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someonesbeenhere · 3 years

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Dramione Drabble, prompt - flower

Hermione couldn't help but smile at seeing her name etched in gold script on the door of the Minister for Magic's office. She'd worked hard, achingly so, many times wondering what it was all for.

This.

This was what it was for.

She turned the handle and pushed through, opening the office to be accosted by the overwhelming scent of flowers.

It was like a flower market in here!

Congratulatory bouquets of varying sizes and colours on every available surface.

It was beautiful, yes, but entirely unnecessary and now a bit of an inconvenience.

"Ah, Minister," her assistant piped up from behind her. "People were very forthcoming with

their congratulations. We ran out of space."

"You're telling me," Hermione mumbled. "Can't even sit at my desk on my first day!"

"I'm so sorry Minister, what can I do?"

"No, no. Don't be sorry, it isn't your fault," Hermione assures her. "Hmm..."

Hermione steps forward and picks up a large colourful bouquet in a crystal vase, turning and handing it to her assistant.

"For you."

"Oh no, Minister. I couldn't possibly!"

"Of course you can! Don't be silly! Please, I insist!"

The assistant smiles warmly and accepts the gift.

"Thank you Minister," she says.

"Don't thank me, thank," Hermione pulls a small card from the bouquet and turns it over. "Gerald Ipswich, Department of Magical Games and Sports. Never heard of him."

Her assistant chuckles.

"Thank you Minister."

"Really, it’s no issue! In fact, send everyone else in for a bunch too!"

Her assistant nods and leaves, clutching her bushel of flowers. A moment later, more faces starting appearing in her doorway and Hermione found that she was rather enjoying meeting her new staff like this.

One by one, the room emptied, Hermione handing another and another vase to each employee that stepped through her door.

She only had to clear the desk now and she gave the flowers away happily until ...

Her hand stayed over a small, ceramic jug of wildflowers. Dusky purples, vibrant reds, sunny yellows and pale pinks, the colours were stunning. With dark green stems, untrimmed leaves and a sharp, unique edge to them that Hermione adored.

She couldn't give these ones away, these ones she wanted. She rummaged between the foliage a little, looking for a card, a note, a scrap of parchment, anything to indicate the sender but there was nothing.

She called her assistant back in and just as her pale face peeked into the office Hermione asked her about the jug.

"Are these supposed to be here? There's no note on these ones."

"No, they were left here first thing this morning, before even I got in."

Interesting.

And no note, interesting and infuriating.

"I can get rid of them for you if you like, Minister?"

"No, no. I want to keep them."

The wildflowers took pride of place on her desk when she was finally able to work. Every so often, her eyes would drift to them, take in their colours, using her quill to disturb the leaves from time to time.

Who would send flowers with no note? Surely the point was to suck up to the Minister, can't do that if you don't claim the gesture.

A while later, the door was knocked lightly, her assistants face peering around the frame.

"Auror Malfoy is here to see you, Minister."

Hermione sighed. He couldn't just give her one bloody day to enjoy it could he? Their bickering arguments were infamous in several departments and she had hoped that now she was Minister for Magic, he'd back the hell off.

But apparently not.

"Okay, send him in."

He strode in, tall and lithe, his body agile but held tightly composed, his nose slightly upturned, steely eyes looking everywhere but at her. He stopped just short of her desk.

"Mr Malfoy, what can I do for you?"

"I need your signature on some requests for dark artefact investigation and a couple of raids," he said dryly.

"Of course," Hermione quipped lightly. Kill him with kindness was her new motto with Malfoy.

As she read over and signed each piece of parchment, Malfoy shifted impatiently on his feet.

"Nice office," he said unconvincingly. "Big, cushy."

Hermione suppressed an eye roll.

"I see you got my flowers," he said, nodding towards the wildflowers perched on her desk. "I'm surprised there's not more of them actually, losing the popularity contest are we?" He snarked. Hermione ignored him, her eyes darting up to look at him.

"These ... are from you?" She asked, astounded.

"It is customary Grange- Minister," he bit out, correcting himself. "To send a congratulatory gift when someone receives a new position."

"I'm aware Malfoy," Hermione seethes. "I just didn't expect flowers like these from someone like you. Not exactly your taste are they?"

"They're not supposed to be my taste though, they're not for me. They're for you, therefore they are to your taste, are they not?"

"Very much so," she tells him.

"Very well then."

"Where did you get them? I'd love to get them again sometime."

"The gardens around Malfoy Manor are rife with wildflowers this time of year."

"You picked them!?"

"Jesus Granger, must you question every bloody word I say?!" He burst, realising only too late that he'd just snapped at the new Minister for Magic. "Are we almost done here Minister?" He added quietly.

"Yes, Mr Malfoy," Hermione quickly scribbled two more signatures before handing the parchments back to Malfoy.

"Thank you Minister," he said dryly before turning on his heel to storm out. His hand on the door handle, he stopped, turning his head back only slightly and not daring to look at her.

"If you would like more flowers, Granger, all you have to do is ask."

With that, he wrenched open the door and left.

How interesting and infuriating, Hermione thought.

(Prompt from @dramioneprompts on Twitter) Find the entire collection of my Dramione Drabbles at https://archiveofourown.org/works/30801581/chapters/76033271

#dramione #draco x hermione #Draco Malfoy #hermione granger #drabbles #drabble

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lukethewitt · 4 years

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Angel on the Underground - Chapter 1

I check the graffiti for updates every morning on my commute. Any wall in an area where people spend limited amounts of time is a target for anonymous artists, and it seems tube stations are a good place for the craft. Most of the graffiti I see recommends mononymous teenagers are experts in various vulgarities, with occasional third-person declarations of people’s sexuality provided in conjunction.

However, some graffiti is artistic, and while I would never dream of defacing public property in such a way, I couldn’t help but admire the dedication that went into some pieces. Some of them were detailed, some provocative and some dangerous. There was one vivid portrait which took up a full wall in a tunnel. That is to say that it hadn’t been scrawled on the tiles of an underground station, but rather someone had waited until the trains had stopped and run along the tracks with the sole purpose of creating a striking image which would only ever be seen through the window of an underground train rushing by.

I hoped that the artist had snuck in after the lines had closed, illegal though it may have been, because the alternative was either a construction worker vandalising the lines they were meant to be repairing, or that somebody was stupid and speedy enough to run along the tracks in the limited minutes between one train leaving and another one arriving. Either way, the graffitto’s perpetrator was clearly misinformed about how fast trains move, since nobody could see anything more than a grey blur as the train rushed by in less than a second.

One of the few perks of tube stations was the access to free newspapers. Copies of the Underground magazine were placed in stands at every station in London. They would often be taken quickly, and were mostly adverts, but it was common to see them strewn and abandoned on train seats, meaning practically every commuter had instant access to the same information. A second-hand paper was fine if all the new ones had run out, the only downside being the likelihood of scribbles and drawings of glasses, wings and occasionally genitalia on every picture of a person in a paper.

I read a news story about the ruins of the school I used to teach at. The school had burnt down in the years since I left and there was a plan to demolish the ruins and replace them with a shopping mall. It was a tragedy that the building was gone, but I’d always hoped they would rebuild on the existing plans. There were some fire-damaged walls still standing. If they weren’t stable, they could at least be replaced by new materials for the same structure. Replacing one of Britain’s remaining beautiful buildings (or the ruins of one) with another bland shopping centre was a sin.

Still, I didn’t know how much to believe. Underground was notorious for being rife with mistakes and puff pieces. Even in the short article about my former workplace, they’d incorrectly given the location as Oxfordshire instead of Cambridgeshire. Still, the fact that it was outside London and was being reported in the London press was evidence of how desperate they were for something to write about.

When I got off the tube, I had time for a sweeping glance at the graffiti in Borough Station before turning the corner to my office on Angel Place. The charity I worked for had picked that street in particular as it was a good area - loads of charities had their offices in the same few streets around Borough Station, so it meant any opportunities for joint fundraisers could be organised efficiently and quickly without the need to send people all over the city. The street’s name itself had connotations they liked. Lots of people who faced abuse from loved and trusted people credited their survival to their faith, and the charity saw themselves as saviours more than willing to accept the title of ‘angels’.

I personally rejected this label, as I felt it was wrong for a charity to brag about the good work they were doing, and instead felt we should be focussed on helping people and improving the work we do. If a charity existed solely to call themselves angels, it was nothing more than a vanity project.

They were called Reduce Abuse, and worked to raise awareness of and protect victims of abuse in all its varieties. I had been employed to deal with social media, specifically protecting those who had faced cyber bullying, which Reduce Abuse identified as the biggest growing threat, particularly amongst under-18s. A lot of my work involved responding to Facebook and Twitter messages, as well as emails and occasional phone calls. That is to say, messages from victims of abuse, not the abusive messages themselves. I’d been trained on the right advice to give, how to comfort and provide practical solutions. I liked to think I was doing good, but dealing with the business side of charity could make you cynical.

I spent the morning thinking about angels, about what makes someone good. Good and evil could be tricky things to define, but sometimes you met people who seemed like they could do no wrong. You could never be sure, as even the most trustworthy person could turn and stab you in the back. I liked to think I was good. Anywhere I saw a flaw in myself, I addressed it immediately. Anything I ever did wrong I apologised for, and I did anything I could to make amends.

In art and literature, angels were always depicted as having big wings like an albatross, and eyes as blue as azure. They dressed in white sheets and had halos over their heads. I suppose it was mostly religious symbolism, but I couldn’t see how the blue eyes fit into anything. They were just aesthetic features which seemed trusting. Someone with light blue eyes could never appear sinister. Both my ex-girlfriends had blue eyes. It fit, because they were both very nice people, and I believe we ended things on amicable terms.

I’m not entirely sure why I’d been given the role of Social Media Officer. I applied for any jobs that were going, and they assigned me to that one. I was really just looking for anything that could help me. I think they must have figured I was down to earth and understood young people, what with my previous experience working as a teacher. Whatever the reason, it suited me when I got it. As time went on and I got a great deal of experience, I also realised I became good at my job and was ideal at helping struggling youths. And then as more time passed, I became too good. I didn’t enjoy the work anymore. It was the same thing, day-in, day-out. I was bored, supremely bored.

Today was my annual review. Two years I’d been here. I would bemoan that I was stuck in the same job, but it was my own choosing, so there could be nobody to blame but myself. Besides, I never liked the blame game.

