#it's like an engine driving inside of me. constantly building up pressure up and up and up and up and up

[neverendingford]

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[impala1967dwinchester]

Hello I just wanted to say ur amazing writer and I was wondering if I can request Winchester brother x sister reader where the reader is the youngest Winchester maybe around 16- 17 you can choose the fits but I was hoping u can do like where the reader is depressed and has ED (eating disorder ) and doesn’t tell the brothers and one day it gets worse and passed out the brothers are worried trying to help her out but it hard for her I hope this ok if not I can do different request it just I found comfort in angst topics with struggles I go through you know sorry if this doesn’t makes sense

It started years ago. To be exact it started when your father lost it, going mental on your oldest brother Dean. The three of you were thick as thieves and it physically hurt to see the complete and utter destruction your father left behind for Dean to clean up.

Living your life on the road was okay, you had two great older brothers that kept you up. Kept you in good spirits but it's hard when your whole world around you is crashing. You know it, your family knows but no one else.

How Dean and Sam ever dealt with the massive weight on their shoulders. It blew your mind. You. You weren't worth anything, especially not your mother burning on the ceiling. Your father resented you. You didn't need him to say it, because you could tell. Dean was his soldier, Sam was the disappointment, but the smartest out of the three of you. But you, you were the reason all four of you were in this mess. The reason why John was searching for that revenge every day.

Covering it up with the idea of saving people, but you were smart, so very smart. Sam had complimented you many times on your quickness, and sharpness when it came to the lore, but regarding your father, it was never the approval you were looking for.

Lots of things happened, to get you to the age of seventeen and drowning in the pit of your stomach all because you all no desire to be here anymore. You weren't helping your older brothers you were just in the way.

In the way of progress, a major setback to them. For them to prove to John that they would be like him, do like him. They'd have to leave you behind. It was for the best.

It started off as a way to conserve the little food the four of you had. At the ripe age of seven you learned quickly that offering your food to Sam was a better idea, or skipping off to lay in a shitty motel bed was better than eating. Yes your stomach would growl and the acid would burn, but anything to keep the weight of your brother off your shoulders.

As you grew up you learned that if you stayed at school as long as you could it was the best. Dean had just learned how to drive driving was his passion, reading was Sam. And yours... yours was to stay away, out of the way.

By the age of fifteen, you had your patterned packed down and tight. You leave with Sam since he drove you to school, and since he was a senior. You felt a wave of dizziness almost every morning. The night's dinner is still wrapped in its paper bag. Claiming to take it for lunch. Dean never argued with you. Kiss your forehead and hitting the pillow quicker than he hit on the girls that passed by the motel's door.

Your father was already starting to become absent. The shadow of what a perfect family no one ever talked about. You thrived in the school building though. Sam kissed your forehead his height greatly giving him the advantage before saying his goodbyes to you and running to meet with his senior friends.

You walked alone in the hallways. The bullying started almost immediately the second you stepped into the building. Near of my brothers were aware of the shit I went through on a daily basis. Years later they still weren't.

You had settled on never telling them about my dislike for eating, you hoped and prayed most night that they'd never find out. It was better without their acknowledgment of your weakness. Who knows they might be the same way everyone was at school.

The last year had been hard for you and your brothers, your father making less, and less of an effort with all three of you. Your relationship was already straining to stay alive, the burning and hurt in the bit of your stomach was something that was constant now, and from what you could tell it wasn't going to get any better.

Your brothers are now in their early 20's still taking care of their baby sister. Nights you guys sat down for dinner were odd, without John there. The quiet days where a now older Sam would drive you to school, along by yourself all day long. The teasing being relentless.

The whole idea, you were constantly dizzy, constantly on the verge of falling asleep no matter if you were in class, or at the crappy motel room with your brothers.

Tonight though, tonight your world fell apart as you walked in through the door, your final year of schooling was just starting your summer of staying inside and reading was over. The hot day of September had gotten to you more than you were willing to say. As you walked in through the motel door, the cool air hitting you in your face, and the hot air of the evening summer day kicking you in your ass.

It was too much, down you and your light bookbag went. Dean had been on one of the motels' beds when he heard you fall, Sam behind hadn't been able to catch you even with his long arms.

You don' remember much. You do remember hearing the sounds of your brothers frantically rushing around the room, one dropping his gun, and the other rushing over to your side.

"Dean what the hell just happened?" Sam asked in a frantically worried voice. "I don't know all I heard was the engine of Baby, and then her fall to the floor," Dean said rushing to your thin frame. Neither had noticed until now when they finally had time to pay attention to their baby sister that she was rather thinner than a normal seventeen-year-old.

Paler then normal, "Sam do you notice it?" Dean asked as Sam pulled the lightweight bookbag from your small shoulders. A small hum came from Sams's lips, maybe it was too much to say it. The words making truth when they leave his lips.

Sam picked you up feeling just how boney you were. "How did we let her get this bad Dean?" He questioned, Dean kept his head down grabbing her bag and following behind Sam to the bed's side.

When you woke up your two brothers were talking quietly in the tiny kitchen. Sam saw you try to get up their conversation stopped at a halt, and they both came over to help you.

Quiet overcame the room. Dean was the first to speak. "How are you feeling, Y/n?" He asked, you shrugged your shoulders, the ache in your body was strong, but not enough to make that your brother's problems.

"Y/n please be honest with us... Is this the first time something like this has happened?" Your brother Sam asked. Swallowing hard, before talking you answered Dean's question. "I feel fine guys really nothing to worry about." Answering Sams was going to be harder, you don't really remember the last time something like this happened, maybe last week in school, maybe a few years ago. "I don't remember Sam." That was all you said. Sad expression littered their coarse and worn faces.

"Y/n, how long have been like this?" Dean asked, furrowed brows as he asked the question. "Like what?" You replied. "Like how you don't eat at dinner and think we don't notice, how long Y/n? Just answer please." Dean said.

You tried opening your mouth, but the pressure of being truthful with your brothers was overbearing. Trying again and still, nothing slipped out. Sam ur interrupted your train of thought. "Since dad started on with his hunt for yellow eyes?" Simple questions always have a simple answer.

"If you want an honest answer I'd say seven or eight." You said, pushing yourself up from laying in the bed to sitting up against the headboard. The gasps for air were real between your two brothers. One hand came to rest on top of yours while the other paced around the motel room.

Your guess as to which was mad, and empathic wasn't hard for you. Dean pacing around the room meant he was angry, and Sam's empathic hand on top of yours meant he to wanted help. "Why didn't you tell us?" Dean questioned me, Sam turned to look at his older brother. "That won't help, we were talking remember. We need to help her, bot questions her about her actions or even her reason why." Sam said, Dean, calm down as he continued to pace.

Sam returned his attention to you. Hand still laying on top of yours, "Y/n why don't we, all the three of us help you yeah?" He said you laughed a little and Dean looked up from his pacing feet. "I don't think you guys could ever help me. I've been and felt this way for ten years now. This is just how I am now. Broken and worthless to this Winchester family." You said the strain of holding back was harder than you thought. Dean had paused his pacing staring at you and Sams's hand had engulfed yours.

Dean came over, putting his finger under your chin, grabbing your attention. "You listen here, to Sam and I. We care more about you than you'll ever know. We don't care what any person thinks, we don't care about Dad as much as we care about our little sister. Now believe me when we say that all we want to do is help you, helping you is what Sam and I are here for. Y/n you aren't alone, you aren't, worthless, and you most definitely aren't broken. We can help you all you have to do is let us in." Dean said sitting down next to you when he was down.

"We love you and don't wanna see so much potential be wasted especially when we knew we could have helped you," Sam added. You were having a hard time believing them, but nothing would stop you from trying especially when you had your brothers by your side.

[disfordevineaux]

I don't know if you've done this before. But, do you have any Chase headcanons about his childhood or early teens? I'm kinda curious about how my favorite disaster boi could've been like back then 🤔

Chase childhood/teen/early 20s headcanons

I actually answered an ask I will link HERE with a little bit into what I think about his whole ‘growing up’ situation, if you can even call it that. I’ll delve a bit deeper into my hcs but I recommend you read that post I linked. It establishes my thoughts on his childhood to where a lot of these hcs will spawn from. So essentially this is a Part 2 of my Chase childhood headcanons. Going to focus on his late teens and early 20s.

As stated in my previous hcs Chase was an ‘orphan’ until his uncle (his mothers older brother) who magically showed up to adopt him for the government checks. His uncle was a long haul fisherman or something along those lines. This is where he officially received his last name of Devineaux once again.

I have a feeling his name wasn’t originally Chase. That being most likely his middle name or one he came up with which he changed to be his first, either shortened from something or just as is. He seems like an Alexandre to me. He would have negative connotations towards that name and preferred to decide a name a for himself rather than keeping the given name from a mother or family who didn’t really want him. He would have changed it once he left home.

No matter the living situation he was in, there wasn’t a lot of money around and if there was it wasn’t shared with him.

The majority of his teen years or the years that sculpted him into who he is now were in a town North-West of Paris along the coast. Somewhere like Dieppe, a fishing-port town.

You’d think by looking at him as an adult he was a bully or one of those ass hats at school who tried to be cool by being a dipstick or forcing a ‘class clown’ motif. In reality, he did everything in his power to blend into the shadows as he hated school, especially the social aspect of it.

Still, he was a sarcastic little shit when needed.

Spent a lot of his time outside or working dead-end jobs. Sometimes couldn’t return home or had to get into his house through a window instead of the front door.

Didn’t have many valuable possessions but had many crazy experiences like witnessing a flock of birds attack a drunk man, and won.

Was strangely optimistic about his future. Couldn’t get any worse than this, yeah? Yeah, it can and it will buddy.

Did watch Footloose religiously and intensely enjoyed it. *Wink*

He was reasonably good at school and tried to fast track it and graduate a year early. His application was accepted even with the few blemishes on his school academic report thanks to a few fights he partook in.

He was best at literature, English studies and writing in general. He was the top English and writing student and once even tried joining the drama club but the second he walked in the door he was instantly annoyed with everyone inside and did a full 180 out of that hellscape.

He then tried out for the sports clubs and teams but didn’t have time between work after school.

Chase actually made a friend during his last few years at school who managed to be the school’s main weed dealer (Chase draws chaos to him enough said). They actually were a good duo and Chase developed a serious attachment to him. His friend had a lot of money thanks to his business and often would get Chase to be his ‘bodyguard’ when selling to older clients.

They were both weird guys with different levels of intensity over random things. Both had that ‘dudebro’ vibe who would listen to Abba but in reality, the type of dudes who sit right next to each other in a hot tub, no need for 5 feet apart.

Somehow both comfortable with their sexuality which is refreshing. But, that won’t last long :(

They never got to really developed their relationship further before Chase left but it was a silent agreement between them that they liked one another on a physical and emotional level. They rekindled and I guess, ‘officially’ date when in the Air Force when training together. (Lovers in the military trope don’t @ me it fits him PERFECTLY.)

He and his friend were actually going to join the Air Force together. And they did. Chase first and his friend later.

Dude did some stupidly impulsive shit. Especially once he had a friend. Antics? Yes, many. Young, bored lonely boys with repressed feelings do stupid shit to fill the long hours. Jumping off things at high speed? Yes. Buring stuff? Yes. Smashing stuff? Yes. Listening to Green Day? Unironically, Yes.

No doubt they once burned down an abandoned house while trying to hotbox in one of the rooms. Nearly replicated the incident with the school DURING CLASS in the janitors closet. Boys just wanna get high and kiss okay?

Chase was born strong physically but mentally? Nar. Could fight a bear but would crumble under an anxious moment.

Never wanted to appear weak. It was what everyone expected but he never backed down from a fight or rivalry to his detriment. Stood up for himself no matter the circumstance. He always stood up for his boyfrie- SORRY I MEAN FRIEND.

He was an angry guy, mostly because people constantly tested his patience and intelligence and his home life was always a tense situation where there was no time to be soft or delicate.

Did get into many fights with one particular guy during school and out of school hours.

He was an attractive teenager. I like to think (like is a strong word) he was targeted by this one particular asshole because of their pent up feeling towards Chase. Chase either rejected his advances which set it all off or you just got that vibe from all their exchanges. Either way, at one point the tormentor made his feelings cryptically clear and Chase made sure they weren’t reciprocated.

One particular final fight between them, Chase wound up with a bat to the face which broke his nose badly.

The nose never really healed the best or back to how it was originally. This was something that scared him forever, becoming more resentful and unable to let things go. A lot more guarded from then on.

Chase used to be the pretty buff tall boy but the nose downgraded him to just a tall buff boy who has hints of a pretty boy in him.

Worked a few jobs during most nights. Needed money, mostly supported himself financially. Worked as a dish boy in a local restaurant and at the cinema as a cleaner. He always seemed to get the cleaning jobs.

Chase used to skateboard. He was pretty good at it too.

He started smoking young, around 15-16. And thanks to his companion, would often smoke weed supplied to him by his friend.

Loved going to the dentist when he could. He started eating those strong cheap dusty mints when he smoked as it was a cheap form of keeping his breath fresh after he smoked. Also, he thought it made him look cool and ended up getting addicted.

He wasn’t a joyless kid or teen, He just wasn’t one who smiled a lot.

Chase never really trained for his driving license. He just went for his test at the police station. They made him drive around the block once and they just gave it to him.

Chase: the aspiring pilot.

Chase wanted to be a pilot ever since he was young, specifically the French Air Force. No real trigger set that dream in motion, he just liked the idea of piloting a high-speed plane and seeing the world from up above. Moving fast is his ultimate goal.

He studied and prepared early to join the École Militaire de l'air (Military Air Force before it folded into the Air School). But you have to be over 18 and with his plans to complete school early, he would spend the year until then in basic military training, then would transfer over. All of this was to increase his chances of being accepted along with the examination, which he passed thanks to his passion for it.

Of course, things don’t always go to plan and even though he was on a path to graduating early a huge final brawl broke between him and a longtime bully halted this.

He had always fought with him specifically and this time, after years of building it all up, it hit the fan.  The incident put a hold on his plans and wasn’t able to graduate a whole year early.

Fast track forward and due to home pressures and school weighing him down he decided to just leave school and home and when he left, as one last ‘fuck you’ to his tormentor, his friend helped him break into his house and stole his car and drove it straight to Paris, abandoning it in the countryside just before. No one ever knew it was him and it is by far his greatest victory, as he knew how much he loved that car. Major mood. Chase was tempted to push it off a cliff in spite but couldn’t find one.

Chase still went into the general military before transferring to the Air Force once over 18 and acing his entrance evaluations.

Chase and his ‘friend’ managed to get in at the same time. Que, LLLLLLLL LOVERS!

They made sure they were in the same dorms, ‘classes’ and that their schedules lined up. They even swapped around so they had the same duties.

Chase thrived and was a great pilot. He achieved his pilots’ license and began working his way to completing the 2 years here then moving on to a higher position. His friend focused more on the engineering courses.

For someone spontaneous in an impulsive way, he liked the regimented schedule. It gave him purpose and meaning

Chase ended up getting kicked out after a massive brawl incited by an argument with another cadet about the particular notion of his relationship with his ‘friend’.

It was made clear to him such behaviour receives no second chances and was forced to leave, meaning he never officially completed his 2 years and was never allowed back in the foreseeable future.

Chase was desolated and once again hardened by this turn of events.

His 20s in a nutshell

Chase sought employment in the police force thanks to his military origins. He did, in fact, complete the basic military training aspect so he was a front runner for the police force.

He needed a job as all his money was wasted on a fruitless dream.

Spent the first few years of his police force employment as a ‘beat cop’ until his arrest numbers/success and work availability sought his promotion to a detective quite early in his 20s.

Chase was used to working full time and all the time at odd hours from very early on. He started his work career young.

They say you have 10 years in the prime of your career and Chase used that up instantly, shooting up the police then detective ranks fast due to how hard he worked, non-stop. His obsession and dedication with keeping busy and solving cases made him unmatchable.

Chase was physically skilled despite his smoking habits and mentally quick too, even if he acted dangerously without foresight sometimes.

He was very successful as a detective. It was his true calling

Chase has seen some nasty things and is a very good shot with a handgun.

Has he killed anyone? You decide. Personally? Yes, obviously. This has never and will never phase him.

He has been through so many police issued cars he now gets the second-hand cars due to how reckless he is.

Perused criminals with crazy car chases even when he was just a lowly beat cop. It got worse when he became a detective.

No doubt he kept and took home case files (sometimes even evidence) and didn’t give them back even when he became an Interpol liaison. He worked on those cases, he solved them, they are his. He keeps them all either at his apartment or in a storage unit.

Work became his life. His only vice.

Opted out for a partner as it wasn’t a department regulation just a personal option if wanted. Don’t need someone wasting his time, slowing him down or possibly taking away his shine.

Developed obsessive tendencies.

Detective work is competitive. You end up running around trying and fighting to get the best brutal murder homicide case as it will look great to your superiors. It was all a race to see who was the best. Chase was one of the best thanks to having no outsider life to distract him.

Somehow Chase wasn’t a suck-up his those above him. You would think he would be but Chase just enjoyed working and solving, completing things.

You are measured by your achievements and you have to be sure of yourself and your capabilities to survive in the race.

For work that was on the outside very heroic and selfless. Most detectives he worked around and ‘with’ were selfish, heartless and egotistical. The successful ones were anyway. Chase one of them.

He hated them all just as much as they hated him.

Ended up not caring for normal citizens and fellow employees disdain for his abrupt nature. Developed a superiority complex as a result.

But he remained composed and well mannered when dealing with victims and witnesses.

He was very susceptible to the alluring nature of the egotistic know it all.

All of this aged him rapidly. I have no doubt he is only in his early to mid-30s (in the show) but has aged himself visibly with unhealthy working hours and lifestyles.

(I’m not going to go too deep here as at this point I might as well insert my dam fanfiction. I have a whole story planned for what I think his detective days were like. I’ll give you a hint, it’s dark.)

Final relationships.

