought it was high time that Arya actually had a life outside of their restaurant. Arya, on the other hand, groaned at the thought of another dating app. The last thing she needed was another slew of messages from guys only interested in hook ups or nudes. Men who only saw her picture and made a judgement about whether she was worth the effort.

"The Raven app is so different," Wylla said as they sat in their newly painted kitchens. The restaurant was on the eve of reopening after a fire so they celebrated with wine bottles and a box of doughnuts from the disgustingly hipster Americana, but admittedly delicious, Hot Pie's American Bakery down the street.

Arya rolled her eyes as she sipped from her wine glass. "How different can it be from any other lame dating app?"

Wylla sighed with the expected amount of drama. "My god! Can you just create a screen name already? You'll see. This app is special because you connect based on interests and age range, but there's no photos, no specifics like careers or names, unless users choose to give that information."

Arya raised her eyebrows. "So it's mostly just chatting?"

"Exactly!"

Though Arya felt skeptical, she had been rather lonely in the past year. It's not that she didn't have a wealth of friends or family. Those she had no lack of. However, she'd been single for nearly two years since she broke it up with her ex, Daenerys. Since then, Arya had focused on work. And with the kitchen fire that nearly took over her family's White Harbor landmark sea restaurant, The Nymeria, it only made even more sense for Arya to devote her time renovating the place. Though her parents may have wanted to sell the place after the fire, Arya insisted that she and her best friend, Wylla, could keep the tradition alive. Other restaurants along the harbor would come and go, but The Nymeria was a city institution.

So, Arya relented. Wylla hooted after Arya broke down to her friend's wishes and said, "Fine. I'll make one. I think my screen name will be, um, 'titansdaughter95.'"

"You're gonna get dates in no time," Wylla said as Arya continued to fill out her profile with the information necessary to pair her up with other chatters.

What were Arya's interests? She mused on that very question. Arya Stark enjoyed cooking, sports, theater and films, cats and dogs (as backed up by the pets in her townhouse), fencing, sailing, hiking, and weaponry. Arya figured that list would be enough to sort her out with some chatters. In time.

-----

As The Nymeria finally reopened for business, Arya totally forgot the Raven app. She didn't even bother to see if there were any notifications. Indeed, she was far too busy. Wylla Manderly, the beautiful green-haired influencer and former publicist, was able to gather a great deal of buzz over the restaurant's return to the wharf. In the brief moments Arya was able to spare from the kitchen, she would check up on social media to see if the city shared her excitement for the return of the The Nymeria. Of course, Arya felt elated when The White Harbor Gate published a glowing article on the restaurant's grand reopening on Instagram. All the replies and comments to the article shared the same enthusiasm. Except for one. From a user with the handle of 'willow.h'.

Willow.H: Yawn. How come the only restaurants ever highlighted are these boring standard places owned by the same rich Northern families? You know, there are other chefs and places to eat! Steel and Fire is opening their second location on the Wharf this week too! But I haven't seen one single article about it on this page! The bias is pretty gross if you ask me :/

The comment had 40 likes. Arya felt a mixture of nausea and anger. She wanted to reply to this Willow. H. Yes, The Nymeria was a legacy restaurant, but it was far from boring. Arya had done all she could to fuse the traditional northern sea cuisine with all the culinary training she earned while studying in Braavos' famed House of Black and White Culinary Academy. Her menu was far from standard or boring! Even the critic, Jaqen H'ghar, had written a rave review of The Nymeria. Arya did not think the critique was fair. Quite the contrary, she thought this user and those who liked her article were biased against her without any cause. How was it any fault of hers if this other restaurant, Steel and Fire, did not get the same attention? Arya desperately wanted to speak out against the comment, but she decided to let it go. There were more pressing matters at hand. For one, the restaurant's opening night.

The reopening went as seamless as one could possibly imagine. The house was packed and the food was delicious according to all the guests including various culinary critics and journalists. Though White Harbor was a sizeable city by the sea, it certainly felt like the entire city was at The Nymeria. But most important to Arya, the whole Stark retinue was also attendance. Even Sansa and her new husband, Petyr. Though their addition to the party made for an awkward family table given how Petyr went to college with their parents.

Arya wanted to be as happy as Wylla was about the night's success, but she mostly felt exhausted.

"You did a good job, Arya Underfoot," Arya's father, Ned, said as he embraced her at the end of the night when all the guests had long gone.

Arya breathed in his pine scent. "Thanks, dad," She said when she reluctantly pulled away from the embrace in order to move towards her mother, Catelyn.

Catelyn looked radiant in her fur lined coat. Always elegant and beautiful, her mother. She smiled and pulled Arya into a short hug. "I agree with your father. The Nymeria is quite reinvented with you at the helm. And though the food isn't really my taste, a little too spicy, I did immensely enjoy the dishes."

Years ago, Arya would have felt slighted by the mixed compliment from her mother, but now she decided to take it in stride. She was content with the reopening and that's all that mattered.

When Arya opened the door to her townhouse, she felt so exhausted that she collapsed right on her couch while her old cat, Salem, jumped up to sit on her feet. A part of Arya wanted to sleep into the next year, but she also still felt the night's exhilaration. Instead of getting ready for bed, she glanced at a phone. There was a new notification from the Raven app. Usually, Arya cleared those notifications right away. She was too busy to spend her time chatting. But, this time was different. Even if it was nearly three in the morning, Arya was far too excited to sleep. Maybe chatting would not be so bad.

There were a handful of messages on the app's notifications page. A few were lame pick up lines or inquiries for nudes, so Arya ignored them. However, the latest message did intrigue her.

HammerTime92: What kind of food do you cook?

Arya smiled.

Titansdaughter: A little of everything. Mostly Northern and Braavosi food. Do you cook?

HammerTime92: I grill some, chop some. Does that count?

Titansdaughter: I'd say so. Do you have a signature dish?

HammerTime92: Steak is my speciality. Southern style, though. What about you?

Titansdaughter: Clams and cockles!

HammerTime92: Don't tell me you go around shouting that.

Titansdaughter: Only when I'm planning to distract people while I go on hit jobs.

HammerTime92: I know there's no personal specifics on this app, but I got to say...that sounds pretty cool if you are an assassin.

Titansdaughter: Damn. I knew I should've changed my user name to LicenseToKill.