I liked my old job, but teaching was exhausting work. It was draining to watch children grow and learn and then to wave them goodbye and hope they went off into the big, bad world with all the preparation they needed to survive Earth. Evidently they didn’t, because I could swear half the people who called me up or messaged me at Reduce Abuse were former students.

‘In advance of this review, I asked you to fill in a form and mark up how well you think you’re doing,’ my boss told me. I had no idea why he told me this. We both knew he’d emailed me the form the previous day and I’d filled it in and emailed it back to him. Why did he need to begin by repeating himself?

He was a strange man. He had thin grey hair and was somewhat rotund, and insisted on making smalltalk to people who didn’t like him and had no wish to have any talk with him, regardless of length.

My boss at Reduce Abuse reminded me of my boss and mentor when I worked at the Moore Academy, an elderly man named Tristan Scimitar. They were both grey-haired and authoritative, although Tristan was more Henry V, while the man in front of me was more The Great Dictator. The other reason the man reminded me of Tristan was that he reminded me just how much I missed working under a competent manager.

As my current boss scanned over the form on his screen, he quietly trumpeted with his mouth and scowled, as if reviewing an alarming piece of medical research rather than a tedious piece of bureaucracy. ‘Hmm,’ he said, if that can indeed be called talking. ‘Very interesting.’

This was a lie. I’d answered ‘satisfactory’ to all the questions. Literally just gone down the sheet and ticked the middle box on all of them. When he reached the end of the document, he said, ‘I see for the first question, “How have you been working as part of a team?” you gave the answer…’ He scrolled up to the top of the page to read what answer I’d given, although this was purely for show, as we both knew I’d given the same answer for everything. ‘“Satisfactory”. Three out of five. I think we can bump that up to an “Exceeds Expectations”, don’t you?’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Well, the rest of the team seem to like you.’

‘They chuck things at me all day,’ I calmly pointed out.

‘They throw things to you, Trev. And they all checked to see that you could catch before having a throw-about.’

I said nothing.

‘If there were a question here about throwing and catching, I’d definitely put “Exceeds Expectations”. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. But you do have quite a remarkable rapport with the rest of the staff.’

I supposed that was true, but it didn’t make me happy. Lately the job was making me wonder why I ever quit teaching. I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. Teaching was something I was passionate about, but it was draining. This job was one I wasn’t passionate about, and it was equally draining. Still, somewhere towards the end of my teaching career, my then-girlfriend and I had this ambition of moving to London and having a new start at a new stage of our lives. We lived in constant fear of stagnation. Now I was single and stagnant in a different pond.

‘“Are you able to prioritise and manage your workload?”’ he read. ‘Again, you’ve put “Satisfactory”. Again, I’ll put “Exceeds Expectations”.’

I wasn’t really sure that the answers quite corresponded to the question, but there was no room for deviation from the tick box regime.

‘Next question…’

I could sense we would be here for some time and I could already feel my eyes drooping as we reached the third question. By the time we were approaching the end, it felt as though I’d been trapped in the same dark office for a week. Still, I supposed that it was decent preparation for dealing with victims of abuse and their concerns if the staff subjected us to a rudimentary form of pscyhological torture ourselves.

‘“Would you say you conform—”’

Without warning, my boss picked up a pen and threw it over my head, and I instinctively caught it without even realising it had been thrown. He didn’t look up, but kept reading as if nothing had happened.

‘“—to standard rules of etiquette when dealing with callers on the phone?’ You’ve only put “Satisfactory”, but I’ll have to change that to “Exceeds Expectations”.’

Here he looked up at me for confirmation I agreed with his verdict, as well as to look at my hand, still raised above my head, grasping the pen he'd thrown. I lowered my arm and handed the pen back to him.

‘Extraordinary. You’ve got cat-like reflexes. Did you never think about doing something with them?’

‘Like what?’

‘I’m not saying you’re wasting your time here – obviously the work you do is important and you do it very well.’ He gestured towards the changes he’d made on the screen, despite me being sat opposite and unable to see a screen that was facing away from me. ‘But you could be a professional baseball player or something.’

‘Do you know of any professional baseball players in London?’

‘Do you know of any professional charity workers in London?’ he said back to me, evidently a failed attempt at a snappy comeback. When I started to list the names of other people who worked in our office, he clearly wasn’t amused and carried on through the evaluation form.

In the end, he changed all my “Satisfactory”s to “Exceeds Expectations”s. He had no comments. No feedback. No improvements. Nthing. Just to stay exactly the same forever. He sighed deeply. ‘Um, is there anything you want to say to me?’ he asked out of contractual obligation.

‘No. Is there anything you want to say to me?’

He frowned. Never one to pass up the opportunity to engage in the tedious exchanging of sound, he said, ‘I saw your old school is getting knocked down.’

I wasn’t really sure what to say to that. He must have been reading Underground today as well. Were we all just passing the time by checking the same filler stories in the same free magazine? That’s the trouble with taking the tube. There’s not really enough time to take out a book and read, but it’s a long enough journey to get bored.

‘That was your former school, wasn’t it? The Moore Academy? The school you taught at, I mean, not your school.’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘I didn’t know it burnt down.’

‘Me neither.’ I guess I really was out of the loop. When I lived and worked out in Cambridgeshire, at the Moore Academy, my sphere of influence revolved around small-town drama. We always hated London for the way people lived in their own little bubble and ignored the rest of us, as though the United Kingdom ended when you reached the M25.

Now I was one of those Londoners, or at least a London-liver, I was part of that bubble and out of necessity I’d lost contact with the old bubble that was the Moore Academy. I couldn’t even tell you who still worked there. I suppose it’s probably a consequence of having both my ex-girlfriends working at the same school that I no longer followed their goings-on closely.

But had it really burnt down without even a whiff of the event making its way over to me? I once knew everyone in the area, now 100 km away, and now it was as though they were dead or in another country. I had become one of the ignorant.

Still, they had their own geographic pitfalls. If you ask something there about the lines and stations on the London Underground, they might have a vague idea, but those of us who live here know it intimately. Those tunnels are the veins and arteries transporting people through the city. More vital, perhaps. I know how to get from South Kenton to Stepney Green in the quickest possible time with the fewest changes, but I don’t actually know my own blood type.

‘Was anyone hurt?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘How much is still standing?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well, if there’s any of the original structure it would be a shame to demolish it for the sake of yet another shopping centre. It was a beautiful building.’

‘It really was.’

‘They never give you a lot of detail in the Underground, do they? And they said it was in Oxfordshire, not Cambridgeshire. Do they not have proofreaders anymore?’

‘Apparently not.’

‘It’s full of eye-grabbing headlines and tat, really. No proper journalism. I once saw an article in there about a seagull stealing a chihuahua.’

‘A chihuahua? What happened to it?’

‘The chihuahua? No idea. Oh, actually I think they said the seagull got tired and dropped it over a bridge.’

‘Over a bridge?’ My heart sank. ‘As in, over the edge of a bridge? Or on top? Was it…?’

He racked his brain. ‘They didn’t give a lot of details. Just enough to gather your interest and pick up the paper. But no depth. Anyway, let’s hope someone caught it.’

‘Let’s hope so.’

He grinned inappropriately. ‘It’s a shame you weren’t there. You would have caught it.’

‘I’m sure I would have.’

I took the tube back home at the end of the day, checking the graffiti at the station as I went, before shovelling down my dinner, crawling into bed and falling asleep in preparation for the same thing again tomorrow.

#novel #ya novels #novelist #story #writer #writing #writeaway #author #fiction #prose #weird #alternative #comedy #comic #prompt

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talhaghafoor2019-blog · 5 years

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An Introduction to Extratone: The World’s Fastest Music Genre « Bandcamp Daily

There’s a strong chance you don’t have many extratone records in your collection. An electronic genre that operates at a tempo of 1,000 beats per minute, and can sometimes hit the startling realms of 10,000 BPM, extratone is an acquired taste to say the least—and possibly just a smidgen out of your standard tempo comfort zone. But extratone is very much real; it has a story, history, and lineage in the extreme hardcore continuum. It has a community, a DIY punk-like ethos, and a singular aesthetic that sets it apart from other genres.

“Extratone is basically a form of extreme sound art,” explains a London-based artist and Slime City label owner who has identified himself as Rick. He operates under various aliases, like Zara Skumshot and Skat Injector. “It’s not about pounding kicks, but kicks so fast they have morphed into a tonal beast. They’ve mutated into a whole different animal. A natural process of evolution. It reminds me at times of such genres as harsh noise and HWN in places depending on production. The production of course is more varied and peppered with additional elements such as synths and sampling.”

The key word here is “tonal”: when kick drums are structured at such fast tempos (usually as quarter notes or 16ths), the pneumatic sledgehammer style of beats associated with most ultra-fast music genres no longer exist. Instead, it’s a buzzing textural, tonal trip. At its most uncompromised, extratone perplexes the senses (see the work of Gabberdoom). But there are many examples of more melodic elements within the genre (also see the work of The Quick Brown Fox). A long-standing tradition of any extreme form of music, the real essence of the style is found within the brutal balance of contrasts.

“That’s the thing with difficult music,” admits Neil LAR, founder of U.K.-based label Legs Akimbo Records, an imprint that wound down operations indefinitely on December 31, 2017. “It can be a very rewarding, but also a very harsh experience. You will find both extreme, ear-bleeding distortion and sublimely clean, intricate sound design within the extratone scene. It’s far more diverse than, say, the standard Frenchcore sound.”

“I see extratone as pure power/pure frequency that you clench in your fist, provocatively defying any hardcore audience you can imagine,” adds Riccardo Balli, artist and founder of Italian label Sonic Belligeranza. “It’s so hard that, in a way, it’s not hard anymore. Just like it is so fast that in the end it’s not fast anymore. I like this self-destructive component of this style, when beats get so fast you can’t detect them anymore, you experience, at the same time, aggressivity and chill.”

The earliest evidence of ultra-fast hardcore within dance music (grindcore notwithstanding), is almost always traced back to 1993 and Moby’s “Thousand,” a track that clocks in at 1,015 BPM and was anointed by the Guinness Book Of World Records as the fastest recorded production. Other examples include “Human 1000 BPM De Rebel Va Te Faire Enculer Rubik” by Explore Toi and “Killer Machinery” by DJ Dano, DJ Gizmo, Buzz Fuzz, and the Prophet (both released in 1994) but Balli describes these examples more as reactions to hardcore’s developmental state at the time, and not as the seeds of a new genre.

