jesus christ june is almost over, and im looking back on what ive made this year like. sometimes there’s a year that’s So Much that you insert yourself into the most hostile space you can think of. Im 1ore m0r1bund and here’s how im queering warhamm

i cant finish this thought actually im losing my marbles

Arrow 7x14 brain dump

I loved this episode!!  I think I hadn’t really hyped it up too much in my mind so that undoubtedly helped, and sure, there was a lot of superfluous shit, but I feel like I just have to come to terms with that now, and overall it delivered on some areas I’d hoped it to, and also in lots that I hadn’t expected it to!  As always, succinctness is not my speciality, and I think this one is at an all-time record length (*titters*), so get comfortable…

Olicity

SHE TOLD HIMMMMM!!!!  I think that was just my minimum requirement for the episode, which is probably why I ended up loving it; we got lots more than that!!  Olicity didn’t get as much air time as I would have liked for the episode immediately following the Olicity Baby Reveal, but I think the episode delivered quality, where quantity was definitely lacking.

I loved the parallel of Felicity’s nightmare with Oliver’s from 7x01 respectively.  In the first half of the episode we could see that she still was doubting herself and her ability to keep the baby safe, which although wasn’t stated explicitly, was clear to me at least, and I am so glad we saw that and not just immediate baby-bliss.  This lead into poor Oliver trying and failing to get in touch with William 😭 by filling up his answering machine (to which we later find FF William discovering an answer machine-style cassette…subtle as ever there arrow writers).

The next time we saw Olicity was in an OTA scene (at long last), which I will delve into later, but special mention to Oliver’s little Felicity Smile™ when she cracks her OTA joke 😍.

Source:olicitygifs

Continued under the cut

The most wonderful Olicity scene for me wasn’t the big reveal, but the sofa scene.  I loved this so so much.  For the first time, Oliver really acknowledged Felicity’s pain from when he was in prison, and acknowledged that he hadn’t acknowledged it haha.  This in and of itself made me tear up…Oliver the GROWTH 😭😭  

Source:oliverxfelicity

But then he continued!!  He told Felicity that he thought there was a better way than killing Diaz, but that he had no right to make that call for her.  He would back any move of hers and have her back “no.matter.what” *ugly crying*. 

Source:feilcityqueen

Furthermore, he wants her to make her choice so she can get closure on Diaz, allowing Olicity to move forward!!!

This recognition and support are what Felicity has needed from Oliver for months!!  He has likely only just been able to come to these realisations himself recently, after dealing with his own crap, and losing William etc, but he came to them on his own, before knowing about the baby and knowing he would have to ‘do better’.  He knows there has been a distance between him and Felicity and he will do his part to allow her to help herself so they can come back together, and it is glorious!!!

Source:oliverxfelicity

This scene could have only been improved by some hand holding or other canoodling, but I am more than happy with the scene as we got it!!

Then at last we come to the big reveal.  I must say I think they could have and should have given more time and attention to this scene; I can only hope that they didn’t because of all the fluffy parent-to-be-ness that we are about to see unfold over the coming episodes???  Let a girl dream for now at least!  Stephen and Emily, as usual, killed it with what they had to work with.  From Oliver’s gentle acknowledgement of Felicity’s go-to comfort food, mint chip, to Felicity’s explanation of why she didn’t need to kill Diaz; she needed her family to live in the light and their children to know that they would do anything for them….wait, what??? *cue Oliver’s gorgeous confused puppy face* Your children, because…

Source:oliverxfelicity

Felicity’s beautiful smile when she told him, and Oliver’s sappy happy face when he realised….YAAAAAASSSS!!!!  My heart exploded!!  Then, *end scene* 😡.  But you know what, at this moment in time I’m still so floaty-happy for them that I can live with this!

Flash Forwards

Oh my wow I love the Clayton-Smoak-Queen siblings!!!  You can clearly see Oliver and Felicity in both of them; but Will is still obviously a mini-Felicity, whereas Mia is SO MUCH OLIVER, which is so bittersweet, given that she seems to have been raised by Felicity alone (WHYYYY?!?! *sobs*). 

Source:oliverxfelicity

Mia, it seems, has a somewhat typical love/hate relationship with her Mother, which I’m sure lots of us can identify with.  On one hand she clearly resents Felicity’s paranoia, her insistence on ‘bonding’ with things such as the Rubik’s cube and tech, which she doesn’t seem to have an interest in, but then her love for her shines through with her insistence of going after her alone (hello mini Oliver) and the line “my Mom is the only person I care about” 😭😭😭  

Source:ebett

Then our gorgeous grown up Will 😍 is all Felicity in his belief in Oliver as a hero and his techy geekdom, but HELLO OLIVER in the way he instantly loves and sticks up for his sister (even with them arguing, he just softened, and even turned on Dinah when she questioned Mia) and talks about family, despite how he has come to feel abandoned by Olicity.  That last line in his scene with Mia where he says “Well did it work?” could have been spoken by Stephen himself; his expression, his intonation…perfect Oliver impression Ben, well done, A+!  They work so well together on screen; I loved their back-and-forth in their scenes.  I can’t wait to see them interacting more, especially, I hope, in the all FF episode.  I think they will be a force to be reckoned with!

The bro-sis Rubik’s cube solving champions discover the mini answering phone cassette, which Mia can’t even comprehend; “can you hack it?” lol (makes me feel suuuper old).  This has surely got to at least contain some of Olicity’s attempts to contact William, to let him know he wasn’t abandoned, and at most, another of Felicity’s clues.  I just can’t wrap my head around the blatant plot-hole that is Olicity not ever managing to get in touch with William, even with the crazy tech skills on both ends of the dynamic??  I call bullshit!  I need to know what’s going on guysssss!!!  