Arya smiled. HammerTime92 wasn't such a bad user to chat with. Even if it was so late she had to wonder if the chatter wasn't a complete weirdo.

------

A lack of sleep was not unusual for Arya. When the sun creeped through the windows of her home, Arya was up and ready to go help Wylla and the rest of the crew prep for the day.

Running the restaurant was long and hard, but Arya loved it all the same. In between prepping the menu, the ingredients, and cleaning up, she never felt more alive.

Arya was sweeping when Wylla came along her side. "Hey, let's take a break from this place. We can go out to lunch. Something that isn't from our kitchens for once. Come on. It'll be good to walk around. See some of the other stuff on the wharf. I saw on my feed that a new steak place opened up down the way. We could check it out."

Though Arya couldn't see what was wrong from eating lunch in the restaurant, she did agree with Wylla that it might do some good to get some fresh air outside of The Nymeria.

Arya loved White Habor's wharf. As one walked along, there were tons of shops and restaurants and views of the sea for miles. Arya admired them and took in the salty fresh air as Wylla led them to their destination: Steel and Fire.

Arya blinked. This was the restaurant mentioned by Willow.H in negative comment she had read on Instagram.

The sign was minimalist and forged from steel. Arya had to admit the place was sleek in it's simplicity and homages to a long gone industrial era just by judging what she could through the restaurant's windows.

"How cool is it? My friends went to eat the first location in the Saltpans. They rave about it so much," Wylla said as she dragged Arya into the restaurant.

She had to admit, the place seemed rather busy for lunch hour. "Is there a hostess, or---" Wylla said as she and Arya stood by the door.

A man was cooking on a long grill that was surrounded by a long bar around its perimeters. He answered Wylla loudly over the restaurant's chatter. His voice was deep, gruff, and perfectly understood. "Sit anywhere! Hell, sit right here," the man said as he pointed with a cleaver at the two available bar seats in front of where he was dicing up some ingredients.

Unperturbed, Arya and Wylla made their way over to the two bar seats. A server hastily gave the pair of them some menus and hurried off to deliver a dish to some other diners.

Arya looked at the menu. The selections were not typical for a steak house in the north, so Arya was intrigued. When she picked her head up to look at the grill, she thought she saw the cook in front of her staring at her but he looked away at once.

No, Arya, thought. He wouldn't look at me. Not when I smell like seafood and my clothes are filthy from restaurant prep.

kindred spirits | bts fluff

summary/excerpt: There’s a new contemporary art exhibit at the gallery you conduct tours at and despite an overwhelming dislike from your group, one man makes his liking for the art–and you–very noticeable.

pairing: artsy!namjoon x reader

warnings: a lot of heart-wrenching fluff

word count: ~2900

notes: This is inspired by namjoon’s trip to the Coarse exhibition/gallery in LA but is imagined to take place in a gallery similar in setting to the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, CA, USA. All artist names and artworks in here are parody names of real artists and artworks for fun. All art is linked though so you can see it as you read.

And thank you to @otsevenstyle for igniting my love of writing this stuff again !!

You’d spent weeks preparing for The Human Torch traveling show to come to your museum and his Contemporary masterpieces were finally being hung and set-up right in front of you. You could feel the excitement well-up inside of you as you anticipated the first tour of the day at noon. It was always thrilling to show off an exhibition to groups that paid a pretty penny to hear you talk about it. Sure, it took a lot of work to learn the artist’s inspiration and story behind the works, but the weeks of preparation were always worth it when you saw at least one gaze of amazement when one of your speeches hit home with a participant in the tour.

But something was bugging you that couldn’t be avoided. In a majority Expressionist and Impressionist museum, people on tours were often impatient when they came across Contemporary works in the east wing. While you were always excited for new shows, there was dread that did come with Contemporary pieces. Sometimes it was difficult to get that glimmer of amazement from museum-goers when completely abstract and sometimes controversial pieces were presented to them. The Human Torch exhibition was all of those.

But noon came early and you had to tuck away those bothersome thoughts to focus on the group of fresh faces in front of you. You walked in your flats–that was a requirement since heels were far too noisy–from the lounge on the hidden third-floor to the front desk on the first where your group would meet you. It was five minutes to noon and most of the time, none of the group would be ready–everyone always seemed to be late. But this time, there was a boy in dark-rimmed glasses checking in. 

“I’m here for the tour at noon,” he whispered to the secretary at the front desk. She quickly checked him in and motioned to you who had just taken a seat at the front desk.

“She will be your tour guide for today–she’s one of our very best.”

You blushed at the secretary’s comments and thanked her. It paid off that you two were friends and had drinks every couple of weeks together. Because of that, she usually pumped your tires to guests. But it also wasn’t a lie, even the most disinterested museum-goer could notice your passion and understanding of art.

“It’s nice to meet you,” the man said, extending his hand out to you. ‘What a formality,” you thought. “I’m Namjoon.”

You smiled, shaking his hand, “I’m Y/N, but you can call me ‘art snob’ for short. One of my previous tourers said that to me, so I thought I’d wear it rather proudly.”

The man laughed, but still tried to keep his voice down, to which you assured him no one could hear either of you inside the gallery. “So I take it your job can be rather hard sometimes?”

You shrugged, “It’s neither here nor there,” you admitted. “When you’re surrounded by art, you can’t really complain.” 

“Well from what I can see, the art is rather gorgeous here,” he smirked, his dimple making itself rather obvious. ‘That shit ought to be illegal,’ you thought–it was a great look on him.

“It is isn’t it!” You smiled, “I’m a big sucker for Impressionism and Expressionism myself, so you can imagine my heart eyes when I see this stuff.” The man laughed, looking down at the front desk. He sighed to himself quickly as if something bad had happened. You turned around to see if someone behind you had taken a nasty fall or if there was any crooked paintings or fallen sculptures. But there was no art there. No art at all. 

‘How would he have known how beautiful the art is here?’ you asked yourself.  “How did you hear about us?” You asked him quickly.

“Oh,” he said raising his head, “I’m new in town and saw it on my taxi ride from the airport. The architecture of this place is amazing in itself, so I knew I had to stop by.”

You asked yourself the same question as before in your head again. “So I’m sure you went to your place and looked us up eagerly,” you added.

“Actually, I didn’t want to spoil anything for myself, so I just came in as soon as I could.”