“These tunes were a hyperbolic acceleration reaching the ‘impossible’ threshold of 1,000 BPM,” he explains. “They are to be seen more as a sort of extravagant bonus track inside an EP than anything else. I can see them interpreted as moments of furious, extreme madness in a context, such us the hardcore one, that hails madness as its founding element.”

In the late ‘90s, the genre began coming into its own thanks to the work of Belgian artist DJ Einrich. In Balli’s recent book Frankenstein, Or The 8-Bit Prometheus, leading extratone artist Ralph Brown (given name Daniele Rossi) cites Einrich as the genre’s founding agitator, explaining how Einrich explored the use of oscillators to transform kick drums into actual notes, in octaves.

“By combining two German words, extrahieren (to extract) and tone (note), he came up with extratone,” Rossi explains. “A subgenre where BPM are so crammed that they almost appear like extra-dimensional. So Einrich turned his name into Einrich 3,600 BPM (the perfect number of BPM according to him) and started to release tracks via his own Immer Schneller Records.” It’s here where extratone’s conceptual and mathematical approach began to take shape.

But the greatest influence on extratone is speedcore. The most popular and expansive style of extreme hardcore music, speedcore has been at the center of all ultra-fast electronic music developments since the ‘90s. It has since spawned a cornucopia of sub-styles that includes the likes of splittercore (speedcore that exceeds 600 BPM and is under 1,000 BPM), flashcore (an experimental style of speedcore that doffs its cap to IDM), Frenchcore (a toughened, 200 BPM style of hardcore that emerged from France in the late ’90s), or terrorcore (an abrasive extension of the Dutch and Belgian hardcore mothergenre gabber). However, not all speedcore artists and fans accept or buy into extratone as a style in its own right.

Riccardo Balli and Ralph Brown.

“I first came across extratone in about 2002/2003 when I used to frequent the Speedcore.ca forums run by the Canadian Speedcore Resistance,” explains Neil LAR who’s been involved in speedcore since the mid ‘90s. “It divided opinion even then, with people loving or hating it. Something I have become increasingly aware of is just how petty and childish people within the speedcore scene can be. Cliquey bullshit often involving grown-ass men—it is embarrassing, frankly.”

“The tl;dr is: shit got faster and didn’t stop getting faster,” says Emma Essex, aka The Quick Brown Fox, head of the label and studio Halley Labs. “A few styles really stuck—especially in Europe, where the speedcore is very macho, aggressive, and angry, and not a whole lot else. That’s one of the big stagnations, in my opinion—the concept that speedcore has to be angry or aggressive. It’s been shaken up by regional differences, but that old go-to of aggression is still extremely foundational.”

Yet in contrast to the angriness and aggression, a much stronger characteristic of extreme hardcore is its tongue-in-cheek sense of humor and its wry knowingness, whether it’s the provocative crudities of Aussie musician Passenger Of Shit and his label Shitwank Records, the playfulness of Legs Akimbo, or the daft concepts of Sonic Belligeranza.

“This is the way I personally see this super-hyper-mega fast sound,” explains Balli. “That fist-clenched-in-front-of-the-audience I was mentioning is thought to be very ironic, but also serious and ironic, and so on, in an endless game with the attendees.”

“I don’t take any of the shit too seriously,” says Neil LAR. “I could point you in the direction of others who live for this stuff, but I doubt they would even talk with you. I am probably ‘selling out’ in their eyes just by answering these questions. I have little time for that kind of attitude, frankly, and I am still certain I divided the Legs Akimbo fanbase by not giving a fuck, and releasing whatever I wanted.”

Those who do live for it are as inventive as they are committed. Essex says extratone’s creator base is rife with DIY styles, like mash-up extratone, minimal extratone, noise extratone, and “straight-up joke extratone.”

“It’s something you can just up and make—that’s the entire point,” explains Essex. “The barrier of entry is practically non-existent. And people into weird music have a pretty immediate starting point in a style that requires little knowledge of anything. Because of that base level, you hear all kinds of weird musical decisions that somebody more ‘versed’ in composition or production might not even consider. I think that’s a great thing in any creative scene, it’s just that extratone gets a bad rap for being only that.”

Where extratone stands out within this wider collection of styles is its speed, as well as its textural and sometimes conceptual signature. A good example of this is Balli and Ralph Brown’s Tweet It! EP: In 2012, the Bologna artists realized the similarities between the data produced per second by Twitter (1.456.000) and digital audio (1.411.200), and created a 14-track EP consisting of tracks that are each one minute and 40 seconds in length. These run at 1,400 BPM, 140 Hz, and consist of 140 characters for every tune text. With such a strong conceptual approach, it could be argued that extratone leans heavily on the ideologies of sound art and experimentalism, but Balli disagrees.

“I agree working with tonal/textural audio opens a sort of algebraic and mathematical realm of sound, which I found stimulating as a producer,” says Balli. “However, I think this differs from, for example, sound art. Personally, I think the latter is mostly self-celebrating, and repeating cliches of a tradition—the avant-garde one. What is in the majority of cases considered ‘experimental music’ has got nothing truly experimental in it. Extratone could also be considered ‘drone-ish’ if you want to pigeonhole it in a more academic genre, but with a dynamic afflatus. The noise constituting its texture ain’t static. On the contrary, it’s thought to be, essentially, dance music. And this is what makes it interesting to my ears.”

Neil LAR agrees that extratone comes into its own on the dancefloor, and describes intense performances by acts such as Jensen, Skat Injector, Gridbug, DJ Mucus, Extratrolls, Licho, Hersenerosie, HateWire, Junkie Kut, and 10Jonk-T as “monumental experiences.” Balli is equally emphatic about the genre’s ability to create unique dancefloor encounters. While not strictly an extratone artist himself, he has his own unique performance technique that comprises cutting up pure tone records in a style he describes as “a hybrid, abstract turntablism no man’s land.” He believes the future of the genre is now in the hands of performers who debunk the standard laptop/Ableton combo applied by the majority of live across the entire electronic music spectrum.

“I can’t not mention my colleague Ralph Brown,” he grins. “His act is totally intense, 100% adrenaline, and he’s not using Ableton Live. When he plays, he has these serial killer eyes fixed on the screen. It’s a blast! At the same time, it’s both scary and hilarious.”

“For me, to seek a true extratone experience you have to witness it being performed live,” adds Skumshot. “It’s like walking onto another planet with a skull-crushingly intense atmosphere. A total sensory bombardment hits you like a ton of bricks as you’re shut into one hell of a brutally surreal trip. Proper Altered States shit. There’s times when you’re so blinded by lasers, and your ears are so full of ‘tone’ that you could be in some kind of glitched-out computer program. The searing note blasts, relentless lasers, strobes, and smoke combine to throttle you out of existence—in the best possible way.”

Even without hearing it, that very description of extratone can seem a little intimidating. But because it transcends any net-based ecosystem and survives as a performance style as well as a production style, extratone is very real, and is being pushed, explored, and developed by interesting and genuine artists.

“I think in extratone there’s a huge, underutilized, misunderstood toolkit hidden away which is simply based on exponentially faster kick drum sequencing,” says Essex. “It could really stand to be more deeply explored by people who might write it off as stupid and forget about it.”

You might not have many extratone records in your collection. But beyond the acquired taste, there’s definitely more to it to than meets the eye (and ear). Long may this continue.

-Dave Jenkins

This content was originally published here.

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cryptoquicknews-blog · 5 years

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New Post has been published here https://is.gd/Px03br

Why ‘Mainstream Adoption’ Is an Unfair Success Metric for Dapps

This post was originally published here

Coleman Maher is the head of partnerships at Origin Protocol, a blockchain platform for peer-to-peer marketplaces. You can follow him on Twitter @colemansmaher.

The following is an exclusive contribution to CoinDesk’s 2018 Year in Review.

Two popular refrains by crypto commentators in 2018 were “the herd is coming” and a call for “mainstream adoption.”

Prognosticators openly speculated on the impact institutional investors would have on the value of the crypto assets in their portfolios. Although we did see bitcoin futures launch, exploding venture capital activity and Yale’s endowment dipping its toes in crypto investing, prices have gone down, not up. We are still waiting for this herd.

However, it’s safe to say retail speculation on crypto assets has already reached some level of “mainstream adoption,” as evidenced by constant media coverage by CNBC and Bloomberg and markets like Square Cash, Robinhood and Coinbase. Depending on which researcher you ask, the run-up in crypto prices in late 2017 and early 2018 was fueled largely by retail and enthusiast investors.

In the burgeoning decentralized applications space, on the other hand, the conversation about “mainstream adoption” is focused on DAUs and UX improvements. I have to say — things are not looking good. Usage numbers remain pitifully low and the user experiences offered are generally terrible. The dapp space has been rife with questionable ICOs, outright scams and useless tokens that have lost nearly all their value.

The prophesied inflection point of “mainstream adoption” for dapps feels incredibly distant. However, I would argue that this level of froth is to be expected and that we are way too early for “mainstream adoption” to be a sensible success metric for dapps.

Building Blocks

This was an important year for dapp building. There have been a number of impressive development wins, even if user numbers don’t reflect this.

We saw the release of the prediction market Augur, the first ever ICO for a dapp built on Ethereum, after three years of development. Although it isn’t a pleasure to use (yet), it represents a remarkable technical achievement. Augur saw a notable amount of users, open interest and markets opened after launch. This activity dropped quickly, as commentators were eager to point out, but the US midterm elections was a bright spot for Augur.

Over $1 million was staked on Augur in this market, compared to around $550,000 on PredictIt, the leading centralized prediction market. Prominent Ethereum dapps Golem and Aragon also went live on mainnet in 2018. 0x and MakerDAO saw increased adoption and activity, with several successful relayers launching and 1 percent of all ether locked as collateral to issue Dai stablecoins.

Decentralized exchanges like IDEX and ForkDelta saw huge growth in users and trade volume.

Gnosis launched its “slow.trade” auction-based DEX. Status, a decentralized messaging platform, moved to beta, enabling mainnet by default. Spankchain, Connext and Liquidity Network launched state channel payments on Ethereum, providing a path towards cheaper and faster payments for dapps. Loom Network launched Plasma.

Cash sidechains for its suite of games and dapps. My own company’s peer-to-peer marketplace dapp went live on mainnet, as well.

In the bitcoin world, the Lightning Network saw a significant increase in the number of nodes and channels. The list of Lightning apps is growing. Blockstack’s platform now supports dozens of dapps, including Graphite, a decentralized Google Docs alternative.

Bubble Behavior

Many transformative technologies have been accompanied by speculative bubbles, from railroads, petroleum, electricity, to the internet. Frenzied investors have been plowing money into questionable, “oversubscribed” schemes for hundreds of years.