In regards to his love life? Don’t have one. One night stands? Eh, maybe very occasionally but he isn’t the sort of person to get wrapped up in such things. He is very professional and despite being touch starved he can live without physical relationships easily. They also make him uncomfortable now due to certain events.

His ‘friend’ asked for Chase to wait for him, that once he was finished in the Air Force his partner would come find him. Chase did for the entirety of his 20s and pretty much would for his entire life. First loves are hard to forget.

They only met up again once when Chase was in his late 20s and his friend no longer felt that way towards him or that kind of way anymore. He had a family. Chase sort of understood that his lover realistically would have moved on and blamed himself for not looking for him instead. He became obsessed with his success with work after all.

He couldn’t comprehend why his friend would finally contact him after all these years just to tell him he didn’t love him anymore. He always assumed it was to tie up loose ends or to make fun of him for waiting. To hurt him.

Chase was physically and mentally devastated to say the least. Especially when the last interaction they ever had was his old friend handing him a goddam conversion camp pamphlet.

This really dragged on and I’m sorry I really went off there. I hope it was at least relatively what you were after.

[mgrgfan]

Past of the future, future of the past...

Chapter 5. Soarin' over the space...

A small speck plunged through the atmosphere of Earth, burning pretty bright yellow. Dozens of radars and telescopes were tracking it. It's really ironic, but the Sky High Pokemon, who was supposed to rule the skies and above, was now helplessly falling to the ground, mercilessly dragged by gravity and burned by atmospheric ram pressure. All Draconids, who were now watching TV, could not believe their eyes. The Dragon Lord, the great Rayquaza… got destroyed by the titanic machine, constructed by sorisians. The machine, which was crammed full of nuclear weapons, capable of obliterating cities, should they start flying to Earth. In fact, the same thing could be said for most of other TV watchers… bar sorisians. For them, what little re-entry of the serpentine dragon they've seen, marked a beginning of a new age - an age of open skies, when people can turn their gazes towards the stars and not be afraid, that someone territorial and feral will stop their journey before it even starts. While the rest of the world was either shocked, horrified or furious, Soris was celebrating the first victory of their first space warship. Now the other regions will know, that the Empire is not something to be tampered with! ---- On the Grey Sea, a decent fleet, consisting exclusively of nuclear-powered ships, was underway, towing a giant floating unusually-looking rocket in the middle of the formation. Several ships with "buzzers" - arcanotechnological devices, designed to drive off the Pokemon before the launch - and depth charge launchers, a tanker with kerosene, an electrolyzer-equipped ship for creating liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen on site, four deep space communication ships, several frigates with anti-air weapons and a single launch control ship - all of those machines were preparing for something great. A personal tiltjet of the Emperor, which was speeding to the landing pad of the launch control ship, only confirmed this further. A long distance from it, a research plane from Kanto was flying, trying to get a decent picture of what the heck was even happening. If the reports of astronauts from a nearly year ago were to be believed, imperials claimed, that their Moon mission was launched by the similar rocket 3000 years ago… but how? And what was their reason for this launch, not even ten hours after the launch of their space warship? And what was the payload of this giant rocket? ---- Young Draconid could not believe, what she was seeing. She once saw the Lord Rayquaza with her own eyes - a long, majestic serpentine dragon of incredible power. What lied before her… wasn't like it. This one was thoroughly burned, up to the point when the originally green skin wasn't recognizable, some of the mug-fins were completely destroyed, eye sockets were empty and scorched, the horny ridges of mouth were chipped, one of the fangs was missing… The strange crackling sound interrupted her thoughts and, less than a second after, someone rudely yanked her away and started to mercilessly drag her. "What the Reverse World?" "The less we spend time near the corpse, the better," the assailant replied, revealing himself to be Damien. "The Geiger counter is going crazy near it, as you've heard. When we are back at the Meteor Village, we'll need to throw away our clothes, shave all the hair on our bodies and wash ourselves thoroughly, lest the radiation poisoning get much worse." "Radiation poisoning?" "Valencia works on the nuclear power project, she knows a lot about it and lended me a Geiger counter. Let's go faster, since the sooner we decontaminate ourselves - the better." ---- "Fueling of the Water Dragon is now finished. The rocket is ready to be set into launch position," said one of the launch control officers. "Fill the cap's ballast tanks and set the rocket into launch position," gave an order the Emperor, who was just delighted to see one of his creations being ready to go flight pretty soon. "Executing, Your Majesty." Giant rocket started to slowly sink and, after several hours, stabilized itself half-submerged and vertical. "The rocket is now in the launch position, Your Majesty. Buzzers working good, no Bedolangs or other Pokemon for several kilometers, all systems good." "Excellent. Resume the launch countdown." "Aye-aye." ---- "Much better," said Damien, who has just finished thoroughly washing himself with soap, having already shaved everywhere he was able to. To his left, Helian sat, also washed and completely shaved. "Now can you tell me, what is the meaning of all this?" asked them Renza, who was clearly not happy. "We've seen Rayquaza's corpse. It's so radioactive, the Geiger counter near it goes crazy and, apparently, the corpse itself glows in the dark slightly." "... Wait, what did you just say? Rayquaza's… corpse?" "Yes. As much as it's shocking to us all, apparently, sorisian nuclear weaponry was able to kill the Dragon Lord. And no, you better don't go there, since, as I've already said, it's radioactive as heck. I think we've got a small radiation poisoning by merely standing near it. Good thing wind was blowing away from us too..." "Damien, Renza, I don't feel so we��" started Helian, then fell to her knees and started vomiting. "Uh-oh," murmured the shaved Draconid, carefully helping her to get back up. "Well, it's been six hours already, so, it shouldn't be so bad. Does your head ache?" "Barely, but… yes," Helian said, trying to not throw up again. "Well, Renza, now you see, what the radiation poisoning is. Bury the bag with our old clothing somewhere and get us a new ones. Oh, and also - call the Elder!" "Will do," replied the scared Renza, sprinting out of the building. "Don't worry, Helian, the worst part will be over in less than a 24 hours and all of it will be over in a month or so," murmured Damien, trying to calm the girl down. ---- "... Ignition sequence start, four, three, ballast detached, all engines are running! Liftoff! We have a liftoff! Fifty-four minutes past the hour, liftoff on the Water Dragon!" As those words were being said, the rocket, which was calmly floating in the sea, shuddered, the water around it started to rise from the giant bubble of exhaust gases, but the rocket was already lifting off and setting the course for beyond the sky, propelled by titanic aerospike engine in the aft and four smaller assist engines on top of the first stage. "Never gets old," the Emperor said with a nearly childish glee on his face. "Ah, I remember, how hard it was to fit an aerospike in there… At least it works and is pretty cheap to manufacture and use, as well as recoverable." "The combustion instability for the big bell was even bigger of a bastard to get rid of, though," noted one of the engineers, who worked on this project. "No wonder we've ditched it after a single launch and placed an aerospike engine instead." "Yeah. Arcanics for stabilizing combustion in engine of this grade aren't cheap and aerospike is just better overall." "Not for non-atmo conditions, though." "Of course." ---- "Zemlino has just reported launch of the Water Dragon, crammed full with cargo," happily reported the comm operator. "A hundred-something of drive nukes, a few tons of liquid hydrogen, two retro-missiles and, what's really important - repair supplies!" "Cool!" whistled the engineer. "It's pretty much a miracle, that we not just survived yesterday, not just achieved victory, but also made it with no serious damage to the ship." "Yeah, but this very un-lucky Hyper Beam, which passed right between the second-stage shock absorbers, was… unnerving," the pilot replied. "Even though they are armored, if the shock absorbers got damaged and stuck - we would've been left with no primary propulsion and, as you can guess, majorly screwed." "To speak truthfully, you are the real hero of yesterday battle," noted the weapons operator. "I don't know, how you've managed to do it, but to take the most powerful attacks on the well-armored pusher plate or, at least, make them just scratch the hull's surface - it's more than something. If not for it, our ship would've got a few "unplanned ventilation ducts" - maybe, even through the drive bomb magazines or reactor!" "Me? How about you? After all, it's you, who was constantly scoring the hits on this dragon and not letting it get a metaphorical breath!" retorted the pilot. "Gah, I was just deciding targeting and launch priorities for the offensive weapons, while the fire control system did all the aiming and shooting!" "Comrades, let me just say, that we were all heroes yesterday," interrupted them the captain, who was trying to prevent discussion from getting out of hand. "We all did our part in taking out the tyrant of the sky, so, no need to get hesitant about your achievements. By the way, it's time for us to go rest and allow second shift to take the stations." "Aye-aye, comrade captain!" ---- Deep under the Lumiose City, inside the War Room, quite a few people sat. "So, basically, now we have a giant militarized spaceship above our heads," one of them said. If his badge was to be believed, he was the current Secretary-General of the Pokemon Nation. "As scientists from Unova told me, it uses nuclear explosions for propulsion and for weaponry." "Nuclear explosions? Isn't that just a theory?" said a woman from Kanto. "As you can see, not anymore," unovan president replied, slightly irritated from having to state something so obvious. "By the way, Mr. President, I must note again, that cancelling the Castelia Project was a very, very big mistake," one of the nuclear scientists decided to put a word. "Castelia Project? You mean, weaponizing Forces of Nature and using them against us during this war was not enough?!" the Hoenn delegate responded with a great fury in voice. "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" the Secretary-General decided to take a measure before the actual battle could've ensued. Even if no one had a Pokemon here, all-out physical pummeling was still not entirely out of the question. "Anyway, I will stand on that cancelling the Castelia Project was a great mistake," scientist resumed his talk. "Since, apparently, Soris Empire had no moral or other restrictions in performing their own version of it, which resulted in what we see today - they've got nuclear explosives of many kinds, while we've never ever performed a single test, making the nuclear explosions pure theory until the recent events! We have absolutely nothing, that can even scratch their ship! And it is loaded to brim with nukes, probably, ready to turn entire regions into scorched wastelands! Even the Rayquaza itself fell before this horrible weaponry - by the way, we still have no idea, where should we dispose of this corpse, which is so radioactive, it glows in the dark..." "Loaded to brim? Are you so sure about that? It's entirely possible, that they've exhausted their armament during the fight - there were quite a lot of explosions!" "Not anymore," said a director of the Mossdeep Space Center, getting off the phone. "Just a few minutes ago, a superheavy rocket was launched from the sea. Of course, it's not the same kind of monster, but still something. For what it looks like, it's a cargo mission, designed to resupply their space warship. I'm sure, that there'll be a lot of nukes to replenish the storages." "Arceus damn it," representative from Sinnoh mumbled, grabbing his head. "Can you contact the rulers of the Soris Empire?" "The Emperor is now onboard one of the ships in the fleet, which launched this superheavy rocket. The Empress… we are trying to contact her, but she is not available right now and representative refuses to give any comments." "And those damn journalists are on it again…" stated grimly the Kanto's representative, looking at the TV screen. ---- "Workpods deployed, set to meet the cargo carrier," reported Pyotr Petrov, who was working as an engineer in the second shift. On the outside, one of the lander bays opened, allowing two small, mostly-cylindrical crafts with several manipulators and chemfuel engines, to detach from the space warship and enter the interception course to meet the "Hauler" superheavy cargo spacecraft and ensure, that it safely arrives to the "Red Explorer" for resupplying the massive nuclear pulse-propelled vessel with drive bombs, hydrogen, spare parts and like this. Right now, the pods were working in the automated mode, even though each of them was able to house a single human operator, should the situation require it. As Pyotr looked on the flying pods through the secondary cameras, he thought, that, probably, Pokemon Nation would have used a Reuniclus or something for operation like this. He still could not understand, how did it come, that they were in so close with Pokemon. Of course, cosmonauts of the Nation were using some kind of spherical containment devices, as the crew of the Space Lab 2 reported, and scientists of Soris Empire were going just crazy about them, but… how did it come, that they've relied on Pokemon so much? ---- "Zhorik, how long do we have to wait?" asked the captain in slightly irritated voice. Right now, the entirety of this shift of bridge crew gathered in the mess hall in the outermost level of the habitation centrifuge, which was pretty cozy, with a big display on the wall, several stands with books and magazines (mostly the "Human Will Conquer Space Soon!" and "Human Conquers Space!", because someone in the ground crew had a strange sense of humor), a few tables with comfortable chairs and a galley with mini-bar. "Not much… Here!" happily exclaimed the engineer, who has just managed to reconfigure one of the backup comm antennas into a TV signal receiver and jury-rig a decryption program for the broadcast standards of Pokemon Nation, before running the decrypted signal to the display. "Let us try to tune to one of their channels…" A few minutes of fiddling with settings later, they were greeted by some kind of a news broadcast about their recent battle with, how the hoennians called it, Sky High Pokemon. None of the cosmonauts knew the general language of Pokemon Nation well (though no one from Soris did as for now, even the linguists - the language barrier is not an easy thing to overcome!), but they could get a basic outline. "Taras Grigorievich, do they really think, that we sleep and dream of nuking their cities to ashes?" asked the perplexed sensors operator. "Apparently, yes. Just like we are afraid of them using their Pokemon - especially Ghosts and Psychics - to wage a war on us. Teleport raids, guerrilla warfare and so on… In short, this'll be really bloody, should it happen. I don't know, if the people of Soris would be able to win." "And they are afraid of us razing their cities from orbit, where nothing of their origin can reach our ship without getting intercepted. Makes sense… and parity - if they try to attack Soris, we blow their homes up with nukes and vice versa." ---- "Drive bomb magazines reloaded, RCS tanks full of propellant, retro-missiles loaded into silos, damaged armor plates replaced. I must say, our ship is now almost as good as new", reported engineer Petrov, looking at screens. He was very happy, that there were no heavily-damaged parts, which would've required more repair than removing a damaged armored plate and slapping a fresh one in place, as well as the fact, that most plates were designed to be easily interchangeable. After the trainwreck of a repairability the Project 21A Space Ferry was, no one wanted to go through the same nightmare, except for Pokemon Nation with their Space Shuttle (though even this was debatable). "Wonderful," replied the current commander of the ship. "Incoming transmission!" said the comm officer. "Patching through." Author's notes: "Human Will Conquer Space Soon!" (10.05.400 AFE - 18.05.425 AFE) and "Human Conquers Space!" (18.06.425 AFE and ongoing) - monthly magazines in Soris Empire, which are mostly centered around the Imperial Space Program, but also host some comics and stories. Even though, originally, they weren't selling well, they've managed to rack up a really decent fanbase over time, especially after the Sergiy Vyugenko started to write his stories for those journals. AFE - After Foundation of the Empire. Water Dragon rocket is based on the real Sea Dragon, except with aerospike engine in the first stage (second version of Water Dragon). Bedolang - the Pack Hunting Pokemon, very dangerous aquatic predator, native to Soris. During the Shift, for the reasons yet unknown, most of the Bedolang population got time-shifted as well, while the rest slowly died out from inbreeding. At the current day, the shifted population is sufficient to safely breed and starts to become a sea hazard to rival Gyarados again (in fact, before the Shift, packs of Bedolangs were known to hunt and kill Gyarados without much problems). However, due to the actions of Soris Empire, they prefer to avoid the ships.

[mx-fawkes]

This Homemade Pork Rub Will Have Everyone Squealing With Delight ...

Thank you @sillyscrunchy for your continual support! 

I went with Junkrat taking care of injured Roadhog because I live for that good stuff .

It was Junkrat's fault.

A simple job he'd said. Just stroll into an unguarded building, set up a bomb, and blow it up. The people paying them didn't want anything stolen, just wanted the records in the building destroyed.

Couple timed bombs in the server room would take care of that, and they could be safely on their way before anything started to detonate.

That was before he'd seen the safe on their way out. It was probably just some petty cash, but they'd agreed that no score was too small for them. It wouldn't take long to blow the lock, they could still easily make it out in time.

They were pulling out the loot when the first bomb went off, eyes meeting in panic before sprinting for the door. The second explosion sent Junkrat tumbling to the floor, and Roadhog didn't hesitate to throw himself over his partner,  shielding him as the ceiling began to cave in.

It came down all at once, a sudden blanket of pain.

Roadhog couldn't move, muscles frozen in place and shaking with the effort of holding the weight of the rubble above them. Shale and plaster slid to the floor, invisible behind clouds of dust.

He almost didn't notice Junkrat wriggling around underneath him, barely heard the small explosions as Junkrat tried to clear some of the debris surrounding them. It wasn't until Junkrat fully crawled free that he collapsed, the weight above too heavy to even draw a breath.  

Everything was fading out fast, and he couldn't find the strength to push himself free. Was he really going to die like this, surviving a hundred police shootouts, surviving the apocalypse, just to die in a shitty office building because they were too greedy to run from a ticking time bomb?

Eyes sliding closed, he resigned himself to his fate.

Hopefully, Junkrat had managed to get himself free and had the sense to start running.

The blast above snapped his back into alertness, as his Junkrat's panicked screeching as he pushed the remaining rubble from Roadhog's broad back.

"No! No! No! Get up!"

He felt Junkrats hands pat him down until they pulled a canister free, shoving it into his mask with a soft hiss. Desperately pulling in shallow breaths he could feel the gas start to take effect, body twitching as he coughed wetly. His mouth tasted of blood.  

Another canister clicked into place and he took deeper breaths, feeling joints snapping back into place as he slowly pulled himself upright. Junkrat slipped under his arm, helping keep him upright as they made their way to the bike. slower than either of them would have liked, but even with the gas Roadhog felt like he'd been hit by a truck

Collapsing on the bike with a wheeze, he started the engine with Junkrat clinging to his back. They were moving by the time they heard the first sirens, Junkrat shouting directions right into Roadhog's ear as he drove on auto-pilot muscle memory handing the driving while his brain hadn't quite caught up after the near-death experience.

He made it three steps into their hotel room before collapsing on the bed. Junkrat hovered nearby, nervous energy radiating from him.

"Roadie? You still with me?"

A grunt.

"You want some more gas?"

