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ordonianhero · 3 years

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In the comfort of others.

Synopsis: The lads enjoying the company of each other after doing a bit of hard labor on the Lon Lon ranch.

genre: Comfort/fluff

author's note: I worked on editing this with a editing program, so I am sorry if its not perfect still. I am just sharing this out of inspiration from another friend's personal FB post that had me tickled. then going about describing poetically to my friend how I sleep. so yeah. hope this inspires a few of you. characters are based from Linked Universe.

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On a warm day of May, Twilight lay in the hammock. After helping out around the farm. Time and Malon's home stead. Time and him had been busy fixing up some of the fencing, while others worked around the farm with small tasks that needed to be done. The warm air brushed against his sun kissed skin. The sun glistening through the branches of the trees, that provide a little shade for the worn out young man. One leg dangling from the netted hammock. It didn't take long for him to be lulled into a deep slumber. His mouth slightly slack. Brow relaxed more than ever. Usually he could be seen with a face full of emotions. One arm rested behind his head and his other hand resting gently on his stomach. The older hero softly smiled as he saw the pup comfortably resting. He had just come from putting away the gear they had used that afternoon. His wife coming out with some refreshments and snacks. She kissed her husband's cheek before seeing the image he was looking at.

"looks like you wore him out?" she joked with him before making her way to the other's

Time followed, "he's use to hard labor. I wouldn't doubt he may be even caught doing the same thing back where he is from."

She smiled at him, as they reached the other's, calling them over. The others were ever so grateful for the food and drink. Wind had been helping with staking sacks of grain with the Warriors. Legend and Four went about helping with mucking and setting down fresh bedding for the barn animals. Sky and Hyrule went to looking after the animals. While Wild had helped Malon on the snacks. Something to help replenish their energy.

"I say we are good for the rest of the day. You all are welcome to just go take it easy." Time stated, placing a rag he used to wipe the sweat from his face on his shoulder.

"I agree, you all worked so hard today. I am very grateful for it." Malon chimed in.

Warriors took a gulp of the cucumber water before speaking, "where's rancher?"

"probably still out doing us with more work." snorted Legend, before biting into a sliced sandwich wedge.

"want to take a bet on that?" chuckled the Captain.

"Eh, waste of good money." The veteran replied.

"Also he couldn't anyways, he lost his fund to Sky." pointed out Four, sky in the background waving the bag of rupees.

Malon set the tray of food and drinks down on the mini table where they other's sat by, in the shade of the barn. Everyone snacked and chatted cheerfully. Time stayed quiet listening to them chatter away. At some point, Wind had grown sleepy and fell against Warriors. Time stood up slowly after having some refreshments and stated he was going off to go catch a few z's himself. The others wished him luck. Usually cause he didn't sleep at all or not very well. He could do with a long slumber. He made his way back to the house.

Four had taken to finding a more quieter place to do some reading. Hyrule went to hang by the little sugar bowls which the fairy were happily hanging out at. He watched them and every once in a while spoke to them. Warriors was trapped by the sleeping body against him, so he gently scooped up the young sailor and followed Time back to the house. Legend stuck by Four before drifting off into a nap. Sky had gotten his harp out and was plucking away at it. soft little tune.

Malon was gathering up the empty cups and such when she could hear music. She peeked over at Sky. "That is so beautiful." she said as she walked over to him. The youth blushed.

"Thank you." responded sky with a slight blush.

"Who taught you it? The melody I mean?" She asked as she sat by him.

"Hm, well a friend of mine did. Along my journey, I was taught these music pieces." he explained.

"What a wonderful friend then." Malon said. "I taught Link, a few things back in his days when we were young. Music wise." she continued.

"Oh really?" his eyes lighting up.

Malon nodded. "would you like me to sing you it?" she asked.

"that would be lovely." sky cheerfully said, placing his harp down to listen.

Malon closed her eyes and started softly singing. Swaying gently, like the wind in the tree branches. over waves lapping at the sore of a lake.

When she finished. Sky's mouth hung open. She giggled slightly. Legend had mysteriously popped over when he was woken by the tune.

"I have heard Rancher hum that tune before." he stated joining them.

"Yeah, Twi hums it to his horse. It's very calming." added sky.

"Oh does he? hm? Well it's a melody my own mother passed down to me. It was to help me sleep at night when I was very little." Malon explained. I see our song has passed down to the next generation. I wonder what other songs he may know?