Long after these bubbles burst, primordial companies borne from them, such as Union Pacific, the descendants of Standard Oil, (Edison) General Electric and Amazon, remain giants.

There is a common thread in all of this. Speculators expect too much too quickly, bad actors rush in to take advantage of this, people sour on the technology after market crashes, and this underlying technology does eventually change the world in profound ways — even if it doesn’t make every impatient speculator rich.

I have been exposed to a huge variety of blockchain projects and founders due to my role in dealing with partnerships for a blockchain platform company. Earlier this year, the crypto bull market and ICO mania created an environment of perverse incentives. Short-term greed and FOMO ruled. Many projects focused solely on fundraising and marketing.

There were even rumors of some projects acting like unregulated hedge funds, investing company money into their friends’ companies. Extreme price appreciation inflated many egos. A lack of sensible treasury management and a total disregard of securities laws were shockingly common. We are seeing some of the consequences of our failure to self-regulate now, with SEC enforcement on the rise and once-hyped projects shutting down due to their war chests experiencing 90% drawdowns.

All of this is deleterious for long-term growth. The sooner we rid ourselves of this behavior, the better.

Beyond the bubble

Something to keep in mind is that we are competing with the legacy internet, computer applications and financial infrastructure all while trying to launch a grand, fragile economic experiment.

We should remember that it took decades for automobiles and tractors to overtake horses. This may seem surprising today, but if you consider that early drivers had to contend with a complete lack of supporting infrastructure, it becomes easier to understand. I would liken the current state of blockchain to before the beginning of the dot-com boom, placing us in the 1980s rather than the 1990s. We are still in an infrastructure building phase.

We are not ready for mainstream adoption. Everyone knows that the “layer-one” of public blockchains badly needs to scale. Developers are running into the current limits of blockchain and shifting focus to layer 2 and off-chain solutions.

I predict we will see the terms “Web3” and “decentralized web” more and more in 2019. Another major long-term challenge in the dapp space is that we don’t yet have a proven economic model for dapp tokens. Many dapp tokens which have been good investments suffer from questionable economic design.

Even the dominant narratives about bitcoin and ether — bitcoin being a store of value akin to digital gold, and ether paying for the gas required to use a decentralized world computer — are not universally accepted by researchers.

It will be an ongoing challenge for projects to demonstrate a model that supports the price of their token that is rooted in utility instead of speculation. A dapp token claiming to be like bitcoin’s digital gold or ether’s gas should face extreme scrutiny. Tokens have tremendous potential to incentivize growth and good behavior. We need to figure this out.

The good news is, there are tons of smart and motivated people quietly working on all of these problems. Testing new economic models and improving the base infrastructure that supports billions of dollars in value takes time.

Be Patient

Finally, we must learn to separate price movements from underlying fundamentals. High prices don’t mean that a blockchain revolution is imminent and low prices don’t mean that the technology is doomed. Things aren’t going to look like what we expected when everyone was drunk off 100x returns, at least not anytime soon.

It will take a while for this technology to mature, but the underlying fundamentals are strong.

The amount of smart contract computations on Ethereum is nearly the same as it was during the beginning of the year, when prices were at all-time highs. This year has seen hundreds of thousands of GitHub commits to blockchain projects and developer tool downloads. Blockchain offers open platforms with novel economic incentives for developers, which will win their hearts and minds in the long-run.

A herd of builders is coming, laying the foundation for mainstream adoption in the future. When this inflection point hits, it will be hugely disruptive. There are going to be applications and use cases we never dreamed of. The world will be transformed by blockchain technology and decentralization.

We just need a little patience.

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newseveryhourly · 4 years

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As Kenosha, Wisconsin, continues to reel from the police shooting of Jacob Blake, residents are increasingly turning their anger to so-called outside agitators who some say invaded the city to sow chaos amongst the protests—and even kill demonstrators.“They [outsiders] tore up our neighborhood, this is our neighborhood, this is where we shop at. These are not Kenosha people,” Lonnie Stewart, 60, told The Daily Beast. “They’re coming to Kenosha, Wisconsin to destroy our city.”Immediately after a Kenosha police officer shot 29-year-old Blake in the back several times as he tried to get into a van with his kids on Sunday, the Wisconsin city descended into fiery unrest against police brutality. Buildings burned, and cars were razed as activists decried yet another act of police violence against a person of color.That alone provided new fodder for the “outside agitator” narrative—that rogues from out of town have used protests across America over wanton killings by cops as an excuse to riot or incite violence. Those claims haven’t always been baseless, though they are most often used as a premise to crack down on activists. This week, they were also in keeping with the be-very-afraid spirit of the Republican National Convention, which has ignored police violence except to dunk on the unrest that follows it.But after two nights of tense altercations between police in tactical gear and residents and regional activists who defied citywide curfews, hoards of heavily-armed counter-protesters arrived in Kenosha to murderous effect on Tuesday. Police say 17-year-old Kyle Rittenhouse, a Blue Lives Matter fanatic carrying a military-style semi-automatic rifle, killed two people and injured a third after traveling from Illinois to co-mingle with other armed vigilantes looking to protect the city. Prosecutors filed five felony charges against him on Thursday, including first-degree intentional homicide and first-degree reckless homicide—as well as a misdemeanor charge of possession of a deadly weapon.Residents say not all “outside agitators” are created equal—and they want the far-right hordes who have taken to cheering on Rittenhouse as some kind of hero to know that.Here Are the Athletes and Teams Boycotting Games to Protest the Shooting of Jacob Blake“I was terrified when I heard that news and I really had hoped it was just talk and that they wouldn’t actually do anything,” Angie Aker, a 41-year-old Kenosha native, said of armed groups. “Kenosha is a peaceful place. It still has a small-town feel to it—almost everybody knows everyone or is only like one or two degrees of separation. There isn’t usually any of this widespread chaos.”Right-wing media have predictably emerged as staunch defenders of the teenager, even justifying his deadly alleged actions as a necessary evil. “Kenosha has devolved into anarchy, the authorities in charge of the city abandoned it,” Fox News host Tucker Carlson said Wednesday night. “People in charge, from the governor of Wisconsin on down, refused to enforce the law. They stood back and watched Kenosha burn.”“So are we really surprised this looting and arson accelerated to murder?” he continued. “How shocked are we that 17-year-olds with rifles decided they had to maintain order when no one else would? Everyone can see what was happening in Kenosha. It was getting crazier by the hour.”Rittenhouse appeared on multiple videos taken throughout the night as the peaceful demonstration veered toward something more sinister. The Lake County Public Defender’s Office, which is listed as representing the teenager, declined to comment. Attorney Lin Wood, who represented Covington Catholic graduate Nick Sandmann, had a team gearing up to provide support to Rittenhouse, his assistant told The Daily Beast. The lawyers have also established a defense fund on the teenager’s behalf.In one gut-wrenching video, an armed man matching Rittenhouse’s description tripped over on a street before firing at people who seemed to be making an attempt to disarm him. During the exchange, one person was shot in the head and another in the chest around 11:45 p.m. and never got up. Another video appears to show the teenager firing several shots—before getting up and walking toward police vehicles with his hands up in apparent surrender. A third video appears to show him running away and holding his rifle, where he is heard apparently uttering into his phone, “I just killed somebody.” While authorities have not yet released any names, family and friends have identified Anthony Huber, 26, of Silver Lake, and Joseph “Jojo” Rosenbaum, 36, of Kenosha as the two who were killed, according to several local media outlets. Friends also say Gaige Grosskreutz, 26, was shot in the arm during the incident and was expected to survive. Grosskreutz was in Kenosha with the social justice reform group the People's Revolution Movement of Milwaukee, a spokesperson told The Daily Beast.“I had to watch my friend die on Facebook, I had to watch my city burn down,” Marcus Starks, a 35-year-old Kenosha native, and friend of Huber, previously told The Daily Beast. He proceeded to turn his ire to Rittenhouse, the new vigilante prince of the far-right.“That boy had no business being here, let alone with open carry,” Starks told The Daily Beast, adding, “If you’re gonna close this town, close it all the way down.”Officer Rusten Sheskey Identified as Cop Who Shot Jacob BlakeIn a separate video seemingly shot at the boarded-up gas station where Rittenhouse appeared in a Daily Caller video, an individual resembling Rittenhouse is seen chatting with police officers and other vigilante guards. Rittenhouse, whose social media accounts are rife with support for pro-police causes and his affinity for guns, also was interviewed by a Daily Caller reporter before the shootings. “So people are getting injured and our job is to protect this business,” Rittenhouse replies in the video posted on Twitter after being asked what he’s doing at the protest. “And part of my job is to also help people. If there is somebody hurt I’m running into harm’s way. That’s why I have my rifle because I need to protect myself obviously. I also have my med kit.”The Kenosha Police Department said Friday nine people were arrested for disorderly conduct on Aug. 26 after officers received a tip about “suspicious” vehicles with out-of-state license plates meeting up in a remote parking lot. Cops followed the vehicles—which included a black school bus, a break truck, and a tan minivan—to a gas station where some people were attempting “to fill multiple fuel cans.” The vehicles contained items like helmets, gas masks, protective vests, illegal fireworks, and suspected controlled substances, cops said.A Facebook spokesperson said Thursday that none of Rittenhouse’s accounts were reported prior to the shooting. Nor did the company find any evidence that suggested the teenager followed a self-declared militia group, the Kenosha Guard, on the platform—nor was he invited to their event for Tuesday evening, according to Facebook.Still, he seemed to establish himself quickly on the scene. And while outsiders often show up at BLM protests purporting to keep peace, they have also shown a remarkable capacity for—deliberately or otherwise—inciting violence.One of the first prominent instances of property damage tied to George Floyd-era protests, in which a masked man smashed windows in Minneapolis in late May, appears to have been the work of a white supremacist disguised as an anti-fascist, investigators later claimed in an affidavit. Meanwhile, even as initial reports suggested most or all arrests at the Minneapolis-area chaos were from out of state, nearly all of those people were later revealed to be locals. This week, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones was one of the first on the far right to fervently defend Rittenhouse, stating on his show Infowars Wednesday that the violence was just an act of self-preservation against what he described as “a community overthrow of the country.” “I told you they’re going to ratchet this up toward the election and try to make the whole thing racial. But it’s not—it’s about a globalist takeover,” Jones said.Jones was among several right-wing pundits defending Rittenhouse’s actions. The Gateway Pundit, a conservative blog, wrote multiple articles based on the extremely graphic videos, seemingly justifying Rittenhouses’s actions as self-defense.In a post now taken-down by Twitter, Ann Coulter declared Rittenhouse should be her president. A contributor for Turning Point USA, a right-wing pro-Trump student organization founded by Charlie Kirk, defended the actions as a “justified shooting,” while former Major League Baseball player Aubrey Huff tweeted on Thursday that Rittenhouse is a “national treasure.”Unrest in Kenosha was also an implicit theme during the third night of the Republican National Convention—even if no one appeared to explicitly embrace Rittenhouse’s alleged actions. Vice President Mike Pence condemned "the violence and chaos engulfing cities across this country.”“The violence must stop whether in Minneapolis, Portland, or Kenosha too,” he added. Even Donald Trump Jr. has inched toward Rittenhouse's defense: The president’s son on Thursday liked a tweet from far-right conspiracy-theorist Mike Cernovich about the teenager’s “Mostly Peaceful Self Defense Initiative.”Aker, the Kenosha native, said even “pockets of libertarians” in the city were defending Rittenhouse. “In their minds, and the way I’ve seen them talking about it, they’re hailing Rittenhouse as a hero,” she told The Daily Beast. “I think the armed militia agitators, while they don’t represent a lot of Kenosha, showed the world the cooperation that is going on between white racist citizens, the children they’re grooming for violence and hate, and law enforcement,” she added. “It’s been more under the surface until this situation, and this really forced it into plain view. It’s probably a good thing that we’re talking about it and seeing it for what it is now. That’s the only good thing to come out of all this.” Officials on Wednesday were already anticipating—if also perhaps inviting—more chaos with a different kind of outsider: Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers announced National Guard troops from Arizona, Michigan, and Alabama, were being deployed to assist local law enforcement as a city-wide curfew remains in place.“Our town not finna be the same no more,” Elicia Pavlovich, a 29-year-old Kenosha native, told The Daily Beast. “It’s never been like this. Never. Seeing this sight, it just hurts me.”—With reporting by Grace Del VecchioRead more at The Daily Beast.Get our top stories in your inbox every day. Sign up now!Daily Beast Membership: Beast Inside goes deeper on the stories that matter to you. Learn more.

