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cherrytoru · 5 years ago

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A Letter For You

also titled: Five Times Yaku Said I love You & When They Said It Back

Word Count: 2.4 K

Pronouns: they/them

warnings: swearing, a little bit of angst, currently unedited

Authors Note: this is my second time posting this cause tumblr decided to delete it last time. also apologise of the lack of a read more for some reason tumblr won’t let me add it right now.

tags: @thembo-for-anime @ohayoposts (uhh tagging you so you can get your yaku fix-)

Number One: Hasty Confessions

Yaku Morisuke was lot of things, late was not one of them. But alas here he is, running faster than he ever has in his life. Okay maybe that one is a stretch.

As he ran towards the club room he racked his brain for a logical reason of how he ended up in this situation. His alarm was set. And so was his back up. Hell even his back up’s back up was on. So why was he sprinting to Nekoma 20 minutes later than he should have arrived?

Yaku didn’t really have an excuse. All he really knew was that he was late and starving. He also knew that the chances of him getting to eat before lunch were slim to none.

“Yakkun!” He turned his head to where the sound was coming from. Standing by the club door was Y/N, waving at him a small smile on their lips. “There you are! I was starting to get worried.”

He let out a breathy laugh. “I slept through my alarm by accident.” He sheepishly replied rubbing the back of his neck.

“Well don’t keep the team waiting, they need their libero, silly.” And with that they pushed him into the club room, closing the door behind him to allow him privacy.

Yaku let out a sign of relief when he walked into the gym. No one seemed to ridicule him for showing up late. He quickly stretched and got to work receiving with Lev.

Practice went on as normal despite his late entrance. He yelled at Lev for failing to receive the ball. Kuroo laughed and poked fun at the pair. And seemingly as soon as it started it was over.

A knock resonated from the door of the club room. “Are ya decent?” Y/n yelled with a slight laugh.

“Yeah yeah you’re good creep.” Kuroo laughed out as Y/N creaked open the door.

“Yaku are you good?” He perked up at the mention of his name, a slight blush dusting his cheeks realizing you where staring at him questioningly.

“Huh? Uh what?”

“You’re tie?” He looked down the the crooked knot which donned his neck. They stalked towards him, hands reaching out to pull the knot undone.

Fingers making quick work of the loose fabric. “Thanks.” He flushed again.

They nodded quickly grabbing his blazer and handing it to him. “Let’s go.” They walked back towards the door but paused, hand stopped on the handle. “Don’t need you being late again.”

Yaku sat at his desk feeling nauseous. The lack of food in his system finally catching up to him. Dropping his head down on to the desk hoping it would all just go away.

Soft footsteps made there way in his direction before stopping in front of his desk. “Yakkun.” The soft voice didn’t register as his beloved manager at first.

An annoyed groan paired with an overly annoyed face came out of the libero’s mouth. As soon as he looked up his face softened at the sight of Y/N. “Are you feeling alright?”

The paled skin and clear look of discomfort on his face where answer enough for the manager. Silently They placed a tin and bottle of water onto his desk.

Opening the tin Yaku was greeted by an arrangement of fruit. He quickly picked up the utensil from the side of the tin and started to shovel the fruits into his mouth. Y/N smiled to themself seeing him more relaxed than he had previously been.

Yaku looked up at them, words fall from his mouth quicker than he could think them over “Thank you, Y/N. I love you.” To Y/N it seemed like he hadn’t even realized what he had said as he went straight back to eating.

“Of course, Yakkun.” They muttered leaning down to place a kiss on his cheek. Although they walked out too quickly to see the red flame filling his cheeks.

Number Two: Sleepy Confessions

The second time Yaku muttered the words “I love you” Y/N was after he suffered yet another sleepless night.

He could count on one hand the hours of sleep he managed to catch last night. No matter what he tried he just couldn’t manage to peacefully fall into slumber.

He’s movements were lagged, and his receives were off. Despite all this no one commented on how he was in fear of irking him.

An all to familiar knock rang at the door. Y/N walked in to make sure the lingerers of the team where finishing up. A look of soft concern was thrown to Yaku, but they decided not to press the matter right now. He was still getting changed after all.

Although that didn't stop them from sliding a coffee across his desk where he laid with his head down once again.

“Yakkun? Can you drink this for me?” He peered up at his manager in front of him looking at him with a sympathetic smile.

He nodded with a small smile, cracking the can open and taking a sip. “Did you not get enough sleep last night?” they frowned.

“I just couldn’t seem to fall asleep is all...” He looked down into the can almost as if it would magically wake him up more.

“Alright, I’ll see you at lunch Yakkun.” they stood up from the seat they had previously resigned in and ruffled his fair. His leaning into their hand didn’t go unnoticed and resulted in them smiling to themself.

Lunch came quickly much to Yaku’s enjoyment as he found himself surrounded by his friends. He also found himself significantly more drowsy than he was just a few hours earlier. The coffee Y/N had given him doing seemingly nothing at this point.

“Yaku-senpai you look tired are you okay?” Lev questioned.

Yaku sighed shaking his head slightly, taking another bite of the onigiri in his hand. Soft eyes fell upon him and small hands gestured towards him.

Quietly he shuffled and his head found its way onto their lap. A sigh of content managed to slip past his lips as he started to drift off. Lev stifled a giggle as Y/N sent a glare his way, a silent warning to let Yaku sleep.

Nimble fingers found their way into his hair. sifting and lightly tugging in hopes of allowing him to rest peacefully even if it was just for a few minutes.

Yaku muttered a few words of affirmation to continue their ministrations. In his lulled state he mumbled daring words causing all but Y/N to freeze.

“Mmm... I love you...” A small contented smile plastered on his face.

Number Three: Rushed Confessions

The third time Yaku confessed to Y/N it was pouring down rain and he had forgotten his umbrella.

From inside the gym the rain sounded more like an army coming to attack than the thunderstorm that was correctly predicted for today.

A loud laugh resonated from the opposite side of the gym where Kuroo sat next to Y/N and Kenma. He stared at the group with admiration in his eyes, although he cleverly masked it with faux annoyance on his face. “Stop being so loud Kuroo.” He shunned.

“Awe don’t be mean Yakkun.” Y/N teased playfully, “C’mere doofus.”

Yaku trekked towards the group and placed himself next to Y/N. Without saying anything they wrapped their arm around him and pulled him towards their shoulder where he placed his head.

After a few more minutes Kuroo and Kenma left, the former holding up his umbrella for the two in hopes that the latter’s game wouldn’t get ruined.

So there the two sat. cuddled together as the rain pounded down atop the roof of the gym. Neither made any effort to move. If you where to ask either of them they would have quickly dismissed their staying. A readied excuse of “oh we forgot our umbrellas so we’re just waiting out the storm” at the tip of their tongues.

For Yaku it wouldn’t be a lie. He hadn’t heeded the warnings of the storm from the news broadcast early on in the morning. He had a long walk and it would be even longer with walking Y/N home to insure their safety. And what gentleman would he be if he didn’t offer his umbrella to protect them from the rain. So instead he opted for sitting with them in the quiet gym.

For Y/N it was as from from the truth as possible. They always kept an extra umbrella in the club room for situations just like these. And even if they didn’t they could have just asked Lev if they could have their umbrella back so they could make the journey home without threat of water in their hair or coat. But instead they let the white lie slip past their lips in hopes of spending time with Yaku.

Thirty more minutes past and the storm wasn’t letting up. Both were getting antsy from sitting so still. “Serve me a few?”

Y/N turned towards the boy sitting next to them. They hesitated, their serves have never be great and they worried that Yaku would be less than enthused when he saw how poor they truly were. “Okay.”

So they grabbed the ball bin from the closet and started. The serves weren’t the greatest but Yaku received every one. In stark contrast to the last time he haphazardly confessed his feelings for them. It was after a rather bad serve that Yaku let it slip once again.

“Man I love you..” He mumbled to himself as he watched Y/N sheepishly rub the back of their neck. a light blush dusted their cheeks, not from fudging the serve but because they had heard him. But he didn’t need to know that.

Number Four: Angry Confessions

The fourth time Yaku confessed he hated it. He hated it cause he hurt them and that’s the last thing he would have ever wanted to do.

It wasn’t uncommon for a teenager to go on dates. Yaku understood this but he couldn’t help but get angry when they happily gushed to some of their friends that Washio had asked them out.

He didn’t hate Washio. In fact at one point he would have said they could have been friends. But hearing the person who he had been so infatuated with called him Washio-kun lead every feeling of friendliness to leave his body. Instead being replaced with something he couldn’t describe. Kuroo could however, and he would describe it as pure, unadulterated jealousy.

Yaku wouldn’t come to terms with his jealousy until he was trying to have a conversation with Y/N but they kept checking their phone every few minutes. He had no way of knowing if they were texting Washio. In fact they were actually texting Bokuto about how while they appreciated the sentiment of Washio’s offer ultimately they turned him down because they care deeper for someone much closer to them.

Of course Yaku didn’t know this though and the buzzing of their phone was only making him more angry. And when they giggled down at heir phone, a look of admiration in their eye’s he snapped.

“Why do you keep texting him so fucking much?” shit.

“What?” The abrupt outburst startled them and as their phone clattered against the table Yaku realized he shouldn’t have said anything. But at this point he couldn’t stop.

“I’m trying to have a conversation with you and you keep fucking texting him!” Tears brimmed their eyes and threatened to spill at the harshness of Yaku’s words.

“Yakkun wait-”

“No.” He huffed “I can’t stand seeing you so fucking excited about Washio when I’m right fucking here.” They both were crying now.

Y/N didn’t know where Yaku’s words where coming from. He seemed happy when they had first told everyone that Washio had asked them out.

Yaku didn’t know how they weren’t able to notice the tight lipped smiles that he wore whenever they brought him up. How could they completely miss how much he cared about them. How in love with them he was.

But by the time Yaku had gotten out of his head Y/N was starting to walk out of his bedroom. “W-Wait! Y/N!” He scrambled up in an attempt to stop them from leaving.

They wanted too. They really did but they didn’t want him to see that tears that streamed down their face knowing how they would effect him. So they kept walking. “Wait please!” He panicked. He never wanted to make you upset. “Please... I love you...”

Number Five: Letter Confessions

It had been a week. A week since he had yelled at them. A week since he had hurt them. He knew they wouldn’t speak to him. He didn’t blame them for it. He couldn’t text them . It wouldn’t feel as sincere as he wants.

So he did the next best thing. He wrote a letter. A letter detailing every feeling he felt for them. He poured out his heart and soul and hoped that it would be enough for them to at least forgive him for lashing out.

After several hours and several crumpled papers later, he entrusted the safety of the letter in the hands of their favorite first year. Much to his own displeasure.

When Lev appeared in the door frame of their classroom the other students whispered about the silver giant awkwardly looking for Y/N. When he spotted them, his face lit up and he shuffled his way towards the back of the room.

He quietly placed the red letter onto their desk. Anyone watching the scene unfold would have assumed the letter was from the first year. But they knew better, they recognized the lettering of their name atop the envelope. It wasn’t the first time Yaku had decided to apologize with a letter.

They sighed opening the envelope carefully, they would add it to their collection of letters previously sent. The apology was standard at first. Exactly what you’d expect when your best friend screamed at you for reasons unbeknownst to you.

The second half of the letter caught their attention though. No longer was it an apology but instead a confession. Yaku had written out exactly how he felt about his best friend simply ending the letter with “I love you, Yaku.”

Double Sided Confessions

Quickly Y/N forced themself out of their chair grabbing their bag and the letter running towards Yaku’s class.

“Morisuke.” They breathed out standing in front of him.

“I’m sorry.”

“Shut up already” They rolled their eyes and did the one thing they could think of doing. The one thing they’ve thought about doing for three years now. They kissed him. And he kissed them back.

“I love you too, Yakkun.”

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edie-k · 5 years ago

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The Art of Christmas Tree Selection

Title: The Art of Christmas Tree Selection

Rating: PG/PG-13 (just language)

Disclaimer: Not mine

Summary: On holiday at Hermione's house, Ron is faced with one the scariest prospects of his young life: a talk with Mr. Granger.

In the way back times, less than a year after the publication of Order of the Phoenix, I wrote my first Romione fic. This was it. In the spirt of Christmas, I thought I would share it. It is, AU after OOTP. Originally published on Checkmated, as I am 16 years older, I now made Ron’s conversation with Mr. Granger slightly less melodramatic to find a better balance. Enjoy!

“Now wait Hermione, explain this again. How exactly do those people get into that box?” asked Ron, cocking his head at the television set in the corner.

“Honestly Ron, I’m not explaining it again!” Hermione huffed, placing her hands on her hips. The long strands of garland she had previously been winding around the banister of the staircase trailed from her fists to the floor.

“Aw, come on love. You enjoy being a know it all,” Ron replied, crossing the room and wrapping his arms around her waist from behind and pulled her back against him.

“Ron!” squealed Hermione, pulling away slightly and turning in his arms to place her hands on the back of his neck. It was all Ron could do to restrain himself from letting out a sigh of contentment. Luckily, his ego kept him from sounding too effeminate.

It was his last Christmas break before leaving Hogwarts and it was the first holiday that he would spend without Harry or his family. Hermione had wanted to spend Christmas with her mum and dad and she had managed to get Ron to agree to accompany her home.

If he was completely honest, Hermione had some rather brilliant ways of convincing him.

Hermione and he had finally managed to get their act together a couple of months into sixth year. All of their pent up emotions and tension spilled out in the middle of a row. “I always knew it would come out like that,” Ginny bragged. In all honesty, Ron couldn’t remember what the argument had been about but he never mentioned that because Hermione most likely did.

In the year and some months they had been together, life had proved to be rather trying. Then again, life as Harry Potter’s best friend was never easy. Having Hermione by his side through it all was the biggest blessing he could have received. Of course, Hermione had always been there with him but without the underlying tension, he found that much more comfort in her presence.

Harry was really supposed to be there with them. After Hermione had talked (well, not necessarily talked) Ron into going to her home for the holiday, she had immediately invited Harry, who much to their surprise, declined. He informed them that he had already accepted his mum’s invitation to join the Weasleys and told Ron and Hermione that he would see them when they arrived at the Burrow on Boxing Day to spend the rest of their holiday. “Besides,” said Harry after Hermione had retired to her room for the night. “Don’t you two want to spend some time alone?”

Yes. Yes he did. Another disadvantage of being Harry Potter’s best friend (besides the target on your back) was that Harry required an abundance of support and attention to keep him from slipping into a mood of eternal melancholy. Ron looked forward to any time that he could spend alone with Hermione. Of course, their alone time was not going to happen at her parents’ house.

Hermione’s parents. Oh Merlin, they made him nervous. There were times when Ron could barely convince himself that he deserved Hermione, how could he convince her parents?

Ron had seen snippets from letters that Hermione had received from home and he could tell that they thought she could do no wrong. He figured this had to do with the fact she was an only child. His own parents had never harbored such beliefs. They were overjoyed if their children could make it through the day without hurting themselves or one another.

Hermione’s parents were dentists. This was some sort of Muggle tooth doctor and according to Harry, dentists typically made a good deal of money. If their house was any indication, it was rather obvious. Harry also told him that to become a dentist, you had to go to university for a number of years. Therefore, the Grangers were just as brilliant as their genius daughter.

For the three days since their arrival at the Granger household, Ron stuck as close as possible to Hermione. This strategy had seemed to work for him so far. The first two days, the Grangers had worked during the day (which also equated to some proper alone time) and he only faced their scrutiny at dinner. With Hermione there to properly steer the conversation, Ron was able to participate and sound at least half way intelligent.