He slowly shook his head. He wasn't wounded anymore, just tired and sore.  

"Alright, You get some rest, I'll-"

It felt like he'd only closed his eyes for a moment, but when Junkrat shook him awake the sun had risen. Junkrat had changed too, scrubbed mostly clean and wearing the baggy hoodie and trackie-daks he wore when they pretended to be citizens.

"How ya feelin'? Went out to pick up a couple of things. Figured I'd try and, well, I ran you a bath."

Roadhog sighed. Sleeping had helped, but now he was alert enough to feel how filthy he was. He raised a hand, letting Junkrat pull him from the bed.

Clothing and armour fell to the floor, leaving outlines in the thick dust covering his skin. He looked like a tanning session gone horribly wrong.

The en-suite bathroom was the best part of this hotel, a large green room with a bath big enough for even Roadhog to fit in comfortably. It looked inviting, steam rising through the thick layer of bubbles.

He was about to climb in when Junkrat put a hand on his shoulder. "Want your mask off? I can wash your hair."

What was this?

He nodded, closing his eyes as Junkrat undid the straps and pulled it off. When he opened them Junkrat was looking at him with a pained expression. Blood was spattered all over the inside of the mask, he could imagine how bad his face looked.

He took a deep breath, inhaling the strangely spicy scent in the air before the steam flooded his lungs, leaving him clinging to the wall as he hacked up what felt like half a lungs worth of blood.

"-need more gas?"

"I'm fine."

The bathwater was almost scalding, and he slowly sank into the tub with a heavy sigh. It had been a while since he'd had anything other than a quick scrub down in the shower, they rarely had time to rest and recover.

"I got some bubble bath that said it was good for muscle pain, also got you some good shampoo and- Oh!" Junkrat bolted from the room, nearly slipping on the tile. Three steam filled breaths and he was back, carefully carrying a glass of orange liquid. "Thought I'd get ya some juice too, might make you feel better?"

Honestly, he'd rather have a beer, but the cool sweetness of the drink was welcome, washing the taste of blood and dust from his mouth. He handed the glass back to Junkrat, closing his eyes and trying to relax.

It was a little difficult when he could feel Junkrat's orange eyes boring into his skull. He cracked one eye open, staring back.

"Do you want me to help you clean off or anything? You can just relax and let me take care of ya."

Roadhog nodded, zoning out while Junkrat grabbed a loofah.

He'd gotten hurt on heists before, and Junkrat was rarely this attentive afterwards. The last time he'd gotten like this had been... Italy maybe? When they'd started that oil fire in the kitchen. When Junkrat found out that Roadhog had been burnt he'd been beside himself with worry. It wasn't serious, not even worth wasting gas on, but he'd insisted on applying burn cream every day, constantly asking Roadhog to remind him when it needed doing.

Then there had been the time back in Australia when he'd crashed his rip-tire into a pile of scrap in the middle of a fight, bringing the whole thing down on top of everybody. Back then he thought Junkrat's attempts to help were born from fear that Roadhog would end their partnership, throw him out of the farmhouse and leave him to fend for himself.

He wasn't so sure now. Junkrat trying to himself feel better about his mistakes, or an attempt at an apology he would never say aloud?

Either way, it was nice.

Junkrat was humming something as he carefully pulled bits of debris from silver hair, a soothing half-waltz. It sounded familiar, and if he had the energy he'd ask what it was.

By the time he was clean, the bathwater had turned into a cold grey slurry. Junkrat gave him a quick rinse with the showerhead before helping him to his feet, towelling off before they headed for the bedroom.

"Want me to give you a rub before we go to sleep?"

What.

His confusion must have shown on his face, Junkrat barking an embarrassed laugh before looking away.

"A massage, just a nice friendly massage between mates! I've done 'em before, I know what I'm doing."

Doubtful, but he followed Junkrat's instruction to lie on his front anyway, shoving a couple of pillows under himself. He always found lying on his stomach awkward, worried about putting too much pressure on his lungs.

Long fingers trailed over his exposed back, and he shivered. There was the snap of a bottle cap, and oil was poured onto his back. He recognised the smell, the ginger oil Junkrat used on his own muscle pains.

Exploratory fingers spread the oil out, roaming over muscle groups to find the places where the muscles were at their worst.

They found a spot to the left of his spine, pressing harder and rubbing the muscle until it relaxed before moving on.

The slow unwinding of his muscles felt both amazing and terrible. Junkrat seemingly knowing just how far he could push without causing actual pain, moving to different spots as soon as it got too much. Had he always been so tense?

"Should do this for you more often."

That sounded good.

Roadhog had no idea where or when Junkrat learnt massage techniques, he seemed unlikely to land a job in any of the places in Junkertown that offered the service.

"Had a mate teach me." He was never sure if Junkrat was able to read him that well or if his chatter just happened to align with Roadhog's thoughts.

"He did it for a living, helped me with the muscle pain when I first got my prosthetics. Returned the favour for him whenever he had a bad day."

Junkrat continued to work away the ache of the day and the tension of years. Groans of pleasure began to slip from Roadhog's lips, too tired and relaxed to fight against it. He felt like he'd melted into a puddle. Even when Junkrat moved away he just lay there, idly watching his partner put things away and missing the feel of those hands on his skin.

"What do you say we order some food in and figure out where we're gonna go next? Reckon we can find somewhere that does those dumplings you like."

"Sounds good."

Roadhog pulled himself into a sitting position, leaning against the headboard. "Thanks."

[maiasolaire]

KDramas I Wanna Watch

Dramas recommended to me by friends and/or internet posts.

(Summaries aren’t mine)

1. She Was Pretty

Can you over-romanticize a cherished memory from childhood? Ji Sung Joon (Park Seo Joon) was a shy, porky kid who was constantly teased by the other kids for his rotund shape. When he transfers to a new school in fifth grade and meets Kim Hye Jin (Hwang Jung Eum), the prettiest, most popular girl in school, his life turns around. The kind-hearted Hye Jin becomes his only friend and protector — and they become each other’s first love. But then everything changes when Sung Joon’s family immigrates to the United States and then Hye Jin’s father’s business goes downhill, plunging her family from their previous wealthy lifestyle. But that’s not all! Hye Jin’s beautiful looks initially took after her mother. But as soon as Hye Jin hits puberty, her father’s genetic skin condition takes hold and leaves her with reddish facial scars that makes her resemble a raccoon. Fifteen years later, Sung Joon is a whole new person — dashing and handsome and a successful art director — who is transferred from New York to the Seoul office of “The Most” fashion magazine to work as the deputy chief editor. He tries to find his childhood friend, Hye Jin, again. But embarrassed by her current unglamorous appearance, Hye Jin passes off her best friend, the stunning Min Ha Ri (Go Jun Hee), as herself. But when Hye Jin is suddenly transferred to the magazine department at her new job to work as in intern under Sung Joon, how much longer can she keep her true identity a secret?

2. Descendants of the Sun

Some relationships are fated, despite the challenges of time and place.

Yoo Shi Jin (Song Joong Ki), the leader of a Special Forces unit, meets trauma surgeon Kang Mo Yeon (Song Hye Kyo) in a hospital emergency room after Shi Jin and his second-in-command, Seo Dae Young (Jin Goo), chase down a thief on their day off.

Shi Jin is immediately smitten with Mo Yeon, and he asks her out on a date. But Shi Jin keeps getting called to duty when he is with Mo Yeon, and the two also realize that they have conflicting views about human life (he will kill to protect his country and she has to save lives at all costs). They decide to break off their budding relationship as a result.

Dae Young also tries to break off his relationship with Army doctor Yoon Myeong Ju (Kim Ji Won) because her father, Lt. General Yoon (Kang Shin Il), thinks Shi Jin is a better match for his daughter.

Shi Jin and Dae Young are then deployed to the fictional war-torn country of Urk on a long-term assignment of helping the United Nations keep peace in the area. After repeatedly being passed over for a promotion because of her lack of connections, Mo Yeon gives up performing surgeries, loosening her principles somewhat to become a celebrity TV doctor and caring for VIP patients at the hospital. But when she refuses the sexual advances of the hospital chairman, Mo Yeon is picked to lead a medical team to staff a clinic in Urk! There, Mo Yeon unexpectedly reconnects with Shi Jin.

3. Strong Woman Do Bong Soon

Do Bong Soon (Park Bo Young) comes from a long line of women possessing Herculean strength. But Bong Soon can only use her strength for good; if she uses it for her own personal gain or to mistreat others, she can lose her strength forever like her mother, Hwang Jin Yi (Shim Hye Jin). Bong Soon’s twin brother, Do Bong Ki (An Woo Yeon) did not inherit the unusual family strength and is a doctor, but Bong Soon has trouble finding gainful employment as an aspiring game developer.

When Ahn Min Hyuk (Park Hyung Sik), the young CEO of AIN Software, a gaming company, witnesses Bong Soon’s amazing strength against a group of gangsters one day, he hires her to be his personal bodyguard to help him catch a man who has been making death threats against him. Bong Soon has a secret crush on her childhood friend, In Guk Doo (Ji Soo), a police detective who is trying to capture a dangerous kidnapper in Bong Soon’s neighborhood. Can Bong Soon help both men track down the culprits?

4. While You Were Sleeping

A young woman with bad premonition dreams meets two people who suddenly develop the same ability.

Nam Hong Joo (Suzy) lives with her mother, Yoon Moon Sun (Hwang Young Hee), a widow who runs a small restaurant. Jung Jae Chan (Lee Jong Suk), a rookie prosecutor, and his younger brother, Seung Won (Shin Jae Ha), move in across the street. Since she was young, Hong Joo has had the ability to see bad events before they happen, but she is often unable to do anything about it.

One day, Jae Chan has a strange premonition dream about an accident involving Hong Joo and Lee Yoo Beom (Lee Sang Yeob), a ruthless attorney who used to be Jae Chan’s tutor. Jae Chan decides to interfere in the course of events and ends up saving the lives of Hong Joo and Han Woo Tak (Jung Hae In), a young police officer. When Jae Chan, Hong Joo and Woo Tak then start having dreams about one another, they realize that their lives are now somehow entwined.

But can the three discover the reason that they were brought together, and can they prevent the people closest to them from getting hurt?

5. Just Between Lovers (Rain or Shine)

A building collapse ties the fates of three young people years later. Ten years ago, the S Mall collapsed due to shoddy construction, killing 48 people inside.

Ha Moon Soo (Won Jin Ah) was there with her younger sister, who perished in the accident. Lee Kang Doo (Junho) was there waiting for his father, who was an electrician doing work on the building. Seo Joo Won (Lee Ki Woo) was helping out his father, who was the head engineer of the building. Moon Soo, Kang Doo and Joo Won survived the horrible accident, but their loved ones did not.

Years later, Joo Won is an architect who is working on a new project to replace the former S Mall. With her keen eye for detail and sturdy building construction, Moon Soo ends up working for Joo Won on the project. Kang Doo works odd jobs to get by and ends up working at the new construction site.

How will they each deal with their respective pains as they are reminded of the event that changed all of their lives so profoundly?

6. Father Is Strange

This is one of those things that can disrupt a seemingly normal family. Byun Han Soo (Kim Young Chul) lives on the outskirts of Seoul with his selfless wife, Na Young Sil (Kim Hae Sook). Their bustling lives center around his small diner, “Daddy’s Snack Shop,” and their four adult children, Joon Young (Min Jin Woong), Hye Young (Lee Yoo Ri), Mi Young (Jung So Min) and Ra Young (Ryu Hwayoung).

Joon Young tries not to disappoint his parents as he has been unable to pass the civil service exam for five years. Hye Young is the most accomplished as a successful attorney who has an on-again, off-again relationship with Cha Jung Hwan (Ryu Soo Young), a television producer-director. After years of trying to land a job, Mi Young finally lands her dream job as an intern for Gabi Entertainment, only to discover that her high school bully, Kim Yoo Joo (Lee Mi Do), works there as a team leader. Ra Young works a yoga instructor and falls for Park Cheol Soo (Ahn Hyo Seop), who has absolutely no interest in returning her attention.

The close-knit Byun family is thrown into turmoil when Ahn Joong Hee (Lee Joon), an idol-turned-actor, shows up one day and claims that Han Soo is his father. Joong Hee is widely ridiculed by netizens as a robotic actor, but he is determined to earn respect by landing a role in a highly anticipated miniseries about a father-son relationship. But in order to conjure the emotions needed for the role, Joong Hee decides he needs to get to know the father he believes abandoned him and his mother 35 years ago.

Will Joong Hee’s appearance threaten to reveal a deeply buried secret and otherwise disrupt Han Soo’s happy family life?

7. Weightlifting Fairy Kim Bok Joo

What else could there be to life than barbells and heavy weights?

Kim Bok Joo (Lee Sung Kyung) is a weightlifting phenom who has only focused on barbells her entire life while growing up with her father, Kim Chang Gul (Ahn Gil Kang), is a former weightlifter. She attends Hanwool College of Physical Education, a university full of top-notch athletes who are driven to succeed in the hopes of representing their country in national and international competitions.

Bok Joo went to the same elementary school as Jung Joon Hyung (Nam Joo Hyuk) but reunites with him in college. He is now a competitive swimmer who is having trouble recovering from the trauma of being disqualified for a false start in his first international swim competition.

Song Shi Ho (Kyung Soo Jin) is a fiercely competitive rhythmic gymnast who won a silver medal at the Asian Games when she was 18, but the pressures of her sport drive her to break up with Joon Hyung. Bok Joo’s tunnel-vision life starts to change when she falls in love with Joon Hyung’s older cousin, Jung Jae Yi (Lee Jae Yoon), a former athlete who became an obesity doctor after suffering a career-ending injury.

Will Bok Joo learn that there is more to life than weightlifting?

8. Queen In Hyun’s Man

Every actress hopes that an opportunity will come along to play an iconic role that could bring her out of obscurity and make her a star.

For Choi Hee Jin (Yoo In Na), that opportunity is in a television drama playing the role of Queen In Hyun (Kim Hae In), who was deposed during the Joseon Dynasty as King Suk Jong’s (Seo Woo Jin) consort by the scheming actions of Lady Jang (Choi Woo Ri). But Hee Jin’s modern-day world collides with that of her character in ways she doesn’t fully understand.

Kim Boong Do (Ji Hyun Woo), a scholar from the Joseon era, is mysteriously transported 300 years into the future to modern-day Seoul and comes into Hee Jin’s life as she is preparing for her career-making role. Boong Do not only knew the real queen but also supported her reinstatement.

Was Boong Do brought to the future to help Hee Jin bring some authenticity to her role as the queen?

9. Madame Antoine

Can a very observant woman outwit a psychotherapist? Go Hye Rim (Han Ye Seul) operates the Madame Antoine cafe on the first floor of a building that also houses a famous psychotherapy clinic on the top floor. Hye Rim uses her keen intellect and heightened senses to also work as an adviser to psychotherapist Choi Soo Hyun (Sung Joon). But unknown to Hye Rim, Soo Hyun is running a top-secret experiment on her “ideal type of man” with the help of his younger half-brother, Choi Seung Chan (Jung Jin Woon), and clinic employee Won Ji Ho (Lee Joo Hyung). But unknown to Soo Hyun, Hye Rim also is being paid by a mysterious man to get a hold of Soo Hyun’s valuable experiment files. What is Soo Hyun’s true experiment, and will Hye Rim help him or hurt him in his research goals?

10. The Guardians (Lookout)

The Guardians tells the story of a group of people who team up to serve justice themselves after losing their loved ones to criminals. The group consists of a detective, prosecutor, hacker, and an extremely shy person. They want to give these criminals the punishment that they deserve, and take matters into their own hands as the corrupt justice system in South Korea fails to capture the culprits.

11. Circle (Circle: Two Worlds Connected)

A sci-fi mystery drama that takes place in both the year 2017 and the year 2037. In 2007, twin brothers, Kim Woo-jin and Kim Bum-gyun, witness an alien arrival that brings about a huge change in their lives. In 2017, Kim Woo-jin (Yeo Jin-goo), now a college student, notices that a series of suicides in his university is somehow linked to his brother, Kim Bum-gyun (An Woo-yeon). While in pursuit of the case, he meets Han Jung-yeon (Gong Seung-yeon), another college student who is investigating the serial suicides. In 2037, South Korea is now divided into General Earth, a heavily polluted place where crimes are rampant, and Smart Earth, a clean and peaceful city free from crimes. Kim Joon-hyuk (Kim Kang-woo) is a crime detective who tries to get into Smart Earth to investigate a case of twin brothers who went missing in 2017. Each episode contains two parts, the first part is set in 2017 called “Beta Project,” while the second part is set in 2037 called “Brave New World.”

12. The Heirs

The series follows a group of rich, privileged, and high school students as they are about to take over their families' business empires, overcoming difficulties and growing every step of the way.

Kim Tan (Lee Min-ho) is a wealthy heir to a large Korean conglomerate called Jeguk Group.[9] He was exiled to the U.S. by his brother Kim Won (Choi Jin-hyuk), who tries to take control of the family business.[10] While in the States, he meets Cha Eun-sang (Park Shin-hye), who went there to look for her sister.[11] Despite being engaged to Yoo Rachel (Kim Ji-won), a fellow heiress, Kim Tan soon falls in love with Eun-sang. When Kim Tan returns to Korea, his former best friend turned enemy Choi Young-do (Kim Woo-bin) begins picking on Eun-sang to irritate Tan. Tension ensues when Young-do also falls in love with Eun-sang, and Kim Tan is forced to choose between responsibility of pursuing the family business or love.

13. Laughter in Waikiki (Welcome to Waikiki)

The story of three men who come to run a failing guesthouse called Waikiki. Complications spark when their guesthouse is visited by a single mother and her baby.