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bigbirdgladiator · 4 years

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kmalexander · 5 years

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Van der Aa: A Free 18th Century Cartography Brush Set for Fantasy Maps

History is rife with “impregnable” walls and it’s a long list full of failure. The ancient Wall of Amurru didn’t last long, invaders got around the Great Wall of China (many times), and the Walls of Constantinople couldn’t stop the Ottoman forces. And that’s only three examples. The record goes on and on (Berlin, Hadrian’s Wall, Walls of Ston, the Red Snake, etc.) and we see the colossal scars they leave behind all across the earth.

With that in mind, I’m happy to present a new set based on Mingrelie autrefois Colchis by Dutch cartographer and publisher, Pieter Van der Aa. A beautifully rendered map of the Mingrelia region of northwest Georgia complete with, you guessed it, a wall. (The Kelasuri Wall to be precise.)

That’s right, you too can let your arrogant fantastical kingdoms erect a border wall! Watch as they bankrupt the royal treasury and overextend their defensive forces! Finally, shake your head as the barbarians invade anyway and the whole ordeal proves once again to be a monumental waste of effort and resources. Hey, it’s drama, and at least someone gets a tourist attraction out of it. Think about it, future generations of hotel owners will thank the ancient paranoid rulers for their ignorance.

Van der Aa isn’t my most extensive set, nor is it my most complex. But what it does, it does rather well. Because of the map’s size, the brushes tend to run a little larger than other sets (the biggest is over 1000px wide), and the settlements and landforms have a very unique style. Lots of little details in the settlements and craggy mountains. I think you’ll like it.

Inside Van der Aa you’ll find over 180 brushes, including:

11 Hamlets

1 Elevated Hamlet

30 Villages

7 Elevated Villages

2 Unique Villages

30 Towns

12 Elevated Towns

8 Large Towns

3 Unique Towns

3 Towers

25 Mountains

25 Mountain Ranges

3 Unique Mountain Ranges

25 Forests

4 Walls

1 Well

2 Cartouches

The button below links to a ZIP file that contains a Photoshop brush set (it’ll work in GIMP as well) as well as a set of transparent PNGs in case you’re using a program that doesn’t support Adobe brush files. I’ve separated them by type, Settlements, Flora & Cartouches, and Landforms. They’re black, and they’ll look broken if viewed in Chrome, but trust me, they’re all there.

DOWNLOAD VAN DER AA

As with all of my previous brush sets, Van der Aa is free for any use. As of July 2019, I now distribute my sets with a Creative Common, No Rights Reserved License (CC0), which means you can freely use this and any of my brushes in commercial work and distribute adaptations. (Details on this decision here.) No attribution is required. Easy peasy!

Enjoy Van der Aa. Feel free to show me what you created by sending me an email or finding me on Twitter. I love seeing how these brushes get used, and I’d be happy to share your work with my readers. Let me see what you make!

Van der Aa In Use

Want to see this brush set in use? I put together a sample map using Van der Aa, and you can see a few variants below. Just click on any of the images below to view them larger.

Supporting This Work

If you like the Van der Aa brush set (or any of my free brushes, really) and want to support my work, instead of a donation, consider buying one of my speculative fiction novels. The first book—The Stars Were Right—is only $2.99 on eBook. I think you’ll dig it. You can find all my books in stores and online. Visit bellforgingcycle.com to learn more about the series. Tell your friends!

More Map Brushes

Gomboust isn’t the only brush set I’ve released. You can find other free brush sets with a wide variety of styles over on my Free Stuff page. Every set is free, distributed under a CC0 license, and open for personal or commercial use. I’m sure you’ll be able to find something that works for your project.

Gomboust: A 17th Century Urban Cartography Brush Set

My first brush set to focus on creating realistic maps for fantastical urban environments! Gomboust is a huge set, and its symbols are extracted from Jacques Gomboust’s beautiful 1652 map of Paris, France. His style is detailed yet quirky, isometric yet off-kilter, packed with intricacies, and it brings a lot of personality to a project.

Harrewyn: An 18th Century Cartography Brush Set

Based on Eugene Henry Fricx’s “Cartes des Paysbas et des Frontieres de France,” this set leans into its 1727 gothic styling and its focus on the developed rather than the natural. It’s hauntingly familiar yet strikingly different. If you’re looking for more natural elements, Harrewyn works well alongside other sets as well.

Popple: A Free 18th Century Cartography Brush Set

This set has quickly become a favorite, and it’s perfect for a wide variety of projects. The brushes are taken from 1746’s A Map of the British Empire in America by Henry Popple, and it has a fresh style that does a fantastic job capturing the wildness of a frontier. Plus it has swamps! And we know swamps have become a necessity in fantasy cartography.

Donia: A Free 17th Century Settlement Brush Set

While not my most extensive set (a little over one hundred brushes) Donia boasts one of the more unique takes on settlements from the 17th century. If you’re looking for flora, I suggest checking out other sets, but if you want to pay attention to your maps cities, towns, castles, churches, towers, forts, even fountains then this is the right set for you.

Blaeu: A Free 17th Century Cartography Brush Set

Based on Joan Blaeu’s Terræ Sanctæ—a 17th-century tourist map of the Holy Land—this set includes a ton of unique and varied signs as well as a large portion of illustrative cartouches that can add a flair authenticity to any fantasy map. Elegant and nuanced, everything works within a system, but nearly every sign is unique.

Aubers: An 18th Century Cartography Brush Set

An 18th Century brush set based on a map from 1767 detailing the journey of François Pagès, a French naval officer, who accompanied the Spanish Governor of Texas on a lengthy exploration through Louisiana, Texas, and Mexico. A unique southwestern set with a few interesting deviations—including three volcanos!

L’Isle: An 18th Century Battlefield Brush Set for Fant

A departure from the norm, this set is based on the Plan Batalii map which was included in a special edition of The First Atlas of Russia in 1745. A detailed view of a battle during the Russo-Turkish War of 1735–1739. Canon! Units! Battles! Perfect for mapping out the combat scenarios in your fantasy stories.

Widman: A 17th Century Cartography Brush Set

A 17th Century brush set based on the work of Georgio Widman for Giovanni Giacomo de Rossi’s atlas published in 1692. A fantastic example of Cantelli da Vignola’s influence and a solid set for any fantastic map. This is the workhorse of antique map brush sets—perfect for nearly any setting.

Walser: An 18th Century Cartography Brush Set

An 18th Century brush set based on the work of Gabriel Walser with a focus on small farms and ruins and a robust set of mountain and hills. This is a great brush set to see how Vignola’s influence persisted across generations. It was etched over 80 years after the Widman set, but you’ll find a few familiar symbols within.

Lumbia: A Sketchy Cartography Brush Set

A sketchy style brush set I drew myself that focuses on unique hills and mountains and personal customizability. My attempt at trying to channel the sort of map a barkeep would draw for a band of hearty adventurers. It includes extra-large brushes for extremely high-resolution maps.

Lehmann: A Hatchure Brush Set

Named after Austrian topographer Johann Georg Lehmann creator of the Lehmann hatching system in 1799, this is a path-focused brush set designed for Adobe Illustrator that attempts to captures the hand-drawn style unique 19th Century hachure-style mountains. This set works perfectly in conjunction with my other sets from the late 18th century.

Want to stay in touch with me? Sign up for Dead Drop, my rare and elusive newsletter. Subscribers get news, previews, and notices on my books before anyone else delivered directly to their inbox. I work hard to make sure it’s not spammy and full of interesting and relevant information. SIGN UP TODAY →

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mysteriouslyzealouspandalov-blog · 5 years

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Is Kate Beckinsale And Pete Davidson's Relationship A PR Stunt Betches

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Is Kate Beckinsale And Pete Davidson's Relationship A PR Stunt Betches

Over the last few weeks, the most interesting new celebrity couple has without a doubt been Kate Beckinsale and Pete Davidson. And that has nothing at all to do with the fact that the more interesting celebrity couples are already broken up. When Pete and Kate were first spotted getting cozy together, it seemed like it might just be a random drunken hookup, but they’ve definitely got some sort of relationship going on. And by that I mean, they’ve escalated from hand-holding to full-blown public makeouts, as celebrity couples do. Our curiosity about what’s happening with them was refreshed this week when they were seen making out at a Rangers game. Classic. Antoni was clearly stressed out about the situation, and frankly, so was I. We’ve all been wondering if this relationship is a PR stunt, so we reached out to our go-to for celeb gossip, Enty Lawyer. His site Crazy Days and Nights is always on point with the latest Hollywood drama, so we really needed him to weigh in. But before we go to the expert’s opinion, we first need to establish why Kate Beckinsale and Pete Davidson’s relationship might be a PR stunt in the first place.