This morning, however, was the first day of the Grangers’ holiday from their office, and consequently, Mrs. Granger had scheduled a doctor’s appointment for Hermione. Hermione had protested fervently. “Honestly, I don’t need to see a cardiologist. Just because I had a slight murmur as a baby doesn’t mean there is a thing wrong with me now. Believe me, if it was anything life threatening I’m sure that I would already have had cardiovascular failure,” Hermione had vented to Ron. He had merely nodded and inquired as to the time of her appointment. The appointment was scheduled for 9:15 in the morning and Ron had managed to stay in bed until 11:00 when he heard the front door open. His mum would have him degnoming the garden for the rest of his life if she found out he behaved that way while a guest in someone’s home.

It was now the afternoon and they had finished lunch and begun to decorate the house for Christmas. Hermione had been wrapping the garland around the banister of the stairs of the entrance hall where Ron had been hanging garland to line the windows of the front door. The house was beginning to take on the aromas of Christmastime, which reminded him of his own mum’s baking.

“Ron? Ron?” said an amused voice. He shook his head, clearing it and looked down at a grinning Hermione. “Did you hear what I said?”

“Oh, uh, sorry. I got a bit lost in my own thoughts there.”

“I asked if you wanted to take two steps to the right,” she repeated. Ron glanced upward in the direction that she had indicated and grinned. With his arms still around her, he took two exaggerated steps until they were directly underneath a small sprig of mistletoe dangling from the ceiling. He raised his eyebrows twice and drew a giggle from Hermione, something only he could do. He leaned in for a sweet kiss.

“Hermione?” called a voice. Ron dropped his arms away from Hermione and quickly pushed her away.

“Yes Dad?” asked Hermione, rolling her eyes at Ron. Hermione had told him that she was positive her parents would not be offended if they were affectionate with each other in front of them but Ron could barely bring himself to hold her hand in the presence of her mum and dad.

“Mum was hoping that you would help her in the kitchen with the fudge. She seems to think that if you prepare it, Aunt Patricia won’t be so inclined to criticize it tomorrow.” Mr. Granger gave her a wink and she smiled.

“Sure, Dad,” she replied.

Ron was now completely unsure as to what he should do while Hermione assisted her mum. Before he had much chance to panic, Mr. Granger opened his mouth, uttering one of the scariest things Ron ever heard in his life.

“I was just about to leave to get our Christmas tree. I could use some help. Why don’t you join me, Ron?”

“Uh-um, yeah,” Ron stuttered out. “I mean, yes sir. I would be glad to help.”

“Wonderful! I’ll just round up my winter things,” Mr. Granger said, heading toward the back of the house and leaving Hermione and Ron alone in the front hall once again.

Ron turned to Hermione, his eyes wide open and filled with panic. Hermione rolled her eyes. “Ron, it’s just my dad. You have faced things much more terrifying than my father.”

“Well, what if I slip and say something that makes him hate me?” Ron asked, his voice filled with fear.

“As long as you two don’t discuss snogging habits, I think that you will do fine,” Hermione said with a smirk.

“Hermione!” Ron said, aghast. How could she even joke about this?

“Well, honestly Ron. What could you possibly do? Dad is already quite aware of the wizarding world. My parents know the basics of the war with Voldemort, so no surprises there. I’m sure you’ll be fine.” With that, she stood on her toes and gave him a kiss on the cheek before entering the kitchen to help her mother and leaving him absolutely alone in his own misery.

“Blimey,” Ron muttered to the empty room. “I’m screwed.”

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

This whole excruciating mess had to be almost over. It seemed like hours since they had left the safety of Hermione acting as a buffer. Ron glanced out the car window and over his shoulder. Shit. He could still see the driveway. They had barely started.

“Well Ron,” said Mr. Granger. “Judy and I are glad that you could join us for Christmas. I’m sure Hermione filled you in on our family.” Ron nodded. Both sets of Hermione’s grandparents knew that she was a witch but none of her aunts, uncles, or cousins were privy to that information. They thought she attended Huntington Preparatory School. So that meant that he would not only have to pretend to be a Muggle but a smart one as well. At least with Hermione’s parents he could respond with his real life.

“I plan on letting Hermione run the conversation,” Ron said nervously.

Mr. Granger smiled sympathetically. “Don’t worry Ron. We won’t let you die out there. I hope you won’t be too overwhelmed by all of the family tomorrow. They are a good group but they can get a bit rowdy as a party wears on.”

“If anyone understands a rowdy family, it’s me, sir,” Ron answered. Of course, when he was with his own family, he didn’t need to lie about his entire life and impress them enough so that they thought he was good enough for Hermione.

Mr. Granger chuckled. “I would imagine that you are well-versed in that. I’ve heard plenty of stories about the trouble that your twin brothers cause… What are their names again?”

“Fred and George,” supplied Ron. Ron had a feeling that Mr. Granger had not heard some of the more recent stories from Hermione’s visit this summer since most of those involved Ron and Hermione having tricks played on them while being caught in rather compromising situations.

“I know that Hermione has always enjoyed the time that she spends with your family. I imagine it’s nice for her to experience a big family first-hand. Judy and I are glad that she’s seeing a young man that comes from such a strong family background. I’m not sure how things are in the wizarding world but there has been a breakdown of families here in recent years and it’s nice to see that Hermione found someone who was raised with strong family values.”

“My mum and dad tried their best,” Ron responded. He began to relax a bit. This wasn’t so bad. Mr. Granger was actually being quite flattering. And he had managed to answer mostly in complete sentences.

“Judy and I do like you, Ron,” Mr. Granger continued. “But Hermione is our only child. As her father, it’s my obligation to ask you what your exact feelings toward her are.”

How much would it hurt to jump from a moving car? They were traveling on side streets so they couldn’t be going that fast. As long as he tucked his head…

“Ron?” prompted Mr. Granger again.

“I’m sorry sir,” squeaked Ron in a voice that had not made an appearance since early puberty. He cleared his throat. “Could you repeat that?”

“I’m sorry to take you by surprise. Take a moment to collect your thoughts,” Mr. Granger said.

What Ron really wanted to do was slap himself in the forehead. Why had he left his wand back at the house? Not only was it stupid with all the danger they faced but if he had it, he could Apparate the hell out of there. No. No, he had to stay. And not just because he did not have his wand. He had to stay because he loved Hermione. All he had to do was explain to her father why.

“Uh, well sir, I love your daughter very much. She’s been my friend forever. And I reckon that even with a family as large as mine, she’s the one person in the world that I never have to doubt. She always believes in me and supports me. And even when we argue, I never have to wonder if she really loves me or not because I already know the answer. And I want to be that person for her as well. She means everything to me,” Ron said. Wow, that was pretty articulate!

Hermione was really rubbing off on him because now he was thinking words like articulate. And earlier this afternoon, he was pretty sure he had thought the word melancholy. What was happening to him?

Mr. Granger cleared his throat. “That’s very good to hear Ron. A little hard for a father to hear but it’s a very nice thought.”

“I uh- I mean every word of it,” Ron said, trying to sound confident. He was confident in how he felt about Hermione but less certain about expressing it to her father.

“I’m sure that you do. So now I have to know-what are your intentions toward my daughter?”

According to Bill, Charlie, and Fred, who all had fiancées or steady girlfriends, those were the scariest seven words in the English language. He had laughed at the time. What could be so horrible about saying that his plan was to marry Hermione (when they were much older, of course)? Now that he was actually expected to say it to her father he felt closer to his older brothers than ever before. He prayed that he could channel one of them as he answered the question. Preferably not Fred.

“Um, well, uh, sir, I guess my plan is that when we are older-uh, much older- I would like to spend- that is I want to.” Gryffindor, Gryffindor! “I’m planning to be with her for as long as she’ll have me.”

Mr. Granger turned to regard him as Ron stared determinedly out the windshield. “Do you know what Hermione’s plans are for the future?”

Ron was a little surprised by this. He had expected the next question to be about his own future and career. “I don’t think she has quite made up her mind as to what occupation she wants to pursue. I suppose it doesn’t matter. I’m sure she’ll succeed no matter what she does. I just hope that she plans to take me along for the ride.”

The answer seemed to satisfy Mr. Granger. “We know our daughter is intelligent Ron.”

“I wouldn’t have made it this far without her,” Ron said. He immediately reddened at his sudden interruption. “Um, sorry sir.”

“That’s okay. I’m glad to see you think so highly of her. We want her to reach her full potential and we want to see her with someone who will be supportive of that.”

“Yes, of course sir. I sincerely doubt that I could stop her even if I really wanted to.”

Mr. Granger laughed. “She said you had a sense of humor. Although we haven’t seen much of it this holiday.”

“Well, I reckon I have been a bit nervous,” Ron admitted. He remembered Charlie had said that his girlfriend’s father had liked it when he had shown fear.

“I remember the first time I was alone with Judy’s father,” Mr. Granger said. “I was helping him fix a few shingles on his roof and when he asked me how I felt about Judy, I contemplated jumping off the roof.”

Ron laughed uncomfortably. Was he a mind reader?

Mr. Granger cleared his throat and a rather serious look crossed his face. “This might sound a bit hypocritical after I made such a point of Hermione’s independence but as her father….” Mr. Granger stopped and he looked as uncomfortable as Ron did for a moment.

The car was on a busier road and now traveling at a faster speed but if Mr. Granger asked Ron a question about their physical relationship… gravity be damned, he was jumping.

Ron debated on whether he should prompt Mr. Granger to continue because he wasn’t quite sure he wanted to hear it, when Mr. Granger continued his previous thought.

“I know there is danger in your world. I don’t know the extent of it but I think that it is worse than Hermione leads us to believe.” Mr. Granger glanced at Ron who continued to sit in silence. He did not want to incriminate Hermione because he knew that she had not told her parents the whole truth but his silence seemed to affirm Mr. Granger’s opinion.

“And I know that Hermione is in more danger than most.” Harry Potter’s Muggle-born best friend? She was probably third on Voldemort’s hit list, behind Harry and Dumbledore.

“So I just want to make sure that, well, that...” Mr. Granger was struggling for the words but Ron could see where he was going. And Ron knew exactly how to answer this question.

“Mr. Granger, I promise you that I will protect your daughter. I will keep her safe until the day I die. I would do anything to keep her safe. Anything.” Wow, that was good. He sounded pretty manly.

“Thank you Ron. That’s what I wanted to hear,” Mr. Granger said.

Ron felt the need to fill the silence so he followed up with “I mean it, sir.” He mentally slapped himself. Way to contribute a worthwhile comment, Weasley.

Mr. Granger looked at him and smiled. For the first time the whole ride, Ron turned to meet his eyes and smiled back.

The car coasted into a lot filled with pine trees already cut and prepared to be sold. Mr. Granger put the car into park and Ron opened his door and slid out.

“One more thing Ron,” said Mr. Granger as they walked toward the tree lot.

“Yes?” Ron asked, meeting his eyes again. Hermione was right. Her dad wasn’t so bad.

“When you’re with my daughter, keep your hands where I can see them.”

#au romione #ROMIONE #fanfic #christmas fanfiction #ron weasley #ron x hermione #hermione granger

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amoralto · 6 years ago

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Q: Paul McCartney: An Innocent Man? (October, 1986)

(Note: I’ve posted so many quotes and audio clips from this interview in the past (#interviewer: chris salewicz), I may as well post the entire printed interview as well. Still remains one of my very favourite Paul interviews - candid, emotionally fraught, brimming with preoccupations, and all the more revealing for it.

Paul McCartney curls up on the couch and relives the Beatles’ story for the first time since the death of John Lennon. “He was one great guy, but part of his greatness was that he wasn’t a saint.”

by Chris Salewicz

Paul McCartney is 44. He was 20 when his first composition appeared on record. Today he’s just returned from remixing a second single from his new LP Press To Play, his 27th solo or group studio album in 24 years.

He’s sitting on a sofa on the second floor of the building in Central London from which he directs his activities. Outside, on this sunny early afternoon, lie the neatly trimmed lawns of Soho Square; inside a forest of deco mahogany woodwork, a De Kooning on the wall and a chrome and neon-garlanded Wurlitzer jukebox of quite archetypal proportions and splendour. He’s wearing fawn moccasins, yellow socks, and a blue and white striped shirt and trousers and, despite the omnipresent grey hair, he looks in immensely good shape for someone who was still in the studio at three in the morning.

Part of McCartney’s agility as a communicator has been the paradoxical mastery of revealing nothing whatsoever of himself to journalists. This was particularly notable during the interviews he gave for Give My Regards To Broad Street, an almost unprecedented barrage of publicity in which it seemed that the more people he spoke to, the less he said. This was perhaps connected with a comprehension of the transparent unsubstantiality of the work. “Broad Street?” he says now. “You don’t stop things just because they’re not good; if you’ve done a bit of work, you put it out. I mean, if Picasso’s painted a thing…”

Today, however, on this Friday afternoon, Paul McCartney is immensely forthcoming. Possibly this is a reflection of the confidence he feels in his new LP, a work that stands almost on a par with Band On The Run, his finest solo record and one which, in many ways, seems to have a direct conduit to post-Sgt. Pepper Beatles albums.

The interview has a relaxed, conversational tone with no sense of formally structured questions and answers. In the cold light of print, his replies can occasionally take on a tone that seems almost petty in its self-justification, but such an emphasis is completely absent when he’s delivering these words to you in person.

The principle strength of the new LP is the quality of the songs, six of which McCartney co-wrote with Eric Stewart, the former 10cc singer and writer of such classics as ‘I’m Not In Love’, a song that is almost a parody of a McCartney love ballad.

The numbers were written, he says, in the manner in which he would work with John Lennon, sitting side-by-side, watching each other search for appropriate chords.

You’ve been in the studio all night re-mixing tracks from the new album for single release. How do you feel about the new LP?

I like it. I have a lot of trouble saying, ‘I think it’s great.’ I wish I was just a fan and I could genuinely like it without seeming wildly immodest. I can’t be objective yet. It’s going to take me a couple of months. I can listen to McCartney, I can just listen to that. I like that one; it’s growing on me. It’s a touchy subject. You’ve done a thing and there it is, it’s your presentation. You mean to get every bit of it right.

So how do you react to criticism?

When I see bad reviews, it’ll hurt me. I am giving myself a bit easier time in life these days. I’ve gone through so much criticism, and not just from critics. From people like John, over so many things, that like a fool I just stood there and said, ‘Yeah, you must be right.’ All those things I was said to be the cause of, I just accepted that I was to blame. I’m beginning to see it a bit differently now. I’m beginning to see a lot of what they say is their problem, not mine.

John was going through a lot of pain when he said a lot of that stuff, and he felt that we were being vindictive towards him and Yoko. In fact I think we were quite good, looking back on it; many people would’ve just downed tools in a situation like that, would’ve just said: ‘Look man, she’s not sitting on our amps while we’re making a film.’ That wouldn’t be unheard of. Most people just say, ‘We’re not having this person here, don’t care how much you love her.’

But we were actually quite supportive. Not supportive enough, you know; it would have been nice to have been really supportive because then we could look back and say, Weren’t we really terrific? But looking back on it, I think we were OK. We were never really that mean to them, but I think a lot of the time John suspected meanness where it wasn’t really there.

He was presumably fairly paranoid.

I think so. He warned me off Yoko once: ‘Look, this is my chick!’ Just because he knew my reputation. We knew each other rather well. I just said, ‘Yeah, no problem.’ But I did feel he ought to have known I wouldn’t. That was John; just a jealous guy. He was a paranoid guy. And he was into drugs … heavy. He was into heroin, the extent of which I hadn’t realised, till just now.