You smiled but mentally smiled to yourself even more. ‘This sap called me the artwork’. Never heard that one before.’ You rolled your eyes and frankly, didn’t care if he noticed. His comment was tacky in the least, but at least he wasn’t horribly out of place like most men that came here and hit on you did. There were only a small handful of men who had done so and all didn’t seem to know a lick about art. And as far as you knew, Namjoon could be just like them–but at least he looked the part. The glasses, the floral patterned blousy button-up, the bleached hair: he was the whole nine yards.

You really didn’t think you found him immediately attractive or charming and to die for, but you noticed you were rather disgruntled when an elderly couple that had just arrived, who was also on the tour, pulled you away.

“Is it true you have Edgar Degrassi’s paintings of ballerinas on display here?” the woman asked. Her husband laughed heartily, confessing his wife was once a ballerina.

You laughed, “Well now I can’t go ruining the surprise now can I?”

It was 12:06 when the last member of the tour group burst in, sweating. He was one minute late but tagged onto the group as you led the now group of seven to the gallery.

The first room was decorated with early Impressionist works. It was the real grassroots of the movement. You could see heavy defined brush strokes, but each artist was obviously leery of breaking from the form of realistic painting that had been so tightly held onto since the Renaissance. You gave your speech, pointed out a few key paintings (since sculptures at this time were few and far between) and let the group disband for fifteen minutes and explore the paintings on their own. 

This part of the gallery was old hat to you. You’d run over this section more times than you could count in the couple years you’d been there. Old pieces had moved out and new ones had moved into their place but the story remained almost the same for many. French painters were inspired by the Realism movement and started painting more abstractly with softer and gentler colors to contrast Realism, yadda yadda yadda. So it was at this time that you usually observed your guests the closest to see how they’d react the rest of the tour. The man who was late looked completely disinterested. The family of three looked worn out. The father was interested and the mother was trying to get her 11-year-old daughter to appreciate the history of the art. The elderly couple was anxiously awaiting the Degrassi section, glazing over the plaques by each painting and stood too close the artworks. Security guards had to tell them to step back several times.

Then there was Namjoon. He had strong shoulders that would conceal most of the painting he was looking at. ‘I would hate to browse a gallery with him in the way,’ you thought. He looked strong, but he was slender, almost like he’d come straight out of a Mannerism painting, minus all the awkward parts like in Long Neck Madonna. He rested his fingers on his lips as he leaned forward and read each plaque before stepping back and admiring the painting. He’d tilt his head sometimes. He looked the most interested of them all. You sighed deeply, his thoughtfulness was a hard trait to find in people. A hard trait to find in men. 

While it was fun to watch Namjoon observe the paintings, you had to reassemble the group and lead them to the next room. The 11-year-old had started to whimper and hint at a tantrum oncoming. The elderly couple kept asking about the ballerinas.

The next room was the ballerinas. It was Impressionism at its height. Because of the broad topic, it was split into several small subsections with walls dividing up artworks by major themes. You giggled, watching the elderly couple reminisce about the good old days when the man met the woman at one of her performances. You swooned at the thought of falling in love with someone over art.

“Excuse me,” you heard from over your shoulder.

“Hmm?” You turned to see Namjoon standing there. He smiled, asking about a specific painting in the other room. You followed him over to the painting: Arrival of the French Train by Claude Bonnet. “This my favorite permanent piece in this gallery,” you muttered.

“I really love this one as well, can you tell me about it?”

“Of course. Bonnet is known for his landscapes but before that, he was into urban scenes, like many Impressionists are. He did several versions of this scene to capture the changing atmosphere–as he was known for. There’s something I love about him moving on to landscapes after this. It’s almost as if industrialization had bored him and he went to look into the simpler things in life.”

You looked at the less than 2-foot by 3-foot painting with wonder as you spoke, but Namjoon didn’t. He was wrapped up in you. You turned to him after your schpiel to see him with his head tilted and his eyes smiling along with his mouth.

“I agree,” he said in a breathy tone, trying to keep his voice down. His voice sounded soft like his silk button-down top. “The earthy tones really tie into that don’t you think?” You didn’t even turn to look at the image but nodded in agreeance. To be fair, you’d seen this painting a million times over. “And the smoke, it looks like clouds.”

It was hitting you all at once. You couldn’t tell if you were whipped over only Namjoon’s knowledge and thoughts, but suddenly he was looking very handsome. It had only been just under an hour and you felt like you were going to lose your mind. ‘I have to focus,’ you thought, ‘I’m here for art’. 

“Y-yes,” you stammered quickly, “I think that is also a nod to dreams and following dreams? Clouds usually are associated with dreams so...” You got nervous and lost your train of thought. 

“And industrialization takes away from that. Maybe Bonnet thought man was too interested in building bigger better machines than looking within the natural world for their own aspirations.” 

You smiled, “That was well articulated Namjoon.”

He blushed, covering his mouth to hide his smile, “Well, I try. You’re very knowledgeable about art so I can’t let you down now can I?”

“It’s about the art, not me,” you quipped before leaving to assemble the group as the fifteen minutes were up. Your head felt heavy and dizzy. It was official, no man had ever had a conversation about art like that with you. He made you nervous–very nervous.

The next few rooms were a blur. You wound up interfering with the viewing of many paintings by trying to make small talk with the other members of the group, but they weren’t having any of it. The elderly couple grew disinterested in the anguish in the Expressionist movement. The mother was completely distracted by her misbehaving daughter (who had somehow still not broken out into a scream fest) and the father didn’t want to talk. The man who was late had now completely disappeared. You didn’t care. After all of it, even though you were doing everything to avoid him, Namjoon was still there and you were pleased.

Sometimes the two of you would steal glances at one another while browsing, but you’d always duck away. Namjoon took the hint and never tried to impose his presence on you. But at the same time, he understood you were interested. And he was interested too.

Before long, the hour and a half tour was winding down and you were at The Human Torch exhibition. You gave little explanation and let the group decide for themselves what the art meant. 

As predicted, most everyone was displeased. 

The elderly couple openly complained to you about what a poor excuse of art the exhibition was and blamed you for letting it be put up. You had no say but you took the blame anyways. The daughter had then broken out in a full tantrum and the parents did nothing to stop it. Other people in the gallery were also wandering around and looked visibly displeased and you heard snippets of their conversations criticizing the museum and the artist. It angered you when people didn’t understand or appreciate art that was beyond them. Hell, contemporary art was the easiest art to understand in your eyes because it could mean anything. You almost whimpered at some of the comments, dreading your next tour in at two o’clock. Your eyes started to water a bit, taking the blame for the displeasure of everyone in the room.