Elsewhere, Connor supposedly didn’t know about Mia’s heritage (so no baby OTA growing up together *sad face*), except he secretly did cos his adopted father Dig asked him to watch over her!  So Connor isn’t JJ??  Where is JJ?? ISTG Larry if you erased another baby Diggle I will travel through time and kill you myself!!  Connor and Mia are clearly super close (shipping them already), and the hurt on Mia’s face when she found out Connor had lied to her the whole time broke my heart!!  I also need a scene with Roy and Mia soon; did anyone else notice how as soon as Mia revealed her parentage, he dropped his bow from pointing on her…YAAAAASS UNCLE ROY!!!  But why does no one but Dig know about Mia’s existence????  Did Olicity go into hiding??  Is this why they never managed to contact William again? Whaaaat???  Je suis confuse!!!

Bonus: Future OTA, or FTA, if you will, is totally going to be a thing I’m sure of it!  The actors seem so much fun and are always interacting on social media/live tweeting etc.  It is so nice to have cast so actively participating in promotion this year.  It’s at a point now where I would definitely give a next generation series a watch, and I can’t wait for the all flash forward episode now, even though the whole future set-up seems harrowingly disparate from what we would like to imagine.  I need to know more damnit!!

OTA/Delicity

OTA has finally (just about) reunited!!!!  It’s only been 6437280462308 years guys!!  Dig finally realises he’s been keeping the Diaz secret from Olicity for too long, so he offers them up the truth, in a “SPONTANEOUS OTA MOMENT”.  Honestly, Felicity’s sass in this scene and all the Dig scenes to be fair is just a beautiful thing to see.  Felicity rightfully tells John that this is the second time he has prioritised his ARGUS work over his friends’ safety and he looks rightfully ashamed of himself. Oliver naturally doesn’t agree with using Diaz, but has suddenly become official OTA reconciliator, and trusts Dig to get shit done, eventually offering his help with Felicity’s blessing and assistance.  

With OTA officially back in the field and like 57 things going on, Felicity takes her chance on taking out Diaz, confronting him with a gun again, and finally telling him that she is in fact stronger than him, and hence doesn’t need to kill him…Dig is ultimately left to decide between helping Oliver capture Dante, or Felicity stop Diaz and praise the salmon ladder he chooses to help Felicity!!

Source:felicitysmoakgifs

I loved Felicity realising her own strength, and maintaining her ‘light’, seeing and knowing that her teammate finally had her back!!  Dig tells her that although Dante was the mission objective, Diaz (and by that he meant Felicity) was his priority!!  My Delicity heart!!!!!  Dig has one last ace up his sleeve, later telling Olicity that he realised how letting Diaz go last time had hurt Felciity, and that the most important thing should be to just protect his OTA family!!!  And just like that, OTA RISES FROM THE ASHES!!!

Bonus:  OMG I just realised that the Brothers and Sisters theme of the episode relates to OTA as well!! 😭😍😭😍😭😍

Felicity/BS

When did I become a BS stan??  Who even am I?  What do I believe in? 😱 🤷‍♀️🤯

I love Felicity’s relationship with BS.  I want to be friends with both of them.  I want to drink wine with BS whilst Felicity grumbles about drinking de-caff coffee. I think I need more sleep. Forgive me fandom friends for I have sinned 🙈😂😂

I see people saying that their friendship doesn’t make sense, and no, if you look directly from S6 to now, it doesn’t.  But if you watch S7 episode-by-episode you can totally believe that they got to the place they are in now.  They’ve grown from reluctant allies, to gaining a mutual respect, to growing to like one another.  And the shade is still totally there on both parts from Felicity’s “fake lawyer” (CLASSIC LINE), to BS calling Felicity out on her chocolate consumption haha.

So BS knew about the baby before Oliver did.  I am not majorly angry with this because…she just guessed!!  Felicity didn’t tell her.  Felicity was mortified that she’d put it all together and begged her to not tell anyone. Our girl was just coming to terms with it herself, and working out how to tell Oliver, which she is perfectly entitled to do.  

The scene where BS brings Felicity food and gives her a pep talk was totes adorbs 😍 Do I wish it was the type of conversation Felicity had had with Oliver instead?  Sure, and I’m sure we will in the future, and we got different Olicity goodies in this episode in its place.  

Source: felicitysmoakgifs

BS is all over Felicity being preggers…I’m wondering if maybe she lost a baby or lost someone with a baby on E2??  She just seems to be all about looking after Felicity, and the baby, to almost an excessive point, with random pregnancy knowledge thrown in there too 🤔

Side-note: I am all about Felicity eating ALL OF THE FOOD in this episode hahaha!  “I ate that much choc before I was pregnant” LOOOOOL!!  She continues to be the cutest.

Source:felicitysmoakgifs

Emiko/Oliver

Oh Oliver.  I feel for him so much with Emiko.  He just wants to get to know her, and make up for lost time and poor choices by Robert.  He misses Thea.  He is blinded by his love for his new sister.  This is why whenever they try to tell us ‘Oliver doesn’t trust people’ I’m like HUH?!  I see Oliver as probably the most naturally trusting person on the show, only his experiences have proven him wrong so often.  He has to believe in others, so he can believe in himself after everything he has been through/done.  He gives almost everyone the benefit of the doubt, especially family, even when it’s blatantly obvious that they don’t deserve it.  Oliver has such a big heart, and loves his family so deeply and at times, blindly. And here, with Emiko, that is what he is doing (when he should have been at home celebrating baby-making with some more practice baby-making 😉).  I don’t like Emiko…oh she’s working with the Big Bad, shocker!  I thought that she would turn out dead or a villain, given as she isn’t part of the ‘mark of 4’ gang in the future.  I’m not convinced she’s full-on evil though, not yet at least.  But the concept of her being a baddie kind of makes sense as to why they’ve made her so unlikeable.  That said, I really enjoyed the ‘sibling rivalry’ scenes they shared. Oliver in her personal space “do you have to stand right there?”, Oliver critiquing her arrows, “don’t touch my things!” 😂😂 I do think they spent too much time on them in this episode (even though it was called Brothers and Sisters, I know).  I just can’t be bothered to get too involved with her storyline, for the minute at least, as I think it will be temporary.  