It’s all starting to click a bit in my brain. I just figured, Oh, there’s John, my buddy, and he’s turning on me. He once said to me, ‘Oh, they’re all on the McCartney bandwagon.’ Yet things like that were hurting him, and looking back on it now I just think that it’s a bit sad really.

I saw that thing in The Observer the other week, about the manuscript of the Apple Beatles biography and the vitriolic comments John made in the margins.

I think that shows the sort of pain he was going through. Look, he was a great guy, great sense of humour and I’d do it all again. I’d go through it all again, and have him slagging me off again just because he was so great; those are all the down moments, there was much more pleasure than has really come out. I had a wonderful time, with one of the world’s most talented people. We had all that craziness, but if someone took one of your wedding photos and put ‘funeral’ on it, as he did on that manuscript, you’d tend to feel a bit sorry for the guy. I’ll tell you what, if I’d ever done that to him, he would’ve just hit the roof. But I just sat through it all like mild-mannered Clark Kent.

This was hurting you, presumably.

Not half.

When did you actually get a perspective on it?

I still haven’t. It’s still inside me. John was lucky. He got all his hurt out. I’m a different sort of a personality. There’s still a lot inside me that’s trying to work it out. And that’s why it’s good to see that wedding-funeral bit, because I started to think, ‘Wait a minute, this is someone who’s going over the top. This is paranoia manifesting itself.’ And so my feeling is just like it was at the time, which is like, He’s my buddy, I don’t really want to do anything to hurt him, or his memory, or anything. I don’t want to hurt Yoko. But, at the same time, it doesn’t mean that I understand what went down.

I went at Yoko’s request to New York recently. She said she wanted to see me, I said I was going through New York and so I stopped off and rang her, and she said she couldn’t see me that day. I was 400 yards away from her. I said, ‘Well, I’ll pop over any time today; five minutes, ten minutes, whenever you can squeeze me in.’ She said. ‘It’s going to be very difficult.’ I said, ‘Well, OK, I understand; what is the reason, by the way?’ She said, ‘I was up all night with Sean.’ I said, ‘Well, I understand that. I’ve got four kids, you know. But you’re bound to have a minute today, sometime.’

She asked me to come. I’d flown in specially to see her, and she wouldn’t even see me. So I felt a little humiliated, but I said, ‘OK, 9.30 tomorrow morning, let’s make an appointment.’ She rang up at about 9.00 and said, ‘Could you make it tomorrow morning?’

So that’s the kind of thing. I’m beginning to think it wasn’t all my fault. I’m beginning to let myself off a lot of the guilt. I always felt guilty, but looking back on it I can say OK, let’s try and outline some things. John was hurt; what was he hurt by? What is the single biggest thing that we can find in all our research that hurt John? And the biggest thing that I can find is that I told the world that The Beatles were finished. I don’t think that’s so hurtful.

I’ll tell you what was unfortunate was the method of announcing it all. I said to the guy at the office. Peter Brown, of book fame, I’ve got an album coming out called McCartney. And I don’t really want to see too much press. Can you do me some question-and-answer things?

So he sent all those questions over and I answered them all. We had them printed up and put in the press copies of the album. It wasn’t a number. I see it now and shudder. At the time it was me trying to answer some questions that were being asked and I decided not to fudge those questions.

We didn’t accept Yoko totally, but how many groups do you know who would? It’s a joke, like Spinal Tap. You know, I loved John, I was his best mate for a long time. Then the group started to break up. It was very sad. I got the rap as the guy who broke the group up. It wasn’t actually true.

But legally you had to do that to get out of the contract with Allen Klein, didn’t you?

Yeah, legally I had to. I had to take the other Beatles to court. And I got a lot of guilt off that. But you tell me what you would have done if the entire earnings that you’d made — and it was something like The Beatles’ entire earnings, a big figure, everything we’d ever done up to somewhere round about ‘Hey Jude’ — was about to disappear into someone’s pocket. The guy I’m talking about, Allen Klein, had £5 million the first year he managed The Beatles. So I smelled a rat and thought, £5 million in one year, how long’s it going to take him to get rid of it all?

So I started to resist, and I was given a lot of pressure. The others said, ‘Oh, you’re always stalling’ when I kept refusing to sign Klein’s contract.

But the others suspected you of looking after number one by wanting to bring in your wife’s family as managers.

Obviously everyone worried that because it was my father-in-law, I’d be the one he’d look after. Quite naturally, they said, ‘No, we can’t have him.’ So in the end it turned out to be Klein. And I said, ‘Well, I want out of this. I want to sue this guy Klein.’

They said, ‘You can’t, because he’s not party to any of the agreements.’ So it became clear that I had to sue The Beatles. So obviously I became the baddie. I did take The Beatles to the High Court, which was a highly traumatic period for me, living to front that one out. Imagine, seriously, having to front that one out.

How did you feel through all that?

Crazy, just insane. So insecure. Half the reason I grew the beard.

People often put hair on their faces to hide.

It’s often a cover-up. And I had this big beard and I went to the High Court and actually managed to save the situation. But my whole life was on the line at that point. I felt this was the fire, this was the furnace. It had finally arrived. And we used to get shakes in our voices in court. We used to get the Nixon shakes, something we’d never ever had before. So we went through a lot of those problems. But the nice thing was afterwards each one of them in turn very, very quietly and very briefly said, ‘Oh, thanks for that.’ That was about all I ever heard about it.

But again, John turned it round. He said, ‘But you’re always right, aren’t you?’ See, there was always this thing. I mean, it seemed crazy for me because I thought the idea was to try and get it right, you know. It was quite surprising to find that if you did get it right, people could then turn that one around and say: ‘But you’re always right aren’t you?’ It’s like moving the goal posts.

I mean, it occurred quite a few times because I’m pretty ruthless, ambitious, all that stuff. No more than anyone trying to break into showbiz, but I can be pretty forceful. If we’ve gotta make a record, I’ll actually sit down and write songs. This could be interpreted as being overpowering and forceful.

I’d heard that you were the driving force of The Beatles, but that John would be more interested in doing anything but what The Beatles were supposed to be doing.

Yeah, I remember doing Let It Be and we sat around the table in Apple and I came up with this idea that we should get it on film. I remember John said, ‘Why? What for?’ I explained a bit more. He said, ‘I get it. You want a job!’ Yeah, that’s it! But it seemed strange to me that he didn’t. He seemed quite happy languishing out in St George’s Hill in Weybridge.

I always wanted to make the group great, and even greater. When we made the Let It Be album, and it was a bit crummy, I insisted that we made Abbey Road because I knew what we were capable of. I didn’t think that we’d pulled it off on Let It Be and then with the Phil Spector remix, we kinda walked away from that LP. In fact, the best version of it was before anyone got hold of it: the Glyn Johns early mixes were great but they were very spartan; it would be one of the hippest records going if they brought it out. Before it had all its raw edges off it, that was one of the best Beatles albums because it was a bit avant-garde. I loved it.

So then it was Abbey Road we were doing and I got some grief on that because it took three days to do ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’. You know how long Trevor Horn takes to do a mix for Frankie Goes to Hollywood? It takes two days to switch on the Fairlight! I had a group in the other day, spent two days trying to find the ON switch! That’s what we’re into these days, you know.

I’m sure I did piss people off at the time, much as I tried not to. It just seemed to me when we had a session booked it was a cool idea to turn up. Like Sgt. Pepper: George turned up for his number and a couple of other sessions but not for very much else.

George was supposed to have resented you for always getting on his back.

He did resent it. Two examples; one on Abbey Road. I was beginning to get too producery for everyone. George Martin was the actual producer and I was beginning to be too definite, and George and Ringo turned around and said, ‘Look, piss off, we’re grown-ups and we can do it without you fine.’ People like me who don’t realise when they’re being very overbearing, it comes as a great surprise to be told.

So I completely clammed up and backed off: right, ‘OK, they’re right, I’m a turd.’ So a day or so went by and the session started to flag a bit and so eventually Ringo turned round to me and said, ‘Come on… produce’, and so it was like you couldn’t have it both ways. You either had to have me doing what I did, which, let’s face it, I hadn’t done too bad, or I was going to back off and become paranoid myself, which was what happened.

A lot of Wings was to do with that; I’d been told that I was so overbearing. If the guitarists in Wings wanted to play a solo a certain way, I wouldn’t dare tell them that it wasn’t good.

The other example that really pissed George off was when we were making ‘Hey Jude’. To me it had to have a sparse opening and it was going to build. So I started off ‘Hey Jude’ (sings) and George went ‘durnurnawnaww’ (makes guitar noise), and then ‘Don’t make it bad’, and he’d go ‘Derdlederlederdle’ and he was answering every line through the whole song and I just said, ‘No, man, I really don’t want that, it’s my song.’ The rule was whoever’s song it was to say how we did the arrangement for them.

That pissed him off, and I’m sure it pissed Ringo off when he couldn’t quite get the drums to ‘Back In The U.S.S.R.’, and I sat in. I remember sitting for hours thinking, ‘Should I say this thing?’ In the end it always came down to, ‘You should have said something,’ so it’s very hard to balance that. In the end I have to say that sometimes I was overbearing and sometimes they liked it.

Do you have much to do with them now?

I’m just starting to get back with them. It’s all business troubles. If we don’t talk about Apple then we get on like a house on fire. So I’ve just started to see them again. I had a great day the other day when George came down to visit me and for the first time in billions of years we had a really nice time. George was my original mate in The Beatles.

More than John?

He lived near me in Upton Green and I lived in Ardwick Road, and it was like half a mile away, so we took the same bus to the same school — the 500, which was the express — and then we got guitars at about the same time. We went through the Bert Weedon books and learned D and A together and we were quite big buddies then, so that was something I’d missed for all these years. We’d got all professional and Beatles and everything, and you lose that obviously, and he just came down the other day and we didn’t talk about Apple and we didn’t touch an instrument. It was just back as mates, like on the bus. He’s very into trees and planting and horticulture, as I am more now, and so we talked about planting trees. It was great to actually relate as two people and try and get all that crap out the window.

But that seems to be part of the process; he seems to be emerging more now anyway.

We’re all kind of coming to. We all brushed off this whole Beatles episode and sort of said, Well, it’s no big deal. Obviously it’s a big deal… it was a huge deal… if there ever was a big deal, that was it! So I don’t think half of us know what happened to us, really. I can never tell you what year anything was; literally they all go into a haze for me, the years and stuff. I keep seeing pictures of myself shaking hands with Mitzi Gaynor and I think, I didn’t know I met her. It’s that vague. And yet I look as straight as a die in there.

Were you on speed or something?

I don’t think so. I think it was just that life was speeding; you just met Mitzi Gaynor for five minutes and then you’d go and meet Jerry Lewis’s kids. It becomes very difficult after a while to know if you met 50 of them. I keep seeing weird photos of me with people that I didn’t even know I’d met. It’s quite embarrassing. Bowie’s got that problem too; he’s got huge periods of his life where he just does not know what happened.

When the money started to come in, were you aware of that or were you just living your life and you’d hear suddenly you were worth so much?

We used to ask them, ‘Am I a millionaire yet?’ and they used to say cryptic things like ‘On paper you are’ and we’d say, ‘Well, what does that mean? Am I or aren’t I? Are there more than a million of those green things in my bank yet?’ and they’d say, ‘Well, it’s not actually in a bank… we think you are.’ It was actually very difficult to get anything out of these people and the accountants never made you feel successful.

I remember we had the whole top five in America and I decided I wanted to buy a country house. I wasn’t asking for the world. In those days it would have cost about £30,000, top whack, and so I went to the accountants and they said, ‘You’ll have to get a mortgage’ and I said, ‘What do you mean, a mortgage? Aren’t we doing well yet? We’ve got the whole top five in the biggest market in the world! There’s gotta be some money coming in off that!’

They always try and keep you down. So you didn’t actually get much of a feeling of being very rich. The first time I actually saw cheques was when I left Apple, and it wasn’t me that saw them, it was Linda, because we’d co-written a few of our early things.

There are lots of stories about you and money. Miles, once the editor of International Times, who was a friend of yours in the mid-‘60s, told me about finding your MBE and a bunch of £20 notes stuffed into a sock drawer in your bedroom at the Asher house.

Yeah, I’ve heard that story too. I never remember actually having a wad of money like that. Still, it was nice of him not to nick it anyway, wasn’t it? I did know Miles very well. He was my mate. We had many a wondrous stoned evening in his place listening to all sorts of stuff.

That was another of the interesting things. I think that I’ve got a certain personality and if I give charity I don’t like to shout about it. If I get into avant-garde stuff, I don’t particularly shout about that either. I just get on with it. So way before John met Yoko and got avant-garde, I was like the avant-garde London bachelor with Miles in my pad in St. John’s Wood. I was making 8mm movies and showing them to Antonioni. I had all sorts of theories of music — we’d put on a Ravi Shankar record to our home movies and it’d synchronise and John used to come from Weybridge, kind of looking slightly goofy and saying ‘Wow! This is great! We should do more of this!’

I used to sit in a basement in Montagu Square with William Burroughs and a couple of gay guys he knew from Morocco and that Marianne Faithfull-John Dunbar crowd doing little tapes, crazy stuff with guitar and cello. But it didn’t occur to me in the next NME interview I did to rave about William Burroughs. Maybe it would have been good for me to do that.

It’s like Yoko met me before she met John. She turned up for a charity thing, she wanted manuscripts, any spare lyric sheets you had around. Ours tended to be on the backs of envelopes and to tell you the truth I didn’t want to give her any. They were very precious to me and the cause didn’t seem so great. So I said, ‘Look, my mate might be interested,’ and I gave her John’s address, and I think that’s how they first hooked up, and then she had her exhibition and stuff and then their side of the story started to happen.

I feel as though I have to justify living, you know, which is a bit of a piss-off. I don’t really want to have to sit around and justify myself; it’s a bit humiliating. But there are lots of things that haven’t come out. For instance, when they bust up their marriage, she came through London. He was in LA doing Pussy Cats with Nilsson and having a generally quite crazy time of it all, fighting with photographers and haranguing the Smothers Brothers, all because he genuinely loved Yoko and they had a very, very deep, strong relationship, but they were into all sorts of crazy stuff, stuff I don’t know the half of. A lot of people don’t know the half of that. Hints of it keep coming out in books but you never know if you can believe them.

You mean occultism?

All sorts. I certainly did get a postcard from Yoko saying ‘Go round the world in a South-Easterly direction. It’d be good for you. You’re allowed to stop at four places.’ George Martin got one of those and he sort of said, ‘Would it be alright if I go to Montserrat?’, and she said, ‘No.’ Actually, John did the voyage. John went in a South-Easterly direction around the world, but we all kind of went, ‘Sure, sure, we’ll go round the South-East.’ There are so many memories that come flooding in and it’s like a psycho session, the minute I get on this stuff. I’m on a couch and I’m just trying to purge it all.

Linda and me came over for dinner once and John said, ‘You fancy getting the trepanning tiling done?’ I said, ‘Well, what is it?’ and he said, ‘Well, you kind of have a hole bored in your skull and it relieves the pressure.’ We’re sitting at dinner and this is seriously being offered! Now this wasn’t a joke, this was like, ‘Let’s go next week, we know a guy who can do it and maybe we could all go together.’ So I said. ‘Look, you go and have it done, and if it works, great. Tell us all about it and we’ll all have it.’

But I’m afraid I’ve always been a little bit cynical about stuff like that — thank God! — because I think that there’s so much crap that you’ve got to be careful of. But John was more open to things like that.