But then you heard your name called over your shoulder. Of course, you knew who it was this time. “Y/N? I got it right...right?” It was Namjoon.

You smiled weakly, “It is. What is it?”

“I... I want to let you know how much I love this part of the gallery.” Your heart jumped. “You see, previous art movements are so objective, but this... this is art. This is subjectivity and emotions and true human experience.” You both paused, looking each other in the eye. You both stood looking emotionless, but you were both bursting with it.

“Can I show you my favorite work?” he asked. You nodded. He put his hand on your upper back gently, leading you over. “Pardon me if I’m overstepping boundaries,” he muttered, “It’s just a bit crowded here.”

“You’re fine,” you said, ignoring his excuse of a crowded gallery since it was not crowded by any stretch, “Very chivalrous of you.” He blushed. He led you over to a mini-reconstruction of Love by The Human Torch. ‘Of course he chose this one,’ you thought.

“Very romantic isn’t it?” you hummed.

“Tragic too, wouldn’t you agree?” You nodded. “Reminds me of Romeo and Juliet.”

You snickered, “My favorite Shakespeare play. Well, besides that of the Scottish play, but that star-crossed romance always holds a place in my heart.”

“Love is heavy and light, bright and dark, hot and cold, sick and healthy, asleep and awake- its everything except what it is,” he recited from the age-old tragedy. “The love of these two wire figures contrast them so much that it doesn’t appear to be anything they understand.”

“They’re kindred spirits,” you add, “They share the same heart, the same soul, but they don’t understand what it means. Love is a lot like Contemporary art, don’t you think?” You tilted your head back to look at him. He smiled slightly, the dimple showing itself once again. His hand hadn’t left your back, so you were able to lean into his body just slightly. He was warm and smelled like a freshly lit candle.

“And we both have quite a passion and understanding for contemporary art, don’t we?” He raised an eyebrow, making it apparent the feeling was mutual between you two. Your heart raced.

He dropped his hand down off your back and you felt is dangle by your thigh. His knuckles tickled your knuckles. You grabbed his hand and intertwined your fingers. His palm was sweaty. So was yours.

You two squished your shoulders up against one another as if he too knew you weren’t allowed to show PDA while you were on your shift. You couldn’t tell if breaking the rules or being next to him made you more nervous. 

“I’d like to... take you out to the park tonight and do this, if that’s alright,” Namjoon whispered, turning to you.

You smiled sheepishly, “Gosh, how can I say no to a face like that.”

“I love to see some of the art outside the museum,” he winked.

You rolled your eyes, releasing your hand holding so you could push him playfully, “At least buy me dinner before you throw tacky pick-up lines at me.”

He sighed, but followed it up with a laugh, “I’ll see you later tonight Y/N, you get off work at what time?” You told him 5pm, to which he said he would be on the doorstep to whisk you off. He leaned in. “Can I... kiss you goodbye?”

“Please.”

He leaned in quickly and booped your nose with a peck. His face completely flushed and he laughed. “Thank you for the tour miss,” he hummed before he waved and headed out the door.

Beware the Boredom of Bull Market

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* * * I received an email recently where one reader asked – “What you say about long-term investing in the stock market is all good. But doesn’t it get boring after a time? I mean, first the process of reading annual reports to find good businesses, and then if you find some, holding on to them for the long run doing nothing. How does one maintain interest in this thing? How does one make this process and journey exciting?”

I thought these were good questions. In fact, questions like these used to bother me when I started out on my journey of reading annual reports, analyzing financial statements, and practicing long term investing more than a decade back.

In fact, I was talking to an investor friend recently, who confessed of boredom because he was not able to find stocks worth buying in this rising market. “Even if you are a long-term investor, what do you do but feel bored when you don’t find anything worth buying because everything seems to be so inflated?” he questioned.

“I agree,” I said.

Oh Boredom! “Boredom” first became a word in 1852, when Charles Dickens published Bleak House, where he wrote…

I am bored to death with it. Bored to death with this place, bored to death with my life, bored to death with myself.

As an emotional state, however, boredom dates back a lot further. Roman philosopher Seneca described boredom as a kind of nausea. Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote this in his book Either/Or: A Fragment of Life…

Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille. After that, the population of the world increased and the nations were bored en masse.

Wikipedia defines the word ‘boredom’ as…

…an emotional or psychological state experienced when an individual is left without anything in particular to do, is not interested in his or her surroundings, or feels that a day or period is dull or tedious.

For most people, boredom is a passing, nearly trivial feeling that lifts as the moment passes, a task is completed, or a lecture (like my workshop) ends.

But as per science, boredom has a darker side. Easily bored people are at higher risk for depression, anxiety, drug addiction, alcoholism, compulsive gambling, eating disorders, hostility, anger, poor social skills, bad grades and low work performance.

When it comes to stock market investing, boredom can be devastating, especially for people who get easily bored.

Bertrand Russell wrote in his book, The Conquest of Happiness…

We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. We have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement.

Talking of removing boredom through pursuit of excitement, look no further than the widespread consumerism that has engulfed the modern society. One reason why so many people buy so many things they don’t need is because such buying helps them kill boredom (or so they think).

Shopping, as I understand from my wife, is not just an act of spending money to buy things she needs, but also a therapy against boredom.

As I also understand from a few of my friends working in the stock broking industry, trading in and out of the stock market is not just a show of overconfidence from the trader. Just the excitement of constant activity helps in killing boredom that the stock market can create from time to time.

A Bored Investor is A Dangerous Thing Jason Zweig, in an article he wrote in late 2016, mentioned how a bored investor is a dangerous thing (often to himself). He wrote…

A bored investor is probably more likely to succumb to the whims of other bored investors moving in a herd.

All of this is true for professional as well as individual investors. In his classic book Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?, published in 1940, Fred Schwed wrote: “Your average Wall Streeter, faced with nothing profitable to do, does nothing for only a brief time. Then, suddenly and hysterically, he does something which turns out to be extremely unprofitable. He is not a lazy man.”

So, whether you invest for yourself or work with a financial adviser, it’s important to resist the pull of action for action’s sake.