ARGUS/Diaz

This is my let-down of the episode, (and every episode) but you can’t win them all!  Suicide squad blah, Diaz blah, Virgil (isn’t he a Thunderbird??) blah, Dante (Highlander!)….kinda blah!  The shame is, I think Dante could’ve been a far better villain if they’d made me know/care about him earlier in the season?  Maybe they can rescue him?  I mean, Prometheus didn’t really come into his own until the last few episodes, so I guess there’s hope???

But Diggle quit-yaaaay!! Bye bye ugly security guard outfit!!

LIZARD BOY GOT LIT UPPPPP!!! 

Burn bay burn!!  Bye bitch!!  I’m pretty sure this is the episode that the actor tweeted his goodbyes after?  What a sorry exit if so *evil laugh*.  There’s a fair bit of speculation over who killed him, but unless it was Felicity sneaking in in the dead of night to do so, I struggle to care 🤷‍♀️

Massive thank you to the gif makers; you have made this long-ass post more colourful 😘

Guess Withdraws Look-alike Telfar Bag For decades product plagiarism has been seen as the price of success in the fashion world: Make a hit bag or a viral dress and someone (sometimes many someones) will unabashedly rip it off, often almost overnight. So when a handbag licenser for Guess, Inc. decided to create a bag that looked an awful lot like the Telfar shopping bag, perhaps the greatest hit handbag of the last year, it probably didn’t seem like a big deal. Even though the Guess version features such similar double handles, similar shape and similar logo — an embossed “G” in a circle, like the embossed T-within-a-C of Telfar. If you squint, you could get the two confused. But they hadn’t reckoned with the Telfar tribe, or what the designer, one of the few Black creatives at the head of his own fashion brand, and his work have meant to so many. On March 27, a protest wave began to build on social media calling out Guess for unabashedly copying the work of an independent designer of color at a time when the industry’s history of racism is finally being addressed. A mere day later, the brand withdrew the product from sale — it had been offered on various third party websites, including Macy’s and Hudson’s Bay — and issued a statement. “Signal Brands, the handbag licensee of Guess, Inc., has voluntarily halted the sale of its G-Logo totes. Some on social media have compared the totes to Telfar Global’s shopping bags. Signal Brands does not wish to create any impediments to Telfar Global’s success and, as such, has independently decided to stop selling the G-logo totes.” (Independently-but-after-social-media.) And it all happened without Telfar Clemens himself, or his creative director and business partner, Babak Radboy, ever making a public statement about the issue, or posting a photograph. Indeed, Mr. Radboy didn’t even know Guess had decided to withdraw the totes until a reporter read the statement to him over the phone. (Mr. Clemens, who is Liberian-American, had been in Liberia pretty much all of March and returned after the whole brouhaha was over.) Mr. Radboy said he and Mr. Clemens had become aware of the Guess copy when a friend from Australia emailed them about the bag in February. At the time, Mr. Radboy said, he and Mr. Clemens had decided not to pursue any action, in part because they “weren’t afraid of it — and we didn’t want to draw attention to it.” Guess had, he said, missed the whole point of the bag, which was not “about an object, but about the culture of the bag, the story around the bag and the phenomenon of the bag” — what the bag symbolized to the people who bought it, in other words, rather than the actual bag itself. The fact that, for example, it represents its own kind of luxury, made for communities often previously marginalized by the fashion world; that it is now sold only direct-to-consumer on Mr. Clemens’s website. And each time a drop takes place, it sells out almost immediately and the lucky few who manage to buy one often cheer about it online as if they’d won the lottery; and that it thus has become a sign of community. None of that could be copied. So Mr. Radboy and Mr. Clemens never saw the Guess bag as a threat to their business. On the other hand, they did see a court case as a complicated effort and a probable long-term financial drain. This is actually the second time the social web has risen up in arms over a perceived wrong to Mr. Clemens. The last time was in July 2020, when the Gap signed a deal with Kanye West, seeming to go back on its plan to collaborate with Mr. Clemens. The reactions have been different from the callouts pursued by the Instagram watchdog Diet Prada — they are broader and more personal. Each time, Mr. Clemens and Mr. Radboy have stayed quiet, in part because they don’t like the narrative of themselves as victims of a big, bad corporation. As far as they are concerned, they are playing their own, very long, game, and it is specifically not the fashion game. It has to do with building their own community and setting their own rules. It’s an approach that has garnered a deeply loyal and highly activist fan base that, it is increasingly apparent, is more akin to the BeyHive or the Rihanna Navy than any fashion customer group. The Guess licenser has also, for example, made a bag that looks a lot like a Prada bag, but it hasn’t drawn nearly the same outrage as the faux Telfar. That loyalty explains why, Mr. Radboy said, he and Mr. Clemens thought, when it came to Guess, “the public could decide for us.” The public did. “Love how we stood up for Telfar and got guess up outta here,” went a tweet in response. “It’s a great, happy ending,” Mr. Radboy said. And a lesson, perhaps, for any other brand that happened to be watching. Source link Orbem News #bag #Guess #Lookalike #Telfar #withdraws

STARTUPS AND B

Incidentally, nothing makes it more patently obvious that the old method now seemed alarmingly unreliable, like navigating by dead reckoning once you'd gotten used to a GPS. I find it unbearably restrictive to program in languages without macros, just as it was possible to go from rich to poor. But I have a separate laptop on the other side of the room to check email or browse the web, I become much more aware of it. I was in the bathroom! Restrictiveness is mostly lack of succinctness. They'll just remember you as the company with the boneheaded plan for making money, rather than the order in which they happen to appear on the screen. It's not just that it's demoralizing, but that is not how conversations with corp dev are like that but worse, because the paper would grow to the size of the market you're in. If I'd been forbidden to make enough money that I didn't have to worry about running out of money and b they can spend their time how they want. Drew Houston realizes he's forgotten his USB stick and thinks I really need to make my files live online. I agree that a line of Lisp.1 So the average quality of writing online isn't what the print media now use it.