Anyway, I was telling you about the marriage break-up thing. Yoko came through London and visited us, which was very nice. Linda and I were just married and living in this big old house in St John’s Wood. She came by and we started talking, and obviously the important subject for us is: ‘What’s happened? You’ve broken up then? I mean, you’re here and he’s there.’

She was very nice and confided in us but she was being very strong about it. She said, ‘No, he’s got to work his way back.’ I said, ‘Well look, do you still love him?’, and she said, ‘Yes.’ So I said, ‘Well, would you think it was an intrusion if I said to him, “Look, man, she loves you and there’s a way to get back”— sounds like a Beatles’ song — and I said ‘Would that be OK?’

She said she didn’t mind and we went out to visit him in L.A. in that house where all the crazy things went on and I took him into the back room and said, ‘This girl of yours, she really still loves you. Do you love her?’ And he said he did but he didn’t know what to do.

So I said, ‘You’re going to have to work your little ass off, man. You have to get back to New York, you have to take a separate flat, you have to send her roses every fucking day, you have to work at it like a bitch! Then you just might get her back.’ And he did. I mean, if you hear it from John’s point of view, it’ll just be that he spoke to Yoko on the phone and she said to him, ‘Come back.’

I always found it interesting that he got married a month after you.

I think we spurred each other into marriage. They were very strong together which left me out of the picture, so then I got together with Linda and we got our own kind of strength. I think again that they were a little bit peeved that we got married first.

Was it the kind of thing where there are two blokes who are good mates and one of them finds a girl and then the friendship breaks up?

‘Wedding Bells’ is what it was. ‘Wedding bells are breaking up that old gang of mine.’ We used to sing that song, Gene Vincent did it. It was like an army song and for us the Beatles became the army. We always knew that one day ‘Wedding Bells’ would come true, and that was when it did.

Trouble is, in trying to set the record straight I don’t want to blame John. I did this thing recently with Hunter Davies and they pulled out the one line, ‘John could be a manoeuvring swine.’ Well, I still stick to that, but I’d better not say it to The Sun because I’m just going to get hauled over the coals again.

I’ll tell you exactly why I said that. We had a business meeting to break up The Beatles, one of the famous ones that we’d been having — we’re still having them 17 years later, actually. We all flew in to New York specially. George came off his disastrous tour, Ring of flew in and we were at the Plaza for the big final settlement meeting. John was half a mile away at the Dakota and he sent a balloon over with a note that said ‘Listen to this balloon.’ I mean, you’ve got to be pretty cool to handle that kind of stuff.

George blew his cool and rang him up: ’You fucking maniac!! You take your fucking dark glasses off and come and look at us, man!!’ and gave him a whole load of that shit. Around the same time at another meeting we had it all settled, and John asked for an extra million pounds at the last minute. So of course that meeting blew up in disarray. Later, when we got a bit friendlier — and from time to time there would be these little stepping-stones of friendship in the Apple sea — I asked him why he’d actually wanted that million and he said, I just wanted cards to play with. It’s absolutely standard business practice. He wanted a couple of jacks to up your pair of nines. He was one great guy, but part of his greatness was that he wasn’t a saint.

You got an awful lot of shit for saying “It’s a drag” after he’d been killed.

Yea. I think why some politicians are so successful is that they have a little bleeper box in their heads and before they say something they run things through and they can see it as a headline. If it doesn’t look good they edit it. I have that sometimes, but in moments like that all my bleepers go out the window. I just came out of the place and somebody just stuck the proverbial microphone in the window of the car, which I’m mad enough to have open because, you see, I’m quite outgoing and I was telling the fans ‘Thank you, it’s alright.’ You know. Fab Macca, thumbs aloft, wacky… to me that’s just being nice… that’s just ordinary. I’m not going to carry any can for that kind of shit, for me that was OK… Sticking my thumb up isn’t some armour against the fans, it’s just a perfectly straightforward way of being friendly with people.

But, anyway, I said, ‘It’s a dra-a-ag.’ If I could’ve I might’ve just lengthened that word ‘drag’ for about a thousand years, to get the full meaning. Hunter Davies was on television that night, giving a very reasoned account of John, and all the puppets sprang right up there. I thought it was well tasteless. Jesus Christ, ready with the answers, aren’t we? Aren’t we just ready with a summary? Mind you, Hunter admitted to us years ago that he already had our obituaries written. They’re on file at The Times and they just update them, which is chilling to learn.

The question is, which is the more sensitive: my thing or his thing? He was the one I rang up about ‘manoeuvring swine’ too, so it shows what a buddy he is, he immediately put it in print.

That incident reminded me of John saying ‘We’re bigger than Jesus,’ which was a Maureen Cleave article for the Evening Standard. John and Maureen were good friends and in context it was actually John saying to the church, ‘Hey, wake up! We’re bigger than you.’

But you take it out of context, you send it to Selma, Alabama, you put it on the front page and you’ve got little 11-year-olds thumping on your coach window saying, ‘Blasphemer! Devil Worshipper!’ and I’ll never forget the sight of a little blond kid trying to get to us, and he would have done it, if he’d have got to us. I mean, at 11, what does this kid know of life and religion or anything? He’d just been whipped up.

It’s like Phillip Norman’s book Shout. It’s shameful the way it says that George spent the whole of his career holding a plectrum waiting for a solo. To dismiss George like that is just stupid, nothing less. George was a major influence musically. Trouble is with all these guys, when they come to interview you they come with a clipboard of facts that they’ve got from the files. That’s how Willie Russell wrote his play, John, Paul, George, Ringo… and Bert. That’s how I’ve become known as the one who broke up the Beatles.

The only thing I’m thankful for is that now the truth is starting to come out, and when I see that wedding changed to funeral, I start to realise that it was John’s problem, not mine.

What was his problem, do you think?

Heroin, a slight problem.

When did you know he was doing heroin?

When he was living in Montagu Square with Yoko after he’d split up with Cynthia. He never actually told us, no one ever actually saw him take it, but we heard. I was very lucky to miss that whole scene. I was the first one on coke in the group, which horrified the whole group, and I just thought, No sweat. The minute I stopped, the whole record industry got into it and has never stopped since.

I knew the time was up when I saw Jim Webb — Up Up And Away! — offering me a toot. I thought, ‘Hello, this is getting way too popular.’

When was this that you were doing it?

In LA, it was Sgt. Pepper time, it was my circle of friends: the William Burroughs, the Robert Frasers, the Rolling Stones crowd, and we’d use it to wake up after the pot. But that was quite shortlived and I hated it. I soon got the message that it was a big downer.

There’s a story that sums up all that drugs thing. When I went out to LA at the time of that Pussy Cats album I was offered angel dust. I said, ‘What is it?’ and they said, ‘It’s an elephant tranquillizer,’ and I said to the guy, ‘Is it fun?’ He thought for a moment and said, ‘No it’s not fun.’ So I said, ‘OK, I won’t have any then.’ That sums it up, you know. You had anything, man, even if it wasn’t fun! You sort of had to do it — peer pressure.

I was given a lot of stick for being the last one to take acid. I wish I’d held out now in a way, Although it was the times. I don’t really regret anything actually. I remember John going on The Old Grey Whistle Test and saying, ‘Paul only took it four times! We all took it twenty times!!’ It was as if you’d scored points…

Real twenty pints a night stuff, isn’t it?

It really is!! That’s it, exactly! Very northern. It’s the same thing. If you get it right with one crowd; of people, it’s wrong with another crowd, so you can’t win, basically. But it was great times and I really don’t regret it. I love a lot of what we did; we had screwed-up moments too, but who doesn’t?

Like Geldof — there’s this guy who does great stuff, but that doesn’t mean that he’s a saint. In fact, it’s often the opposite with these people; it just means that they’ve got Go Power.

I love the story where they finished the USA For Africa record and Geldof is buzzing and Michael Jackson and his family were having a light meal at about three in the morning. They’re all devout Jehovah’s Witnesses and they were all sitting there and Bob walks in and says, ‘You lot fucking disgust me!!’ The jaws just drop.

He didn’t make himself too wildly popular. I think that’s why he got a bit elbowed in the States. They never mention him. It’s the American guy they always mention. I don’t even know what his name is. Ken something. They all thank him. They never say, ‘And by the way, he got the idea off this mad Irish bog bandit.’

How did you feel at Live Aid? The first time you’d been on stage for ages and it all went wrong.

When the mic went? I felt very strange. It was very loosely organised and I turned up not knowing quite what was expected of me, other than that I had to do ‘Let It Be’. So I sat down at the piano, looked around for a cue to go, and there was just one roadie, and I looked at him for a signal. I started and the monitor was off and I thought, No sweat, this is BBC, this is world television, someone’s bound to have a feed, it’s just that my monitor’s off.

Then I wondered if the audience could hear because I knew some of the words of ‘Let It Be’ were kind of relevant to what we were doing. Anyway, I thought, This is OK, they can hear me, they’re singing along. I just had to keep going, so it was very embarrassing. The terrible thing was that in the middle I heard the roadies come through on the monitor, shouting, ’No, this plug doesn’t go here!‘ I thought, Hello, we have problems. The worst moment was watching it on telly later.

The event itself was so great, but it wasn’t for my ego. It was for people who are dying and it raised over £50 million, and so it was like having been at the battle of Agincourt. It’s something you’ll tell your grandchildren about. I know Paul Simon slightly regrets that he didn’t do it. He was asked, but he had other things to do. I very nearly didn’t do it; Bob just badgered me into it.

That’s your mother invoked in ‘Let It Be’, isn’t it?

Yeah, well, I had a lot of bad times in the ‘60s there, and we used to sort of — probably all the drugs — lie in bed and wonder what was going on and feel quite paranoid. I had a dream one night about my mother. She died when I was 14 so I hadn’t really heard from her in quite a while, and it was very good. It gave me some strength. In my darkest hour Mother Mary comes to me. I don’t know whether you’ve got parents that are still living, but if you do… I get dreams with John in, and my Dad. It’s very nice because you meet them again. It’s wondrous, it’s like magic. Of course, you’re not meeting them, you’re meeting yourself, or whatever…

What about ‘Lady Madonna’?

Lady Madonna’s all women. How do they do it? — bless ‘em — it’s that one, you know. Baby at your breast, how do they get the time to feed them? Where do you get the money? How do you do this thing that women do?

Was your mother a very strong force in your life?

Well, I loved her, you know, yeah.

Was it very traumatic when she died?

Yeah, but I’m a bit of a cover-up. There are many people like me in the world who don’t find it easy to have public grief. But that was one of the things that brought John and I very close together. We used to actually talk about it, being 16 or 17. We actually used to know, not in a cynical way, but a way that was accepting the reality of the situation, how people felt when they said, ‘How’s your mother?’ And we’d say, ‘Well, she’s dead.’ We almost had a sort of joke, we’d have to say, ‘It’s alright, don’t worry.’ We’d both lost our mothers. It was never really spoken about much; no-one really spoke about anything real. There was a famous expression: ‘Don’t get real on me, man.’

How did you feel about all the stick Linda got?

I feel sorry for her. She got a lot of stick, more than we admit to.

It presumably affected your relationship in some way?

It made us stronger, really; the thing I’m beginning to understand now about Linda was that we were just two people who liked each other and found a lot in common and fell in love, got married and found that we liked it. To the world, of course, she was the girl that Paul McCartney had married, and she was a divorcee, which didn’t seem right. People preferred Jane Asher. Jane Asher fitted. She was a better Fergie.

Linda wasn’t a very good Fergie for me, and people generally tended to disapprove of me marrying a divorcee and an American. That wasn’t too clever. None of that made a blind bit of difference; I actually just liked her, I still do and that’s all it’s to do with.

I mean, we got married in the craziest clothes when I look back on it. We didn’t even bother to buy her a decent outfit. I can see it all now; I can see why people were amazed that I’d put her in the group. At the time it didn’t seem the least bit unusual. I even had quotes from Jagger saying, ‘Oh, he’s got his old lady up onstage man.’

A lot of people give her stick for playing with one finger, but as a matter of fact they weren’t polyphonic, the Moogs, in those days. You can only play them with one finger; you can play them with five if you like, but only one’s gonna register, so it’s things like that all added to the picture, and by the time she did the ’76 tour with Wings, she was well good at stuff and actually I was quite surprised, I mean, she was holding down the keyboard job with one of the big bands in the world. From knowing nothing! I mean, the balls of the girl!

But along with the public condemnations, there were always millions of people who liked her. Our shows always did OK, and our records occasionally did OK. Occasionally we’d have a whopper burger that’d suddenly make it worthwhile. Then we’d have our big whopper failures, but as long as you measure them against your successes, it’s alright.

How do you feel about the Wings output?

I was never very happy with the whole thing but I’m actually starting to think that it was a bit churlish of me, because I’m meeting a lot of people now who had a completely different perception of the whole thing. I met a nurse recently who was a Wings fan! I mean, forget me, forget The Beatles, she was an actual die-hard Wings fan. I didn’t think they existed.

A lot of the younger people coming up didn’t really know the Beatles history. There are people who don’t know what Sgt. Pepper was. We find it a bit difficult to understand. It’s like not knowing what War And Peace is.So it’s OK. I was never very pleased with the whole thing, but I’m warming to it now. I’m starting to look at it through my own eyes, and saying, Wait a minute. What did we do? Where did we go wrong? Most people would give their right arm for the Wings career, to have hits as big as ‘Mull Of Kintyre’, ‘My Love’, ‘Band On The Run’, ‘Maybe I’m Amazed’.

But it came to an end when you were busted in Japan. How did that happen?

It happened because we got some good grass in America and no-one could face putting it down the toilet. It was an absolutely crazy move. We knew we weren’t going to get any in Japan. Anybody else would have given it to their roadies, but I didn’t want them to take the rap. It was lying on top of the bloody suitcase. I’ll never forget the guy’s face as he pulled it out. He almost put it back. He just did not want the embarrassment. But it’s a hysterical subject and I’d prefer to skirt round it these days, because I don’t want any of the pressures that go with it, so I’m telling everyone, stay clean, be cool.

I’m pretty straight. I know what crazy is.

#1986 #interviewed: paul #interviewer: chris salewicz #full article placeholder tag #emotional disaster ocean #the many ways i've tried #ceci n'est pas une pomme #in spite of you #our distance and that person

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ardenttheories · 6 years ago

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what do you think about time and space being cardinal aspects if, according to your and many others' theories, the knight is who helps the space player do the frog breeding? an even more far fetched take would be a knight of space solo session, because time isn't as essential, is it?

The importance of the Time player is to ensure that you have some form of backup state should your session ultimately fail. Anything relating to the Scratch is intrinsically tied to your Time player’s Land; without a Time player, there’s simply no possibility for this to happen.

It’s also imperative to note that in Homestuck, and SBURB as a whole, Time plays an incredibly significant role. The entire game is based around stable time loops and paradoxes, from the creation of the players to the creation of the game itself, and even throughout the game to ensure that things will always end up in exactly the right place at exactly the right time. Every session will, at its base level, hold this degree of Time manipulation.

The importance of the Space player is to ensure that the game is even potentially winnable. Anything relating to the Forge, or the Genesis Frog, is intrinsically related to your Space player’s Land; without a Space player, there’s no fertile ground, so to speak, for the new universe to grow, no new beginning to aspire to.

So, Space also plays a significant role in Homestuck, and SBURB as a whole. In conjunction with Time loops and paradoxes, multiple portals exist that allow players to traverse through their Lands, and it’s Skaia’s defence portals that allow the players to go back to their point of origin to begin with - but that also provides the space for an Alpha session, which exists parallel to the Beta session. Beyond the all-important Universe Creation, Space also ensures more than once that objects and people are miraculously transported from one place to another, and provides one of the easiest ways to overcome obstacles.