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Is Pete Davidson and Kate Beckinsale’s relationship real or just a PR stunt? Find out what their astrology reveals at link in bio.

A post shared by Betches (@betches) on Mar 4, 2019 at 9:01am PST

It’s Time For A Rebound

It’s now been like, five months since Pete Davidson’s whirlwind relationship with Ariana Grande came crashing down. (For some reason, it feels like it both happened yesterday and 100 years ago.) We were worried about both Pete and Ariana at first, but it seems like they’re doing fine now. Ariana’s new album became the biggest of her career, and she’s about to embark on a sold-out world tour. Pete seemed like he was really struggling in the immediate aftermath of the breakup, but lately, he’s been doing a lot of comedy shows and has been showing up at SNL. So with their lives back in order, is it time for a new fling? From all the photos we’ve seen of him with Kate so far, it looks like he’s genuinely enjoying himself. They might not be in it for the long haul, but isn’t it time for a fun rebound fling? Their astrology charts show that they’re perfect for each other… at least in the rebound department, anyway, in case you needed further evidence.

He’s Way Younger

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As if y’all really going to care about what this caption says 😒 SMH Guess I’ll take this opportunity to speak about life, from the heart … Whoopity-scoop, whoop-poop Poop-diddy, whoop-scoop Poop, poop Scoop-diddy-whoop Whoop-diddy-scoop Whoop-diddy-scoop, poop… and can’t NOBODY take that from you. ❤️ #YallShallow 📸 by: @shotbylester

A post shared by Matt Rife (@mattrife) on Jun 19, 2018 at 5:15pm PDT

The age gap between Kate Beckinsale and Pete Davidson is one of the more interesting pieces here. Kate, at 45 years old, is 20 years older than Pete, which seems kind of shocking, but this might not be too out of character for her. Enty Lawyer tells us that she’s mostly dated younger since getting divorced in 2016, and he’s right. For a few months in 2017, Kate dated comedian Matt Rife, who is two years younger than Pete, and, um, incredibly hot. She’s got a type!

She Has A New Show Coming Out

The main reason we’ve been wondering whether their relationship is legit is that it just seemed so random. Like, how did these two meet, and at what point did they first get together? The timing seemed especially convenient, considering that Kate Beckinsale’s new Amazon show came out last Friday. Look, Kate Beckinsale is great and all, but let’s not pretend she’s been the buzziest star recently. What better than a high-profile fling to drum up some curiosity about The Widow? That’s right, I bet you didn’t even know the name of the show until this very moment. Whoops, still haven’t watched it. This definitely feels like it could be a fake relationship, but Enty is pretty sure that they met by chance recently the night before an InStyle party, and just hit it off.

He (Maybe) Has BDE

Never forget this f*cking iconic Ariana Grande tweet, implying that Pete is packing major heat. Last summer, all we could talk about was how he radiates big dick energy, and that hasn’t really changed. Then again, Pete has more or less denied that he’s toting a third leg. He joked in a stand-up show, “Everything is huge to [Ariana]. Why would she tell everyone that I have a huge penis? So that every girl who sees my dick for the rest of my life is disappointed.” So does the poster boy for BDE actually have BDE? I don’t intend on finding out for myself, but maybe Kate was really curious. Look, if you’ve never been with a guy just because of his size, well, you’re a better person than me I guess. Even though his relationship with Kate seems random, it’s not difficult to imagine them getting together and having a fun time. This might not be a serious relationship for either of them, but in my opinion, it’s most likely completely real. Enty agrees. Here’s exactly what he had to say:

Is it worth the price of Pete Davidson’s tongue down your throat for all the world to see for a publicity stunt for your Amazon show?

Couldn’t have said it better myself.

Images: @betches, @mattrife / Instagram; @arianagrande / Twitter

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awesomeprofitmc · 5 years

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Turn Your Blog into a Sustainable Online Business – Here’s How to Do It!

First, reality check…

What’s your dream online?

Do you want to build a flourishing business or, you’re only looking for some “make money online” opportunity?

Do you just want to build a blog or, you desire a sustainable and profitable online business?

Your answer will determine where you’ll be a few years from now!

How Do Bloggers Make Money From Blogging?

Some of the top questions I’ve heard over and over again are: how do bloggers make money from blogging? How do beginner blogs make money? What types of blogs make the most money? And, can I really make money blogging?

While there may be no problem with these questions however, a careful look will reveal that the focus of these people is nothing but the amount of money that you can make from blogging.

Of course, that’s not a bad thing. There are hundreds and thousands that are presently making 6 – 7 figures with their blogs. People like John Lee Dumas, Pat Flynn, Michelle Schroeder, Melyssa Griffin, and so many others.

But, focusing ONLY on the money will lead you on the wrong path. This is where many miss it.

For example, in a recent blogging statistics by BlogTyrant.com, it was revealed that out of 350 bloggers surveyed 69.4% reported earning zero income from their blogs and 59.3% reported ever starting a blog and abandoning it at some point.

That’s frustrating, right?

The good thing is that the most successful bloggers today don’t focus on making money blogging, they build sustainable blogging businesses.

You’re Not Just a Blogger!

I’ve written variously on this topic. Please do yourself some good by reading these posts:

1. “The Shocking Truth about Blogging – Evolve or Go Extinct!”

and,

2. “Hey Blogger, Please Quit!”

There are some powerful nuggets of wisdom that you wouldn’t want to miss!

If you’ve been online for some time now you’ll agree with me that in the last few years blogging has changed from what it used to be when “make money blogging” was still in its infancy.

Back then blogging was not different from keeping an online diary. Many didn’t think of it with the commercial intent that we do today. People simply wrote about their personal thoughts, activities and sometimes, their favorite recipes.

Also, social networks weren’t as popular as they are today. But as the World Wide Web continued to evolve and people realized that sharing on social networks like Facebook and Instagram is much easier than writing a long blog post, many transitioned sharing their personal stories to the social networks.

The result is that blogging is now more of a commercial venture than it used to be. Nearly every business now has a blog. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a one-person or a Fortune 500 business; every one now blogs!

Not only has the blogging landscape changed, the competition has also become rife. The last time I did a search I discovered that there are currently over 440 million blogs out there. Besides, since the beginning of 2014 tens of thousands of new blogs are being started every day.

Think about that and consider the fact that back in 2005 there were only about 64 million websites (with just a small portion being blogs). But then the number of blogs rose to about 173 million in 2011 and now we are talking about over 440 million blogs.

Can you just imagine what it’s like out there?

Your guess is mine!

Unfortunately, many newbie bloggers, mislead by articles and blog posts written some 5, 6, or 7 years ago (which in internet years is decades), take on the toga of “Blogger” without taking into cognizance the realities of the day. The result is that many discover too late that they’ve not only wasted their precious time but also their meager resources.

So, if you’re still relishing in being tagged a “blogger” please QUIT because you’re not just a blogger you’re an entrepreneur who blogs.

For your own good please quit blogging and build a business!

And, that’s what this guide is all about – helping you build a flourishing online business with your blog.

Understanding the Blogging Business Model

There are a number of ways you can start making money with a blog. The classic make money blogging advice goes something like this:

Set up a wordpress blog

Go on the content creation hamster (Content is KING!)

Follow and connect with others in your niche on social media

Comment on similar blogs, and

Monetize your blog traffic with paid ads and Google Adsense.

Now, this is actually a faulty blogging business model. The 6 – 7 figure income bloggers never grew their blogging businesses to that income level following this classic “make money blogging” blueprint.

To understand the blogging business model you need to understand the CORE function of a blog.

Just take a critical look around today. Why is it that every business now has a blog?

Why do you think companies like Coca-Cola, Disney, Starbucks, and American Express invest time and resources on creating blog posts?

The answer is: Marketing!

Businesses invest in blogging because a blog is principally a marketing machine. It’s important that you understand this.

So, when you hear some people ask questions like, “what types of blogs make the most money?” or, “how do beginner blogs make money?” it’s clear that they have a wrong understanding of the core function of a blog.

This is because, blogs don’t make money. Businesses do!

Whether online or offline businesses make money by gaining customers. And they do this by selling them something.

However, to sell them something, they will need to gain their attention first. And that’s the purpose of the blog – to generate leads.

So, the blogging business model is all about building a list of prospects and turning them into paying customers!

This is how to really use a blog to make money. It’s the tried and tested business system that’s based on true business principles of all ages.

Alright, let’s now step through the blogging business model.

The Blogging Business Model Step By Step

Step 1: Define Your Blog’s Purpose

It was Mark Twain who said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why”

For me that’s truly profound. And I’d say, “The most important day in your life as a blogger is the day you find out why you are blogging and pursue it with all your passion!”

So, do you want to build a blogging business? First, find out your WHY!

Recommended: 5 Little Known Blogging Mistakes that Could Be Frustrating Your Efforts

Step 2: Define Your Target Audience

Who’s your ideal blog reader? Who do you want to target with your content and offers?

Defining your target audience right from the start will help you avoid wasting your precious time in activities that does not add any positive returns to your business. So, with your blog’s purpose in mind decide who your idea customer will be.

Truth is, no matter the amount of traffic you drive to your blog or the number of followers and friends you acquire on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, etc. if you have not defined your blog’s target audience all your efforts will amount to nothing.

Never delude yourself by the huge growth in your social media following. The truth is social media is great for driving traffic to your blog but those who will help you meet your purpose are those who are interested in your offers.

This is your target market. Ignore this and you will simply waste your time chasing the wrong crowd.

I can tell you this from my personal experience. Time past, this blog was averaging 50 comments per post. The irony was that this “highly engaged community” of fellow bloggers hardly clicked on any ad – not even Google Adsense on the blog – at least as a show of support!

Pick the wrong audience and you can be sure of frustration along the way. You really don’t want that.

Step 3: Define Your Product/Service

It was Robert Kiyosaki who said that except you’re the Central Bank or the government’s designated minting company, you don’t make money because…

Money is earned!

And, I’ve said this earlier, blogs don’t make money; businesses do!

Businesses make money by solving a problem for people or by filling a need. They do this by selling product(s) or service(s) that provide a specific outcome or transformation for their customers.