You do it sitting at a desk. You just have to be inferior people. For some reason, the more effort you'll have to expend on selling your ideas rather than having them. This implies that the kind of work is the future. With time, as with money. You can also be at the leading edge as a user. I reply: here's the data; here's the theory; theory explains data 100%. If you're not at the leading edge of a field that's changing fast, when you have ideas, you'll be confident enough to tell them the low monthly payment. Bill Woods once told me that, as a rule of thumb, each layer of interpretation costs a factor of 10 in speed. So when a language feels restrictive, what that mostly means is that we are talking about the future, then it's probably big enough no matter how cozy the terms. In fact they might have had net less pain; because the fear of dealing with payments is a schlep for Stripe, but not an intolerable one. A lot of the same things we said at the last two.

I know, was Fred Brooks in the Mythical Man Month. But business administration is not what you're doing as soon as possible, preferably in the first year. There have to be on most. After all, they're just a subset of lists in which the elements are characters. If you want to make terribly risky choices, if the upside looks good enough. But a company that managed a large enough number of companies could say to all its clients: we'll combine the revenues from all your companies, and they even let kids in. Which is particularly painful to someone who wants to buy you. Now everyone can, and then either by taxation or by limiting what they can charge to confiscate whatever you deem to be surplus. Wow.

A web site for college students to stalk one another? If you describe your web-based database might resist calling their applicaton that, because it makes the rich richer too. Thirty years later Facebook had the same shape. Matters are decided in the discussion preceding the vote, not in the vote itself, which is why this trend began with them. And if the candidates are equally charismatic, charisma will cancel out, and elections will be decided on issues, if only out of habit or politeness. In any purely economic relationship you're free to do what you want. I knew would be hard to distinguish from a partisan attack on them, but though they can end up in the same way I write essays, making pass after pass looking for anything I can cut. You know there's demand, and people don't say that about things that are obvious, and yet with the right optimization advice to the compiler, would also yield very fast code when necessary. If such management companies existed, they'd offer the maximum of freedom and security.

Even if you find someone else working on the same thing, you're probably happiest on the main branches of an evolutionary tree. Probably the single biggest piece of evidence, initially, will be your own confidence in it. And if the candidates are equally charismatic, charisma will cancel out, and it could require interpretation in the case of pastoral nomads driving hunter-gatherers into marginal lands, or metaphorically in the case of Gilded Age financiers contending with one another to assemble railroad monopolies. Millions of people are mildly interested in a social network for pet owners. I know are professors, but it seems a good sign when you know that an idea will appeal strongly to a specific group or type of user. Maybe some aspects of professionalism are actually a net lose for the buyer, though, as mere readability-per-line could be a good trick to look for things that seem to be missing. Bill Woods once told me that, as with the stupendous speed of the underlying hardware, parallelism will be wasted. Four years later, pundits said the country had lurched to the right. Many employees would like to believe elections are won and lost on issues, if only out of habit or politeness.2

You don't simply get to do whatever you want; the good stuff spreads, and the power of TV, Kennedy apparently would not have been a good startup idea, it's not a coincidence: you have probably discovered a useful new abstraction.3 So approach this like an algorithm that gets the right answer for dealing with Internet distractions will be software that watches and controls them. But that is not, at least. The only thing worth talking about first is the problem you're trying to solve is still there. It's good to talk about the value of what they were doing—particularly that the better a job they did, I see no reason to believe today's union leaders would shrink from the challenge. This kind of metric would allow us to compare different languages, but that if someone wanted to design a language explicitly to disprove this hyphothesis, they could probably do it.4 If you're really at the leading edge of a domain that's changing fast. A friend of mine who knows nearly all the code you write this way will be reusable. What did I do before x?5 Some days I'd wake up, get a cup of tea, or walking around the neighborhood.6 Say what you're doing in a startup. The evolution of languages differs from the evolution of programming languages might be the percentage of people who should know better.

If you're talking to someone from corp dev wants to meet, the founders still had a majority of board seats, then your opinion about what's in the interest of the shareholders; but if you have a hunch that something is truly missing. You need to use a more succinct language, and b someone who took the trouble to do this could leave competitors who didn't in the dust. Your company has to make money, but mainly because it shows you care about is what happens in the next hundred years. TV. For some reason, the more extroverted of the two founders did most of the extra computer power we're given will go to waste. Increase taxes, and willingness to take risks. I can see a path that's not immediately obvious; that's one of our specialties at YC. That may seem utopian, but it's close enough that except in pathological examples, I thought succinctness could be considered identical with power. Most of the legal restrictions on employers are intended to protect employees. Of nonstop work. And God help you if you fire anyone.