14. I’m Not a Robot

Kim Min-kyu (Yoo Seung-ho) lives an isolated life due to a severe allergy to other people. He develops extreme rashes that rapidly spread throughout his body once he makes any form of skin contact. Jo Ji-ah (Chae Soo-bin) is a woman who is trying to make it in life by creating her own businesses. However, after an encounter with Min-kyu, she ends up pretending to be a robot in place of the supposed Aji 3 robot. The Aji 3 robot was developed by Ji-ah's ex-boyfriend, professor Hong Baek-kyun (Um Ki-joon) and his team. The robot was meant to be tested by genius Min-kyu, however an accident caused the robot's battery to malfunction. As Baek-kyun modeled the robot after Ji-ah, the team ends up recruiting her to take the place of Aji 3.

15. Because This Is My First Life

House-poor Nam Se-hee (Lee Min-ki) and homeless Yoon Ji-ho (Jung So-min), both unmarried in their thirties, start living together as housemates.

[cagsun]

Notes about Japan

Oh, Japan, how to start writing about you? We came to visit for just 20 or a maximum of 25 days, depending on the coronavirus situation in South Korea and we ended up staying for more than 60 days. So far.

That is not much when you think about slow travelers or maybe war-time stranded soldiers (yes, I’m looking at you 7 years in Tibet) or refugees. In history there have been people who were left in much worse situations for a much longer time, that’s true.

But there’s a certain peculiar pain in not being able to pursue travel plans that you have been making for years, and burning 2 months of your time and savings on some other country just waiting to return to your homeland. There is much going on inside us there to talk about. I am not sure if I can cover that here, but let's try.

I persuaded myself that those dreams of traveling to Latin America won’t be happening soon, and so far it seems I am comfortable with it. Having traveled almost 4 months around Asia really helped with that. I feel a certain amount of satisfaction from traveling right now that I don’t feel like I need more of it. And also, I came to recognize that traveling can be used perfectly as a runaway tool. If you are unhappy with things in your life, travel is one of the best ways to run away from them, only to return to the same pains when the travel is over. There is so much that keeps you busy while traveling (planning trips, accommodation, learning about new places, getting to know people) you don’t really need to look inside. You can keep running away as long as you want. And you can even get addicted to that. Because it’s such a great way of running away, so much joy involved in it: you would feel happier than you could ever be in your daily life, so travel would feel like the ultimate rescue package. And you would employ it whenever life feels unbearable again. To me this is the sad truth about traveling, and why so many people seem to love traveling so much.

Maybe I’m now aware I can’t run away anymore. Maybe it’s time I need to come to terms with life as is, otherwise, my whole life will be a matter of running away from things. And that’s not what I want with my life, that I know. I now know that I need to consistently invest in certain things (people, expertise, hobbies, etc.) so that I can get deep in things and leave marks that don’t happen so easily & quickly. That is something I’ll need to remember for the rest of my life. Things may be painful, life might feel miserable, but I need to find my way of dealing with it, one way or another. This is my ultimate take away from traveling. And funnily enough, these thoughts didn’t appear to me while traveling.

It happened when we actually stopped traveling due to coronavirus and finally I had the time to think about things. That is why I think if you are after enlightenment, maybe what you need to do is stop moving, and stop searching. Stay where you are, stay with your thoughts and be courageous enough to listen to them. Maybe something is shouting inside you waiting to be heard. As Nuri Bilge Ceylan once said, a new place doesn’t create a new person.

Sorry Japan, I got quite sidetracked there. Talking about you, there is so much to say, and at the same time, it feels like there's nothing really worth saying since they had been said so many times before. Japan amazed us in so many different ways. From the moment we landed, until today, there was something surprising all the time if you were ready to see. I remember when we landed, the first evening we went to Akihabara. I wrote it in my blog post for that day, it was unbelievably interesting for me. I don’t know if I’ve seen anything that was pulling me more in that place. All those gadgets, stores of interesting things, games, cultural content... Heaven for a geek.

And from that beginning until today, there have been constantly things that would grab my attention, and creating some kind of desire in me. Many times with a commercial demand, but still the variety of things, the way they are presented, it’s very intriguing. I may say the Japanese are good at design. Things look beautiful as a default. Both natural things and man-made as well. They have a pixel-perfect way of dealing with and shaping nature as well. In their gardens, you can see they don’t have tolerance for lack of beauty but in contrast, they try to create imperfection intentionally. That may be one of many inconsistencies in Japanese culture, but I don’t feel equipped enough to write about Japanese culture. Because I can see it goes very deep, but I haven’t been able to dig deep. That is primarily due to communication difficulties. The number of people we could have a decent English conversation in Japan hasn’t been more than a handful. That is very unfortunate because there is so much to ask here, so much curiosity in me that I couldn’t find a response to, I gave up after a while with my desire to learn more.

That is also due to the fact that we had a very intense travel around Japan. With our 14-day rail pass, we have seen more than 10 cities and tried to really cover those places with respect so we really had days of running from place to place. I wouldn’t do it that way if I knew we would have 60days or 80days here rather than 20.

Coming back to my point, this intense traveling made me tired quite quickly, and my desire to learn more disappeared since there was soooo so much to learn, and I basically didn’t have that much energy or capacity to learn so much in such a short time. And that habit continued after we got stranded and we had so much extra time here.

What else are they good at? They are definitely good at technology but that’s not news. What surprised me more is that they are so good at machinery and electronics combined with mechanics. I mean, I knew they were good at robotics but until I came here I didn’t recognize they have so many car brands, construction vehicles, precision trains, precision machines, elevators, etc. They are also good at building, controlling nature, controlling water, etc. One good example is the toilets. Just by looking at their toilets, you can say so much about Japanese culture -and all cultures in that respect- Japanese are the ones that took the concept of comfort in a toilet to an extreme. That deserves a post on its own but its highlights are: It can direct water to your preferred body part with the pressure of your preference, its seat is heated, it can play music for privacy and it has an electronically controlled flush. After seeing things like this, things that the whole world uses, and in Japan, you have a version of it that is clearly much better, you get to respect the country naturally. And these things don’t come to an end, which is great news. I saw a signage on the stairway that’s much better than anything I have seen, the showers are also better than anything in the rest of the world, their public baths ( wait, is there a trend here? ) their paper, pens and notebooks (or stationary in general) their rice, and rice makers, their speakers, and HiFi culture, their cameras, their fonts, their signages, sex toys, traffic lights... You name it.

And also their homes. I don’t think you can conclude that they are absolutely better but for me, there are certain things that should have been present in the rest of the world and I don’t know why it doesn’t. Like the tatamis and the futons, and showers and toilets for sure.

Since we came, I started to grow the feeling that from now on I would prefer the Japanese version of anything that I need, if that’s available from a Japanese manufacturer. It seems it’s very well thought over and manufactured with precision. It’s apparent that it’s usually engineering-driven thus complex in usability but it still feels sophisticated, and society has learned to cope with this complexity somehow. Their maps are a good example of this. The metro maps were driving us crazy, and somehow for the Japanese this is manageable. We were wondering if this is due to their extended ability to recognise visual things. I'm I mean, whoever can read and write that alphabet is worthy of a gold medal.

And this is only the material side of things. In Japanese people, we found one of the most welcoming, and probably the kindest hearts of all we’ve seen. They are calm, understanding, and emphatic despite whatever difficulty the situation may have. They are so good with technology and live a life surrounded by it, but they definitely haven’t lost their humanity. We had been through an event that shows the reality of this, more details on that in another post. But you don’t need to go through much to see this. They are especially nice with visitors and just happy to see you around, you meet people smiling or trying to help.

We actually came across some people who were volunteering to help guests. One was an old man, in front of the train station in Hiroshima. He had a neon yellow life jacket which said "volunteer". He was trying to help foreigners, so he approached us seeing that we were looking at our phones in the middle of the street. Although we knew where we were going, we still asked him and he showed us the place, feeling the pleasure of being helpful. I came across some people, who cheered us with their drinks while I was just looking inside the place, to see if it was nice inside. I was surprised because I didn’t have a drink to respond to their gesture, but exchanging smiles was enough.

I wish we had the chance to find deeper into the roots of Japanese culture. We had tried our best, maybe not while intense traveling, but we stayed with a family in Okinawa for instance, and we definitely have a better idea of family life after our experience with them. We also watched several movies, and read a good book ‘a geek in Japan’, which we borrowed from the Cervantes Institute in Tokyo.

After all these days, I feel like I have a decent understanding of Japan. Not quite enough, but I’m sure I’d need years before I’d feel it is enough.

In the end, we are just travelers passing by. To get deeper, you have to stop, and take the time to get clearer, deeper and sometimes better.

[privateplates4u]

8 Frankfurt Show Tech Highlights

Every recent auto show has had some sort of “mobility” conference attached to it, and Frankfurt is no exception—the upstairs of Halle 3 rounded up all the usual suspects. But several other upstairs and downstairs booths mounted what looked like Germany’s version of the SAE World Congress. We’ve got the worn-out shoe leather to prove that we covered both the new cars and the new tech present at this far-flung show. Herewith, our tech-highlights reel. GKN eTwinsterX We know and love GKN’s torque-vectoring Twinster differential in applications such as the Ford Focus RS. We also admire the seamless functionality of the two-speed electric front axle in BMW’s i8. GKN supplies both, and now the company is offering the best of both in an even better e-axle solution known as eTwinsterX. The i8’s e-axle locates the motor “off axis” from the differential, but in this new one the electric motor is concentric with the axle, with one half-shaft running back through the middle of it. This greatly reduces the package size and trims a bit of weight, as well. Not all of the gearing packages on the axle centerline—there is a planetary gearset that takes power off the motor output shaft, returning it to the input of the Twinster differential (which uses clutch packs to engage each wheel, negating the need for spider gears). The ratio change also happens with a twin-clutch-type handoff that suffers no torque interruption (the i8’s e-axle interrupts torque, but you never feel it because the combustion engine fills in with rear-axle torque). The unit on display was rated to deliver 161 hp and up to 2,581 lb-ft of torque (after multiplication), with the ability to shift as much as 1,475 lb-ft to an outside wheel. The system can deliver torque at vehicle speeds of up to 155 mph, with the first-second gear shift typically taking place between 40 and 60 mph. The eTwinsterX system can function as an EV’s front and/or rear powertrain or as an add-on e-axle providing all-wheel drive and propulsion assist to a combustion or hybrid drivetrain on another axle. It has completed its initial design phase and is ready for integration and production, but as it made its world debut at the Frankfurt show, no companies have signed on as yet. IBM Cognitive Configurator Imagine for a moment that you were NOT a car person and that you viewed choosing a new car as a major annoyance. Believe it or not, much of the population feels this way, and so IBM is trying to leverage its Watson artificial intelligence to help folks narrow down the vast array of choices. For now it’s envisioned as a feature that would be offered within a manufacturer’s car configurator tool, but enterprising sites—such as maybe perhaps this one (are you reading me, boss?)—could potentially apply it to the entire industry or whole segments of the car landscape. Users would be asked to log in using their Facebook or Twitter accounts. Watson then takes a quick look at these accounts to classify you in five categories, establishing a sense of your own personal likes, dislikes, hobbies, tastes, etc. It then asks a few questions, ranging from the obvious (“what is your budget?”) to the esoteric (“Which of these three pictures do you like best?”). Then it cogitates and suggests a car, launching the configurator function. I love movies and the Netflix AI assistant has never selected something I like, so I have little hope of this system working for me. But car haters? Have fun! Qualcomm 9150 C-V2X Chipset Just days before the Frankfurt show opened, Qualcomm pulled the wraps off its latest development in the vehicle-to-everything connected-car space. You might not know the name Qualcomm, but like Intel it’s “inside” your smart phone. Qualcomm computer chips specialize in “directing traffic” inside a smart phone, assessing the workload and assigning tasks to the various bits of silicon that can most efficiently handle them so that your phone can survive an entire day on its tiny battery. Millions of car owners have been enjoying Qualcomm chips for many years—the company enabled the original OnStar communications in 2003 and has powered OnStar and many other telematics systems ever since. This latest cellular C-V2X technology rolls out next year and will enable direct communication between cars, cell phones, and infrastructure transponder nodes. It will also handle communications over the traditional cellular networks. It’s that direct component that promises vastly faster delivery of safety-critical information. These signals will travel over the globally harmonized 5.9 GHz ITS communications band established for V2X without the need for a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card, cellular subscription, or network assistance. Just having a powered device connects the person, car, or transponder. Network communications via 4G and the coming 5G technology provides the traditional infotainment streams. This technology is seen as a key building block in the quest for improved safety and productivity (traffic jam avoidance), as well as a major enabler of autonomy. Ford, Audi, France’s PSA, and China’s SAIC all expressed intent to utilize this technology at the time of its launch. IBM Blockchain If the word blockchain rings any bells, it’s probably from an online banking or bitcoin perspective. The official definition is “a digital ledger in which transactions made in cryptocurrencies are recorded chronologically and publicly.” No hanky-panky. IBM is bringing this tech to the car biz primarily to help with the seemingly ever-increasing number of safety and other recalls. Today, all too often, when a problem with some component is revealed, an entire model line gets recalled so dealers can look to see if your car is part is one of the bad ones. Blockchain technology tracks these individual parts. The first link in the chain is a subcomponent’s creation. The next might note its assembly into a subsystem. The next might be that subsystem’s shipment to a Tier 1 supplier for assembly into a bigger component. By now many of these chains are interlocking, and they eventually lead to the point where it’s assembled into a car and that car’s VIN gets recorded to the chain. That VIN can now be cross-reference with zillions of component parts, each with their own little part numbers. So now when a supplier discovers that a nest of rats peed all over this one box of parts, possibly compromising their functionality, the automaker can strategically contact just the owners of cars with the peed-on parts. This recall also goes into the block chain, as does every communication about it and the eventual repair. Now NHTSA can openly see what parts have been problematic, what’s been done to contact owners, and how many owners have made the repairs. It also means that if you wander in for an oil change, and your dealer punches in your VIN, he can see that there’s a recall on and fix it—perhaps before you even know it needs fixing. Isn’t the connected world gonna be great? Röchling Seralite German supplier Röchling specializes in aerodynamic aids, including clever underbody paneling to smooth airflow beneath a vehicle. Seralite looks like aluminum, but it’s a composite made from aluminum and lightweight thermoplastics reinforced with fiberglass. It ends up being lighter and cheaper than aluminum, it’s nonflammable, and it won’t absorb oil or other flammable liquids—a bonus when looking to shroud the area under drippy parts such as the engine and transmission. Seralite also boasts good acoustic absorption characteristics. Introduced last year, Seralite is now in production on the Peugeot 3008 crossover. And Three Tech-Savvy Tire Concepts from Continental ContiAdapt This tire and wheel combo features microcompressors that can adjust the tire pressure, inflating and deflating it as necessary, and hydraulics to change the width of the rim so the tire can be fatter with less pressure for improved grip on a slippery road and then can be narrower with higher pressure for a smaller footprint and less rolling resistance for optimal fuel economy on a dry highway.  The technology is still five to 10 years from production. A little closer to production is ContiSense, which adds sensors and a layer of electrically conductive rubber to the inside wall of the tire that can detect when a metal object punctures it. Likewise, a tread depth sensor can tell when you need new tires. In either case, the tire will send a warning to an app on your phone. The app can then locate the nearest outlet and ensure the tires are in stock and the coffee is hot for while you wait for the old tires to be swapped for new. The feature would be ideal for fleet managers managing the health of their trucks constantly on the road. Another sensor acts as a tire health monitor to measure the temperature of the tire and warn when the truck should switch driving modes to change the tire pressure or if the truck should stop to cool down. The assorted ContiSense features are all in development and should be available in the next five years, said Nikolai Setzer, executive board member and head of the Tire Division. Taraxa Gum. Meanwhile, Continental is entering the next phase of its experimentation with dandelions as a replacement for natural rubber. A lab project in Germany has proven promising enough that Continental is building a research facility and will harvest huge fields of Russian dandelions to assess whether easy-to-grow dandelions can be a viable solution. Dandelions can be grown near tire factories, eliminating the need to import rubber from Southeast Asia. Rubber is currently cheap, so there is not a big financial incentive, but that could change.The post 8 Frankfurt Show Tech Highlights appeared first on Motor Trend.

http://www.motortrend.com/news/8-frankfurt-show-tech-highlights/

[tak4hir0]