And so, to make money with your blog you need to have a system of earning that money. You need a product or service that your target audience is ready to exchange for their money.

Now, there’s something called product market fit. As defined by Marc Andeerssen, who coined the term in 2007, product market fit is “being in a good market with a product that can satisfy that market.”

Basically, what this means is that you need a market that’s large enough and a product that fulfills a need of that market.

From research, between 43% and 75% of businesses fail because they wrongly assume that people are interested in their product/service. And so, in defining your product/service you must avoid falling into this trap. You should research your target audience to pinpoint their pain areas and then offer products/services that will heal those pains.

Step 4: Architect Your Sales Funnel

We’ve mentioned earlier that the main purpose of a blog is for generating leads and converting those leads into paying customers.

… The system that helps you do this is the sales funnel.

The sales funnel is the “money-making machine” behind every one of the 6- to 7-figure blog businesses you see out there. It’s something that you hardly hear of among the “average” bloggers. Most of the typical make money blogging tips your read might mention list building but beyond that nothing is said about a sales funnel!

What’s a sales funnel?

A sales funnel is a series of steps designed to guide visitors toward a buying decision. The steps are composed of marketing assets that do the work of selling, like landing pages and email.

NOTE: Your sales funnel works behind the scenes to make sales for your business.

Unfortunately, most bloggers mainly focus on creating content and then chase after blog readers, comments, followers and shares on social media. This is because they are unaware of the power of the sales funnel!

A sales funnel can help you grow your business, from capturing leads to making the first sale and then turning that into repeat sales. The best part is that it can do all of these automatically, once you’ve set it up!

Your sales funnel over time will include 4 basic levels of offer. These 4 levels are:

(i) Your free offer – This is the exploratory phase and it’s where people are first introduced to your brand. The purpose is to turn “browsers” into interested leads. It’s obviously one of the most important components of the sales funnel. It separates those who are simply curious from those who are truly interested. It’s your “hand raising offer”!

(ii) The front-end offer – This is designed mainly for customer acquisition. The main purpose is to turn a lead into a customer. There’s a huge different between these two. A person who only opted into your list to get a freebie is worlds apart from the one who has bought something from you.

(iii) The Core offer – This is your main product which delivers the transformation that your business is centered around. Your core offer could be a training course, a service, consulting, etc.

(iv) High-end offer – Some more expensive offer that increases the overall customer value. Popular options include coaching, done-for-you service, etc.

Do note that a sales funnel is also a good way of achieving product/market fit because over time, your business will offer different products to your prospects when the time is right for them.

How to Create a Sales Funnel

There are countless ways you can do this. However, here’s a proven simple strategy:

(i) Offer potential customers a lead magnet

This is a free, value-based incentive that encourages people to join your email list. It could be anything from free videos, tutorials, Ebooks or special reports.

To maximize conversion, you’ll want to offer something irresistible and that instantly attracts attention.

There are a number of ways to get your free offer. You can do it yourself or get your hands on dozens of pre-made lead magnet packages. These packages come with everything you need – high-quality reports, responsive squeeze pages and even autoresponder follow-ups that will help you connect with your subscribers.

One of the places you can get pre-made lead magnet packages is….

(ii) Set up a lead-capture page

With your lead magnet ready you will need to set up a lead-capture page. The focus of this page is on capturing the lead via an opt-in form that adds the subscriber to your mailing list.

One of the best tools in the market right for making great lead capture pages is OptimizePress. With this tool you can easily create your own lead capture pages without any problem. Check it out here.

You’ll also need an autoresponder to capture and manage your mailing list. I suggest you check out GetResponse.com.

As I’ve mentioned above, the purpose of the lead magnet is to turn your blog traffic into leads. It’s important that you get this right because the more people that enter your funnel, the more money you’ll make.

It’s worth emphasizing that your sales funnel is the money making machine of your blogging business. It’s important therefore that you get it right.

You can get high quality, done for you Sales Funnels that converts at Funnels Now.

Step 5: Your Unique Brand Positioning

One of the top-most questions you must answer in order to thrive in the marketplace is “Why You?” Why would your potential customer choose you instead of the competition?

If you take the time to check out the 6 – 7 figure income business bloggers you will discover that they are doing so NOT by being “just another blog!” These top earners have built their brand over time and they have become the go-to experts in their niche.

You cannot do anything less and expect great results!

This is where you need a Unique Selling Proposition (USP).

Your USP is simply a statement of what makes you and your offers different from the competition. Its primary purpose is to influence your potential customer’s perception of your business – why they should care about you and your service/product and not the competition.

Put another way, a USP is why a customer should care about your Brand.

Your USP should clearly define the value you offer and the problem you solve. It should articulate a specific benefit that makes you stand out from the competition.

In order to define your USP you’ll need to consider carefully:

(i) Your target audience – Who is your ideal customer? Check step #2 again and be as specific as possible.

Don’t be afraid to exclude people. For example, this blog is targeted at digital entrepreneurs and entrepreneur bloggers. This is why you hardly see “make money blogging tips” and similar posts on the blog. My focus is more on entrepreneurship and building businesses!

(ii) The problem you solve – Ideally, your product/service solves a specific problem for your ideal customer. Think of the pain you’re eliminating. How is your customer better off after working with you or buying your product versus the alternatives?

(iii) Your uniqueness – This is what meaningfully sets you apart from other businesses that are similar to yours. As I’ve mentioned earlier you can differentiate yourself in thousands of ways: service, experience, technique, etc.

Focus on those things that make a tangible difference to your audience.

A great USP comes from a deep understanding of who your customers are, what they want, what they value, and what motivates them. It should also cause your prospects to crave your product or service.

You’ll likely have a different USP for each product or service you offer.

Step 6: Fuel Your Business Machine with the Right Traffic

Traffic is the life-blood of every online business. Of course, that’s nothing new. However, there are a few things you must note when it comes to driving traffic as a business and not as a “blogger”.

First, you must understand that it is not about quantity but quality! You should identify the traffic sources that are right for your purpose and concentrate most of your efforts in those areas.

From my own experience I have discovered that the most reliable way to get traffic to your business blog is to buy it. You could buy traffic from Google, Facebook or even solo mailings.

Now, if you’re concerned with paying for traffic you shouldn’t because your sales funnel allows you to spend money on traffic without going broke. Simply learn the simple tricks of setting up a sales funnel and implement one for your business and you can be sure of recouping your investment in no time at all!

If you’d rather go for free traffic sources then I’ll recommend search engine optimization (SEO). But you must understand that this is really not free as you’d be paying with your time – and time is money!

Conversely, I have also discovered that the worst traffic source for blogs is traffic from blog comments. Comment traffic has only one value for your blog: SOCIAL PROOF!

If you aim to sell advertising space on your blog, the comment section of your blog could be an advantage. But beyond this depending on traffic from comments is a very quick way to go into extinction!

So, in driving traffic to your funnel choose wisely where to concentrate your efforts!

Pitfalls to Avoid While Building Your Blog-Based Business

As you transition your blog into a full-fledged business online it is important that you note some of the common pitfalls that online entrepreneurs face all the time. Being aware of these real issues will help you greatly in your quest for success.

The following list is only a small fraction of what you should look out for. I have only included these out of the many pitfalls believing that these will greatly help you.

1. Not having a plan

A lot of average bloggers only focus on how to make money blogging and never care about making a plan. This is one reason why many of them struggle without any tangible results.

As a business you need a business plan.

Of course, you don’t need a formal twenty-something page business plan. Those big-format business plans have grown obsolete! What you need is a simple document that lays out who your customers are, what you are selling and what people are willing to pay for your product or service. In addition, work out how much cash you’ve got and how long it will last.

RECOMMENDED: The Plan-As-You-Go Business Plan

2. Giving away too much and not getting back

This is the bane of many bloggers. They are used to giving and giving without asking in return. You don’t build a business only by giving.

Of course, to establish your credibility in the marketplace you’re expected to offer something for free. However, your giving should be carried out with your business objectives in mind – turning a conversion into long-term customer relationship. This is the purpose of your sales funnel.

So, don’t give away the farm. Instead give strategically – offer something useful and intangible in exchange for a customer’s contact info so you can promote more of your offers to them in due time.

3. Spreading yourself thin on social media

Social media marketing is good for marketing and building your brand. But, without the right strategy in place it could become a time waster.

While the primary purpose of social media is for connecting and socializing, as a business you’re on social media with a different motive.

It’s important therefore that you clearly define who your target audience is and then choose one or two of the main social media networks where you know your audience congregates and then make a plan of marketing to them.

4. Ignoring your customers

The customer, they say, is always right! And as you must have known by now your business exist to serve the customer. Unfortunately, our human nature usually works against us as we are mostly focused on ourselves.

Not only that, as bloggers we’ve been counseled to do what we LOVE if we want to make money blogging. The result is that we go about our blog business with the mindset of succeeding simply by doing what we KNOW and LOVE!

Unfortunately, that’s only half the truth. Success in business is NOT about what you know or love but about what the market wants. The problem your business solves for your target market should be the problem that your market counts as important enough.

But how do you know this?

By listening to your customers. They have the answers you seek. Ignoring them is detrimental to your success. That’s why the customer is always right!

RECOMMENDED: How to Finally Locate Your ‘Blog Money Topic’ and Create Your First Profitable Online Offer

5. Having wrong expectations

I’m sure you’ve seen those ads that promise success working one hour a week and in your pajamas, right? The truth is, if you build your expectations on those promises you’ll only end up with frustration.

Building a successful business, whether it’s online or offline, takes massive effort. While there are tech tools that will help you automate most of the operations never expect your success timeline to be measured in weeks or months because there’s nothing like overnight success.

So, you must ask yourself from the beginning if building your blog business will still be worth it if it takes years to get there!

6. Business model jumping and niche hopping

This is related to #5 above. A lot of newbie entrepreneurs, because of wrong expectations, are easily moved to abandon their business or change strategies because they see someone else making money in another niche or market.

Instead of focusing on what is working for others find your focus and then stick with it until you make it work. Jumping from one business to another and from niche to niche makes nonsense of your efforts. However, simple, repeatable, and consistent action steps towards your goal will eventually get you there.

Conclusion

If your intention is to make money blogging then this is the proven path you must take. The blogosphere is evolving and you need evolve with it. It doesn’t matter your experience level if you’ll carefully follow these steps you’ll have your blog business up and running in no time.

Remember, it’s not about focusing on some isolated money making methods. It’s about implementing sustainable and automated online systems that keep pulling in new leads and turning those leads into customers that make you money day in, day out.