What this means is that Time and Space have to work together for SBURB to work. That’s why they’re seen, I think, as the Cardinal Aspects. You can’t make the Alpha session without Space having some sort of involvement, and you can’t make the Genesis Frog without the assistance of Time through the breeding device (the last frog, in particular, is just plain unreachable without it).

You also can’t have a fully functioning session without both Time and Space, as multiple times throughout Homestuck we see things travel in two directions; into the past, and into another universe.

For instance, SBURB not only travels from the human session into the troll session, but it’s also sent back in time so that Aradia can find it during one of her archaeological digs. It would be all well and good if it could only go back in Time, or travel through Space - but it would never reach that instance of Aradia, the one who didn’t know fully what it was and was in the prime position to have Sollux recreate it for an Alternian audience just in time for the Reckoning.

Clearly, Space is the more valuable Aspect when it comes to winning the session. You quite literally need it to even beat the game, and so long as you’re either incredibly careful or incredibly lucky, you’ll be able to pull through to the end. This even goes so far as to be a main point in Homestuck itself; Doomed!Dave and Rose are well aware they can’t win the game without Jade, and thus going back in Time is the only option.

But they wouldn’t have that option of Dave weren’t a Time player. Their session would also fail, almost immediately, even if Jade was present; their session faces an extreme lack of Time, and Dave manages to do several weeks of work within a few hours through the use of stable time loops. Without his work, Jade would never be able to finish the frog breeding in time - and they’d remain a barren session.

When it comes to why they’re called Cardinal Aspects, I think it’s because they form the foundation of Paradox Space. As I’ve shown, you need a mix of Time and Space present within a universe in order for any part of SBURB to fully function. If one or the other were lacking, as we see with the Beta kid session, there’s just no way to complete the session, even if you have the other Aspect present.

More than any other Aspect, you need these two. It’s why Caliborn and Calliope’s session even vaguely works. One’s Time, one’s Space. They fill the bare minimum requirements to have a viable session - but then, of course, once one of them predominates the other, it’s game over. Alternate Calliope has no choice but to bide her Time and wait for an opportunity to strike in a session that has no End, and Caliborn struggles to grow in a session that contains nothing but Ends and hosts no universe for him to go into.

I think that’s part of the importance of Time, honestly. Space is the creation of the universe, but Time is the end of the session. You need to have both to ensure that one Ends as the other Begins.

It’s also why the Alpha session is so barren - even more barren than any other session we see (disregarding the Alpha troll session, but that’s not their own fault; that’s an overabundance of Time a la Lord English). They don’t have Time to end their session, nor do they have Space to provide the fertile ground for Skaia to grow. They have Heart, Hope, Life, and Void - all important Aspects, sure, and especially important when related to the individual - but they are at a complete loss for any ability to redo, to progress, or even to come to an end.

As for the solo Knight of Space…

First of all, it’s just a bad idea. I’ve mentioned this before, but for Skaia to grow fully, you need an even number of players and at least 4 minimum; Skaia evolves with each prototyping, and if you don’t allow it to progress through those stages, you’ll never have it reach its fertile state. A Knight of Space might be able to fudge this a little - it’d be well within their powers to, for sure - but as a general rule of thumb, one player sessions just do not work. It’s why Caliborn’s session is so broken. SBURB is a team game, and working on your own will never allow you the opportunity to grow.

Without Time present in their session, the Knight of Space would likely really struggle with… anything Time-related. There’d be no sending themselves things back in time, no future warnings or assistance, and they’d be almost entirely unable to keep a stable time loop going. They’d have to play the game by the skin of their teeth, trying to get everything right first try - which means full prototyping, God Tiering, playing without the assistance of stronger fraymotifs, and a battle against the Black King completely solo.

They might be able to do the frog breeding, but again, they’d be incredibly pushed for time. SBURB is a multi-player game, and is almost entirely about resource management; imagine trying to get the sort of grist Dave does when you’re only one person, and also need to focus on your Quest, your Denizen, your Choice, the Reckoning, the Black Queen and King, Dersite Agents, and the construction of your own home.

The easiest way I could see a Knight of Space doing this is… duplicates, maybe? We’ve never seen that happen for a Space player, I think, but imagine Double Team from the Pokemon games; creations of oneself that aren’t physical, but exist as you do and are capable of copying things you would do. If they can resize things, then they can definitely copy/paste things - and I’d assume for a Knight of Space, duplicating yourself (like Twice does in BNHA) would be the easiest exploit to try and get around the lack of help.

Otherwise your poor Knight would be frequently trying to zap themself around between the Moons, Skaia, and their Land in order to complete everything in an orderly fashion.

My biggest concern is whether or not they’d be able to snatch the last part of Super Special Frog DNA to make the Genesis Frog.

That Super Special Frog is what awakens the Space player initially. It’s specifically, if I remember correctly, transported back in Time to an early point of a young Space player’s life, and then has to be disposed of quickly to ensure that it can be paradoxified - as happens with Jade, wherein Bec kills the frog so that she can paradoxify it to get its genetic code in the future.

This is also why Karkat and Kanaya fail at making the Genesis Frog. Doc Scratch awakens Kanaya prior to her seeing the Super Special Frog, and if I’m remembering correctly, she never sees that Frog at all. This is why they can’t find the last piece of genetic code, and why the human session ends up Cancerous.

So even if the Knight of Space manages to achieve everything else, they may never be able to find that Super Special Frog. They may never be able to paradoxify it, or they may never have seen it to begin with (since it’s sent back in Time, and your Knight has no way of easily ensuring something will go through Time as it’s meant to) - and thus they’ll never be able to finish off the Genesis Frog. Sure, they’ll be able to beat the game (just barely, at this point, and with difficulty against the Black King unless they exploit the multiple selves thing), but the universe they go into won’t be healthy.

I have seen it mentioned somewhere that you do need a Knight of Time in order to successfully win the game, but I think that’s probably a bit much. The chances of having a Knight of Time, specifically, in your session is incredibly low - literally one in the five sessions we see within Homestuck - and is only relevant to the Beta human session because of their lack of time. SBURB doesn’t want every session to win, and there’s a much higher ratio of barren sessions to successful ones, but it at least gives you a fighting chance. Failure is typically attributed to Failed Classpects, lack of growth, or the team just not getting on well enough to try and win together - not because you were missing such a specific thing. Even the Alpha session got a Space player in the end.

The Knight as a Class is imperative, I think, because of its Exploitative/Protective nature - though you do need the Time player in order to ensure there’s enough Time in your session for normal aspects of the game to even work.

So! For TL;DR:

- Space and Time are Cardinal Aspects because they’re vital to the running of any session. It doesn’t really matter what other Classpects you have in your session; without Space and Time, the fundamental characteristics of Paradox Space don’t exist, and you won’t have a winnable session

- A Knight of Space could, potentially, win a game of SBURB, but the chances of it are highly unlikely, and they’d likely end up with a cancerous frog

- Knights are important to the process of breeding the frogs because of their specific powerset and mentality, and though they don’t specifically need to be a Knight of Time, you still will need a Time player separate to the Knight in order for frog breeding to be a viable process (at least if you don’t want a cancerous session)

#homestuck analysis #sburb meta #time aspect #space aspect #ardenttheories #long post//#anonymous

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kaedeichinose · 6 years ago

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hi janelle, do i remember right that you like otome games? please help me out i have an abundance of free time and im feeling so lonely i just need fictional characters to say they love me. what are the best ones you'd recommend?

hell yeah i do. ok so as a general rule, if you’re taking a chance go for something thats out on a real console (psp, vita, ps3/4) basically because theres a lot more random garbage on the mobile and steam fronts, and it’s not like there arent good ones but obviously the rate of trash to good is higher

so heres a few of my most highly recommended:

Hakuoki: this is the most popular otome franchise in the west by far (even the non otome spinoff action game got localized. imagine) the most recent edition of the games in on vita (maybe steam? i havent checked) and its the combo of kyoto winds and edo blossoms. the reason theres two of them is because the game has SO MUCH CONTENT there was no way they could localize it as it was and possibly make a profit, so they ended up splitting it. Some people dislike the protag bc shes a little too yamato nadeshiko for their tastes but it never bugged me. it’s got a lot of action, historical intrigue, theres like? 13? romance candidates as of kw/eb so you’re getting a lot of bang for your buck. plus, since so many version of hakuoki got localized the older versions tend to go on sale whenever aksys’ stuff is on sale so you can get one of the older version for real cheap if you wanna dip your toes.

Code Realize: this is probably my favorite otome game and one of my favorite vns in general. the art is gorgeous, the characters are so fleshed out and well developed (even the side characters), all the narratives whirl together with intrigue and drama and the protagonist has a lot of personality. Theres not a single character i dislike here. i think the ps4 version comes in a dual pack with future blessings, which is a direct sequel focusing on lovey-dovey marriage stuff with some more serious stories too.

norn9: norn9 is really unique because it has three entirely different protags to play as, and each one has three different boys to pursue. this affords for them to have a lot of love interests while still keeping the MC’s arcs feeling fresh. theres one route i dont like but 8/9 aint bad! nice art, good writing, intriguing world building. fully recommend.

anniversary no kuni no alice: so this ones pretty different in that its a doujin game that was never officially localized (ok, there was a mobile port that got released in the west but calling that a translation...... is generous) but the fantranslation finally got finished like? last year? recentlyish. despite its humble routes it made a huge splash in japan and is definitely genre defining. it also isnt as tender and sweet as some of the other games i listed, it fully embodies the charm of alice in wonderland where nearly everyone is an oddball whackjob/asshole (and dont worry, the protagonist can throw a punch) and has an old fashioned affection point and date system which make it feel really old school. its not an eroge but these characters absolutely fuck, which is nice if you want some self indulgent steamy stuff. that said i fully recommend opening up the debug menu and just slapping max affection on your chosen boy bc the low budget, slightly dated mechanics can be kind of a slog. theres also like a shit load of secret events that you need to monitor flags for so you might as well just save yourself the trouble and fudge the numbers a bit. and since the company that made it is fucking dead its 100% free! rad.

collarxmalice: this one is a bit weird bc im more recommending it for the story bc the romance elements didnt really do it for me? like full disclaimer this is a me problem, and even though the romance elements didnt click with me the routes are all still very well written (except.... for one.... who i was expecting to like the most..... aaaaaaaaaaaaa) . the heroine is a cop so shes very action focused and the game even forces you to do your own crime solving, and its easy but its still more immersive than a lot of other games try to be. it has a very strong story and aesthetic and even though it bounced off me im still looking forward to the fandisc releasing on switch so i still really enjoyed it. it was met with rave reviews and was even an office favorite of the translators working on it.

if youre still unsure i suggest just checking out which game has a cast you find appealing, theyre the main reason your here afterall

#Anonymous

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prorevenge · 6 years ago

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Refuse to Provide Accurate Investment Percentages And Take Me Off Reporting Team? Enjoy being fired and losing equity in the business.

I work for a very large financial company. Like the tech industry, occasionally we will want to pursue market opportunities in areas we are not necessarily experts in, and it is much easier and faster to buy (either whole or a controlling interest) in a specialized investment company or advisor in order to acquire their talent, resources and industry connections (commonly called an acqui-hire). Several years ago, we acquired a controlling interest in one such company. As an incentive to keep the talent on board and minimize disruptions to their business, instead of buying them outright, we bought about 2/3 of the interest and the management bought the remainder. They then hung shares of that remainder over the heads of certain key managers as future bonuses to be triggered by performance and remaining with the company for specific amounts of time beyond the acquisition. The CIO of the company was one such employee. We shall call him Asshole CIO.

This guy was a piece of work. He prided himself in having attended some university (I forget which) and felt that anyone without a certain title or higher was beneath him. He was used to being a big fish at his company, but didn't quite get that guys like him in his new corporate parent were a dime a dozen. I worked on the acquisition of his company and interacted with him fairly regularly, and while he was super nice with my boss, he never wasted an opportunity to be condescending to me (even though I was doing the bulk of the work). His favorite move was to refuse to answer my calls or emails and instead instruct his secretary to reply on his behalf after I had reached out to him multiple times about the same thing. Luckily his secretary was awesome and IMHO, probably good enough to have done his job.

Anyhow, as a result of the acquisition, the company now had to report a host of different activities to the parent company on a fairly regular basis. One of these things was the percentage ownership of certain investments in a wide range of funds, by a host of different entities. The thing to know is that as you invested in these funds, your entity acquired an equity stake that varied somewhat from reporting period to reporting period based on the performance of the fund and how much you were invested in it at the time. Unless the size of your investment changed substantially, the percentage variation in the ownership stake varied very little from one period to another. Still, those fluctuations had to be reported regardless of size. I tracked these for a host of similar companies owned by the parent company and had developed a reporting system that all of them used, which ensured detailed and accurate reporting. Everyone that is, except for this company, which at the express direction of their Asshole CIO, refused.

Now I tried talking sense to the Asshole CIO, his analysts and to his secretary, and in every case, he shut me down. Instead of supplying the information in the manner requested, he sent me an automatic performance summary generated by different software and told me to figure out the numbers myself, because his staff didn't have the time to change their methods and accommodate me. Of course, I went to my bosses with this, and their advice that since this was a new company and we really wanted to build good relations with them while we were integrating them into our business, to just play along and try and play nice with this guy. In other words, make the best of it.

Enter Malicious compliance.

I did exactly what they ordered me to do. Every single reporting period, for a year, I took their crappy report, fleshed out their numbers as best as possible, and reported them, fully knowing that they were inaccurate. Every single time, I interacted with their staff, I made sure to tell them this and to ask them to please use the system every other investment subsidiary was using. Every single time, they came back with orders from the Asshole CIO to refuse.

Around that time, the Asshole CIO decided to grace us with his presence and flies in to do a meet and greet with our team. My boss and I even had a one on one meeting with him. Asshole CIO comes into the room greets my boss and then proceeds to ignore that I'm standing in front of him with my hand out waiting to shake his (even looked me in the eye while proceeding to ignore me in front of my boss). I waved off his behavior and time passed. About 6 months later the parent company decides to audit their business, and what do you think they find? yep, they find that all their equity and performance reports are off (sometimes way off). Of course, the president of the sub gets a call from my boss's boss,the Parent Company's CIO and gets an earful. They in turn pull in the Asshole CIO and give him an earful about their reports. He immediately proceeds to throw me under the bus. The next day I get called in to my boss’s office for a conference call with the president of the subsidiary, the Asshole CIO and the Corporate CIO. Right off the bat Asshole CIO starts demeaning me and demanding to know how I could possibly have fucked up their reporting. The guy lays into me and demands that I be fired for the fuck up. By now I'm tired of this guy's bullshit and I'm done playing nice with him, so I asked to be excused, get my laptop and return. I then proceeded to forward and quote email after email evidencing my requests for compliance and his express refusal to do so... for a year and fucking half. The Corporate CIO thanked me and asked me to step out of the meeting.

A couple of days later, my boss pulls me aside to tell me that going forward, the subsidiary will be reporting all figures as per my instructions, and the Asshole CIO had gotten the ass chewing of a lifetime by his and my bosses. However, while he agreed to comply going forward, he demanded that I no longer be part of the reporting process. My boss told me not to worry about it, that it was one less thing for me to worry about and the Asshole CIO was just being vindictive because I had embarrassed him in front of his bosses. Fair enough, I passed the process on to someone else and enjoyed the reduced stress. I still had to interact with the company's analysts on direct investments, but I no longer had to interact with the Asshole CIO, which was fine by me.