CreditPeter Prato for The New York Times As told to Kate Conger Published Sept. 5, 2019Updated Sept. 6, 2019Parisa Tabriz used to be a hacker. Now she is a princess. Ms. Tabriz, 36, is a director of engineering at Google, where she oversees its Chrome web browser and a team of security investigators called Project Zero. Several years ago, when Google required her to get business cards, she picked the title “security princess” because it seemed less boring than “information security engineer,” her actual title at the time. As Ms. Tabriz climbed the ranks, the designation stuck — and reminded men in the cybersecurity field that women belonged there, too. “I want them to know that princesses can do engineering and STEM,” Ms. Tabriz said. Chrome is the world’s most widely used web browser — the window through which more than a billion people view the internet every day. Some days, Ms. Tabriz’s work at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., entails studying furniture design (rounded chairs and felt baskets, she said, helped inspire the curve of Chrome’s tabs); at other times, she studies wonky research papers. One recent challenge: trying to figure out how to keep search queries and other data private, even if multiple users are sharing a single phone for internet access, as is often the case in developing countries. Often, Ms. Tabriz has to figure out how to convey complex concepts like encryption through pictograms so that users around the world can understand them. When a user visited a website over an encrypted connection, Chrome used to show a green lock icon to indicate “secure,” while a red lock indicated the connection might not be private. But some users mistook the locks for tiny purses. On Twitter, Ms. Tabriz describes herself as Project Zero’s “den mom.” The group hunts down unknown vulnerabilities in products made by Google and its competitors and then publicly discloses its discoveries. The group’s work has unearthed widespread vulnerabilities like Meltdown and Spectre; most recently, on Aug. 29, it discovered several security flaws in Apple’s mobile operating system. We corresponded for a week in mid-June. Monday6 a.m. My superpower might be that I just wake up at 6 a.m. without an alarm. My cats, Darwin and Grace, hear me and immediately start meowing from inside their room for breakfast and freedom. My husband is a light sleeper, so we keep them separated from our bedroom by two locked doors. They’re named after Charles Darwin and the pioneering computer scientist Grace Hopper. I just built them a new house. We’re planning to build ourselves a container house, which uses prefabricated materials for a quicker and more environmentally friendly construction, but it’s a long process. In some ways I am buying and building cat houses as a way to make me feel like I’m making progress. 7:30 a.m. Every work day starts with coffee and a sparkling water. After some inbox pruning, I hold virtual office hours. My team is made up of 375 people spread across 12 Google offices around the world, and anyone can sign up for time to talk face to face. Today, I talk to an engineer in Mountain View, another in Munich and a product manager in Seattle. 11 a.m. I go on a walking one-on-one with Ben, who leads the Project Zero team. I try to do walking meetings to take advantage of mild Bay Area weather and get some movement into what can otherwise be a day of a lot of indoor sitting. We talk about his upcoming talk for the security conference Black Hat, which will cover five years of work making zero-day attacks harder and advancing the public understanding of software exploitation. 4 p.m. I meet Jenna, a software engineering intern who joined for the summer and will be working on a feature for Chrome on Android. Twelve years ago, I interned at Google. I keep getting older, but the interns stay the same age. 7 p.m. I get home and compare notes with my husband about our days over leftovers from the weekend. He’s a deputy sheriff and deals with security problems and users in the real world. I finish off the day with Netflix on the couch with cats. I’m an introvert and need the time away from people to recharge. Tuesday5:45 a.m. Wake up, do morning routine and put on a typical work uniform: black shirt, jeans and sandals. I spend some time with a lint roller before heading out; otherwise, I’d be covered in fur. 7:20 a.m. Google Calendar seems to be down. Yikes! I’m left feeling a bit helpless. A lot of my work day is driven by my calendar, despite continuous effort to remove or reduce the number of meetings I’m invited to. As much as possible, I try to solve problems over email or by delegation — pushing decision-making power down to engineers in my team who are closer to the problems and implications. Luckily, my calendar is still cached on my phone, so I can see that I’m scheduled to chat with Alex, Chrome’s lead designer, at 7:30 a.m. 7:30 a.m. Alex and I talk about a new feature our team is mulling. People complain to us all the time about how many tabs they keep open, and Alex wants to try some new ways to group and display them. We discuss whether we should build a rough prototype to show people in a focus group setting or actually build something more polished to experiment with all Chrome users. He also asks for some advice about handling interpersonal conflict in our team, and we talk through some things to try. As they say, engineering is easy — it’s the people problems that are hard. 11 a.m. Four-hour brainstorming and discussion session about Chrome’s road map for the next year. 3 p.m. I get a direct message on Twitter from @SwiftOnSecurity, a pseudonymous computer security expert and influencer who pretends to be Taylor Swift, with feedback about a new Chrome extension we launched earlier in the day that helps users report suspicious sites. I get a lot of suggestions about security for Chrome, and they come from everywhere: Twitter, work and personal email, Snap, Chrome bug reports, calls from family and friends. I sometimes even get physical mail! I also get a lot of hate mail, rants, job requests and solicitations for … weird things. I try to respond to as many of the respectful inquiries as I can, but I end up having to ignore a lot. 6 p.m. I drive to dinner, listening to a mix of NPR and Top 40 for when the news gets too depressing. I’m really digging anything by Billie Eilish right now. Dinner is with Chrome leaders from around the world, who are in town right now for a big planning session. As a geeky icebreaker, we go around the table and share our favorite guilty-pleasure website. I’ve been spending lots of time on houzz.com, swiping through modern architecture and interior design inspiration for my container house project. Wednesday7:30 a.m. Grab my iPhone and Windows laptop for the day. Neither is my primary device, but I like to use them on Wednesdays. Thursdays, I try to mostly use my Mac, and the rest of the week I’m on my Chromebook or my Pixel Android phone. I’m responsible for Chrome across every operating system, so I try to use all the different Chromes each week to catch the subtle and important differences, and give feedback or file bugs if something isn’t working right. Noon. I see they’re serving Persian food for lunch, and I’m almost tempted to try it but stick to the salad bar. Persian food at work is always a disappointment compared with my mom’s cooking. She’s Polish-American, but she learned how to cook traditional Persian food from my grandma, who would visit from Iran. They didn’t share a common language outside of cooking, but after years of kitchen time, my mom makes an amazing ghormeh sabzi and kuku sabzi. 4:30 p.m. I block off private work time for myself so no one can schedule meetings with me, then work through two design docs, skim a project pitch deck and then walk around campus, snacking and thinking. I need to make a decision on a tricky escalation that will slightly increase security, but at the cost of a phone’s battery life. Chrome runs on everything from a high-end desktop computer to low-end mobile phones, so a big part of my job is absorbing lots of technical details and input; thinking through subtle trade-offs in performance, security and usability; considering hundreds of people and billions of users that will be impacted by any decision; and then making and delivering a decision. Often under time pressure. 8 p.m. Cereal for dinner. My current favorite is Kashi’s Peanut Butter Crunch cereal. I’m not embarrassed to admit that many weekend and evening meals are cereal. I get plenty of vegetables and food diversity from Google lunches or snacks, and I don’t enjoy cooking. Thursday6:30 a.m. On the recommendation of a co-worker, I try a new color-depositing shampoo to brighten my pink highlights. My hair isn’t naturally pink, unfortunately, so it takes some ongoing work and shower cleanup; most of my towels have some pattern of tie-dye pink. 10 a.m. Meeting with an executive to talk about new security features for Chromebooks, Google’s brand of laptops. We’re considering a feature that would make changes to secure boot, which helps lock hackers out of the operating system. 4:10 p.m. Weekly meeting with Brea, my admin, to check in on all-the-things and prepare for next week. Brea is constantly on top of my schedule, defragging my calendar to make space for me to do uninterrupted thinking, booking travel and meetings, reminding me to get things done, or helping answer questions on my behalf. She helps keep me sane and efficient at work, and since she part-times as a yoga teacher, she also gives me free stretching and wellness tips. 5 p.m. Read some updated user research from a study done in India. Based on some research published last year, many women in South Asia are expected to share their phones with kids or male family members, which results in a range of privacy concerns and strategies. I don’t share my personal phone with anyone, so these user needs and behaviors were really surprising to me. 6 p.m. Lots more email triage. I’m going to work late since I’m taking Friday off to spend time with three girlfriends I’ve known for over a decade. We actually get email reminders about taking vacation time at Google, and I’ve been getting them regularly since I’ve been accruing lots of time off. Friday7:30 a.m. Go to Planet Granite, a local rock climbing gym. I’m trying to get back into climbing shape after taking a lot of time off to recover from a shoulder injury. After 90 minutes of bouldering with my husband, my forearms are pumped, I’m covered in chalk, and the skin on my finger pads is sore and swollen, so we head home. 9 a.m. Email triage. Technically, I’m off for the day, but during downtime like this, I’ll check my inbox to see if I can handle anything. I’m a terrible role model when it comes to fully disconnecting. Interviews are conducted by email, text and phone, then condensed and edited.

[thedietian]

Lose Fat & Gain Muscle – with Natural Bodybuilding Star Hugo Rivera

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I threw out everything that didn’t work and improved on what did; the end result 17 years later being the most powerful bodybuilding / body transformation system in existence! I’m going to literally show you how to Re-Engineer your current physique.

This report completely rips away the BS, and gives 10 easy to implement tactics you can employ immediately to start getting shredded and gaining lean muscle mass.

Once you unlearn all the misleading confusing and often contradictory “advice” and finally discover how you should be eating and training, the results you’ll see in the mirror will amaze you, not to mention your confidence and motivation will go through the roof in a very short period.

I can guarantee it because I’ve been through the exact same process, the only difference is you can sidestep all the mistakes I had to go through in the process of creating what I can honestly tell you is the most powerful muscle building and fat loss system available today. Big claim perhaps, but I can back it up: I’m living proof and so are my clients.

If you want rock hard, tightly defined muscles, a small waist, ripped abs and shirt ripping arms, my system can make it happen faster than you ever thought possible.

Firstly, because unlike some genetic freaks, I’m just an average guy who achieved physique success despite having the worst possible natural genetics. Every pound of muscle I’ve gained and every pound of fat I’ve lost, has come by training and eating correctly using the Body Re-Engineering program. Nothing came easy to me, but I still succeeded, in other words, you need to learn from somebody who’s been in the trenches and who knows exactly what it takes to achieve a great body.Secondly, I have over 17 years of real world experience behind me. I’m a multi certified personal trainer with a background in engineering. I also hold an ISSA Certified Fitness Trainer (CFT) qualification, as well as a Sports Nutrition Performance (SPN) one. I’ve also won and competed in multiple natural bodybuilding competitions. I’ve been featured in national and local television, many magazines, and several radio shows, and have written articles for dozens of online and offline publications. Through personal and online training, I’ve guided clients in their quest to radically improve their physiques by gaining lean muscle and shedding body fat, and now, I’m releasing my previously closely guarded body building program to you. I’m not an “arm chair expert”, I might talk the talk but I also walk the walk. I practice what I preach, as they say.

I’m also a best selling fitness author of physical books.

My “Body Sculpting Bible” series of books has sold over 1 million copies worldwide. These can be found in all good book stores and in online ones like Amazon.com. But most importantly, I’ve been skinny and fat, so I know how to deal with both problems and I’m here to share the solution with you.

I was seriously overweight (classified as obese) and with high blood pressure/high cholesterol at an early age. I was also extremely unhappy with the way I looked and as a result was very insecure. I had dreams of being fit and muscular one day, but everyone else would laugh at me telling me that I was going to be out of shape forever. In desperation I stopped eating, and as a result, I lost all my weight but I also lost all my muscle. In addition, I became anorexic since I started to fear that eating would get me back to where I started. I was then even more unhappy being a bag of bones with no strength than I was when I was chubby, and constantly fearing that any bite of food would make me fat again.

It was not until my parents took me to a nutritionist that told me: “Food will not make you fat; only the abuse of the wrong sorts of food will”, that I kicked the anorexic habit to the curve and started to learn more about nutrition.

Later on, I became interested in bodybuilding as a girl I liked told me that she found muscles attractive. At that point, I began going to the nutrition store more frequently searching for answers in a supplement bottle. I tried every single product you can imagine. I also tried every single champion routine and noticed that I would only get marginal results. Frustrated and broke, I decided to stop reading and buying supplements, and instead, concentrate all my efforts into finding the answers myself by using the scientific method.

Determined to find the answers, I began by creating a routine and a diet, following it for six weeks at a time and carefully writing down the results on a daily basis, weight gained, fat lost, strength gained and so forth. I repeated this process over and over again, some of my experiments failed miserably (like when I tried a super high volume routine with a 6000 calorie diet and hours of aerobics) but other experiments were extremely successful.

Eventually, after years of documentation, trial and error I put together a system that will yield consistent muscle mass gains or fat loss, week after week. The system works no matter who you are or what shape you are in and it is tailored towards your specific metabolism and goals. I named it Body Re-Engineering since you will literally be Re-Engineering the way you look. A system which is split up into different sections to show you how to gain muscle mass but also how to strip body fat fast.

Now, years later and 80 pounds of muscle heavier, I decided to share with everyone the way in which I accomplished this remarkable physique transformation, in the hope that you can feed from my knowledge, avoid all the painful and costly mistakes I made, and thus achieve the bodybuilding goals that you have as fast as humanly possible.

I use a unique combination of techniques which I created after many years of research and trial and error, testing the system on myself time after time until I finally tweaked it to perfection so I could release it to you.

The two key important factors are my special training routine and diet plans.

My 21 week training program involves 3 unique stages, including a loading phase, growth phase and active recovery stage.

During that time, I manipulate the 3 unique stages of my workouts that cause the body/muscles to overcompensate (grow) in response to the stress.

The way the body overcompensates and grows in result to this training method will astound you, the results never stop, you don’t hit plateaus and you grow muscle like crazy. Nobody else right now has perfected this system the way I have. I can guarantee I can add muscle to your frame at a rate you simply wouldn’t have believed possible.

The second unique aspect of my program is my diet. Body Re-Engineering is as much about fat loss as it is about muscle gain as I believe a good program has to do both.

I use a very unique dietary system which manipulates calories and carbohydrates on a rotation system, this is one secret which if followed correctly allows you to gain lean solid muscle mass with no additional fat or simply to strip excess body fat fast with no slowdown or tapering off of results as time goes by. With my unique diet cycling system you continue to gain mass or lose fat for as long as you like. I’ve developed and tweaked this system over many years. In doing so I created a diet system that will constantly trick your body into releasing body fat and gaining lean muscle tissue 24/7 creating such impressive changes in your physique so quickly, people will notice within a few short weeks.

I can honestly tell you that my system is quite possibly the most powerful method available to incinerate body fat and slap on pound after pound of solid muscle mass available today.

It’s a 21 week total program, complete with every workout and diet you need to last the 21 weeks.

It is written in plain English (no fancy terminology) and in an easy to follow format. You’ll get clear, concise information that will get you on your road to produce the most incredible muscle growth ever.

Here is just a sample of what you will learn:

Absolutely! There is no doubt in my mind that you can. I don’t believe in 600 page e-books, so my book is just 180 pages long and If I could have made it even shorter, I would have. When I want to know something I just want to be given the information as quickly as possible, in an easy to read fashion, no complex science or pages of filler; just straight up usable details on how to get started on your program immediately. I’m a busy guy as I have stated already. My e-book is downloadable, you can order it immediately and have the information in your hands literally within 30 seconds of ordering. It’s that quick.

Here’s an amazing bonus, as soon as you purchase Body Re-Engineering you will get access to my private customer only forum where I hang out every day answering questions on my program.

That’s right.. you get access to me as your personal coach for as long as you need me. Ask me anything at anytime, I’l be there for you.

Abs, the holy grail for many. Over the last 15 years I’ve tried just about everything and in this bonus e-book I reveal exactly how I train my abs to get them looking as good as they do now. Forget what you think you know about getting a six pack, this bonus e-book explains all.

Sometimes you’re just too busy to make up your own diets. In the BRE manual I give you the foods to use, the amounts and when to eat but to make life even easier, what I’ve done is to create the diets for you on charts you can simply download at the click of a mouse button. This lets you just step directly into the BRE program without having to spend any time on figuring out what to eat.

This is a great bonus. I hired a professional video artist to visit me at my gym and had dozens of exercises professionally recorded on to video. When you purchase BRE you will be given access to a special hidden members area where you will be able to watch me perform all the exercises in the BRE program in full colour video with sound. No need to be confused about exactly how to perform an exercise again.

This is a killer bonus. Every time that I upgrade the Body Re-Engineering Manual you will have free access to download it . No upgrade costs, or hidden subscription costs, just a guarantee from me to you that as soon as I update it you will be able to login to my private members area (See Below) and download the new version.

A special bonus I’ve put together just for my Body Re-Engineering customers. My complete guide to creating a leaner you in just 8 weeks. I use this system when I need to get in shape fast for a posing exhibition etc. It contains my full ‘get lean quick’ diet and training routine.

My Entire Program And Everything Above All Come With My My Cast Iron Zero Hassle 60 Day 8 Week 100% Guarantee.

I know it sounds ridiculous, but you can take my course, you can read it, you can listen to it, you can ask for advice on the forums, get all the answers you need, use the tools, you can even rip me off , download it all, get what you want and ask for a refund I guess, if you wanted to, if you’re a dishonest person – but I know you’re not

So here’s the deal, give “BRE” a try out and if you’re not completely happy for any reason within 60 days, then I INSIST you email and request a refund. No questions asked; no small print; that’s a guarantee for a full 90 days. . Even if it’s on the last day, I’ll refund 100% of your money if you’re not 100% satisfied. Is that fair enough?

All you need to do now is click add to cart button and get started. I’ll see you in the members area in a few minutes, I’m there every day.

Yes, Hugo, I understand that If I am not satisfied with the package , I have A No Hassle, No-Hoops-To-Jump-Through 100% Day Money Back Guarante

Sincerely Your Friend Hugo Rivera Best Selling Author and Natural Bodybuilding Champion

PS. Remember I’m offering a 100% unconditional money back offer so you have zero risk, and I’m no arm chair expert. I had the worst genetics ever and despite that I achieved this physique, so I know that if you are determined enough you can too; I guarantee it.

“Gained 15lbs of Muscle and 1″ on My Arms Already”

I love that the system is just easy to use. I’m no expert at building muscle and I’ve purchased other programs online that just left me confused, with body re-engineering i could get started immediately and follow the diet and training plans from day 1, it’s like painting by numbers which suits me. I started on March 19th and 18 weeks later, I’ve now lost 11lbs of fat and gained 14 lbs of muscle and 1″ on my arms, with abs I can now just about see, I’m excited to see what happens by the end of the full 21 week program. I will keep you up to date. David Miles Cali, USA.

Hi Hugo, I just wanted to give you a little feedback on how your natural bodybuilding exercise/nutrition program has helped me. I started following your program in late Febuary of (2002) and have lost approximately 30 pounds and added some significant size. My body fat percentage is now around 12.5%. I have a couple of recent photos that I took as part of a 30-day rapid-results fitness competition. I just submitted my photos and other information so I’m not sure how I did yet but following your program certainly helped me get the results I wanted. Here’s the before and after pictures after 30 days. I’m now trying to get under 10% body fat and get some additional size. I’m even thinking about trying a competition for the over 40 crowd (I turn 40 next March). Just so you know, I’m 6′-3″, 215 lbs.