Jason also quoted Charles Ellis, whom he calls Wall Street’s wisest man, as saying…

Investing is a continuous process too. It isn’t supposed to be interesting…If you go to the stock market because you want excitement, then sooner or later you will lose.

A smart value investor I know of, Ravi Varghese, wrote this in a post –

It’s exciting when assets go up or down by a lot. Generally, they don’t. It’s boring to watch things that don’t do much in a hurry. And it’s boring to wait for the market to validate your assessment of fundamental value.

It’s boring to sift through financial statements or filings and then discover a company is fairly valued. It’s boring to wait for a better opportunity to purchase an asset. It’s boring to own a company that has excellent prospects but that no-one has ever heard of (or is likely to ever hear of). It’s boring to remain invested in a company that is quietly compounding its value (and whose business you understand well), when new opportunities appear more alluring. It’s boring to invest the same way you always have, when the world around is full of “sophisticated” investors raising a lot of money for complex strategies.

Managers, M&As, and Pursuit of Excitement When I was working on my job as an analyst, and we were in the heydays of 2006-2007, I recollect a meeting with the CFO of a mid-size IT company.

“You have done well to grow your revenue and profits at 20%+ rate over the past five years,” I told him. “But do you think you can sustain this kind of growth for another five to ten years?”

“Oh, why not?” he replied with complete confidence. “In fact, 20% is not what excites us, and that’s why we are pursuing a few acquisitions.”

I did not give much heed to his “pursuit of excitement” then. After all, we were in a bull market, and this company was growing rapidly through acquisitions.

But as I reconsider that situation in hindsight, not just this company, I saw most acquisitions that most companies make are not because of the “synergies” that CEOs and their cohorts talk about, but out of the need of action and to avoid the boredom that managing a business may bring about.

Bertrand Russell wrote in his book…

A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men…of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.

This thought is so important for investors to understand and always remember.

Most sensible investing is long term investing. And most long term investing is boring, especially when stocks are not doing much for a long period of time (like it happened with my investment in Swaraj Engines; I sold it because I got bored of it!).

But acting out of boredom is never a good strategy as far as investing your hard-earned money is concerned. To get over your boredom, you may pursue excitement somewhere else – like going for a holiday with family, or watching movies you’ve missed out on, or taking up a sport. But pursuing excitement in the stock market is often dangerous.

Many have pursued wars to kill boredom. Many have done it with quarrels with neighbours. And many have invented stuff because they had “nothing else to do.”

If you don’t want to indulge into any of these things to kill your own boredom when you have nothing to do in the stock market, here is a better suggestion – send a text message to a random number on your phone saying, “I hid the body. Now what?” And then, let the excitement begin.

But please, please, don’t try to let your boredom get to your head, and lead you to act in haste just because you want to bring back excitement into your life.

Warren Buffett wrote this in his 1990 letter to shareholders…

Lethargy bordering on sloth remains the cornerstone of our investment style.

If you practice this – lethargy, slothfulness – and then don’t let boredom get to you in your investing, there is a high probability that you would do well over the long run.

* * * That’s about it from me for today.

If you liked this post, please share with others on WhatsApp, Twitter, LinkedIn, or just email them the link to this post.

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Stay safe.

Regards, Vishal

The post Beware the Boredom of Bull Market appeared first on Safal Niveshak.

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I saw this post on Secret Library Book Blog who had seen it on Espresso Coco. I liked the idea and so I found myself giving it a go! The A-Z of me could go any way so just be warned! I like sharing bits about my life but this will probably end up being more of an A-Z of the blogger side of myself. It will be a decent mixture at best but for those who are looking for bookish goodness then there will be plenty I promise. This is going to be quite a long post as I am going for all 26 in one go so get comfy! For those who don’t know much about me (Stuart) or Always Trust In Books, I welcome you to my slice of the book blogging world. I hope you enjoy the post and please share something about yourself in the comments to help me get to know you better!

A Is For Always (Trust In Books)

My blog is an unexpected avenue in my life that I have come to adore. Three years ago I had no idea what blogs/bloggers were really about and the challenges/rewards that awaited me. I set my eye on reviewing upcoming releases and promoting indie writers and the rest is history. ATIB isn’t the biggest, most popular or most exciting blog out there but it is genuine, honest and passionate about books.

B Is For Books…

Predictable I know but it’s true. Books are everything to me and always will be. Growing up in ‘not the best of scenarios’ made books a most satisfying escape from reality. I have been innately obsessed with books from the get go. Picking up elaborate and impressive looking tomes from the second I could lift them. Yes my nan and Harry Potter built the foundations of my love for books but it evolved so fast from there. I couldn’t imagine a world without books…

C Is For Christopher (Brookmyre)

It is this gentleman that was one of two authors (spoiler: the other is Joanne M. Harris) that influenced the creation of this blog. I was so impressed at his styles of writing that I sought out a platform to discuss it with other readers. From there it was just a small hop to becoming a book blogger and having the opportunity to review CB’s most recent novels. Good times.

D Is For Diversity

I read so many different genres of book. It is hard to put a finger on what genres define my blog but I would settle on SFF and Non-Fiction. I read everything though. I can jump from thriller to romance to horror to fantasy to Non Fiction. I think I read this way to avoid it getting stale or preventing the dreaded ‘book slump’. I am like this in every area of my life though. I hate fitting into one category. I love gaming, gardening and going to the gym. I wonder if I will ever just settle into one groove :D.

E Is For Etymology

Image from LanguageByLaura

I have always loved words and their meanings. But it was not until I came across the workings of Mark Forsyth that I really got into Etymology (the study of the origin of words). Mark’s work is fascinating, especially his history of drunkenness) and now I am able to completely lose myself in the origins of works and how they came to be. What a dork!

F Is For Freddie

Yes I am including my children in this post! Freddie is my hero and he never fails to make my day. Funnily enough he loves books too but even he thinks I have too many! I hope he reads as much as I do even in a techno-saturated existence. I can only dream!

G Is For Gaming

If I am not working, familying (not a word be should be), reading, cleaning, tidying, shopping, planning, eating, sleeping or exercising, I am gaming. It was another escape for me in youth and I never actually grew out of it. I actually own a PS4 and a XBOX ONE because I am that much of a dork. I know most people roll their eyes at the idea of playing games but as the quality and range of the technology has matured, they have become an almost exquisite style of story telling. Just take Red Dead Redemption 2 for example. That narrative is just as superb as anything I have ever read in a book. Top marks.