Fast forward two months and I find out that Asshole CIO has been fired, and that it was his handling of my report that caused the Corporate CIO to order a review of this guy's investments and reporting at every level. They found discrepancies everywhere (sometimes serious ones). It seems he had been fudging numbers in order to report better performance than he was actually generating because he was not one of the initial equity holders but was one of those managers who had been offered equity stakes in the company based on performance and longevity. His refusal to play ball with my little report ended up shinning a light on his activities, which ultimately cost him his job and a very lucrative equity stake in the business which was probably worth 7 figures.

(source) (story by Santeno)

#prorevenge #by Santeno #pro revenge #revenge stories #malicious compliance #revenge story #pro #revenge #last10

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statusquoergo · 6 years ago

Text

Part I

Apparently Alex managed to sway Katrina with his last pitch, because here she is showing up in Faye’s office late at night to inform her that “if Harvey testifies tomorrow, so will [she].” Uh, okay.

Except that Katrina’s not threatening to testify to the truth or anything; she plans to accuse Faye of “[asking her] to use [her] friendship with the other side, and when [she] refused, [Faye] got rid of [her].” Faye points out that this is a lie, and Katrina counters that it doesn’t matter because “it’s also the third time [she’ll] be accused of wrongful termination, only this time, it’s a crime,” and I’m confused, is she talking about the three strikes law? Because that refers to persistent violent offenders, not civil disputes; Faye could be accused of wrongfully terminating a hundred employees, that doesn’t necessarily make it illegal. Or is she saying that this time she’s accusing Faye of committing a crime that led to the wrongful termination? I guess this is that perjury thing Louis was warning Gretchen about, and wow, of all the people I expected to try to pull it off, Katrina was way down there on the list.

Not surprisingly, Faye follows Harvey through the lobby to accuse him of putting Katrina up to threatening her, which Harvey denies, and that’s technically true, but no matter, because Faye called for a one-day continuance for Harvey to get Katrina off the witness list (even though that’s not appropriate cause for a continuance to be granted, not to mention the fact that if they didn’t keep rushing everything, they might actually have time to deal with this sort of shit in the normal course of business the way they’re supposed to). Harvey refuses unless she puts their “entire agreement into writing” so she can’t “move the goalposts another fucking inch,” and this is so stupid that it has to be on purpose but I still can’t figure out what the hell is going on.

The next day, Faye is surprised to find all the major players waiting in the conference room to bear witness to her signing this agreement with Harvey, making a big show of their united front, so I’m guessing that whatever their big plan is…this is it. Gretchen gives Faye the document for review, and right on cue, Mike and Samantha burst onto the scene to accuse Harvey of tampering with Mike’s witness (Katrina), prompting Faye to accuse him of “[playing] dirty in [her] name”; Harvey defends that he stopped her from testifying, just as Faye asked, and Mike demands to know if that’s true, and Faye tells him not to “twist this,” and like, is their plan just to create confusion? Because it’s working. It’s dumb, but it’s working. Harvey and Mike yell at each other until Harvey shoves Mike, Samantha yells at Harvey and pretends to punch him (she does “punch” him, it just looks super fake), Gretchen putters around furtively in the background, and oh my god are they really doing what I think they’re doing?

With a heavy sigh, Faye signs the document, informing them all that “[she] can’t wait to put [them] all behind [her],” thereby prompting Louis to smugly tell her to “get the hell out right now” because yes they did do exactly what I was hoping they hadn’t: They tricked her into signing the document Gretchen swapped for the agreement, “an order for Harvey to witness tamper by any means necessary” that, in combination with the facts that “Katrina came to see [her] last night and there’s a record of it in the lobby downstairs, and after she did, [Faye] went to see Harvey, and there’s a record of that too,” makes her look guilty as fuck. And sure, “it may be bullshit, but to a jury, it’s gonna look like a hot fudge sundae.” (What the fuck does that mean?) Faye proceeds to go off the deep end a little, shouting that she’ll never back down and that Harvey is a blight, and a real fight almost starts brewing until Harvey kicks them all out so he can “give [Faye] the thing [she’s] wanted since the moment [she] got here, but not the way [she] wanted it,” and I get that he needs to get the last word in and everything, but this whole “patronizing asshole” routine is really off-putting.

The motley crew bustles off to a different conference room to fret that even Harvey’s best efforts might not be enough to get rid of Faye, but lucky them, Harvey makes a hero’s return about five seconds later to announce that Faye’s “packing her shit as [they] speak.” Louis immediately hires Samantha back, seconded by Alex if for no other reason than “finally giving Harvey what he’s always had coming” when she punched him in the face, and Louis needs to know what Harvey did to convince Faye to leave, but Harvey’s not telling yet. Or ever. I bet it was something super scandalous. Anyway Donna makes a speech about how much they love each other and therefore they should go out for drinks even though it’s like, ten in the morning, and that’s something you can do when you’re your own boss, so off they go.

This episode is basically two episodes scotch-taped together, so I want to pause here at the end of the first installment to talk for a minute about what just happened.

For nine episodes, the looming threat over this firm, and all these characters’ livelihoods, has been Faye Richardson’s attempts to put their affairs in order, to stop their habit of “crossing lines” (re: committing disbarrable offenses) to win their cases. It’s not an unreasonable request; in fact, they could easily get rid of her at any time by bringing the firm up to code, so to speak, but these rebels with a cause can’t stand being told what to do, so no one’s going to be entertaining that option. Okay, fine; we’re not going to take the easy way out, so instead the entire season is twisted into knots to find new and increasingly ludicrous excuses for them to do battle, all the while trying to weave in all the backstory that could’ve been built up at any previous time but probably wasn’t even conceived of until the moment it was thrown into this melting pot.

This disjointed narrative leads to a serious problem in trying to craft a satisfying resolution to this story: There’s nowhere to go but sideways. Faye established right at the start of her tenure that she would have no qualms about demoting or firing anyone who she deemed to be acting inappropriately, so the question there has never been whether someone would be fired (Chekhov’s gun and all that) but rather who, and, to a lesser extent, why. Louis was demoted but remained at the firm in essentially the same capacity, Samantha was fired but kept right on working with all her former coworkers, Katrina was fired immediately before the finale and therefore only kept in limbo for half an episode; none of these actions have any weight because they don’t have any serious consequences, not to mention it’s so obvious that everything will return to normal when all is finally said and done. There is no sense of mounting tension; however they planned to get rid of Faye, it couldn’t result in a hero’s reward after a long and hard-fought battle because every time they’ve gone up against her, it’s just been another parallel version of them trying to get away with business as usual under slightly different circumstances. The entire game has been played on normal mode and we’ve barely even bothered to leave the training area; the thing that finally does her in isn’t even a particularly clever ploy or masterful legal maneuver, merely that the sleight of hand happened to work this time around.

Except that it shouldn’t have worked, because it makes no sense. And as much as that ought to be the slogan anytime Suits tries to pull any sort of legal shenanigans, if they’re ever going to pretend to know what they’re doing, shouldn’t it be now? I guess they’ve made it this far, they might as well go all the way.

So Faye signs one copy of a document which makes her appear to have directed Harvey to tamper with a witness; this document is not notarized, the only witnesses to its signing stand to benefit directly from the signatory’s expulsion from the firm, no one in their right mind, much less a veteran officer of the court, would ever put something like that in writing, and as I said, this is the only copy, and there’s literally nothing stopping her from destroying it. Their supporting evidence is a lobby record of Katrina’s visit to see Faye the previous night; while it’s certainly possible that this building requires listing a point of contact before admission, the fact that Faye was surprised by Katrina’s appearance (“Katrina, you’re not permitted to be here”) makes that unlikely, meaning Katrina was almost certainly documented as a visitor to the firm, meaning that, as far as anyone not bearing witness to these events knows, she could have met with anyone there for any reason. The next piece of evidence, that Faye immediately went to see Harvey after Katrina left, is even more ludicrous, if possible; she followed him to the lobby, so there would be no record of their meeting unless they’re talking about a video recording, but even so, it’s perfectly reasonable to think that two coworkers might be discussing any number of things in the building where they work, so that’s hardly conclusive. At best, this all boils down to a case of she-said, they-said, built on a teetering mountain of conjecture, hearsay, perjury, and fabricated evidence that would force any self-respecting judge to acquit, putting them all right back where they started, but with a lot less patience for each other’s bullshit.

Except that none of this matters anyway, because, spoiler alert, Harvey only gets Faye to leave by promising to leave as well, framing it as some big sacrifice even though this is how he planned to end things all along. So Donna can make her speech about them all risking everything for each other to get Faye out, and they can all go out together to celebrate a job well done, but when it comes right down to it, at the end of the day, none of their parlor tricks really worked, and the war was only won when Harvey made the decision to throw himself down upon his sword for the rest of them. And even then, he didn’t sustain much of a wound, having already lined up a position at Mike’s firm where I doubt he’s going to stay a junior partner for very long.

I’m just saying that after all the buildup, after all the manufactured tension…this is kind of a letdown. Or, well, it would be, but I said I was keeping my expectations low and this is exactly why.

Onto the second half!

Part III

#suits usa #s09e10 #season 9 #analysis

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im-the-king-of-the-ocean · 7 years ago

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Barbara Lake - Life Timeline Notes

@archaeopter-ace

Here’s what I got for Barbara’s age and her timeline.

Under a cut cause it gets really, like really long.

A note I want to add after writing this all out is that I don’t have a definite, exact age pinpointed for Barbara, just a lot of theories and possibilities based on what we know and what I wanted to write in my stories (I originally did all this specifically in preparation for writing my fanfic Shadow of Change, which is a Barbara backstory). This post isn’t necessarily meant to prove anything, just give what my thoughts and considerations have been.

Barbara’s Age: The Math

My original guesstimate that I use throughout my musings is that Barbara’s somewhere in her late 30s to early 40s.

-50s seem too old, given lack of gray hair (her hair is very clearly solidly red-brown). On the one hand, I want to say lack of gray is due to 3D model/animation design. Maybe it was easier for them to just not add in that much detailing? But then we have Strickler who does have graying/white hair and more defined facial (age) lines, so they clearly can do that much detailing on the character models, but didn’t for Barbara. My interpretation of this was that they didn’t want her to appear in that age range.

-Early to mid-thirties (30-35) seems too young. Given we have confirmation from the show that Jim is 16, that means Barbara had him at her current age - 16 years. So, say Barbara were currently 35, that would mean that she gave birth to Jim at 19 (35 -16). That, and any age younger and we’re in teen pregnancy area.

Jim as Teen Pregnancy Possibility

(I don’t personally like this idea, but this post is meant to cover every potential scenario so that’s why it’s included)

Jim as a teen pregnancy is not completely outside the realm of possibility in theory, but I feel like it would create more hurdles to jump over than what we see in the show, especially financially.

Barbara is a doctor (meaning she’s been through undergrad, med school, and residency). To get to this point, she’d have to pay off student loan debts, deal with the costs of a baby/young child, and be able to afford a house.

I’m not saying she can’t find a way to make all that work out if she started as a 19 year old (I mean she’s Barbara, she probably could tbh), but I feel like it would be extremely hard. Particularly if she doesn’t come from a super well-off background and if James Senior left the picture relatively early on.

She’d either have to find a way to completely support herself and her kid quickly or get help from people like her parents (who are not in the picture as of the show, so who knows about them) while simultaneously doing everything it takes to become a doctor.

Just having the time for both kid and medical career would be difficult at best too.

I feel like we’d see more signs that the Lakes are still paying off her student debts and/or the house too if she started off younger/at a place of more instability. For instance, one of Jim’s worries about his mom could have been he’s concerned about Barbara trying to support them/straining herself to make enough money. But we don’t see that.

More Numbers

According to the research I did back when I wrote Shadow, in general:

College (undergrad) Graduation: 22 yrs old

Medical School Graduation: 26 yrs old

Residency: 29-30 yrs old

which brings us to this picture:

(sorry it’s so huge, I don’t really know how to edit down photo sizes on tumblr).

Source: This post

which shows that Jim was at least a kid at a time when Barbara graduated.

I’ve seen numerous theories on how old Jim is in the picture that range from 5-6 years old to 11-12 years old. Personally, I stuck to the younger range.

Say this picture shows Barbara’s undergrad graduation. That would likely put her at 22yrs of age in it, which would mean she was 17 when she has Jim if he’s 6 (22-5) and 10/11 if he’s 11 or 12 (22-12), which would mean that one’s literally impossible.

Based on Barbara’s appearance in the picture (she doesn’t strike me as early 20s here), I’d say it’s likelier that it’s of her med school graduation, meaning she’d be around 26 and not 22.

In that case:

26 - 5 = 21

26 - 11 = 15

I like the numbers for a younger Jim in the picture way, way better so that’s my headcanon and I’m sticking to it.

Then, if Barbara had Jim when she was 21 that would mean her current/2016 age is 37 (21 + 16), which I feel is within the realm of possibility.

**However, these numbers can be fudged a little.

(if one happens to be a 22 year old who wants to write a story but is kinda uncomfortable with the idea of having a dfab protagonist who gets pregnant at their own age or younger. Am I saying I purposefully messed with the numbers of when various life events happened for Barbara for my own comfort? yes, yes I am).

So, one could decide:

maybe Barbara graduated college late (at 23-24). It’s possible. I had a friend who graduated at 24 and I myself am graduating a semester late (so I’ll be 23 by then).

That would mean:

College (undergrad) Graduation: 24 yrs old

Medical School Graduation: 28 yrs old

Residency: 31-32 yrs old

If Jim is 5 at the Med School Graduation while Barbara is 28, that would mean she’d be 23 when he’s born and currently (in 2016) 39.

Personally, I wiggled these numbers around again later when I wrote GhostHunters!. I wanted that story to take place in 1985, about a year after Ghostbusters was originally released in theaters (it’s plot-related) and I wanted Barbara to be a kid at an age where it would be realistic if she got massively obsessed with the Ghostbusters (also plot-related) so I decided she’d be 10, which would mean she’d be born in 1975.

so:

1975: birth, 0 years

1985: 10 years

2000: 25 years old (Jim is born)

2016: 41 years old

Early/Mid 20s Barbara Becomes A Mother Possibility

I feel like if Barbara were in this age range when she had Jim, it would be less likely for her and James to have been married beforehand. If that’s so, I lean in the direction of him being an unplanned pregnancy.

Barbara and James could have met at college, become boyfriend/girlfriend, then start to be sexually active, which eventually leads to an accidental pregnancy (Jim). They decide to raise the kid together, potentially marry, and settle down in Arcadia.

*In Shadow, I have Jim happening simultaneously to Barbara’s med schools applications. She and James conceive Jim during that process and her decision to go to Arcadia’s Medical School is rushed by the fact they want to have a home before the baby arrives (I didn’t actually manage to work that into the story, but it’s in my notes).

Another Possibility: Late 20s Barbara Becomes A Mother

For the sake of my curiosity, I also decided do calculations for what if Barbara were currently 45, the oldest I’d guesstimate for her based on her physical appearance.

That would mean she had Jim when she was 29 (45-16). Then, going off the med school graduation pic:

College (undergrad) graduation: 30 yrs old

Med School Graduation: 34 (29 + 5) yrs old

Residency: 37/38 yrs old

This would then beg the question of what was Barbara doing between the ages of 18, when she would leave high school, and 26, when she entered undergrad, which could make for an interesting backstory narrative to fill in.

This also works better for her marriage to James and their house + kid being a planned thing, I think. Like they’d have more time to be together as adults before making those life choices.