Curtis Helm – USA

I went from 190 lbs to my current weight of 205lbs

Before using Hugo Rivera’s Body Re- Engineering training regimen and diet, I was not in very good shape, and I did not have too much confidence in my abilities. As a prior member of the military (U.S. Armed Forces), even though it was a requirement to stay in half way decent shape, I knew that I did not have the strength I desired, nor the stamina. I went from 190 lbs to my current weight of 205 lbs in just the first 10 weeks of the program, while at the same time losing 10 pounds of body fat. Hugo Rivera is the real deal .Sincerely, Robert A. Lee St. Petersburg, Florida

NOTE: Body Re-Engineering is a downloadable e-book. The Members’ Zone is found online. No physical products will be shipped when you purchase. The e-book is in Adobe PDF format, which can be viewed on a Mac or PC. You will receive full access to everything within seconds of ordering

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Click here to get Lose Fat & Gain Muscle – with Natural Bodybuilding Star Hugo Rivera at discounted price while it’s still available…

All orders are protected by SSL encryption – the highest industry standard for online security from trusted vendors. Lose Fat & Gain Muscle – with Natural Bodybuilding Star Hugo Rivera is backed with a 60 Day No Questions Asked Money Back Guarantee. If within the first 60 days of receipt you are not satisfied with Wake Up Lean, you can request a refund by sending an email to the address given inside the product and we will immediately refund your entire purchase price, with no questions asked.

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[giancarlonicoli]

One of the most popular JPMorgan analysts, traders and commentators, Jan Loeys, head of global asset strategy and author of the weekly "The JPMorgan View" piece is moving on (to a different, non-client facing part of the company), and is using his last weekly address to JPM clients to recap the main lessons he has learned over his 30 year career.

For those carbon-based traders who still trade on the basis of fundamental analysis, inductive reasoning,  and discounting, and forecasting the future - instead of merely relying on the fastest laser-based algos to react to the news or hoping for central bank bailouts - we have excerpted the entire piece, and are excited to note that while Loeys may be leaving, he will be replaced by two of our favorite JPM analysts and commentators, Nikos Panigirtzoglou and Marko Kolanovic, who under John Normand will take over as JPM's new Cross-Asset Strategy team.

So, without further ado, here is the latest, and last, from JPM's Jan Loeys, explaining "What have I learned?" after 30 years of doing this...

What have I learned?

How to forecast markets?

The theory and empirical literature of Finance are the best starting point as they deal directly with asset prices. Next are macro economics and statistics. Markets are not Math or Engineering, but a forever learning and adapting system with all of us observing and participating from the inside. Quantitative techniques are indispensable, though, to deal with the complexity of financial instruments and the overload of information we face. Empirical evidence counts for more than theory, but you need theory to constrain empirical searchers and avoid spurious correlations.

The starting point of Finance is the Theorem of Market Efficiency which posits that under ideal conditions what we all know should be in the price. Only new information moves the price. Hence, it is changes in expectations about the future that drive asset prices, not the level of anything.

How to forecasts view changes? The good news is that changes in opinions about fundamentals such as growth and inflation tend to repeat. This is one driver of momentum in asset prices, and is likely driven by the positive feedback between risk markets and the economy that forecasters naturally find very difficult getting ahead of.

I live by Occam’s Razor: If you can explain the world with one variable, don’t use two. This keep-it-simple rule does not deny that reality is complex, nor does it say anything about simple minds. It forces one to focus on the most important fundamental drivers of markets and to cut out the clutter. It reduces the risk of becoming a two-handed strategist.

The mode and the mean. There is a fundamental difference between an asset price and a forecast. A forecast is a single outcome that you consider the most likely, among many. In statistics, we call this the mode. An asset price, in contrast, is closer to the probability-weighted mean of the different scenarios you consider possible in the future. When our own probability distribution for these different outcomes is not evenly balanced but instead skewed to, say, the upside, the market price will be above our modal view. Asset prices can thus move without a change in modal views if the market perceives a change in the risk distribution. An investor should thus monitor changing risk perceptions as much as changing modal views.

Do markets get ahead of reality? They do, yes, exactly because asset prices are probability-weighted means and the reality we perceive is coded as a modal view. Information arrives constantly and almost always only gently moves the risk distribution around a given modal view. Before we change our modal view of reality, the market will have seen the change in risk distribution and will have started moving already.

Are some markets faster than others? I hear frequently in one market, say equities, that they are monitoring other markets, such as credit or bonds, for early signs on what stocks will do. But I hear the reverse frequently in the bond world. I do not like either view and just assume that all markets react at the same speed as they see all information at the same time.

Levels or direction? In our business, we are asked to forecast asset prices and returns. I have found this very hard but fortunately have had the luxury to be able to stick to forecasting market direction rather than outright asset price levels. In markets that are close to efficiently priced, what we know is already in the price and we cannot really use that same information to make a coherent case for an asset price level that much different from today. All I have been able to do is to make a case that there are mild-to-decent odds in favor of the market going in one direction rather than the other. We have been much more successful in forecasting direction than actual asset price levels, and it is the direction that is more important for strategy.

Top down or bottom up? In assessing the outlook for a market or an economy, should you start judging individual countries, sectors, and companies and then add them up to the overall market, or should you start from the top down? As a macro strategist, I naturally think top down, arguing I sit on top of a tall building, seeing where all the traffic and capital is going. But I know that from that high up, I do not see any potholes. For that, I have been relying on my local analysts to tell what conditions prevail on their street. And they in turn ask me what I can see from high up. I have found that it is the dialogue between bottom-up and top-down thinking that is most fruitful. Our economists do this quite well: they start the global forecast from the country level up, but then look at a host of global signals to put pressure on the bottom-up forecasts.

The US as the indispensable market. Applying this top-down thinking, should we therefore start strategy at the global level and then drill down to regions and sectors, or should we follow the more common approach of starting with the USD market and economy, and then analyze the rest of the world as a spread market? I have done the latter. This is not only because we have the longest return series in the US and the US market and economy have been more stationary than others, but also because dollar assets are half of the investable world as many non-US entities both fund and invest in dollars.

Rules versus discretion? You need both. I have tried to have logical arguments to buy or sell certain assets, based on Finance. And I have tried to corral evidence that the signals I use have in the past had the assumed impact on asset prices. Each of these then became a rule, of the form: If X>0, buy A, and vice versa. As we collected these rules, and published them in our Investment Strategies series, the question came up naturally whether we should not simply make our investment process driven by a number of empirically proven rules, and to banish any discretion (emotion?) from the process. Over time, we converged on a mixture of the two as pure rules ran into the problem that the world is forever changing, partly as every one else figures out the same rule and then arbitrages away the profit, and partly as economic structures and regimes similarly change over time in a way that we cannot capture with simple rules.

Much as I have been talking a lot about cycles, I do not think of the world as a stationary system described by a set of parameters that we steadily get to know more about. Instead, as economists we think of people constantly optimizing their objectives, under the constraints they face. Aside from truly exogenous shocks to the system, the main difference between today and yesterday is that today, we know what happened yesterday and that information allows us to constantly fine tune and thus change our behavior. That is, we constantly learn from the past, much to try to avoid making the same mistakes. At the macro level, this means that the system is constantly evolving. As Mark Twain said, “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes”. As investors, we should look at the market as billons of people all learning and adapting. The best investors are those who get ahead of this by learning faster and understanding better how others are learning.

Expectations are adaptive. Markets should be purely forward looking into the future and treat the past as just that, the past. The problem we have is that the only information we receive is from the past. Ages ago, a debate raged in economics on whether expectations for say inflation are rational, or adaptive. The term rational was meant to denote that investors plug in all the info they have into their model of what will drive the future and derive from that the most efficient forecast. That is, investors do not slavishly extrapolate the past. True in principle. But we also find that as new information arrives, all of it past, investors constantly update these rational priors as new data steadily challenge them. In effect, then, market expectations for future fundamentals on earnings, inflation, defaults and such come close to adaptive, moving averages of past performance.

Risk premia are about risk and uncertainty. This sounds obvious, but is frequently overlooked. It means that even when nothing surprising is happening, that by itself is surprising against markets that are priced for a certain volume of surprises. When nothing happens and data come out as expected, the market updates in an adaptive sense its uncertainty, and risk premia come down.

Flows, positions, and supply and demand. Economics teaches us that supply and demand determines price. That is true also for asset prices, and explains the high interest in information on flows. Applying this dictum is not easy, though, as we cannot measure future intended supply and demand, aside from governments’ budget plans. All we measure ex post is transactions at a price that then equated supply with demand. For every seller in the past, there was a buyer, with the price moving to create this equilibrium. Only the movement in prices can tell us whether intended demand exceeded or fell short of supply. Given that we know how prices changed, flow data do not tell us much more.

I have a different gripe about position surveys. If you tell me that you are long or OW asset class X, then I must conclude investors are long and advise you to sell. You know that, and thus should not tell me that you are long. I thus do not “trust” survey data.

This is not to say that flow and position data are useless. We instead find that more detailed understanding of how different types of investors, each with their own restrictions and objectives, interact with the plumbing of the system, has allowed us to make better investment decisions. It led us to start 10 years ago a dedicated Flows & Liquidity weekly managed by my colleague Nikos Panigirtzoglou that is one of our top three publications by readership.

Central banks and QE do not “cause” asset price inflation. It is often argued, and our own language has come dangerously close to it, that easy money by central banks has massively and artificially inflated asset prices and that a QE unwind will thus deflate them. I do not like to think in those terms. Easy money may be the proximate cause of high asset prices, but is not the ultimate one. All central bankers try to do is to search for the non-inflationary equilibrium level of rates driven by the supply and demand for capital as well as inflation expectations. In this cycle, higher global savings from EM and corporates, depressed capital spending, consumer delevering and public sector austerity have created a surplus of savings over investment that is the real cause of low interest rates and high asset prices. If central money was too easy, we would have also seen much faster growth and higher inflation, which we did not get.

Market volatility is not a mystery but should be thought of as fundamental volatility, of growth, earnings, inflation, plus technical forces which are largely due to leverage, positions, market plumbing and such. Another way of looking at vol is as a function of the number of shocks and surprises hitting the system, the propagation and contagion forces around them (mostly leverage) and the shock absorbers that counteract them (largely central banks).

Where is alpha?

The Theorem of Market efficiency, which implies investors can’t beat the market, implies that asset prices will follow random walks, with drift and that asset price changes will be white noise, with no serial correlation. There are thus only two possible inefficiencies to be exploited: positive serial correlation, which we call Momentum, or negative serial correlation, which we call mean reversion, or Value (to become valuable, asset prices need first to go down, or fundamentals need to improve faster than the price). It is an empirical question which dominates where. At the asset class and sector level, we have found that Momentum dominates, while within the fixed income world, Value is more important.

The Theorem of Market efficiency assumes frictionless markets. Hence, cross-sectionally, we need to focus on areas where there are frictions due to different regulations, business practices, or investment objectives. Most profitable for me have been differences between currencies and industry segmentation between HG and HY, EM and DM, and bonds and equities.

Across time, market momentum at the macro level has been the best way to earn excess returns. I discussed above how some of this is due to the momentum in view changes. More fundamentally, in open markets, we frequently face a Fallacy of Composition according to which rational and equilibrating behavior at the micro level becomes destabilizing at the macro level. The free market is very good at motivating entrepreneurship and rational behavior at the micro level, but is subject to constant booms and busts at the macro level. Central banks try to control this instability through counter-cyclical policies but can’t undo it all.

Trade the risk bias. Even when markets price in exactly our modal views, I find it useful to consider how prices will move on new information and then try to position on any skew in the outlook. If I find that a particular price or spread will move a lot more on bullish than on bearish news, then I will position bullishly. This works at the portfolio level if I can combine different unrelated risk biases.

Is there now so much information that everyone sees at the same time that alpha is dead? To some extent, yes, as reflected by the inability of the hedge fund world to offer better returns than a simple bond and equity portfolio with the same volatility over the past 10 years. Still, while alpha is weaker, I don’t think it is truly dead, as allocation across asset classes is still working well, even as it seems harder to earn alpha within asset classes.

Is passive investing destroying alpha? No. it should actually make it easier if a lot more investors choose to allocate passively and therefore leave opportunities to the reduced number of active managers. I do feel the move to passive is largely within asset classes (i.e., stock picking) and that the arrival of liquidity passive products (ETFs) has made active asset allocation a lot easier. I think many managers have moved from active stock picking to active asset allocation.

How to analyze risk? Risk is not the same as past vol, but the surprise that will hurt your portfolio. I have never found it useful to make long list of all the things that can go wrong over the next year. Instead, I start from the premise that the big risks that will have an impact at the macro level almost always start as small ones. I have called these local brush fires, of which there are always a bunch and of which I need to decide which will become a wildfire. This does not solve the problem fully but at least reduces the number of risks to monitor.

Geopolitics? I have generally ignored these risks, primarily as I do not have a model to understand or project them. When they do become market relevant, they typically hit us so fast that is too late to do much about them.

How to put it together?

I like a Lego approach to TAA of one trade at the time. In theory, an active money manager should translate their ideas into expected returns and risks and then use portfolio optimization to calculate an efficient frontier of the highest return portfolios by levels of risk.

I started that way decades ago as a young strategist and ran into numerous problems of how to assess all the necessary return, volatility and correlation parameters over multiple horizons. I found that the more assumptions you have to make, the greater the probability of putting in numbers for which you have no idea. The well-known Black-Litterman approach tries to deal with this from a Bayesian point of view, starting with the parameters implied by market outstandings, but I had problems with why these parameters would make sense, and how to dynamically change portfolios on constantly incoming new information and ideas.

I then moved to greatly simplify my process of converting views into portfolios in two ways. First was to postulate that any active portfolio is a passive benchmark portfolio plus a number of zero sum deviations of under- and overweights against that benchmark that I think about as indifferent to what benchmark is used. That allowed me to separate the active overlay portfolio from the underlying benchmark and give each global investor the same OW/UW advice, irrespective of their benchmark.

The second simplification was to think of each single active view as a single trade that needs to stand on its own, with its own drivers and logic. If the latter turn, I exit the trade, without changing the other trades.

Does that mean I ignore correlations? Yes and no. When building a portfolio of active trades, I start with a target overall active risk (e.g., 1% VaR). The lower the correlations between my different trades, the higher the VaR I can allocate to each individual trade. But as we actively turn off trades and add new ones, I will not constantly move the whole portfolio around.

This is partly as I find correlations unstable and hard to forecast. The past correlation between two assets or positions depends on what was driving them. Bonds rallying because of monetary easing will be bullish for stocks and the equity bonds correlation will be positive. Bonds gaining because of low inflation on weak growth will correlate negative with equities. I am very wary of extrapolating past correlations and will generally not base recommendations on them.

Sizing risk by track record and hot hands. It is not only important to have the right trade on but also to make sure to have the right amount of risk allocated to each. I start with a target amount of tactical risk which I think about in Value of risk, in dollar terms or percent of AUM. I then decide whether today is a good time to take a lot of risk, or a bad time. If we are been on a roll making money, then we probably have a better sense of the direction of markets and I then take more than average risk.

Next comes deciding where to take this risk. I look here at track records, both long term and more recent. I have found over the past 30 years that certain areas are “easier” to make money than others. They are broad asset allocation (risk on, risk off), cross country in bonds and FX, and credit spreads. The harder ones are bond duration, and country and sector selection in equities. I aim to make sure I generally take more risk in the easier areas.

Finally, I check where we have been doing better more recently. At times, we have a cold hand in certain areas, and I then reduce their risk budget until performance picks up, and vice versa. In effect, I assume momentum in success.

The conflict between consistency and diversification. Given how efficient markets generally are and that I do not really have superior information, I try not to get too cocky about my ability to beat the market. I assume my success rate for any individual position will be only just over 50/50. How then to get a portfolio with a success rate that is well above 50/50? The trick is to choose positions and OWs/UWs that are not correlated to each other. That is easier said than done because our mind naturally veers to creating consistency.

I have found only one way to create diversification in trades, which is to make them go through different brains and ways of thinking. As a research strategy CIO, I had to make sure I do not dictate all trades, as they would otherwise become highly correlated. Instead, it is important to allocate trading decisions (on paper in our case) to different individuals and ways of thinking.

How long to hold on? I find it nearly impossible to hit the exact top to take profit on a winning trade and thus had to make a choice between exiting while still going up, or only after it is already going down. Most of the time I find myself selling on the way down, and have rationalized this by the observation that we are generally underestimate how far a market can go when we have the direction right.

What is the right investment horizon for active positions? It is almost a truism that successful trades end up becoming longer lived than expected, while bad ones becomes shorter-lived. Beyond that, I find that asset classes with positive feedback with fundamentals, like equities and credit, have much higher longevity (quarter to years) than markets with negative feedback, such as bonds and currencies (weeks, maybe months). This is why our bond floor always feels so short-termist versus our equity floor. It took me a long time to recognize that this makes sense.

How frequently to adjust your portfolio? In theory, every time new information arrives or asset prices move. This is not practical. I have been doing it monthly, but the beauty of our Lego approach and the usage of different brains in our paper portfolio with each managing a different trade is that we are effectively changing small parts here and there of the portfolio virtually on a weekly, if not daily basis.

Final thoughts

Cherish your errors. I have learned ten times more from being wrong than being right. Once you make a mistake, go public with it, analyze it in detail, and learn from it.

Be your own devil’s advocate, and spend most time with people who do not agree with you, or who have a different way of looking at things. Not always easy as being with like-minded people is more comforting.

Regrets? None really. I have been extremely fortunate having come to JPMorgan at the right time, the right place, with the right mentors and the right great colleagues to learn every day from the right clients. And the journey, and the lessons are not over. Thank you so much! You made my 30 years, and counting.

[robertkstone]

8 Frankfurt Show Tech Highlights

Every recent auto show has had some sort of “mobility” conference attached to it, and Frankfurt is no exception—the upstairs of Halle 3 rounded up all the usual suspects. But several other upstairs and downstairs booths mounted what looked like Germany’s version of the SAE World Congress. We’ve got the worn-out shoe leather to prove that we covered both the new cars and the new tech present at this far-flung show. Herewith, our tech-highlights reel.