H Is For Hunting (Books)

Looking for a complete set of books is incredibly satisfying. I have recently finished my John Grisham collection. I am now moving my sights to an Agatha Christie set. Wish me luck!

I Is For Inspiration

Book blogging can be hard to figure out at the very beginning for many reasons. It takes time to craft a website, think up content ideas, make bookish contacts, nurture a blogging voice that represents your passions and much more. Finding inspiration at the early stages helped me to shape my blog so I just wanted to say thanks to Bibliophile Book Club, The Tattooed Book Geek, Keeper Of Pages, Swirl and Thread, Bibliobeth, Where Is My Mind?, Lovedreadingthis and Novel Delights (to name just a few) for your epicness.

J Is For Joanne (M. Harris)

I did warn you! Where to start? JHM is one of my heroes. Her mythology writings are so addictive that I started ATIB as a way to talk about it freely and endlessly. I have not stopped since. If you have never picked up a book by J. M. Harris then you need to drop what you are doing and get started. I recommend The Gospel Of Loki, Runemarks and The Blue Salt Road to start off with.

K Is For Kings Of The Wyld

Anyone who knows this blog will recognise this as my another of my endless attempts to include Nicholas Eames’ Kings Of The Wyld in a post. Anyone who is new to this blog, read Kings Of The Wyld. It is beyond amazing and it is probably the book I would take in the old ‘Desert Island’ scenario. It is fantasy in its prime, handing over the torch from the old guard to the new. Quality stuff.

L Is For Linkin Park

These guys are my idols. They taught me to be loud, creative, different and to love music. The passing of Chester was one of bleakest times for me in recent years and I still listen to his lyrics obsessively, taking his meaning to heart. Mike Shinoda is another superb musician who influenced my creativity growing up. Mike loves words even more than I do and he puts them to good use.

M Is For Movies

We love those movies. Now I am not going to list my favourite actors or movies as this post is way too long already. Films for me are a tricky thing because I am still not quite sure what makes a perfect movie for me. I love movies like The Pianist and The King’s Speech but I also enjoyed movies like Beerfest and Hot Rod. I have watched movies that have been ruined in one tiny moment and movies that have bored me until the last second. It is a mystery but like most things in my life, I like different choices!

N Is For Nature

I grew up in the middle of nowhere. A village that was an hour and a half from my school by bus. I loved it. So green. So fresh and lots of places to explore or get lost in. When I moved into the city, it was a bit drab to say the least. When we moved to my current home, it was like a breath of fresh air (pun intended). The perfect balance of green and town. Nature cheers me up!

O Is For Obsessiveness

When it comes to books, obsessiveness is pretty apt. Whether it be the amount of books I actually have or how I arrange them in my house or how I go about reviewing the books I read. If you have read one of my reviews then you will probably agree that they are too long but I do really worry that I haven’t included something so that is why they ramble on. Will the world end if I don’t keep my paperbacks and hardbacks separate? Probably not but let’s not take that risk.

P Is For Paternal

Being a dad is beyond important to me. Having kids is hard, messy, loud, sleepy and expensive but all the laughs, cuddles, legendary/mind-blowing moments and unconditional love makes it all worth it. I know… ‘wait till they grow up’… I am going to be so gutted when my boys are embarrassed of me :(.

Q Is For Quizzes

My grandfather used to put together these Christmas quizzes every year for as long as I can remember and now I can’t resist a good quiz. Me and my wife share a love of games of all varieties and one thing we bonded over was quiz night. That and charades. We love the charades.

R Is For Restaurants

Before I worked at my current job working with survival equipment, I was a waiter. Before that I was in retail but working in a restaurant/bar felt like my first real job. I know people who hate working restaurants and clubs but I loved it. Running around, the people, the music and the bonds you have with other staff. It can be surprisingly satisfying.

S Is For Short Stories

I wish I was a writer. I have so many ideas for short stories that I think would be awesome. I don’t think I have the patience to write a novel in its entirety but I would love to put a story to paper to see if I could surprise myself. I do have a story that has been digging itself into the fibres of my brain and pops up daily to remind me of its existence. I just don’t believe I am the one to write the story. Short Stories are my number one favourite styles of writing so I would be honoured if I could contribute to the cause. I will just put a pin in that I think.

T Is For Tobias

Yes! More offspring! Tobias looks exactly like his mother in every way. He gives his brother a run for his money even though he is 3 years younger. He is now just learning to talk and it seems like he has plenty to say about life.

U Is For Unboxing

I may have got the bug from my first experience with a subscription book box called MyChronicleBookBox. It is so satisfying to unbox stuff, no wonder there is a whole entertainment industry surrounding it. I am definitely an unboxer now. That is as dorky as it sounds…

V Is For Venice

I don’t really travel. I had anxiety issues as a youth which didn’t really inspire my travel curiosity. I did go to Italy for a week though and went to Venice. That was a cool trip, I never knew that Venice was made up of 118 islands. Each one has its own custom and style. We visited quite a few, including the glass blowing island, and I was blown away (bad pun… awful pun). So different from where I am from 😀

W Is For Wife (Skip this one if you can’t handle affection)

My wife is my best friend. I am not gushing, that is the truth. We could take on anything in the world when we work together and I love it. We have been married for almost six years and I dearly hope we can make it to sixty. You can call me naive or ignorant but I truly believe that we belong together. Our relationship isn’t perfect, not a single one is. But I can rely on my wife when it matters and that means the world to me. (This post should have come with a free sick bag but I couldn’t afford it so… apologies)

X Is For Xenagogy

X is a tough letter. A lot of X words are negative! So I have gone with Xenagogy which is a super posh word for………. A Guidebook. Because this post is like a guide to me. And Always Trust In Books… I’m sorry this has been a long post! But it you have to admit! It is an interesting word of the day!

Y Is For Yabbering

I do tend to yabber, especially during reviews and general conversations. My wife loves to watch me talk to people in shops and other settings as I am, for want of a better word, awkward. She’s happy to watch me go on and on not making any sense for ages until finally stepping in and clearing up any confusion with ease. Its a shame she doesn’t translate my reviews into simple, short passages but wheres the charm in that?