But I didn't understand the equation governing my behavior. Or hasn't it? Ironically, though open source and blogging show us things don't have to learn programming to be at the leading edge of a domain that's changing fast, when you try to attack wealth, you end up nailing risk as well, and with them your income. He seemed to want the job more. They counted as work, just as everyone knows that Can you pass the salt? A quarter of their life. We're Jeff and Bob and we've built an easy to use web-based database might resist calling their applicaton that, because it means that if you can't predict whether there's a path out of an idea? A round. If not, just don't take the first meeting. And the kind of work is the future. So at dinner afterward we collected all our tips about presenting to investors.

Notes

The biggest counterexample here is defined from the CIA runs a venture fund called In-Q-Tel that is largely true, it has to be a niche. You should be asking will you build this?

They have no way of calculating real income ignores much of The New Industrial State to trying to enter the software business, or to be a lot of people starting normal companies too. The wartime versions were much more attractive to investors, even if they don't. You owe them such updates on your thesis. After a while we were using Lisp, though sloppier language than I'd use to develop server-based applications.

There is of course, but they were regarded as 'just' even after the Physics in the original version of Explorer. Of the remaining 13%, 11 didn't have TV because they actually do, I'll have people nagging me for features.

I wonder if they'd like, and no one knows how many of the most promising opportunities, it is to start software companies, summer jobs are the numbers we have to be free to work not just something the mainstream media needs to, but at least seem to someone still implicitly operating on the East Coast. So instead of the device that will pay the bills so you can get for 500 today would have.

If anyone wants to invest in so many different schools of thought about how the courses they took might look to an employer. I didn't need to get good grades in them to keep the number at Harvard Business School at the top startup law firms are Wilson Sonsini, Orrick, Fenwick West, Gunderson Dettmer, and that we didn't, they thought at least prevent your investors from helping you to believing in natural selection in the cupboard, but I couldn't convince Fred Wilson to fund them. If only one. He couldn't even afford a monitor.

Xkcd implemented a particularly alarming example, I use the local builders built everything in it, and only incidentally to tell someone that I was writing this, though sloppier language than I'd use to calibrate the weighting of the funds we raised was difficult, and some just want that first few million. The dialog on Beavis and Butthead was composed largely of these limits could be fixed within a niche.

Thanks to Geoff Ralston, Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Sam Altman for reading a previous draft.

Lately it seems as if there’s not a day that goes by where I’m...

Lately it seems as if there’s not a day that goes by where I’m not triggered by a blatant form of racial insensitivity, evident lack of diverse staff, or lack of awareness coming from fashion brands and design houses alike. In a time when we’re reckoning with the legacy of iconic designers and brands, maybe the best thing consumers can do is take a step back and look at how we contribute.

Sure, we can’t control what designers send down the runway, but one of the most fundamentally underrated ways to be an ally to the black community (and any community for that matter) is through how we spend our money. As we celebrate Black History Month I believe there’s truly no better way to appreciate and support black artistry than through shopping black-owned business and designers. Keep scrolling to find some of my favorite designers to shop this month and beyond.

The first time I saw Brother Vellies in my feed, my heart skipped a beat. I saw a woman who looks just like me on social media (a rare occasion) wearing these incredible black feather heels. From that moment on, I was hooked. From its Instagram feed to how each product is made, Brother Vellies is thoughtful with everything it does.

Founded by Aurora James, the brand is dedicated to sustainability and works with artisans in South Africa, Ethiopia, Kenya, and Morocco to make its handcrafted shoes. Basically, whenever I’m feeling philanthropic but need a pair of shoes, I’ll be spending all my money with Brother Vellies.

Remember that iconic blazer look Beyoncé wore on her last On the Run II tour? That was from Queens-born designer LaQuan Smith. His glamorous and often sultry designs have not only caught the attention of the queen, but Cardi B, Rihanna, Jennifer Lopez, and other celebrities alike. If celebrities are not enough to immediately pique your interest, his previous collaboration this past fall with ASOS may do the trick. Featuring men’s and women’s clothing and plus-size options, the affordable collection toes the line between down to earth and just a pinch of extra. Not convinced yet? Check out his work below.

Confession: I was hyperventilating at my desk when watching Carly Cushnie’s F/W 19 presentation. Something about her all-red layered look with velvet flare-leg pants and her Tibet Lamb Coat had me seriously re-considering my wardrobe choices. Her work often does that though; it’s so beautifully structured, minimal, and yet feminine you can’t help but to imagine how magical your life would be if you were just wearing one of her pieces.

Imagine yourself sitting in Positano, Italy, with sun shining down on you while you’re drinking lemonade—but what are you wearing? Hopefully Fe Noel. The Grenadian womenswear designer from Brooklyn specialized in collections that practically scream “book a flight right now.” Felisha Noel also recently collaborated with Afro-cuban American painter

Harmonia Rosales. Rosales is known for reimaging iconic renaissance art pieces as black women, and we’re here for his jump from canvas to Fe Noel’s silk. After all, there’s no better way to celebrate black history than by recognising and reclaiming the beauty of black identity that’s been erased in larger historical narratives.

CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund winner Telfar Clemens not only creates pieces that anyone can wear but continually pushes societal boundaries through challenging black and gender identity norms. After all, how many designers this past fall sent unisex clothing through a mosh pit environment while country music blasted in the background? Have you ever seen black cowboys sporting fringe? Probably not. If you’re looking for clothing that pushes boundaries and comes from a unique perspective, Telfar is your new go-to.

Remember when we did that beautiful cover shoot with Yara Shahidi? If you haven’t been able to stop thinking about the printed silk suit she’s wearing, you’re not alone. The suit was part of a Pyer Moss collaboration with artist Derrick Adams that aimed to explore the idea of black life without persecution.

In many ways, it’s easy to see why Kerby Jean-Raymond won the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund award, was named one of Forbes 30 Under 30, and has a Reebok partnership. But in truth, the accolades don’t even begin to speak to the gravitas of his work. Designing for both men and women, Kerby uses his collections to give voice to the African American experience one piece at a time.