An interesting possibility could be that James was meant to stay at home more to take care of Jim so Barbara could pursue college/med school. This would lead into a situation where James and Jim were closer since they spent more time together (and, subsequently, Barbara would be the more distant parent since she isn’t there as often). Then, them being close would have caused Jim extra hurt when James walked out.

Though, at one point in the show I think it states that Jim used to tell Barbara everything so those two have likely always been close.

And that’s all I got! Thanks for reading if you’ve made it this far, I know it’s super long.

#trollhunters #barbara lake #jim lake jr #meta analysis #age study

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vvvveta · 4 years ago

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Wars Aren’t Ending

After 18 years of illegal warfare, corruption, and untold numbers of innocent people killed or made into refugees, the U.S. combat mission in Iraq will be declared finished—for the third time. Sort of. This week, President Joe Biden said that the United States is “not going to be, by the end of the year, in a combat mission” in Iraq. The 2,500 U.S. soldiers officially staged there—almost certainly an undercount, as military leaders tend to fudge deployment numbers and reorganize troops under intelligence authorities or noncombat roles so as to disguise the scale of our overseas footprint—will be moving on.

But they won’t necessarily be going home, or even leaving the region. The change in status, while pleasing to anti-war advocates and to Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa Al Kadhimi, who met with Biden this week, is mostly a distinction without a difference. The U.S. will be moving into an “advise-and-assist role,” as it’s euphemistically described, providing many of the same services it does now. According to ABC News, “the change in mission is more of a semantic one, and the number of U.S. troops in Iraq will not dramatically differ as they shift their emphasis to training and assisting.” U.S. soldiers will be doing “the exact same things they’re already doing, just fewer doing it,” said Wesley Morgan, author of a book about America’s war in Afghanistan.

The forever wars don’t seem to end, they just molt into their next iteration, as assets are shuffled around, missions rebranded, and local allies reassured that we are there to “advise and assist” for as long as is needed. Relying heavily on special forces, intelligence resources, contractors, and unmatched air power, the U.S. continues to be involved in conflicts in Syria, Somalia, Libya, Niger, and other undeclared war zones. In Africa alone, the U.S. has at least 29 military bases and participates in operations against Islamic State sympathizers and other jihadist groups in a number of countries, particularly in West Africa. Earlier this year, making good on a campaign promise, Biden claimed that the U.S. would stop providing “offensive assistance” to the vicious war prosecuted by Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates—with British and American help—in Yemen. We still don’t know if anything has changed, and the U.S. continues to help enforce a devastating blockade of a key port in a country where millions face hunger.

Prolonging a process that was begun under Donald Trump, the U.S. hasn’t so much folded its cards in these conflicts as it has reshuffled the deck. Biden has positioned himself as a reluctant peacemaker—so reluctant that he sometimes brushes off questions about Afghanistan because they aren’t “happy.” But in practice, he appears to be a pliant imperial overseer. In moving to reestablish the relationships and treaties Trump trashed, while rebranding U.S. involvement in various conflicts, Biden’s foreign policy looks much like a return to the muscular liberalism of the Obama era, which gave us the Islamic State and humanitarian disasters in Yemen, Libya, and elsewhere. Any reports that the forever wars are ending miss what is really happening in U.S. foreign policy.

Consider America’s pullout from Afghanistan, which has featured quietly dramatic scenes of fleets of vehicles abandoned at Bagram Airbase and reports of the Taliban capturing district after district. Even in that conflict, there’s little sense that the U.S. is about to abandon its foundering efforts to create a functional democracy in a country wracked by generations of war and outside meddling. Rather than fully exit the region, the U.S. reportedly has been considering repositioning its military assets to surrounding Central Asian countries, including possibly leasing Russian military bases in places like Tajikistan. U.S. forces have also continued launching airstrikes against the Taliban to try to aid the teetering Afghan government and to provide cover for foreign forces set to leave the country. (The Taliban, for its part, promised “consequences” for the U.S. violating its agreement to pull out of Afghanistan fully by August 31.) The U.S. has similarly promised, in the words of Gen. Kenneth McKenzie Jr., to provide “intelligence sharing and advising and assisting through security consultations at the strategic level” to the Afghan government—for as long as that government lasts in the face of growing Taliban assaults.

American military operations seem to be continuing in Syria and Somalia, as well. Trump expressed interest in ending U.S. involvement in Somalia, but according to some reports, U.S. forces were mostly relocated to Kenya and other regional bases, essentially “commuting to work,” as described by Air Force Magazine. Following a six-month respite, the Biden administration resumed airstrikes in Somalia, leading several Democratic senators to demand an explanation. “I have received no information suggesting that these strikes are necessary to protect any U.S. personnel and would need to understand, if this is so, why they are occurring,” said Senator Tim Kaine. The same could be said about much of the last 20 years of America’s wars of choice.

In Syria, the U.S. has carved out a small “buffer zone” in the east of the country, where Green Berets train and assist Syrian Democratic Forces in their battle against remnants of the Islamic State, and other U.S. assets provide air support. Although their presence is probably illegal, and occurred without any congressional debate, the mission will go on. “I don’t anticipate any changes right now to the mission or the footprint in Syria,” an anonymous official told Politico on Tuesday. More detailed information about the U.S. mission in Syria, including photos, videos, and other friendly propaganda, can be found on Twitter, where a U.S. spokesman provides regular updates with the hashtag #defeatdaesh (Daesh being a derogatory Arabic term for the Islamic State). The U.S.-led coalition “is committed to supporting the #SDF to combat terrorism & ensure a long-term stability in NE Syria,” said spokesman Col. Wayne Marotto this week.

In both Iraq and Syria, U.S. officials say, American soldiers no longer participate in raids or kick down doors. They merely do everything else a long-term counterinsurgency campaign requires. This shift to more hazily described assistance roles is supposed to reflect a maturation and evolution of a global war on terror. But they’re also a way of keeping U.S. forces engaged in the region without visibly occupying it. This strategy also allows the U.S. to amp up involvement any time an Iranian-sponsored militia manages to lob some missiles a U.S. base in Iraq or Syria. As Marotto, the coalition spokesman, recently said, “The U.S./Coalition has the inherent right to self-defense. Force protection remains the highest priority of the @Coalition.”

It’s a measure of how distorted our forever-war logic has become. Why keep U.S. soldiers parked at regional bases without any combat role, just so they can be targets for militia drone strikes that may then demand an escalating response? These soldiers and contractors wouldn’t require force protection if they were returned home.

According to The Washington Post, President Biden is trying “to end the post-9/11 era.” From Afghanistan to Iraq to Guantánamo, where a prisoner was recently released after years of confinement and no criminal charges, Biden claims to be turning the page, reorienting toward security threats emanating from China and Russia.

This new eagerness to wave sabers in the general direction of Beijing would be concerning on its own. But it also highlights how ending America’s decades-long imperial drift will take far more than rearranging some military deployments. It will require a complete reimagining of how to engage with a world that has been cynically reduced to a global battlefield populated with endless threats. It requires admitting that we live in a country mostly safe from external enemies, with only a marginal risk of terrorism. For 20 years, our political and military leaders and foreign policy establishment have claimed otherwise. Judging by Biden’s latest decisions—as well as the hysterically overwrought reactions of old neocon hands like George W. Bush and Lindsey Graham, who would be content to occupy Afghanistan for another generation—our elites are still not ready to admit the obvious: We lost these wars, and the only way to expiate our failure is to go home.

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michaelandy101-blog · 5 years ago

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How Do Sessions Work in Google Analytics? — Best of Whiteboard Friday

New Post has been published on http://tiptopreview.com/how-do-sessions-work-in-google-analytics-best-of-whiteboard-friday/

How Do Sessions Work in Google Analytics? — Best of Whiteboard Friday

Google Analytics data is used to support tons of important work, ranging from our everyday marketing reporting, all the way to investment decisions. To that end, it’s integral that we’re aware of just how that data works. In this Best of Whiteboard Friday edition, Tom Capper explains how the sessions metric in Google Analytics works, several ways that it can have unexpected results, and as a bonus, how sessions affect the time on page metric (and why you should rethink using time on page for reporting).

Editor’s note: Tom Capper is now an independent SEO consultant. This video is from 2018, but the same principles hold up today. There is only one minor caveat: the words “user” and “browser” are used interchangeably early in the video, which still hold mostly true. Google is trying to further push multi-device users as a concept with Google Analytics 4, but still relies on users being logged in, as well as extra tracking setup. For most sites most of the time, neither of these conditions hold.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hello, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I am Tom Capper. I am a consultant at Distilled, and today I’m going to be talking to you about how sessions work in Google Analytics. Obviously, all of us use Google Analytics. Pretty much all of us use Google Analytics in our day-to-day work.

Data from the platform is used these days in everything from investment decisions to press reporting to the actual marketing that we use it for. So it’s important to understand the basic building blocks of these platforms. Up here I’ve got the absolute basics. So in the blue squares I’ve got hits being sent to Google Analytics.

So when you first put Google Analytics on your site, you get that bit of tracking code, you put it on every page, and what that means is when someone loads the page, it sends a page view. So those are the ones I’ve marked P. So we’ve got page view and page view and so on as you’re going around the site. I’ve also got events with an E and transactions with a T. Those are two other hit types that you might have added.

The job of Google Analytics is to take all this hit data that you’re sending it and try and bring it together into something that actually makes sense as sessions. So they’re grouped into sessions that I’ve put in black, and then if you have multiple sessions from the same browser, then that would be a user that I’ve marked in pink. The issue here is it’s kind of arbitrary how you divide these up.

These eight hits could be one long session. They could be eight tiny ones or anything in between. So I want to talk today about the different ways that Google Analytics will actually split up those hit types into sessions. So over here I’ve got some examples I’m going to go through. But first I’m going to go through a real-world example of a brick-and-mortar store, because I think that’s what they’re trying to emulate, and it kind of makes more sense with that context.

Brick-and-mortar example

So in this example, say a supermarket, we enter by a passing trade. That’s going to be our source. Then we’ve got an entrance is in the lobby of the supermarket when we walk in. We got passed from there to the beer aisle to the cashier, or at least I do. So that’s one big, long session with the source passing trade. That makes sense.

In the case of a brick-and-mortar store, it’s not to difficult to divide that up and try and decide how many sessions are going on here. There’s not really any ambiguity. In the case of websites, when you have people leaving their keyboard for a while or leaving the computer on while they go on holiday or just having the same computer over a period of time, it becomes harder to divide things up, because you don’t know when people are actually coming and going.

So what they’ve tried to do is in the very basic case something quite similar: arrive by Google, category page, product page, checkout. Great. We’ve got one long session, and the source is Google. Okay, so what are the different ways that that might go wrong or that that might get divided up?

Several things that can change the meaning of a session

1. Time zone

The first and possibly most annoying one, although it doesn’t tend to be a huge issue for some sites, is whatever time zone you’ve set in your Google Analytics settings, the midnight in that time zone can break up a session. So say we’ve got midnight here. This is 12:00 at night, and we happen to be browsing. We’re doing some shopping quite late.

Because Google Analytics won’t allow a session to have two dates, this is going to be one session with the source Google, and this is going to be one session and the source will be this page. So this is a self-referral unless you’ve chosen to exclude that in your settings. So not necessarily hugely helpful.

2. Half-hour cutoff for “coffee breaks”

Another thing that can happen is you might go and make a cup of coffee. So ideally if you went and had a cup of coffee while in you’re in Tesco or a supermarket that’s popular in whatever country you’re from, you might want to consider that one long session. Google has made the executive decision that we’re actually going to have a cutoff of half an hour by default.

If you leave for half an hour, then again you’ve got two sessions. One, the category page is the landing page and the source of Google, and one in this case where the blog is the landing page, and this would be another self-referral, because when you come back after your coffee break, you’re going to click through from here to here. This time period, the 30 minutes, that is actually adjustable in your settings, but most people do just leave it as it is, and there isn’t really an obvious number that would make this always correct either. It’s kind of, like I said earlier, an arbitrary distinction.

3. Leaving the site and coming back

The next issue I want to talk about is if you leave the site and come back. So obviously it makes sense that if you enter the site from Google, browse for a bit, and then enter again from Bing, you might want to count that as two different sessions with two different sources. However, where this gets a little murky is with things like external payment providers.

If you had to click through from the category page to PayPal to the checkout, then unless PayPal is excluded from your referral list, then this would be one session, entrance from Google, one session, entrance from checkout. The last issue I want to talk about is not necessarily a way that sessions are divided, but a quirk of how they are.

4. Return direct sessions

If you were to enter by Google to the category page, go on holiday and then use a bookmark or something or just type in the URL to come back, then obviously this is going to be two different sessions. You would hope that it would be one session from Google and one session from direct. That would make sense, right?

But instead, what actually happens is that, because Google and most Google Analytics and most of its reports uses last non-direct click, we pass through that source all the way over here, so you’ve got two sessions from Google. Again, you can change this timeout period. So that’s some ways that sessions work that you might not expect.

As a bonus, I want to give you some extra information about how this affects a certain metric, mainly because I want to persuade you to stop using it, and that metric is time on page.

Bonus: Three scenarios where this affects time on page

So I’ve got three different scenarios here that I want to talk you through, and we’ll see how the time on page metric works out.

I want you to bear in mind that, basically, because Google Analytics really has very little data to work with typically, they only know that you’ve landed on a page, and that sent a page view and then potentially nothing else. If you were to have a single page visit to a site, or a bounce in other words, then they don’t know whether you were on that page for 10 seconds or the rest of your life.

They’ve got no further data to work with. So what they do is they say, “Okay, we’re not going to include that in our average time on page metrics.” So we’ve got the formula of time divided by views minus exits. However, this fudge has some really unfortunate consequences. So let’s talk through these scenarios.

Example 1: Intuitive time on page = actual time on page

In the first scenario, I arrive on the page. It sends a page view. Great. Ten seconds later I trigger some kind of event that the site has added. Twenty seconds later I click through to the next page on the site. In this case, everything is working as intended in a sense, because there’s a next page on the site, so Google Analytics has that extra data of another page view 20 seconds after the first one. So they know that I was on here for 20 seconds.

In this case, the intuitive time on page is 20 seconds, and the actual time on page is also 20 seconds. Great.

Example 2: Intuitive time on page is higher than measured time on page

However, let’s think about this next example. We’ve got a page view, event 10 seconds later, except this time instead of clicking somewhere else on the site, I’m going to just leave altogether. So there’s no data available, but Google Analytics knows we’re here for 10 seconds.

So the intuitive time on page here is still 20 seconds. That’s how long I actually spent looking at the page. But the measured time or the reported time is going to be 10 seconds.

Example 3: Measured time on page is zero

The last example, I browse for 20 seconds. I leave. I haven’t triggered an event. So we’ve got an intuitive time on page of 20 seconds and an actual time on page or a measured time on page of 0.

The interesting bit is when we then come to calculate the average time on page for this page that appeared here, here, and here, you would initially hope it would be 20 seconds, because that’s how long we actually spent. But your next guess, when you look at the reported or the available data that Google Analytics has in terms of how long we’re on these pages, the average of these three numbers would be 10 seconds.

So that would make some sense. What they actually do, because of this formula, is they end up with 30 seconds. So you’ve got the total time here, which is 30, divided by the number of views, we’ve got 3 views, minus 2 exits. Thirty divided 3 minus 2, 30 divided by 1, so we’ve got 30 seconds as the average across these 3 sessions.

Well, the average across these three page views, sorry, for the amount of time we’re spending, and that is longer than any of them, and it doesn’t make any sense with the constituent data. So that’s just one final tip to please not use average time on page as a reporting metric.