If your blog is already up and running it’s important that you start treating it as a business by building into it this automated business system. However, if you’re still thinking of starting your blog then you’re in luck. Read this post carefully again and take action right away.

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michaeljtraylor · 5 years

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It’s getting scary out there

Editor’s Note: This edition of Morning Money is published weekdays at 8 a.m. POLITICO Pro Financial Services subscribers hold exclusive early access to the newsletter each morning at 5:15 a.m. To learn more about POLITICO Pro’s comprehensive policy intelligence coverage, policy tools and services, click here.

Things are looking scary — Apple issued a rare profit warning late Wednesday citing a sharp decline in Chinese demand for its expected lower first quarter numbers. The company blamed, in part, “rising trade tensions with the United States.” This, to a degree, is a win for President Donald Trump, as he wants China to feel pain from tariffs. But it’s also a reminder that many big U.S. companies generate close to half their profits overseas.

Story Continued Below

The spooky salvo from Cupertino tanked Apple shares by 7 percent in after-hours trading, sent U.S. futures lower and could weigh heavily on U.S. stocks on Thursday even as the partial U.S. government shutdown is slated to roll on with no end in sight.

So the trade war has to end — In the latest POLITICO Money podcast, Leuthold’s Jim Paulsen explains why Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping will have to made a deal by March 31: “I think personally that the trade war is coming to an end and there is really nothing Trump can do about it.”

Wall Street eyes the 2020 field — MM talked to a couple of Wall Street Democrats about where they think the industry will wind up in the crowded field to take on Trump. More on this below but Mike Bloomberg tops the list, followed by Joe Biden and then a wild card. Read on to find out who.

GOOD THURSDAY MORNING — Sounds like many of you dig the new faster MM. Keep the comments coming to [email protected] and follow me on Twitter @morningmoneyben. Email Aubree Eliza Weaver at [email protected] and follow her on Twitter @AubreeEWeaver.

THIS MORNING ON POLITICO PRO FINANCIAL SERVICES — Zachary Warmbrodt on what to watch on Capitol Hill in 2019, in the financial services world. To get Morning Money every day before 6 a.m., please contact Pro Services at (703) 341-4600 or [email protected].

New Senators and House members will be sworn in this afternoon for the 116th Congress and will immediately begin yelling at each other about the shutdown. House Democrats still plan to pass a funding bill with no wall but it’s DOA in the Senate (even though the Senate previously approved such a measure unanimously).

… ADP private sector employment report at 8:15 a.m. expected to show a gain of 180K … ISM Manufacturing Survey at 10:00 a.m. expected to fall to 57.6 from 59.3 …

WHAT WALL STREET DEMOCRATS WANT IN 2020 — Per an email from a plugged in Wall Street Democrat: “Most of them would love a Bloomberg presidency but have some doubts about his ability to withstand a Democratic primary. Biden not particularly well known on the Street but a safe pair of hands and has a credible path to the nomination and a general election victory.

“Don’t think Beto will run the kind of campaign that attracts centrist Democrats. The other possibility — if he runs — is [former Virginia governor Terry] McAuliffe who is pro-business, well known from the Clinton years and has demonstrated that he can win the kind of swing state Dems need to carry.”

From another: “Bloomberg for sure. Biden too. I think [New York Senator] Kirsten [Gillibrand] will get some of the Wall Streeters. Maybe Cory too. Everything is so up in the air.”

Top tweet — From Josh Brown @ReformedBroker: “Chinese demand wrecked Apple’s quarter. Your friendly reminder that 40% + of the S&P 500’s 2019 profits are expected to come from overseas. Call Kudlow and remind him too. You break it, you bought it.”

Bob Rubin weighs in — Former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin in a NYT op-ed argues that the climate of animosity between the world’s two largest economies could get incredibly dangerous.

How growth could crash — Morgan Stanley’s Ellen Zenter in a client note: “In 2019, fading stimulus and tighter financial conditions bite. We expect full year growth to come in at 1.7 percent … sharply slower (the slowest since 2012) and much lower compared with consensus (2.3 percent) and with a low point of just 1.0 percent in 3Q2109.”

WARREN LAST NIGHT— Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) last night on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSBC took direct aim at prospective self-funders like Mike Bloomberg and Tom Steyer: “People should not be self-funding and they should not be funded from PACs from other billionaires.”

BERNIE SANDERS HAS A PROBLEM — Per the NYT, his 2016 campaign was rife with sexual harassment and pay disparity complaints and he did nothing about it. Read more. And he told CNN he didn’t do anything because he didn’t know about it and was too busy.

ROMNEY SAYS HE’S NOT RUNNING — Incoming Sen. Mitt Romney said Wednesday he wasn’t running against Trump in 2020 but might not support his reelection: “I think it’s early to make that decision and I want to see what the alternatives are,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper.

WHAT TO THINK — Romney could still run. He’s changed his tune plenty of times on Trump so far, what’s once more? And the world could look totally different in a few months. Romney probably can’t win a primary challenge to Trump but he’s still in the game, as our Alex Isenstadt explain here. And our John Harris on why people like Romney don’t bother Trump very much, because he always crushes them.

STOCK MARKET KICKS OFF 2019 WITH MORE TURBULENCE — AP’s Marley Jay: “The roller-coaster ride on Wall Street resumed on Wednesday, the first trading day of the new year, as stocks plunged early on, then slowly recovered and finished with a slight gain. The Dow … dropped as much as 398 points in the first few minutes of trading after more shaky economic news from China. But it gradually recouped those losses, and a small rally over the last 15 minutes of trading left major indexes a bit higher than where they started.” Read more.

But the first day of stocks doesn’t really mean much — Bloomberg’s Lu Wang: “It’s tempting to assume that as today goes, so goes the year. But history shows that using the year’s first day of stock trading as a premise for an annual view of the market is baseless.”

INVESTORS EXPECT THE FED TO PUMP THE BRAKES — WSJ’s Daniel Kruger and Nick Timiraos: “Investors increasingly believe the Fed … won’t raise interest rates in 2019, a sign of fading confidence that the U.S. economic expansion will continue at the stable pace the central bank foresaw just two weeks ago.” Read more.

TAKING STOCK OF THE WORLD’S DEBT — WSJ’s Aaron Kuriloff: “The world has never had as much debt as it has right now—nearly $250 trillion. That figure is three times what it was two decades ago, according to a Citigroup analysis of data from the Institute of International Finance. The biggest borrowers: the U.S., China, the eurozone and Japan, which have more than two-thirds of the world’s household debt, three-quarters of corporate debt and nearly 80 percent of government debt.” Read more.

TRUMP AND STOCKS — The latest Bloomberg Businessweek goes long on Trump’s impact on the stock market with a piece by Peter Coy.

QUARLES WANTS TO OPEN THE BLACK BOX — Our Victoria Guida on Fed Vice Chair for Supervision Randy Quarles and the stress tests: “In outlining his thinking for how the Fed should improve the stress tests, Quarles said he does not want to ‘rewrite Genesis,’ but he does want to make the exercise more transparent. That’s welcome news to bankers, who often refer to the tests as a ‘black box.’” More for Pros here.

Victoria also has a look-ahead on the year for financial regulations and Zachary Warmbrodt has the view from Capitol Hill.

And Victoria scoops that Pentagon Federal Credit Union has acquired Progressive Credit Union in an emergency merger, a move that means PenFed will now be able to serve anyone in the country.

DEMS FIGHTING THEMSELVES — Our Rachel Bade and Heather Caygle on progressive fighting with leadership over a rules package the left fears could make it harder to vote for Medicare for all and other big ticket items.

THE YEAR AHEAD LOOKS SCARY — Mohamed A. El-Erian on Bloomberg view: “The world enters 2019 with a lot more uncertainty about the prospects for global growth. The excitement a year ago about a synchronized pickup in global growth is replaced by angst that was initially focused on China and Europe but is increasingly spreading to the U.S.” Read more.

PREPAID CARD GROUP REBRANDS — New year, new name. The Network Branded Prepaid Card Association — whose membership includes companies like Visa, Mastercard and Discover — is starting 2019 off fresh and has officially rebranded itself as the Innovative Payments Association. Read more here.

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nicholerestrada · 5 years

Text

It’s getting scary out there

Story Continued Below

… ADP private sector employment report at 8:15 a.m. expected to show a gain of 180K … ISM Manufacturing Survey at 10:00 a.m. expected to fall to 57.6 from 59.3 …

From another: “Bloomberg for sure. Biden too. I think [New York Senator] Kirsten [Gillibrand] will get some of the Wall Streeters. Maybe Cory too. Everything is so up in the air.”

Bob Rubin weighs in — Former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin in a NYT op-ed argues that the climate of animosity between the world’s two largest economies could get incredibly dangerous.

TRUMP AND STOCKS — The latest Bloomberg Businessweek goes long on Trump’s impact on the stock market with a piece by Peter Coy.

Victoria also has a look-ahead on the year for financial regulations and Zachary Warmbrodt has the view from Capitol Hill.

And Victoria scoops that Pentagon Federal Credit Union has acquired Progressive Credit Union in an emergency merger, a move that means PenFed will now be able to serve anyone in the country.

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Source: https://hashtaghighways.com/2019/01/04/its-getting-scary-out-there/

from Garko Media https://garkomedia1.wordpress.com/2019/01/04/its-getting-scary-out-there/

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garkomedia1 · 5 years

Text

It’s getting scary out there

Story Continued Below

… ADP private sector employment report at 8:15 a.m. expected to show a gain of 180K … ISM Manufacturing Survey at 10:00 a.m. expected to fall to 57.6 from 59.3 …

From another: “Bloomberg for sure. Biden too. I think [New York Senator] Kirsten [Gillibrand] will get some of the Wall Streeters. Maybe Cory too. Everything is so up in the air.”

Bob Rubin weighs in — Former Treasury Secretary Bob Rubin in a NYT op-ed argues that the climate of animosity between the world’s two largest economies could get incredibly dangerous.

TRUMP AND STOCKS — The latest Bloomberg Businessweek goes long on Trump’s impact on the stock market with a piece by Peter Coy.

Victoria also has a look-ahead on the year for financial regulations and Zachary Warmbrodt has the view from Capitol Hill.

And Victoria scoops that Pentagon Federal Credit Union has acquired Progressive Credit Union in an emergency merger, a move that means PenFed will now be able to serve anyone in the country.

Source link

from RSSUnify feed https://hashtaghighways.com/2019/01/04/its-getting-scary-out-there/

0 notes