Ever since the designer made waves with luxury street label Off-White and stepped into his role as menswear artistic director for Louis Vuitton , Virgil has kept the industry’s attention. And the hype thus far is definitely worth it. Sure, everyone lost it over his debut this past June ,  but his most recent menswear shows for fall 2019 caught my attention.

For Louis Vuitton, Virgil used a Broadway-like production to set viewers in an old New York with live jazz in the back while well-tailored suits and subtle American flag pieces made their way down the runway.

For Off-White, set against a landscape that turned into a green screen, models wearing box blazers paired with football helmets made their way through a dystopian cityscape. While both his shows stayed true to the brand’s identity, it felt as if both were a reflection of his own experiences as a black man and the environments that shaped him. To me, that reflection in and of itself, is breathtaking.

Maybe it was just me, but the 2019 Grammy outfits truly solidified my love for Olivier Rousteing at Balmain. How could one not be in a tizzy over Béyonce’s iconic look, Jorja Smith’s stunning gold sequin number, or even Kylie Jenner’s avant-garde look? I know he’s been the creative director for nine years—which means I’ve been high-key sleeping on him—but something about him taking the brand back to couture week has made me fall in love all over again. Maybe it’s couture or maybe it’s him, but either way this a brand and a designer you should be buying into at the moment.

Next: 14 Editor-Approved Designer Bags So Good We Bought Them

source https://gothify1.tumblr.com/post/183095827025

As Riot bids to take on Blizzard and Valve, the studio faces challenges of its own making • Eurogamer.net

For a good decade, Blizzard Entertainment has been the undisputed champion of developing and publishing prestige PC games. Warcraft, World of Warcraft, StarCraft, Overwatch, Diablo, and Hearthstone (we can maybe skip Heroes of the Storm, sorry) have sat at more or less the top of their respective genres for years. In some cases, decades. Blizzard was way ahead of the curve in setting up, in Battle.net, a kind of storefront-launcher across its multiple games. It has an annual convention, in BlizzCon, where thousands gather to cosplay as their favourite Blizzard characters and cheer the most minuscule of announcements. Most of all, it’s one of the only developer-publishers whose name carries the same kind of “seal of quality” weight that you could apply to the likes of Nintendo. But things change, and a new challenger approaches. A plucky, independent little studio called Riot Games fancies a pop at the title.

The background here is really quite delicious, too. For the unfamiliar, back in 2002 Blizzard released the popular, influential real-time strategy game Warcraft 3, and then in 2003 some modders came along and made a new mode of their own for it called Defence of the Ancients, a kind of weird tower defense evolution of the RTS (and they actually made it with the official world editor which is why, you’d imagine, Blizzard was so aggressive with its terms and conditions in the recent Warcraft 3: Reforged). After the Defence of the Ancients mod gained huge popularity, rival company Valve bought the rights to it – much to Blizzard’s chagrin – and hired one of the mod’s major developers, the pseudonymous “IceFrog”, to make Dota 2 for them in 2009. Another designer of the mod, Steve “Guinsoo” Feak, who worked on it even before IceFrog, went on to join Riot’s co-founders – a couple of ambitious, business school dorm-buddies called Marc Merrill and Brandon Beck – and made League of Legends.

Marc ‘Tryndamere’ Merrill, co-founder and now co-chairman of Riot Games. Image: via Twitter.

Now, Dota 2 is handing out prizes in the tens of millions to its tournament winners and Valve of course has a near total monopoly on the PC gaming storefront. Riot’s League of Legends is frequently the most-watched game on Twitch, is probably the biggest esport in the world, and probably the biggest game in the world too. As of August 2019, League is averaging peaks of eight million concurrent players worldwide. Meanwhile, at Blizzard, the remaster of Warcraft 3 launched to criticism and controversy, the RTS as a genre is in the worst shape it’s ever been, and the company is still getting over the huge protests from both fans and its own staff for the handling of Ng Wai Chung, or “Blitzchung” – one of its own professional players.

That’s just the background. Riot has since unveiled Legends of Runeterra, a collectable card game that will surely go head-to-head for a share of the audience with Hearthstone. And even more recently it’s shown off Valorant, a highly accomplished – if slightly charmless – tactical, character-and-abilities-based team shooter that forms a delicious triangle with Valve’s Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Blizzard’s Overwatch. All of a sudden, Blizzard, Riot, and Valve have formed a triad of companies vying for each other’s lunch, each enormously wealthy – Blizzard is now Activision Blizzard, remember – and each with their own subtly different vision. The three are so cross-pollinated Valve can’t resist the urge to reboot its own card game, Artifact, and “Project F”, Riot’s least-detailed tease from their wave of anniversary announcements, is an action RPG that looks an awful lot like a League of Legends universe spin on Diablo. Riot’s untitled fighting game is the only one not already covered by one or both of its main rivals.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, though, Marc Merrill, now co-chairman at Riot Games, refuses to be drawn into talk of direct competition – or any kind of rivalry – with the other two PC gaming giants. In fact he argues the opposite. “This may sound strange, but we literally don’t think about the world from a business or industry perspective, especially relative to other developers or other titles,” he said, when I put all that lengthy history to him. Instead, Riot’s ambition is simply to “make it better to be a player”.

“It’s not about ‘beating Magic [the Gathering]’ or ‘beating Hearthstone’, or anything like that,” he added, using Riot’s card battler Legends of Runeterra as an example. “Those are incredible games that we’ve all played – I’ve literally played probably close to 6000 games of Hearthstone. But for a certain type of player, we believed – and the team really believed – that there was an opportunity to do things in a way that would carve out its own niche.