I hope that’s all been useful to you. I’d love to hear what you think in the comments below. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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lakelandseo · 5 years ago

Text

How Do Sessions Work in Google Analytics? — Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Tom.Capper

Google Analytics data is used to support tons of important work, ranging from our everyday marketing reporting, all the way to investment decisions. To that end, it's integral that we're aware of just how that data works. In this Best of Whiteboard Friday edition, Tom Capper explains how the sessions metric in Google Analytics works, several ways that it can have unexpected results, and as a bonus, how sessions affect the time on page metric (and why you should rethink using time on page for reporting).

Editor’s note: Tom Capper is now an independent SEO consultant. This video is from 2018, but the same principles hold up today. There is only one minor caveat: the words "user" and "browser" are used interchangeably early in the video, which still hold mostly true. Google is trying to further push multi-device users as a concept with Google Analytics 4, but still relies on users being logged in, as well as extra tracking setup. For most sites most of the time, neither of these conditions hold.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Hello, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. I am Tom Capper. I am a consultant at Distilled, and today I'm going to be talking to you about how sessions work in Google Analytics. Obviously, all of us use Google Analytics. Pretty much all of us use Google Analytics in our day-to-day work.

Data from the platform is used these days in everything from investment decisions to press reporting to the actual marketing that we use it for. So it's important to understand the basic building blocks of these platforms. Up here I've got the absolute basics. So in the blue squares I've got hits being sent to Google Analytics.

So when you first put Google Analytics on your site, you get that bit of tracking code, you put it on every page, and what that means is when someone loads the page, it sends a page view. So those are the ones I've marked P. So we've got page view and page view and so on as you're going around the site. I've also got events with an E and transactions with a T. Those are two other hit types that you might have added.

The job of Google Analytics is to take all this hit data that you're sending it and try and bring it together into something that actually makes sense as sessions. So they're grouped into sessions that I've put in black, and then if you have multiple sessions from the same browser, then that would be a user that I've marked in pink. The issue here is it's kind of arbitrary how you divide these up.

These eight hits could be one long session. They could be eight tiny ones or anything in between. So I want to talk today about the different ways that Google Analytics will actually split up those hit types into sessions. So over here I've got some examples I'm going to go through. But first I'm going to go through a real-world example of a brick-and-mortar store, because I think that's what they're trying to emulate, and it kind of makes more sense with that context.

Brick-and-mortar example

So in this example, say a supermarket, we enter by a passing trade. That's going to be our source. Then we've got an entrance is in the lobby of the supermarket when we walk in. We got passed from there to the beer aisle to the cashier, or at least I do. So that's one big, long session with the source passing trade. That makes sense.

In the case of a brick-and-mortar store, it's not to difficult to divide that up and try and decide how many sessions are going on here. There's not really any ambiguity. In the case of websites, when you have people leaving their keyboard for a while or leaving the computer on while they go on holiday or just having the same computer over a period of time, it becomes harder to divide things up, because you don't know when people are actually coming and going.

So what they've tried to do is in the very basic case something quite similar: arrive by Google, category page, product page, checkout. Great. We've got one long session, and the source is Google. Okay, so what are the different ways that that might go wrong or that that might get divided up?

Several things that can change the meaning of a session

1. Time zone

The first and possibly most annoying one, although it doesn't tend to be a huge issue for some sites, is whatever time zone you've set in your Google Analytics settings, the midnight in that time zone can break up a session. So say we've got midnight here. This is 12:00 at night, and we happen to be browsing. We're doing some shopping quite late.

Because Google Analytics won't allow a session to have two dates, this is going to be one session with the source Google, and this is going to be one session and the source will be this page. So this is a self-referral unless you've chosen to exclude that in your settings. So not necessarily hugely helpful.

2. Half-hour cutoff for "coffee breaks"

Another thing that can happen is you might go and make a cup of coffee. So ideally if you went and had a cup of coffee while in you're in Tesco or a supermarket that's popular in whatever country you're from, you might want to consider that one long session. Google has made the executive decision that we're actually going to have a cutoff of half an hour by default.

If you leave for half an hour, then again you've got two sessions. One, the category page is the landing page and the source of Google, and one in this case where the blog is the landing page, and this would be another self-referral, because when you come back after your coffee break, you're going to click through from here to here. This time period, the 30 minutes, that is actually adjustable in your settings, but most people do just leave it as it is, and there isn't really an obvious number that would make this always correct either. It's kind of, like I said earlier, an arbitrary distinction.

3. Leaving the site and coming back

4. Return direct sessions

But instead, what actually happens is that, because Google and most Google Analytics and most of its reports uses last non-direct click, we pass through that source all the way over here, so you've got two sessions from Google. Again, you can change this timeout period. So that's some ways that sessions work that you might not expect.

As a bonus, I want to give you some extra information about how this affects a certain metric, mainly because I want to persuade you to stop using it, and that metric is time on page.

Bonus: Three scenarios where this affects time on page

So I've got three different scenarios here that I want to talk you through, and we'll see how the time on page metric works out.

I want you to bear in mind that, basically, because Google Analytics really has very little data to work with typically, they only know that you've landed on a page, and that sent a page view and then potentially nothing else. If you were to have a single page visit to a site, or a bounce in other words, then they don't know whether you were on that page for 10 seconds or the rest of your life.

They've got no further data to work with. So what they do is they say, "Okay, we're not going to include that in our average time on page metrics." So we've got the formula of time divided by views minus exits. However, this fudge has some really unfortunate consequences. So let's talk through these scenarios.

Example 1: Intuitive time on page = actual time on page

In the first scenario, I arrive on the page. It sends a page view. Great. Ten seconds later I trigger some kind of event that the site has added. Twenty seconds later I click through to the next page on the site. In this case, everything is working as intended in a sense, because there's a next page on the site, so Google Analytics has that extra data of another page view 20 seconds after the first one. So they know that I was on here for 20 seconds.

In this case, the intuitive time on page is 20 seconds, and the actual time on page is also 20 seconds. Great.

Example 2: Intuitive time on page is higher than measured time on page

However, let's think about this next example. We've got a page view, event 10 seconds later, except this time instead of clicking somewhere else on the site, I'm going to just leave altogether. So there's no data available, but Google Analytics knows we're here for 10 seconds.

So the intuitive time on page here is still 20 seconds. That's how long I actually spent looking at the page. But the measured time or the reported time is going to be 10 seconds.

Example 3: Measured time on page is zero

The last example, I browse for 20 seconds. I leave. I haven't triggered an event. So we've got an intuitive time on page of 20 seconds and an actual time on page or a measured time on page of 0.

The interesting bit is when we then come to calculate the average time on page for this page that appeared here, here, and here, you would initially hope it would be 20 seconds, because that's how long we actually spent. But your next guess, when you look at the reported or the available data that Google Analytics has in terms of how long we're on these pages, the average of these three numbers would be 10 seconds.

So that would make some sense. What they actually do, because of this formula, is they end up with 30 seconds. So you've got the total time here, which is 30, divided by the number of views, we've got 3 views, minus 2 exits. Thirty divided 3 minus 2, 30 divided by 1, so we've got 30 seconds as the average across these 3 sessions.

Well, the average across these three page views, sorry, for the amount of time we're spending, and that is longer than any of them, and it doesn't make any sense with the constituent data. So that's just one final tip to please not use average time on page as a reporting metric.

I hope that's all been useful to you. I'd love to hear what you think in the comments below. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

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epackingvietnam · 5 years ago

Text

How Do Sessions Work in Google Analytics? — Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Tom.Capper

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

So when you first put Google Analytics on your site, you get that bit of tracking code, you put it on every page, and what that means is when someone loads the page, it sends a page view. So those are the ones I've marked P. So we've got page view and page view and so on as you're going around the site. I've also got events with an E and transactions with a T. Those are two other hit types that you might have added.

These eight hits could be one long session. They could be eight tiny ones or anything in between. So I want to talk today about the different ways that Google Analytics will actually split up those hit types into sessions. So over here I've got some examples I'm going to go through. But first I'm going to go through a real-world example of a brick-and-mortar store, because I think that's what they're trying to emulate, and it kind of makes more sense with that context.

Brick-and-mortar example

Several things that can change the meaning of a session

1. Time zone

2. Half-hour cutoff for "coffee breaks"

3. Leaving the site and coming back

4. Return direct sessions

But instead, what actually happens is that, because Google and most Google Analytics and most of its reports uses last non-direct click, we pass through that source all the way over here, so you've got two sessions from Google. Again, you can change this timeout period. So that's some ways that sessions work that you might not expect.

As a bonus, I want to give you some extra information about how this affects a certain metric, mainly because I want to persuade you to stop using it, and that metric is time on page.

Bonus: Three scenarios where this affects time on page

So I've got three different scenarios here that I want to talk you through, and we'll see how the time on page metric works out.

Example 1: Intuitive time on page = actual time on page

In the first scenario, I arrive on the page. It sends a page view. Great. Ten seconds later I trigger some kind of event that the site has added. Twenty seconds later I click through to the next page on the site. In this case, everything is working as intended in a sense, because there's a next page on the site, so Google Analytics has that extra data of another page view 20 seconds after the first one. So they know that I was on here for 20 seconds.

In this case, the intuitive time on page is 20 seconds, and the actual time on page is also 20 seconds. Great.

Example 2: Intuitive time on page is higher than measured time on page

So the intuitive time on page here is still 20 seconds. That's how long I actually spent looking at the page. But the measured time or the reported time is going to be 10 seconds.

Example 3: Measured time on page is zero

The last example, I browse for 20 seconds. I leave. I haven't triggered an event. So we've got an intuitive time on page of 20 seconds and an actual time on page or a measured time on page of 0.

The interesting bit is when we then come to calculate the average time on page for this page that appeared here, here, and here, you would initially hope it would be 20 seconds, because that's how long we actually spent. But your next guess, when you look at the reported or the available data that Google Analytics has in terms of how long we're on these pages, the average of these three numbers would be 10 seconds.

I hope that's all been useful to you. I'd love to hear what you think in the comments below. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

#túi_giấy_epacking_việt_nam #túi_giấy_epacking #in_túi_giấy_giá_rẻ #in_túi_giấy #epackingvietnam #tuigiayepacking

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bfxenon · 5 years ago

Text

How Do Sessions Work in Google Analytics? — Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Tom.Capper

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

So when you first put Google Analytics on your site, you get that bit of tracking code, you put it on every page, and what that means is when someone loads the page, it sends a page view. So those are the ones I've marked P. So we've got page view and page view and so on as you're going around the site. I've also got events with an E and transactions with a T. Those are two other hit types that you might have added.

These eight hits could be one long session. They could be eight tiny ones or anything in between. So I want to talk today about the different ways that Google Analytics will actually split up those hit types into sessions. So over here I've got some examples I'm going to go through. But first I'm going to go through a real-world example of a brick-and-mortar store, because I think that's what they're trying to emulate, and it kind of makes more sense with that context.

Brick-and-mortar example

Several things that can change the meaning of a session

1. Time zone

2. Half-hour cutoff for "coffee breaks"

3. Leaving the site and coming back

4. Return direct sessions

But instead, what actually happens is that, because Google and most Google Analytics and most of its reports uses last non-direct click, we pass through that source all the way over here, so you've got two sessions from Google. Again, you can change this timeout period. So that's some ways that sessions work that you might not expect.

As a bonus, I want to give you some extra information about how this affects a certain metric, mainly because I want to persuade you to stop using it, and that metric is time on page.

Bonus: Three scenarios where this affects time on page

So I've got three different scenarios here that I want to talk you through, and we'll see how the time on page metric works out.

Example 1: Intuitive time on page = actual time on page

In the first scenario, I arrive on the page. It sends a page view. Great. Ten seconds later I trigger some kind of event that the site has added. Twenty seconds later I click through to the next page on the site. In this case, everything is working as intended in a sense, because there's a next page on the site, so Google Analytics has that extra data of another page view 20 seconds after the first one. So they know that I was on here for 20 seconds.

In this case, the intuitive time on page is 20 seconds, and the actual time on page is also 20 seconds. Great.

Example 2: Intuitive time on page is higher than measured time on page

So the intuitive time on page here is still 20 seconds. That's how long I actually spent looking at the page. But the measured time or the reported time is going to be 10 seconds.

Example 3: Measured time on page is zero

The last example, I browse for 20 seconds. I leave. I haven't triggered an event. So we've got an intuitive time on page of 20 seconds and an actual time on page or a measured time on page of 0.

The interesting bit is when we then come to calculate the average time on page for this page that appeared here, here, and here, you would initially hope it would be 20 seconds, because that's how long we actually spent. But your next guess, when you look at the reported or the available data that Google Analytics has in terms of how long we're on these pages, the average of these three numbers would be 10 seconds.

I hope that's all been useful to you. I'd love to hear what you think in the comments below. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

0 notes

nutrifami · 5 years ago

Text

How Do Sessions Work in Google Analytics? — Best of Whiteboard Friday

Posted by Tom.Capper

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

So when you first put Google Analytics on your site, you get that bit of tracking code, you put it on every page, and what that means is when someone loads the page, it sends a page view. So those are the ones I've marked P. So we've got page view and page view and so on as you're going around the site. I've also got events with an E and transactions with a T. Those are two other hit types that you might have added.

These eight hits could be one long session. They could be eight tiny ones or anything in between. So I want to talk today about the different ways that Google Analytics will actually split up those hit types into sessions. So over here I've got some examples I'm going to go through. But first I'm going to go through a real-world example of a brick-and-mortar store, because I think that's what they're trying to emulate, and it kind of makes more sense with that context.

Brick-and-mortar example

Several things that can change the meaning of a session

1. Time zone

2. Half-hour cutoff for "coffee breaks"

3. Leaving the site and coming back

4. Return direct sessions

But instead, what actually happens is that, because Google and most Google Analytics and most of its reports uses last non-direct click, we pass through that source all the way over here, so you've got two sessions from Google. Again, you can change this timeout period. So that's some ways that sessions work that you might not expect.

As a bonus, I want to give you some extra information about how this affects a certain metric, mainly because I want to persuade you to stop using it, and that metric is time on page.

Bonus: Three scenarios where this affects time on page

So I've got three different scenarios here that I want to talk you through, and we'll see how the time on page metric works out.

Example 1: Intuitive time on page = actual time on page

In the first scenario, I arrive on the page. It sends a page view. Great. Ten seconds later I trigger some kind of event that the site has added. Twenty seconds later I click through to the next page on the site. In this case, everything is working as intended in a sense, because there's a next page on the site, so Google Analytics has that extra data of another page view 20 seconds after the first one. So they know that I was on here for 20 seconds.

In this case, the intuitive time on page is 20 seconds, and the actual time on page is also 20 seconds. Great.

Example 2: Intuitive time on page is higher than measured time on page

So the intuitive time on page here is still 20 seconds. That's how long I actually spent looking at the page. But the measured time or the reported time is going to be 10 seconds.

Example 3: Measured time on page is zero

The last example, I browse for 20 seconds. I leave. I haven't triggered an event. So we've got an intuitive time on page of 20 seconds and an actual time on page or a measured time on page of 0.

The interesting bit is when we then come to calculate the average time on page for this page that appeared here, here, and here, you would initially hope it would be 20 seconds, because that's how long we actually spent. But your next guess, when you look at the reported or the available data that Google Analytics has in terms of how long we're on these pages, the average of these three numbers would be 10 seconds.

I hope that's all been useful to you. I'd love to hear what you think in the comments below. Thanks.

Video transcription by Speechpad.com

0 notes