"actually he seems to know quite a few tunes that he has hummed." Legend said, tapping his chin.

"sounds like there's a few of you who are a musical bunch." Malon said with a warm smile.

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When Wild finished helping Malon work on snacks for the others, came out. He spotted Twilight sleep in the hammock. His little sneaky side would of wanted to tip him over. However, he knew that would gain him one very angry ranch hand. Or worst being chased by wolfie, nipping at his heels. He walked over, staring at him, he had suddenly realized how exhausted he himself was. Nightmares often plagued him and Wolfie/Twilight seem to be the only source of comfort in those moments. The cub removed his boots before making his way to climb in the hammock with the Rancher.

Twilight woke with a startle and used his dangling foot to steady the hammock. The cub crawling in and flopping on top of twilight. The hammock swayed back and forth a bit. "Hm." Twilight softly grunted. He shifted a bit in a way so the Cub wasn't laying heavily on him. Wedging them in his arm and cradling him on his side. Wild settled in. Twilight used his toes to gently sing the hammock, softly humming a tune. in which lulled them both to sleep.

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Warriors walked along Times side as they walked to the house. The sailor softly asleep.

"He's so young, I am not surprised the hard labor wore him out." The Captain quietly joke.

Time looked over at the young hero in the Captain's arms. "younger bodies are different from older ones." Time replied. He paused seeing now the Pup and Cub all cuddled up in the hammock, deep in a restful state. Warriors pausing too.

"well aren't they a pair." chuckled The Captain.

Time smirked, "careful, same could be said about you."

"ah fair." Smiled the Captain as they made their way into the farm house.

Time dragged himself to the bed he shared with his wife and flopped onto it. Sleep coming quickly, as he drifted off in a dreamless nap. Laying on his stomach and feet hanging off the bed slightly. Warriors carefully set Wind down on his own bedroll, the young sailor however had his grip on Warriors. So the Captain took to just holding them. The sailor snuggling his head into the Captain's shirt. A trail of drool slipping from his mouth as he softly breathed. The Captain gently stroked the youths hair and then found himself falling asleep as well.

All was peaceful, on that warm day in May.

-fin.

#linked universe #linkeduniverseau #Linked universe everyone #just some boys taking it easy #linked universe fanfic #linked universe creator #Ordonian writes

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helpibrokemybrain · 3 years

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writing-prompt-s facelessnamelessanarchist Follow

Follow welcomedhappiness Farewell online privacy

Follow tikalgirl What happened?

xdvisyrx Trump happened.

Follow pizzaalle just get a VPN?

Follow earth-ruins You can’t just tell people to ‘get a VPN (Virtual Private Network)’. Buying a VPN is like buying a house. It’s very very important. Having no VPN or having a ‘wrong’ one can seriously damage your life. Especially for Americans because their privacy laws are garbage. I am going to try explain why you should get a VPN but bare with me, I am from Germany and my English is far from perfect. Let’s start with a simple test. Click this link here: https://whatismyipaddress.com/ It will tell your IP adres, your ISP (internet service provider), and your location. The location might not be very accurate, but then again, it’s just a simple website. Imagine what the government can do! So basically, everyone can find out where you live. But there is more danger. Your ISP. Your ISP logs your every move online and they are required to keep it in case the government wants access to it (or if a 3rd party wants to buy your data (yikes). They have everything. What websites you visit. How long you stay on a website. What you download. Your search terms. European laws are more subtle on this but if you are from the US you are #@*#&, especially because Trump doesn’t support the open internet. It’s scary but maybe in the future you can’t get a job because the recruiter knows your searched on ‘how to deal with depression’ or anythings else that’s supposed to be private because it’s your f*cking right. Or you get a $100k fine because you pirated a movie 15 years ago. You need a VPN. You’re dumb for not using one. but what does a VPN do? A VPN encrypts all your data so if it were be intercepted no one can ‘crack the code’ and damage your privacy. Usually being online goes like this (simplified): Your computer —-> ISP (—–> keeps data —–> sells it) But with a VPN it goes like: Your computer —–> VPN (encrypts data)—–> ISP (ISP can’t see shit) Furthermore, a VPN hides your IP address and location by giving you another IP address located in Spain for example (you can often choose from a list and change as many times as you want). Now that you know why you should get a VPN and what is does it is important to educate yourself because people often choose the wrong VPN. VPN providers are also businesses and have to obey the law. If you choose a VPN provider located in the US then you are throwing your money away because the laws in the US shits on your privacy. If the US gov wants the provider to give all their logs they have to obey. The ISP still can’t see what you are doing online and sell your data but the US gov can interfere with your VPN provider so NEVER CHOOSE A PROVIDER LOCATED IN THE US. I just wanted to make that very clear so my followers don’t buy false security. There is still more danger! Who says your VPN provider isn’t selling your data? You need to check their logging policy. Do they keep logs? If yes, what for? For how long do they keep them? Tip: Choose a provider who doesn’t keep logs More about law The US is part of the Five Eyes program (the worst): The Five Eyes, often abbreviated as FVEY, is an intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States. These countries are bound by the multilateral UKUSA Agreement, a treaty for joint cooperation in signals intelligence (source) There is also a Nine Eyes (bit better) and Fourteen Eyes Program (better). You don’t want a VPN provider who is located in one the Five Eyes countries. If you had to choose go for a provider located in a country that’s part of the Fourteen Eyes Program or even better, go for a country that isn’t part of any program! I know this is a shitty explanation and please pardon my english but now it’s time to do your own research. Take your privacy seriously. Maybe WWIII breaks out and you get killed for liking the ‘wrong’ FB-page. Go to this website: https://thatoneprivacysite.net/simple-vpn-comparison-chart/ Make sure that your future VPN provider both has green boxes for Privacy Jurisdiction and Privacy Logging. I recommend ovpn.se and trust.zone. ovpn is located in Sweden so they are part