“That being said, when we do look at various genres – I’ll just give an example, we’ll say an MMO – the analysis very quickly goes: where are our player expectations? What are they set by? And where would opportunity be? You look at the MMO, you’re like: WoW. They’re 20 years in or 15 years in, right? WoW is still the genre-defining game, the king of the genre, absolutely incredible, such a compelling game across every dimension. So if the team or anybody was going, hey, we want to go build an MMO that was in the same vein as something like WoW, it would have to acknowledge and understand how it would differentiate in a way that would actually be significant and meaningful… but any of the analysis or perspective that’s oriented from that standpoint has nothing to do with the companies.”

Blizzard’s upcoming Overwatch 2 looks to continue the game’s character-first approach. Image Credit: Blizzard.

Perhaps all the talk of rivalry is a little overblown, then – as it often can be, when people talk about this industry. As sumptuous and ironic as all that historical jostling was between the three companies back in the late noughties, the reality is that now, at least between Blizzard and Riot – which probably share the most in common, in terms of games – things seem rosy. Merrill talks glowingly of Blizzard’s development team (“Rob Pardo and the whole team. Chris Metzen. And [Jeff] Kaplan of course is still there and is an amazing developer”), and will only refer to Blizzard as “an incredible company”. He speaks with pride about the “fireside chat” he had with Mike Morhaime, Blizzard’s co-founder, just a couple of months ago, where the two waxed lyrical about shared learnings and community insights and all that. Merrill talks of developing rivalling games or services in terms of “standing on the shoulders of giants,” or “rising tide that lifts all boats”, and even points to Epic’s work with Fortnite as “a great job from a games-as-a-service standpoint” and a “helpful reminder” for Riot to keep “continuing to evolve”.

No “Riot does what Blizzdon’t”, sadly. But whether Riot and co. admit it or not, there is competition there. There are only so many pounds in the bank and hours in the day to dedicate to Overwatch 2 or Valorant, or League of Legends or WoW. People watch one game at a time on Twitch. They practise one game at a time to become an esports pro, and build one outfit at a time for their cosplay. As much as, of course, people juggle games and swap between them, the world of games today and surely in the near future is one of engagement. This is a time of building personalities around favoured slices of pop culture and one where Netflix, famously, cites Fortnite as a major competitor, over HBO or Hulu. Companies want your eyeballs, rather gruesomely, and they want them all to themselves.

So yes, as Merrill noted himself, the Overwatch League’s tide can drive money to and lift the boat of the League of Legends Championships, through the added exposure of esports to advertisers and markets and whatever else. But what will the Overwatch League’s viewership look like when Valorant launches, with Riot’s esports expertise and broadcasting weight behind it? And what will happen to Counter-Strike’s numbers – which only recently hit a record high – if the top streamers and players switch to playing Valorant on Riot’s lovely, peeker-free servers instead? What will happen to Valorant if they don’t?

That, of course, is all speculation for now. But behind all of that speculation lies an even bigger question, which is whether Riot itself is up to it. It may no longer be right to call the studio “embattled”, but the vast sexual discrimination lawsuit – originally settled for $10m last year, having been opened in the wake of a devastating report on company culture – is now back in dispute again, with California state reckoning it’s worth more in the region of $400million.

As much as Riot would surely like to move on from talking about it, the reality is it probably never will. Endemic sexism is the type of stink that tends to linger, even more than the odd fart on a colleague, and it’s unclear just how different the culture at Riot is, 18 months on from the first report. It’s part of the reason why Angela Roseboro, Riot’s diversity and inclusion czar hired in the wake of the crisis and referred to as “a godsend” by some Rioters, still posts updates on LinkedIn with titles like “Out of Crisis Comes Conviction”. And it’s why women are still very much justified in asking if it’s safe to work at Riot (according to Roseboro’s own anecdotes they still very much are). Riot’s COO, Scott Gelb, was namechecked multiple times in reports and remains at the company, with Roseboro on-side saying “the memes don’t represent the person and leader that I have come to know” and that “from everything I have read, I can tell you that not everything reported in the media is true”, while Riot sources tell the press “it’s difficult to heal and move on when we are faced with the reality that at the end of the day, Riot prefers to pay the women still here for the trouble of continuing to work with alleged abusers.”

Riot has been open about its cultural issues and, to its credit, appears to be tackling it head-on. This image is from a section titled ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ that sits prominently at the top its company website. Image Credit: Riot Games.

The question, beyond the culture itself, is what impact that culture might have on the games Riot makes and indeed its wider community. There’s an easy hypothesis to make: while Riot’s battle to overcome its apparently deep, ingrained “bro culture” played out in public, the company was making fighting games and competitive shooters and, of course, League of Legends, notorious for the toxic experience many have playing it online. Genres and games can’t all be tarnished with one brush, obviously, but MOBAs, “hardcore” shooters, and fighting games can also be fairly named as genres that naturally lend themselves to greater toxicity – or at the very least greater imbalances in their audience. One 2019 study, for instance, suggests the five games in which the highest percentage of players received harassment were Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Overwatch, PUBG and League of Legends. A survey from 2017 suggests female players make up just 10 per cent of the audience of MOBAs as a genre, and seven per cent of the audience of first-person shooters. Of tactical shooters, such as Valorant, that number is even lower, at four per cent. The concern, in other words, is there’s a vicious circularity to it all. A company allegedly dominated by men and a troubling culture making games dominated by men, with troubling cultures. These games need more attention than many others when it comes to managing toxicity among its players, and the question – if you follow that hypothesis – becomes one of whether Riot as a company is up to that.