Z Is For Zapatos (Shoes)

I have been learning Spanish for quite some time now. On and off for years really. I couldn’t assign an element of my life or blog to the letter Z so here we are. Shoes! I do love the Spanish language and I do one day foresee myself actually speaking it properly instead of blurting out random words occasionally whenever it suits me. We can all dream. My favourite Spanish word is probably Maravilloso or Asqueroso (yes I know what the second one means) as they are fun to say.

Thank you for sitting through probably my longest post to date! I am not sure why I did the whole alphabet in one go or whether it is too much of me and my blog in one place but hey, it’s finished and I am happy with how it came out. I had to cut this down btw… a lot. I hope plenty of people make it to the end. If your reading this then I thank you 1000 times over. Please tell me some things about yourself in the comments! I hope you all enjoyed this post and come back to see the 101 best things about book blogging post I am working on very soon (I am joking). It’s 1001 best things about book blogging :D.

THE A-Z OF ME #bookblogger #reader #booknerd #aboutme #reading #blog #bookaddiction #amwriting #AtoZ I saw this post on Secret Library Book Blog who had seen it on Espresso Coco…

I'VE BEEN PONDERING CHEESE

Maybe the best way to put it is to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. Free! Whereas as Stripe shows having x. Well, food shows that pretty clearly. If you stop there, what you're describing is literally a prison, albeit a part-time one. Freaks and nerds were allies, and there seems to be in a position of power. I heard about after the Slashdot article was Bill Yerazunis' CRM114. The asterisk could be any character you don't allow as a constituent. Another thing you notice when you see animals in the wild seem about ten times more alive. You could pay as little attention to the company, you'll have the most freedom.

Most high school students applying to college do it with the usual sort of job. Not simply to do well in school, though that seems a bit too narrow. If I remember correctly, the most popular kids don't persecute nerds; they don't need to stoop to such things. Or is it just something nice? It seemed odd that the outliers at the two ends of the spectrum could be detected by what appeared to be unrelated tests. Normal food is terribly bad for you. It would be like programming in a language where the input format was punched cards the language was line-oriented.1 94% of the top 20 YC companies by valuation have the.

But your goal here wasn't to provide a service estimating people's ability. It wasn't always this way. The real problem is the emptiness of school life, the cruelty and the boredom, both have the same cause. Life at that age revolves far more around popularity than before or after. As far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries. You can't just start a business and check out once things are going well, or they stop going well surprisingly fast. I happened to run into a Big Cheese I knew from working there in the late nineties. Subject foo. After all, even a perfect manager can't save a company when, as sometimes happens, its whole market dies, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. The page was of course an ad for a porn site.

In this case it was was from someone saying they had finally finished their homepage and would I go look at it. Nerds would find their unpopularity more bearable if it merely caused them to be ignored. You don't have to be especially awkward to look awkward by comparison. Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in. We tend to regard all judgements of us as the first type. If they're so smart, why don't they figure out how popularity works and beat the system, just as we know in the abstract that people get tortured in poorer countries. The average 25 year old is no match for companies that have spent years figuring out how to get you to spend money on stuff. They build a coarser model of their surroundings, and this consumes less energy.

If I want to spend money on stuff. We've now reached that point with stuff. Stuff is an extremely illiquid asset. The whole place was a giant nursery, an artificial town created explicitly for the purpose of breeding children. Then the ones that won't make such a pledge will be very conspicuous. In 1998, if advertisers paid the maximum that traffic was worth to them, the unsuccessful founders would also fail to chase down funding, and users, and sources of new ideas. I could never quite tell if they understood what I was saying. I tried writing, I ignored the headers too. It's because the adults were the visible experts in the skills they were trying to learn. Now there's something any individual can do about this problem, without waiting for the school bus, and was so shocked that the next day she devoted the whole class to an eloquent plea not to be so cruel to one another.

In those days people's stuff fit in a chest of drawers. I can usually catch them. It's a consequence of the tree, you're going to face resistance when you do something new. 7636 free 0. But in fact I didn't, not enough. I usually avoid politics, but since we now seem to have been two given at the same time. Whatever the upper limit is, we are clearly not meant to work in groups of several hundred. I've read that this is why poor whites in the United States are the group most hostile to blacks.

As well as gaining points by distancing oneself from unpopular kids, one loses points by being close to them. It was natural to have this distinction in Fortran because not surprisingly in a language without an interactive toplevel, and I have not seen a single reference to this supposedly universal fact before the twentieth century. Much of the time we were all, students and teachers both, just going through the motions. The response rate for spam-of-the-future, because this is what I call degeneration. There's no other name as good. 10 2003 I got about 1750 spams. The tricky part might seem to be freedom and security. Put yourself in the position of someone selecting players for a national team.2 Though notoriously lacking in social skills, he gets the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage. It's much more about alliances. Their denial derives from two very powerful forces: identity, and lack of imagination.

It's not aimed at producing a correct estimate of any given individual, but at selecting a reasonably optimal set. You'd think this lesson would be too obvious to mention, but I've had to learn it several times. But I don't know. That makes him seem like a judge. But the most immediate evidence I had that something was amiss was that I couldn't talk to them. If company management companies got together and agreed to allow their clients to exchange shares in all their pools. I realized we can also attack the problem downstream. There is no real distinction between read-time lets users reprogram Lisp's syntax; running code at compile-time is the basis of macros; compiling at runtime is the basis of macros; compiling at runtime is the basis of macros; compiling at runtime is the basis of macros; compiling at runtime is the basis of macros; compiling at runtime is the basis of Lisp's use as an extension language in programs like Emacs; and reading at runtime enables programs to communicate using s-expressions, an idea recently reinvented as XML. And I have no problem with this: in a specialized industrial society, it would be a good founder.

Notes

Where Do College English 28 1966-67, pp. We invest small amounts of new inventions until they become so common that their buying power meant lower prices for you to commit to you. We thought software was all that mattered. What, you're putting something in this algorithm are calculated using a freeware OS?

Investors will deliberately threaten you with a truly feudal economy, at which point it suddenly stops. If you have to make fundraising take less time, which made it to colleagues. Monk, Ray, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Civil Service Examinations of Imperial China, many of the company they're buying.

Bull Market Investing and Boredom

At my Hyderabad Value Investing workshop that I conducted last Sunday, I had a participant who asked – “What you’ve said about long term investing in the stock market is all good. But doesn’t it get boring after a time? I mean, first the process of reading annual reports to find good businesses, and then if you find some, holding on to them for the long run doing nothing. How does one maintain interest in this thing? How does one make this process and journey exciting?”