GKN eTwinsterX

We know and love GKN’s torque-vectoring Twinster differential in applications such as the Ford Focus RS. We also admire the seamless functionality of the two-speed electric front axle in BMW’s i8. GKN supplies both, and now the company is offering the best of both in an even better e-axle solution known as eTwinsterX. The i8’s e-axle locates the motor “off axis” from the differential, but in this new one the electric motor is concentric with the axle, with one half-shaft running back through the middle of it. This greatly reduces the package size and trims a bit of weight, as well. Not all of the gearing packages on the axle centerline—there is a planetary gearset that takes power off the motor output shaft, returning it to the input of the Twinster differential (which uses clutch packs to engage each wheel, negating the need for spider gears). The ratio change also happens with a twin-clutch-type handoff that suffers no torque interruption (the i8’s e-axle interrupts torque, but you never feel it because the combustion engine fills in with rear-axle torque). The unit on display was rated to deliver 161 hp and up to 2,581 lb-ft of torque (after multiplication), with the ability to shift as much as 1,475 lb-ft to an outside wheel. The system can deliver torque at vehicle speeds of up to 155 mph, with the first-second gear shift typically taking place between 40 and 60 mph. The eTwinsterX system can function as an EV’s front and/or rear powertrain or as an add-on e-axle providing all-wheel drive and propulsion assist to a combustion or hybrid drivetrain on another axle. It has completed its initial design phase and is ready for integration and production, but as it made its world debut at the Frankfurt show, no companies have signed on as yet.

IBM Cognitive Configurator

Imagine for a moment that you were NOT a car person and that you viewed choosing a new car as a major annoyance. Believe it or not, much of the population feels this way, and so IBM is trying to leverage its Watson artificial intelligence to help folks narrow down the vast array of choices. For now it’s envisioned as a feature that would be offered within a manufacturer’s car configurator tool, but enterprising sites—such as maybe perhaps this one (are you reading me, boss?)—could potentially apply it to the entire industry or whole segments of the car landscape. Users would be asked to log in using their Facebook or Twitter accounts. Watson then takes a quick look at these accounts to classify you in five categories, establishing a sense of your own personal likes, dislikes, hobbies, tastes, etc. It then asks a few questions, ranging from the obvious (“what is your budget?”) to the esoteric (“Which of these three pictures do you like best?”). Then it cogitates and suggests a car, launching the configurator function. I love movies and the Netflix AI assistant has never selected something I like, so I have little hope of this system working for me. But car haters? Have fun!

Qualcomm 9150 C-V2X Chipset

Just days before the Frankfurt show opened, Qualcomm pulled the wraps off its latest development in the vehicle-to-everything connected-car space. You might not know the name Qualcomm, but like Intel it’s “inside” your smart phone. Qualcomm computer chips specialize in “directing traffic” inside a smart phone, assessing the workload and assigning tasks to the various bits of silicon that can most efficiently handle them so that your phone can survive an entire day on its tiny battery. Millions of car owners have been enjoying Qualcomm chips for many years—the company enabled the original OnStar communications in 2003 and has powered OnStar and many other telematics systems ever since. This latest cellular C-V2X technology rolls out next year and will enable direct communication between cars, cell phones, and infrastructure transponder nodes. It will also handle communications over the traditional cellular networks. It’s that direct component that promises vastly faster delivery of safety-critical information. These signals will travel over the globally harmonized 5.9 GHz ITS communications band established for V2X without the need for a Subscriber Identity Module (SIM) card, cellular subscription, or network assistance. Just having a powered device connects the person, car, or transponder. Network communications via 4G and the coming 5G technology provides the traditional infotainment streams. This technology is seen as a key building block in the quest for improved safety and productivity (traffic jam avoidance), as well as a major enabler of autonomy. Ford, Audi, France’s PSA, and China’s SAIC all expressed intent to utilize this technology at the time of its launch.

IBM Blockchain

If the word blockchain rings any bells, it’s probably from an online banking or bitcoin perspective. The official definition is “a digital ledger in which transactions made in cryptocurrencies are recorded chronologically and publicly.” No hanky-panky. IBM is bringing this tech to the car biz primarily to help with the seemingly ever-increasing number of safety and other recalls. Today, all too often, when a problem with some component is revealed, an entire model line gets recalled so dealers can look to see if your car is part is one of the bad ones. Blockchain technology tracks these individual parts. The first link in the chain is a subcomponent’s creation. The next might note its assembly into a subsystem. The next might be that subsystem’s shipment to a Tier 1 supplier for assembly into a bigger component. By now many of these chains are interlocking, and they eventually lead to the point where it’s assembled into a car and that car’s VIN gets recorded to the chain. That VIN can now be cross-reference with zillions of component parts, each with their own little part numbers. So now when a supplier discovers that a nest of rats peed all over this one box of parts, possibly compromising their functionality, the automaker can strategically contact just the owners of cars with the peed-on parts. This recall also goes into the block chain, as does every communication about it and the eventual repair. Now NHTSA can openly see what parts have been problematic, what’s been done to contact owners, and how many owners have made the repairs. It also means that if you wander in for an oil change, and your dealer punches in your VIN, he can see that there’s a recall on and fix it—perhaps before you even know it needs fixing. Isn’t the connected world gonna be great?

Röchling Seralite

German supplier Röchling specializes in aerodynamic aids, including clever underbody paneling to smooth airflow beneath a vehicle. Seralite looks like aluminum, but it’s a composite made from aluminum and lightweight thermoplastics reinforced with fiberglass. It ends up being lighter and cheaper than aluminum, it’s nonflammable, and it won’t absorb oil or other flammable liquids—a bonus when looking to shroud the area under drippy parts such as the engine and transmission. Seralite also boasts good acoustic absorption characteristics. Introduced last year, Seralite is now in production on the Peugeot 3008 crossover.

And Three Tech-Savvy Tire Concepts from Continental

ContiAdapt This tire and wheel combo features microcompressors that can adjust the tire pressure, inflating and deflating it as necessary, and hydraulics to change the width of the rim so the tire can be fatter with less pressure for improved grip on a slippery road and then can be narrower with higher pressure for a smaller footprint and less rolling resistance for optimal fuel economy on a dry highway.  The technology is still five to 10 years from production.

A little closer to production is ContiSense, which adds sensors and a layer of electrically conductive rubber to the inside wall of the tire that can detect when a metal object punctures it. Likewise, a tread depth sensor can tell when you need new tires. In either case, the tire will send a warning to an app on your phone. The app can then locate the nearest outlet and ensure the tires are in stock and the coffee is hot for while you wait for the old tires to be swapped for new. The feature would be ideal for fleet managers managing the health of their trucks constantly on the road. Another sensor acts as a tire health monitor to measure the temperature of the tire and warn when the truck should switch driving modes to change the tire pressure or if the truck should stop to cool down. The assorted ContiSense features are all in development and should be available in the next five years, said Nikolai Setzer, executive board member and head of the Tire Division.

Taraxa Gum. Meanwhile, Continental is entering the next phase of its experimentation with dandelions as a replacement for natural rubber. A lab project in Germany has proven promising enough that Continental is building a research facility and will harvest huge fields of Russian dandelions to assess whether easy-to-grow dandelions can be a viable solution. Dandelions can be grown near tire factories, eliminating the need to import rubber from Southeast Asia. Rubber is currently cheap, so there is not a big financial incentive, but that could change.

The post 8 Frankfurt Show Tech Highlights appeared first on Motor Trend.

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New Post has been published on Attendantdesign

New Post has been published on https://attendantdesign.com/blogger-shows-why-women-need-to-stop-focusing/

Blogger shows why women need to stop focusing

She then mentioned what others see – and what she does.

The outcomes have been notion-frightening, with Parisian student Louise’s annotations highlighting just how merciless girls may be to themselves.

She wrote: “I am guilty. I am right here to always be absolutely sincere because I feel social medias want more of it.

“As a great deal as I preach self-love and simply made some progress accepting myself, there is some thing I in real warfare with pix.

“Whenever I see a photo of me, the primary matters which catches my eyes are my FLAWS. I constantly see what is wrong.

“I really do now not take a look at human beings’ flaws first once I take a look at an image of someone else. On the opposite, I generally tend to focus on their belongings.

Laura shared a photograph of her in a bikini from a different angleINSTAGRAM_MYBETTER_SELF 4 Laura shared a photo of her in a bikini from a distinctive attitude “We really need to examine no longer to be so harsh on ourselves. It is not healthy. I am going to paintings on it, and I wish you’ll too.”

Louise cited that strangers might see her “big smile, long legs, and strong butt”, but she saw a “big nose, lower back fats, and cellulite”.

READ NOW

SO UNNECESSARY Plus-size blogger left devastated after bikini picture receives NINE HUNDRED ‘vile remarks’

FAKE VIEWS? Travel blogger Amelia Liana is accused of doctoring her globe-trotting photos… But can you spot why?

INSIDE TRICKS Bloggers are displaying how PRISONERS can create DIY makeup… Like the usage of birthday cards for eye shadow

FLOWER POWER Fashion bloggers are LOVING these elegant Matalan trousers…And they’re only £14

‘ENDO IS NO JOKE’ Fashion blogger’s photos screen reality of residing with endometriosis – as she pleads with others to get period pains checked Speaking extra approximately the picture to Metro, she explained that there are a variety of motives why people experience bad approximately themselves.

She said: “Self-criticism comes from several reasons.

“The society we’ve advanced in overemphasizes our physical appearances.

She additionally established the importance of having appropriate postureINSTAGRAM_MYBETTER_SELF 4 She also validated the significance of having exact posture “The have an impact on of role models, using image modifying; it puts an exquisite pressure on our shoulders and nourishes the sensation of not being worthy enough.”

Louise, who blogs about fitness and healthful ingesting, has additionally established the difference among properly and awful digicam angles.

Louise is happy with her ‘study now not skinny’ figureINSTAGRAM_MYBETTER_SELF 4 Louise is happy with her ‘strong now not thin’ parent

  One twinned-up publish suggests the big distinction top posture can make.

This yr has visible a surge in popularity in ‘Dad bloggers’ who supply a male attitude on all things parenting.

And this sincere blogger has lifted the lid on how she concealed her “unsexy mum tum” and granny pants for her “perfect selfie”

Whilst websites need traffic to survive, blog sites do too. Bloggers are constantly seeking new ways to improve traffic to their websites. Popular methods include advertising, SEO, syndicating articles, and submitting posts to authoritative sites, such as eHow.com and ezine articles

But all these take time, cost money, or both.

As a result, an increasing number of Internet marketers are turning to guest blogging to drive traffic to their own web pages. Guest blogging is when you write a blog post and offer it to another blogger to post on their blog. While this arrangement doesn’t cost either party any money, it can be hugely beneficial to both.

So why would you want to write on somebody else’s blog for free? And why would an established blogger want to publish your blog on their website? The answer to that question is easy: Traffic.

Build Your Email List by Guest Blogging

Win/Win for Blogger and Guest Guest blogging benefits both the blog’s host and the person writing the guest blog. For the guest, posting on an established blog can lead to a lot of interest from the host’s readers. If the guest blog provides high-value content, readers may want to click the links to the guest bloggers website, products, and services.

For the host blogger, allowing a guest blogger to publish on their blog allows them to provide high-value content to their readers without having to do anything themselves., They enjoy the same level of traffic without having to research and create original content.

Creates women New Backlinks  Blogger  focusing

Blogging on a host blog also allows guest bloggers to obtain new backlinks to their landing pages. Readers who find the content of the guest blog of value can follow the links back to the guest blogger’s landing page.

These links also increase the value of the landing page in the eyes of the search engines – such as Google, Bing, and others. If the host blog site is considered to be an authoritative site with a great Alexa rank, Google especially likes this. This authoritative backlink increases the guest bloggers page ranking of their landing page.

Google wants to provide value and importance to websites which have a lot of links from authoritative sites. They distinguish these websites as reliable and trustworthy, so they rank them at or near the top of the SERP (search engine results page) for their niche.

Selecting Guest Bloggers Established bloggers need to choose who they allow writing guest blogs on their pages carefully. They need to ensure the guest is going to give their readers useful and informative content.

If the host blogger is not familiar with the guest blogger, they can research them, and check with other writers in their community. The host blogger can also ask the guest for credentials including academic degrees, or past experience. They can also ask for links to previous guest blogs.

Overall, the advantages of guest blogging are numerous for both the host blogger and the guest blogger.

Whilst websites need traffic to survive, blog sites do too. Bloggers are constantly seeking new ways to improve traffic to their websites. Popular methods include advertising, SEO, syndicating articles, and submitting posts to authoritative sites, such as eHow.com and ezine articles

But all these take time, cost money, or both.

[grgedoors02142]

Why Some Startups Win

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

I was having a second coffee with an ex student, now the head of a marketing inside a rapidly growing startup.  His company had marched through customer discovery, learning about the customer problem, validated solutions and was now scaling sales and marketing.  All good news.

But he was getting uneasy that as his headcount was growing the productivity of his marketing department seemed to be rapidly declining.

I wasn’t surprised. When organizations are small (startups, small teams in companies and government agencies) early employees share a mission (why they come to work, what they need to do while they are at work, and how they will know they have succeeded). But as these organizations grow large, what was once a shared mission and intent gets buried under HR process and Key Performance Indicators.

I told him that I had learned long ago that to keep that from happening, you need to on-board/train your team about mission and intent.

—-

Why Do You Work Here? I had taken the job of VP of Marketing in a company emerging from bankruptcy. We’d managed to secure another infusion of cash, but it wasn’t going to last long.

During my first week on the job, I asked each of my department heads what they did for marketing and the company. When I asked our trade show manager, she looked surprised and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to take our booth to trade shows and set it up?” The other departments gave the same type of logistical answers; the product-marketing department, for example, said their job was to get the product specs from engineering and write data sheets. But my favorite was when the public relations manager told me, “We’re here to summarize the data sheets and put them in press releases and then answer the phone in case the press calls.”

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup, update your resume.

Titles Are Not Your Job When I pressed my staff to explain why marketing did trade shows or wrote press releases or penned data sheets, the best response I could get was, “Why that’s our job.” In their heads their titles were a link back to a Human Resources job spec that came from a 10,000-person company (ie. listing duties and responsibilities, skills and competencies, reporting relationships…)

It dawned on me that we had a department full of people with titles describing process-centric execution while we were in environment that required relentless agility and speed with urgency. While their titles might be what their business cards said, titles were not their job – and being a slave to process lost the sight of the forest for the trees.  This was the last thing we needed in a company where every day could be our last.

Titles in a startup are not the same as what your job is. This is a big idea.

Department Mission Statements – What am I Supposed to Do Today? It wasn’t that I had somehow inherited dumb employees. What I was hearing was a failure of management.

No one had on-boarded these people. No one had differentiated a startup job description from a large company job. They were all doing what they thought they were supposed to.

But most importantly, no one had sat the marketing department down and defined our department Mission (with a capital “M”).

Most startups put together a corporate mission statement because the CEO remembered seeing one at his last job or the investors said they needed one. Most companies spend an inordinate amount of time crafting a finely honed corporate mission statement for external consumption and then do nothing internally to make it happen. What I’m about to describe here is quite different.

What our marketing department was missing was anything that gave the marketing staff daily guidance about what they should be doing. The first reaction from my CEO was, “That’s why you’re running the department.” And yes, we could have built a top-down, command-and-control hierarchy. But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction.

We needed to craft a Departmental Mission statement that told everyone why they came to work, what they needed to do while they were at work, and how they would know they had succeeded. And it was going to mention the two words that marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit.

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers and working with sales, we defined the marketing Mission (our job) as:

Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.), competitive analyses, channel and customer collateral (white papers, data sheets, product reviews), customer surveys, and customer discovery findings.

This year, marketing needs to provide sales with 40,000 active and accepted leads, company and product name recognition over 65% in our target market, and five positive product reviews per quarter. We will reach 35% market share in year one of sales with a headcount of twenty people, spending less than $4,000,000.

Generate end-user demand (to match our revenue goals)

Drive that demand into our sales channels

Value price our products to achieve our revenue and margin goals (create high-value)

Educate our sales channel(s)

Help Engineering understand customer needs

That was it. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Building a Mission-focused Team Having the mission in place meant that our team could see that what mattered wasn’t what was on their business card, but how much closer their work moved our department to completing the mission. Period. It wasn’t an easy concept for everyone to understand.

My new Director of Marketing Communications turned the Marcom departments into a mission-focused organization. Her new tradeshow manager quickly came to understand that his job was not to set up booths. We hired union laborers to do that. A trade show was where our company went to create awareness and/or leads. And if you ran the tradeshow department, you owned the responsibility for awareness and leads. The booth was incidental. I couldn’t care less if we had a booth or not if we could generate the same amount of leads and awareness by skydiving naked into a coffee cup.

The same was true for PR. My new head of Public Relations quickly learned that my admin could answer calls from the press. The job of Public Relations wasn’t a passive “write a press release and wait for something to happen” activity. It wasn’t measured by how busy you were, it was measured by results. And the results weren’t the traditional PR metrics of number of articles or inches of ink. I couldn’t care less about those. I wanted our PR department to map the sales process, figure out where getting awareness and interest could be done with PR, then get close and personal with the press and use it to generate end-user demand and then drive that demand into our sales channel. We were constantly doing internal and external audits and creating metrics to see the effects of different PR messages, channels and audiences on customer awareness, purchase intent and end-user sales.

The same was true for the Product Marketing group. I hired a Director of Product Marketing who in his last company had ran its marketing and then went out into the field and became its national sales director. He got the job when I asked him how much of his own marketing material his sales team actually used in the field. When he said, “about ten percent,” I knew by the embarrassed look on his face I had found the right guy. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to Engineering.

Mission Intent – What’s Really Important With a great team in place, the next step was recognizing that our Mission statement might change on the fly. “Hey, we just all bought into this Mission idea and now you’re telling us it can change?!”  (The mission might change if we pivot, competitors might announce new products, we might learn something new about our customers, etc.)