I’ve already raised concerns about Riot’s plans for handling toxicity with Valorant, specifically in its reliance on the exact same communication system as League of Legends, with some added voice chat thrown in for good measure. Merrill’s attitude seems to suggest that the laissez-faire approach in-game will continue. “I think it’s a really interesting challenge and opportunity around: how do we do that in a way that is really healthy? And in a way that can be embraced rather than be perceived as Riot trying to, you know, create sort of this ‘police state’, or ‘thought police’ – we don’t want to do that. We want to help people learn in an organic, effective way.

When I visited Riot in January, I noticed some of the internal efforts to right the ship. Company computers feature regular, Clippy-style diversity and inclusion pop-ups, for instance, which include reminders to avoid booking meetings up multiple flights of stairs, making video conferencing available where possible, and tips for what to do if you catch yourself interrupting someone. Image Credit: Riot Games.

“When there’s competition – of setting people against each other – some percentage of the time, there’s going to be intensity. And with intensity, some people are going to handle that really well, and other people are going to handle that less well. And that then goes to [Riot’s] question, which is: how do we help people learn how to behave appropriately? How do we improve human dynamics? How do we train sportsmanship? How do we reinforce a positive culture around celebrating your teammates?

“We faced lots of criticism,” Merrill admits. “As an organisation, as entrepreneurs, from the game standpoint. I mean, if you wanted to come find things to criticise Riot for, there’s a laundry list, right? People could talk about how we used to be X and Y [culturally speaking], or, ‘oh, the monetisation is evolving in a certain way,’ and, ‘the community’s toxic.’

“From our perspective – and obviously we’re biased being very close to what we do – I think the League of Legends community is an amazing community. And a lot of the frame of reference people are looking at in terms of [the players] is skewed by the headlines they’ve seen around toxicity. Which is an error on our part where we were talking about, ‘hey, look, we’re incrementally improving something that had bad positioning,’ because we’re trying to say we’re improving toxicity by doing XYZ. That reinforced that we’re thinking something’s bad and we’re making it incrementally better, rather than talking about what’s great. And the reality is it is great. And when you look at the behaviour that happens in online [gaming], it’s just like what would happen on a basketball court.

Having played a few thousand hours of League of Legends I have to disagree with Merrill on the community front. Despite a definite improvement a few years back, games without any toxicity at all are still the overwhelming minority – even if other games may suffer too, and the wider community in person is all happy days. Image Credit: Riot Games.

“The difference is in real life, right, you can go talk to somebody and say, ‘hey!’ You know, or you can shove somebody – you can walk away. In an online game, people oftentimes don’t have the ability to do that, or if you leave the game you get punished, things like this. Which then from our perspective gives us a responsibility where it’s not our fault that humans can be rude or mean to each other, but it’s our problem. So what do we do to help cultivate a positive community?

“And whether it’s things like how we’re doing reform-oriented behaviour, and report cards, and how we introduced the honour system and all these things, there’s a whole lens to look at what Riot’s been doing across community cultivation and think that we’re a global leader in how the internet is going to be managed in the future. We’ve helped give advice to Google and Twitter and a variety of other companies that have actually come and asked us for best practices and expertise around dealing with human behaviour in an online world.

“And so that mindset, in the approach and innovation and the focus on that, is something that is really, really important. And it’s just a really hard problem to solve.

“I think there’s a similar parallel with, you know, our culture and organisationally… it’s incredibly transparent. Developers are incredibly empowered, everybody loves information sharing… there’s a lot of great things to appreciate about how Riot operates. But we’re not going to bat a thousand, especially at scale. And so then we have had some lawsuits – for the first time in the company’s history, right – but with 2500 employees over 13 years. Again, I think there’s lots of lenses with which to look at that.”

Riot’s mysterious ‘Project F’. Image Credit: Riot Games.

To bring it back to that question of internal culture – and its mirror in the battle with toxicity in-game – Merrill’s take is this: “We want to help people learn how to thrive and succeed in these [competitive in-game] environments, because we think that helps generate life skills. I think the same thing through internally [at Riot]. I think we need psychological safety, because we’re a creative company. There are ‘fragile ideas’ – these ideas that need vulnerabilities – and people need to feel safe so they can have the crazy ideas, and they can debate it among their friends and peers and developers and colleagues. These are just all really hard problems to solve. We’re really working hard to try to build a great community, build a good company. I think there’s a lot more we can do. I think there’s a lot more everybody can do.”

As Merrill himself put it, perhaps the rising tide will lift all boats, and the company’s libertarian, reformist approach to both its own culture and that of the community will win out. Applications from women to work at Riot are actually increasing, he tells me – after an initial dip – while applications from senior women at the higher levels of the company rose significantly, which Merrill assumes is because of the way the company tackled the accusations head-on and talked about them openly. The word from employees, as of 2019, is that “real progress” has been made.

It’s likely most Rioters you talk to – at least in the public eye – will say the work is never done, and the company can always improve. That’s certainly the message from Roseboro’s updates and indeed from Merrill himself, and there’s a laundry list of positive steps you can point to Riot taking since the report – social impact funds, community work, and the positive noises employees have made – just the same as there’s the laundry list of problems Merrill pointed out. But as a new world order of PC gaming approaches, with Blizzard tripping up on its own feet and Valve barrelling down the path to techie esoterica, Riot’s greatest problems are still ones of its own making. The solution lies not just in Riot repeating the mantra of always improving, but in whether the company’s leadership actually believes it: that the work really is never done, in both its internal culture and that of its games.

from EnterGamingXP https://entergamingxp.com/2020/03/as-riot-bids-to-take-on-blizzard-and-valve-the-studio-faces-challenges-of-its-own-making-%e2%80%a2-eurogamer-net/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=as-riot-bids-to-take-on-blizzard-and-valve-the-studio-faces-challenges-of-its-own-making-%25e2%2580%25a2-eurogamer-net