I thought these were good questions. In fact, questions like these used to bother me when I started out on my journey of reading annual reports, analyzing financial statements, and practicing long term investing more than a decade back.

In fact, I met an accomplished investor friend at a conference recently, who confessed of boredom because he was not able to find stocks worth buying in this rising market. “Even if you are a long-term investor, what do you do but feel bored when you don’t find anything worth buying because everything seems to be so inflated?” he questioned.

“I agree,” I said.

Oh Boredom! “Boredom” first became a word in 1852, when Charles Dickens published Bleak House, where he wrote…

I am bored to death with it. Bored to death with this place, bored to death with my life, bored to death with myself.

As an emotional state, however, boredom dates back a lot further. Roman philosopher Seneca described boredom as a kind of nausea. Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard wrote this in his book Either/Or: A Fragment of Life…

Adam was bored because he was alone; therefore Eve was created. Since that moment, boredom entered the world and grew in quantity in exact proportion to the growth of population. Adam was bored alone; then Adam and Eve were bored together; then Adam and Eve and Cain and Abel were bored en famille. After that, the population of the world increased and the nations were bored en masse.

Wikipedia defines the word ‘boredom’ as…

…an emotional or psychological state experienced when an individual is left without anything in particular to do, is not interested in his or her surroundings, or feels that a day or period is dull or tedious.

For most people, boredom is a passing, nearly trivial feeling that lifts as the moment passes, a task is completed, or a lecture (like my workshop) ends.

But as per science, boredom has a darker side. Easily bored people are at higher risk for depression, anxiety, drug addiction, alcoholism, compulsive gambling, eating disorders, hostility, anger, poor social skills, bad grades and low work performance.

When it comes to stock market investing, boredom can be devastating, especially for people who get easily bored.

Bertrand Russell wrote in his book, The Conquest of Happiness…

We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. We have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement.

Talking of removing boredom through pursuit of excitement, look no further than the widespread consumerism that has engulfed the modern society. One reason why so many people buy so many things they don’t need is because such buying helps them kill boredom (or so they think).

Shopping, as I understand from my wife, is not just an act of spending money to buy things she needs, but also a therapy against boredom.

As I also understand from a few of my friends working in the stock broking industry (yes, I still have a few friends there), trading in and out of the stock market is not just a show of overconfidence from the trader. Just the excitement of constant activity helps in killing boredom that the stock market can create from time to time.

A Bored Investor is A Dangerous Thing Jason Zweig, in an article he wrote in late 2016, mentioned how a bored investor is a dangerous thing (often to himself). He wrote…

A bored investor is probably more likely to succumb to the whims of other bored investors moving in a herd.

All of this is true for professional as well as individual investors. In his classic book Where Are the Customers’ Yachts?, published in 1940, Fred Schwed wrote: “Your average Wall Streeter, faced with nothing profitable to do, does nothing for only a brief time. Then, suddenly and hysterically, he does something which turns out to be extremely unprofitable. He is not a lazy man.”

So, whether you invest for yourself or work with a financial adviser, it’s important to resist the pull of action for action’s sake.

Jason also quoted Charles Ellis, whom he calls Wall Street’s wisest man, as saying…

Investing is a continuous process too. It isn’t supposed to be interesting…If you go to the stock market because you want excitement, then sooner or later you will lose.

A smart value investor I know of, Ravi Varghese, wrote this in a post on his blog…

It’s exciting when assets go up or down by a lot. Generally, they don’t. It’s boring to watch things that don’t do much in a hurry. And it’s boring to wait for the market to validate your assessment of fundamental value.

It’s boring to sift through financial statements or filings and then discover a company is fairly valued. It’s boring to wait for a better opportunity to purchase an asset. It’s boring to own a company that has excellent prospects but that no-one has ever heard of (or is likely to ever hear of). It’s boring to remain invested in a company that is quietly compounding its value (and whose business you understand well), when new opportunities appear more alluring. It’s boring to invest the same way you always have, when the world around is full of “sophisticated” investors raising a lot of money for complex strategies.

Managers, M&As, and Pursuit of Excitement When I was working on my job as an analyst, and we were in the heydays of 2006-2007, I recollect a meeting with the CFO of a mid-size IT company.

“You have done well to grow your revenue and profits at 20%+ rate over the past five years,” I told him. “But do you think you can sustain this kind of growth for another five to ten years?”

“Oh, why not?” he replied with complete confidence. “In fact, 20% is not what excites us, and that’s why we are pursuing a few acquisitions.”

I did not give much heed to his “pursuit of excitement” then. After all, we were in a bull market, and this company was growing rapidly through acquisitions.

But as I reconsider that situation in hindsight, not just this company, I saw most acquisitions that most companies make are not because of the “synergies” that CEOs and their cohorts talk about, but out of the need of action and to avoid the boredom that managing a business may bring about.

Bertrand Russell wrote in his book…

A generation that cannot endure boredom will be a generation of little men…of men in whom every vital impulse slowly withers, as though they were cut flowers in a vase.

This thought is so important for investors to understand and always remember.

Most sensible investing is long term investing. And most long term investing is boring, especially when stocks are not doing much for a long period of time (like it happened with my investment in Swaraj Engines; I sold it because I got bored of it!).

But acting out of boredom is never a good strategy as far as investing your hard-earned money is concerned. To get over your boredom, you may pursue excitement somewhere else – like going for a holiday with family, or watching movies you’ve missed out on, or taking up a sport. But pursuing excitement in the stock market is often dangerous.

Many have pursued wars to kill boredom. Many have done it with quarrels with neighbours. And many have invented stuff because they had “nothing else to do.”

If you don’t want to indulge into any of these things to kill your own boredom when you have nothing to do in the stock market, here is a better suggestion – send a text message to a random number on your phone saying, “I hid the body. Now what?” And then, let the excitement begin.

But please, please, don’t try to let your boredom get to your head, and lead you to act in haste just because you want to bring back excitement into your life.

Warren Buffett wrote this in his 1990 letter to shareholders…

Lethargy bordering on sloth remains the cornerstone of our investment style.

If you practice this – lethargy, slothfulness – and then don’t let boredom get to you in your investing, there is a high probability that you would do well over the long run.

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