So we introduced the notion of Mission Intent. Intent answered the question, “What is the company thinking and goal behind the mission?” In our case, the mission of the company was to sell $25 million of product with 45% gross margin. The idea of teaching intention is that if employees understand what we intended  behind the mission, they can work collaboratively to achieve it.

We recognized that there would be a time marketing would screw up or something out of our control would happen, making the marketing mission obsolete (i.e. we might fail to deliver 40,000 leads.) Think of intention as the answer to the adage, “When you are up to your neck in alligators it’s hard to remember you were supposed to drain the swamp.” For example, our mission intent said that the reason why marketing needed to deliver 40,000 leads and 35% market share, etc., was so that Sales could sell $25 million of products at 45% gross margin.

What we taught everyone is that the intention is more enduring than the mission. (“Let’s see, the company is trying to sell $25 million in product with 45% gross margin. If marketing can’t deliver the 40,000 leads, what else can we do for sales to still achieve our revenue and profitability?”) The mission was our goal, but based on circumstances, it might change. However, the Intent was immovable.

When faced with the time pressures of a startup, too many demands and too few people, we began to teach our staff to refer back to the five Mission goals and the Intent of the department. When stuff started piling up on their desks, they learned to ask themselves, “Is what I’m working on furthering these goals? If so, which one? If not, why am I doing it?”

They understood the mission intent was our corporate revenue and profit goals.

Why Do It By the end of the first year, our team had jelled. (Over time, we added the No Excuses culture to solve accountability.) It was a department willing to exercise initiative, with the judgment to act wisely and an eagerness to accept responsibility.

I remember at the end of a hard week my direct reports came into my office just to talk about the week’s little victories. And there was a moment as they shared their stories when they all began to realize that our company (one that had just come off of life support) was beginning to kick the rear of our better-funded and bigger competitors.  We all marveled in the moment.

Lessons Learned

Push independent execution of tasks down to the lowest possible level

Give everyone a shared Mission Statement: why they come to work, what they need to do, and how they will know they have succeeded.

Share Mission Intent for the big picture for the Mission Statement

Build a team comfortable with independent Mission execution

Add a No Excuses Culture

Agree on Core Values to define your culture

Filed under: Corporate Innovation, Family/Career/Culture from DIYS http://ift.tt/2n3CDbA

[repwinpril9y0a1]

Why Some Startups Win

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

I was having a second coffee with an ex student, now the head of a marketing inside a rapidly growing startup.  His company had marched through customer discovery, learning about the customer problem, validated solutions and was now scaling sales and marketing.  All good news.

But he was getting uneasy that as his headcount was growing the productivity of his marketing department seemed to be rapidly declining.

I wasn’t surprised. When organizations are small (startups, small teams in companies and government agencies) early employees share a mission (why they come to work, what they need to do while they are at work, and how they will know they have succeeded). But as these organizations grow large, what was once a shared mission and intent gets buried under HR process and Key Performance Indicators.

I told him that I had learned long ago that to keep that from happening, you need to on-board/train your team about mission and intent.

—-

Why Do You Work Here? I had taken the job of VP of Marketing in a company emerging from bankruptcy. We’d managed to secure another infusion of cash, but it wasn’t going to last long.

During my first week on the job, I asked each of my department heads what they did for marketing and the company. When I asked our trade show manager, she looked surprised and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to take our booth to trade shows and set it up?” The other departments gave the same type of logistical answers; the product-marketing department, for example, said their job was to get the product specs from engineering and write data sheets. But my favorite was when the public relations manager told me, “We’re here to summarize the data sheets and put them in press releases and then answer the phone in case the press calls.”

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup, update your resume.

Titles Are Not Your Job When I pressed my staff to explain why marketing did trade shows or wrote press releases or penned data sheets, the best response I could get was, “Why that’s our job.” In their heads their titles were a link back to a Human Resources job spec that came from a 10,000-person company (ie. listing duties and responsibilities, skills and competencies, reporting relationships…)

It dawned on me that we had a department full of people with titles describing process-centric execution while we were in environment that required relentless agility and speed with urgency. While their titles might be what their business cards said, titles were not their job – and being a slave to process lost the sight of the forest for the trees.  This was the last thing we needed in a company where every day could be our last.

Titles in a startup are not the same as what your job is. This is a big idea.

Department Mission Statements – What am I Supposed to Do Today? It wasn’t that I had somehow inherited dumb employees. What I was hearing was a failure of management.

No one had on-boarded these people. No one had differentiated a startup job description from a large company job. They were all doing what they thought they were supposed to.

But most importantly, no one had sat the marketing department down and defined our department Mission (with a capital “M”).

Most startups put together a corporate mission statement because the CEO remembered seeing one at his last job or the investors said they needed one. Most companies spend an inordinate amount of time crafting a finely honed corporate mission statement for external consumption and then do nothing internally to make it happen. What I’m about to describe here is quite different.

What our marketing department was missing was anything that gave the marketing staff daily guidance about what they should be doing. The first reaction from my CEO was, “That’s why you’re running the department.” And yes, we could have built a top-down, command-and-control hierarchy. But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction.

We needed to craft a Departmental Mission statement that told everyone why they came to work, what they needed to do while they were at work, and how they would know they had succeeded. And it was going to mention the two words that marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit.

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers and working with sales, we defined the marketing Mission (our job) as:

Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.), competitive analyses, channel and customer collateral (white papers, data sheets, product reviews), customer surveys, and customer discovery findings.

This year, marketing needs to provide sales with 40,000 active and accepted leads, company and product name recognition over 65% in our target market, and five positive product reviews per quarter. We will reach 35% market share in year one of sales with a headcount of twenty people, spending less than $4,000,000.

Generate end-user demand (to match our revenue goals)

Drive that demand into our sales channels

Value price our products to achieve our revenue and margin goals (create high-value)

Educate our sales channel(s)

Help Engineering understand customer needs

That was it. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Building a Mission-focused Team Having the mission in place meant that our team could see that what mattered wasn’t what was on their business card, but how much closer their work moved our department to completing the mission. Period. It wasn’t an easy concept for everyone to understand.

My new Director of Marketing Communications turned the Marcom departments into a mission-focused organization. Her new tradeshow manager quickly came to understand that his job was not to set up booths. We hired union laborers to do that. A trade show was where our company went to create awareness and/or leads. And if you ran the tradeshow department, you owned the responsibility for awareness and leads. The booth was incidental. I couldn’t care less if we had a booth or not if we could generate the same amount of leads and awareness by skydiving naked into a coffee cup.

The same was true for PR. My new head of Public Relations quickly learned that my admin could answer calls from the press. The job of Public Relations wasn’t a passive “write a press release and wait for something to happen” activity. It wasn’t measured by how busy you were, it was measured by results. And the results weren’t the traditional PR metrics of number of articles or inches of ink. I couldn’t care less about those. I wanted our PR department to map the sales process, figure out where getting awareness and interest could be done with PR, then get close and personal with the press and use it to generate end-user demand and then drive that demand into our sales channel. We were constantly doing internal and external audits and creating metrics to see the effects of different PR messages, channels and audiences on customer awareness, purchase intent and end-user sales.

The same was true for the Product Marketing group. I hired a Director of Product Marketing who in his last company had ran its marketing and then went out into the field and became its national sales director. He got the job when I asked him how much of his own marketing material his sales team actually used in the field. When he said, “about ten percent,” I knew by the embarrassed look on his face I had found the right guy. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to Engineering.

Mission Intent – What’s Really Important With a great team in place, the next step was recognizing that our Mission statement might change on the fly. “Hey, we just all bought into this Mission idea and now you’re telling us it can change?!”  (The mission might change if we pivot, competitors might announce new products, we might learn something new about our customers, etc.)

So we introduced the notion of Mission Intent. Intent answered the question, “What is the company thinking and goal behind the mission?” In our case, the mission of the company was to sell $25 million of product with 45% gross margin. The idea of teaching intention is that if employees understand what we intended  behind the mission, they can work collaboratively to achieve it.

We recognized that there would be a time marketing would screw up or something out of our control would happen, making the marketing mission obsolete (i.e. we might fail to deliver 40,000 leads.) Think of intention as the answer to the adage, “When you are up to your neck in alligators it’s hard to remember you were supposed to drain the swamp.” For example, our mission intent said that the reason why marketing needed to deliver 40,000 leads and 35% market share, etc., was so that Sales could sell $25 million of products at 45% gross margin.

What we taught everyone is that the intention is more enduring than the mission. (“Let’s see, the company is trying to sell $25 million in product with 45% gross margin. If marketing can’t deliver the 40,000 leads, what else can we do for sales to still achieve our revenue and profitability?”) The mission was our goal, but based on circumstances, it might change. However, the Intent was immovable.

When faced with the time pressures of a startup, too many demands and too few people, we began to teach our staff to refer back to the five Mission goals and the Intent of the department. When stuff started piling up on their desks, they learned to ask themselves, “Is what I’m working on furthering these goals? If so, which one? If not, why am I doing it?”

They understood the mission intent was our corporate revenue and profit goals.

Why Do It By the end of the first year, our team had jelled. (Over time, we added the No Excuses culture to solve accountability.) It was a department willing to exercise initiative, with the judgment to act wisely and an eagerness to accept responsibility.

I remember at the end of a hard week my direct reports came into my office just to talk about the week’s little victories. And there was a moment as they shared their stories when they all began to realize that our company (one that had just come off of life support) was beginning to kick the rear of our better-funded and bigger competitors.  We all marveled in the moment.

Lessons Learned

Push independent execution of tasks down to the lowest possible level

Give everyone a shared Mission Statement: why they come to work, what they need to do, and how they will know they have succeeded.

Share Mission Intent for the big picture for the Mission Statement

Build a team comfortable with independent Mission execution

Add a No Excuses Culture

Agree on Core Values to define your culture

Filed under: Corporate Innovation, Family/Career/Culture from DIYS http://ift.tt/2n3CDbA

[chpatdoorsl3z0a1]

Why Some Startups Win

If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?

I was having a second coffee with an ex student, now the head of a marketing inside a rapidly growing startup.  His company had marched through customer discovery, learning about the customer problem, validated solutions and was now scaling sales and marketing.  All good news.

But he was getting uneasy that as his headcount was growing the productivity of his marketing department seemed to be rapidly declining.

I wasn’t surprised. When organizations are small (startups, small teams in companies and government agencies) early employees share a mission (why they come to work, what they need to do while they are at work, and how they will know they have succeeded). But as these organizations grow large, what was once a shared mission and intent gets buried under HR process and Key Performance Indicators.

I told him that I had learned long ago that to keep that from happening, you need to on-board/train your team about mission and intent.

—-

Why Do You Work Here? I had taken the job of VP of Marketing in a company emerging from bankruptcy. We’d managed to secure another infusion of cash, but it wasn’t going to last long.

During my first week on the job, I asked each of my department heads what they did for marketing and the company. When I asked our trade show manager, she looked surprised and said, “Steve, don’t you know that my job is to take our booth to trade shows and set it up?” The other departments gave the same type of logistical answers; the product-marketing department, for example, said their job was to get the product specs from engineering and write data sheets. But my favorite was when the public relations manager told me, “We’re here to summarize the data sheets and put them in press releases and then answer the phone in case the press calls.”

If these sound like reasonable answers to you, and you are in a startup, update your resume.

Titles Are Not Your Job When I pressed my staff to explain why marketing did trade shows or wrote press releases or penned data sheets, the best response I could get was, “Why that’s our job.” In their heads their titles were a link back to a Human Resources job spec that came from a 10,000-person company (ie. listing duties and responsibilities, skills and competencies, reporting relationships…)

It dawned on me that we had a department full of people with titles describing process-centric execution while we were in environment that required relentless agility and speed with urgency. While their titles might be what their business cards said, titles were not their job – and being a slave to process lost the sight of the forest for the trees.  This was the last thing we needed in a company where every day could be our last.

Titles in a startup are not the same as what your job is. This is a big idea.

Department Mission Statements – What am I Supposed to Do Today? It wasn’t that I had somehow inherited dumb employees. What I was hearing was a failure of management.

No one had on-boarded these people. No one had differentiated a startup job description from a large company job. They were all doing what they thought they were supposed to.

But most importantly, no one had sat the marketing department down and defined our department Mission (with a capital “M”).

Most startups put together a corporate mission statement because the CEO remembered seeing one at his last job or the investors said they needed one. Most companies spend an inordinate amount of time crafting a finely honed corporate mission statement for external consumption and then do nothing internally to make it happen. What I’m about to describe here is quite different.

What our marketing department was missing was anything that gave the marketing staff daily guidance about what they should be doing. The first reaction from my CEO was, “That’s why you’re running the department.” And yes, we could have built a top-down, command-and-control hierarchy. But what I wanted was an agile marketing team capable of operating independently without day-to-day direction.

We needed to craft a Departmental Mission statement that told everyone why they came to work, what they needed to do while they were at work, and how they would know they had succeeded. And it was going to mention the two words that marketing needed to live and breathe: revenue and profit.

Five Easy Pieces – The Marketing Mission After a few months of talking to customers and working with sales, we defined the marketing Mission (our job) as:

Help Sales deliver $25 million in sales with a 45% gross margin. To do that we will create end-user demand and drive it into the sales channel, educate the channel and customers about why our products are superior, and help Engineering understand customer needs and desires. We will accomplish this through demand-creation activities (advertising, PR, tradeshows, seminars, web sites, etc.), competitive analyses, channel and customer collateral (white papers, data sheets, product reviews), customer surveys, and customer discovery findings.

This year, marketing needs to provide sales with 40,000 active and accepted leads, company and product name recognition over 65% in our target market, and five positive product reviews per quarter. We will reach 35% market share in year one of sales with a headcount of twenty people, spending less than $4,000,000.

Generate end-user demand (to match our revenue goals)

Drive that demand into our sales channels

Value price our products to achieve our revenue and margin goals (create high-value)

Educate our sales channel(s)

Help Engineering understand customer needs

That was it. Two paragraphs, Five bullets. It didn’t take more.

Building a Mission-focused Team Having the mission in place meant that our team could see that what mattered wasn’t what was on their business card, but how much closer their work moved our department to completing the mission. Period. It wasn’t an easy concept for everyone to understand.

My new Director of Marketing Communications turned the Marcom departments into a mission-focused organization. Her new tradeshow manager quickly came to understand that his job was not to set up booths. We hired union laborers to do that. A trade show was where our company went to create awareness and/or leads. And if you ran the tradeshow department, you owned the responsibility for awareness and leads. The booth was incidental. I couldn’t care less if we had a booth or not if we could generate the same amount of leads and awareness by skydiving naked into a coffee cup.

The same was true for PR. My new head of Public Relations quickly learned that my admin could answer calls from the press. The job of Public Relations wasn’t a passive “write a press release and wait for something to happen” activity. It wasn’t measured by how busy you were, it was measured by results. And the results weren’t the traditional PR metrics of number of articles or inches of ink. I couldn’t care less about those. I wanted our PR department to map the sales process, figure out where getting awareness and interest could be done with PR, then get close and personal with the press and use it to generate end-user demand and then drive that demand into our sales channel. We were constantly doing internal and external audits and creating metrics to see the effects of different PR messages, channels and audiences on customer awareness, purchase intent and end-user sales.

The same was true for the Product Marketing group. I hired a Director of Product Marketing who in his last company had ran its marketing and then went out into the field and became its national sales director. He got the job when I asked him how much of his own marketing material his sales team actually used in the field. When he said, “about ten percent,” I knew by the embarrassed look on his face I had found the right guy. And our Director of Technical Marketing was superb at understanding customer needs and communicating them to Engineering.

Mission Intent – What’s Really Important With a great team in place, the next step was recognizing that our Mission statement might change on the fly. “Hey, we just all bought into this Mission idea and now you’re telling us it can change?!”  (The mission might change if we pivot, competitors might announce new products, we might learn something new about our customers, etc.)

So we introduced the notion of Mission Intent. Intent answered the question, “What is the company thinking and goal behind the mission?” In our case, the mission of the company was to sell $25 million of product with 45% gross margin. The idea of teaching intention is that if employees understand what we intended  behind the mission, they can work collaboratively to achieve it.

We recognized that there would be a time marketing would screw up or something out of our control would happen, making the marketing mission obsolete (i.e. we might fail to deliver 40,000 leads.) Think of intention as the answer to the adage, “When you are up to your neck in alligators it’s hard to remember you were supposed to drain the swamp.” For example, our mission intent said that the reason why marketing needed to deliver 40,000 leads and 35% market share, etc., was so that Sales could sell $25 million of products at 45% gross margin.

What we taught everyone is that the intention is more enduring than the mission. (“Let’s see, the company is trying to sell $25 million in product with 45% gross margin. If marketing can’t deliver the 40,000 leads, what else can we do for sales to still achieve our revenue and profitability?”) The mission was our goal, but based on circumstances, it might change. However, the Intent was immovable.

When faced with the time pressures of a startup, too many demands and too few people, we began to teach our staff to refer back to the five Mission goals and the Intent of the department. When stuff started piling up on their desks, they learned to ask themselves, “Is what I’m working on furthering these goals? If so, which one? If not, why am I doing it?”

They understood the mission intent was our corporate revenue and profit goals.

Why Do It By the end of the first year, our team had jelled. (Over time, we added the No Excuses culture to solve accountability.) It was a department willing to exercise initiative, with the judgment to act wisely and an eagerness to accept responsibility.

I remember at the end of a hard week my direct reports came into my office just to talk about the week’s little victories. And there was a moment as they shared their stories when they all began to realize that our company (one that had just come off of life support) was beginning to kick the rear of our better-funded and bigger competitors.  We all marveled in the moment.

Lessons Learned

Push independent execution of tasks down to the lowest possible level

Give everyone a shared Mission Statement: why they come to work, what they need to do, and how they will know they have succeeded.

Share Mission Intent for the big picture for the Mission Statement

Build a team comfortable with independent Mission execution

Add a No Excuses Culture

Agree on Core Values to define your culture

Filed under: Corporate Innovation, Family/Career/Culture from DIYS http://ift.tt/2n3CDbA