of the 14 Eyes Program and they keep minimal logs. Their business ethics, however, are alright. Trustzone is located in the Seychelles. No country can interfere and their privacy jurisdiction is the best you can get. The US want your data but needs to get it from Trustzone? The Seychelles will simply give them the finger and wave them goodbye. However, this makes this provider very appealing for people who torrent and criminals because they keep no logs (and that is how it shoud be) Also, there are almost no marketing efforts so this provider is one the cheapest) Also, often providers such as ExpressVPN are being called ‘The Best’ on websites about VPNs but know that this is just marketing which also makes those provider more expensive (and they too shit on your privacy) This must be the worst article you have ever read but please, please take your privacy very seriously. EDIT: I got many people asking me which provider I use. For those who want to know, I use Trust Zone. They offer a free 3-day trial with no strings attached. But still do your own research!

writing-prompt-s I am also with Trustzone but I think you forgot to explain one of it’s most important features. It protects you when you are using someone else’s Wi-Fi. If you are at Starbucks and you use their Wi-Fi your privacy is at risk. Anyone with ill intentions could steal your information. Especially if you are using an unsecured Wi-Fi hotspot. With a VPN your data gets encrypted so no one can steal it.

Follow rabbittiddy Wait, what’s going, on? Did trump destroy internet privacy with a bill or something? Where’s the news? Oh wait, why am I getting visions of Alex Jones and selling water purifiers?

Follow thecrystalfems He hasn’t yet but he says he wants to. And if he is serious about it it would be really easy to do. Since all our data is already recorded, as the person above explained.

Follow coltrer Trump wants more surveillance of Muslim Americans. This in a country where internet privacy is already close to non-existent. Trust.Zone has a free trial. Use it. btw this post only has 11k notes? That’s quite disappointing for something this important. Don’t reblog this post to save a life. Reblog this to protect an entire family!

Follow imthedoctor12 @earth-ruins @writing-prompt-s Should I get trustzone for my mobile device?

writing-prompt-s If you use public Wi-Fi, then yes. Which VPN you use is up to you, amigo. Take @earth-ruinsadvice. Do your own research first.

writing-prompt-s @elvesfromthedeep just brought the current situation in the US to my attention (March 30, 2017). SourcesAnger as US internet privacy law scrapped Congress just voted to let internet providers sell your browsing history To all my friends in the US, please read this entire post. Making everyone aware of VPNs is going to be my mission. Your privacy matters. Please reblog this post.

Follow greeneyespurpleheart Don’t tell me you just wanted to scroll past this. Stop looking at pictures of cats for a moment, okay? Don’t you realize how important this is? This is dangerous! ‘America, the best FREE country in the world’ my ass. With this new law your ISP can sell your Internet history which could include passwords, usernames, religion, credit card numbers, race and much more to the highest bidder. So here is what I want you to do. You are going to read the whole thing and before you think ’this is so important. Let me reblog this real quick and go back to admiring cats again-’ NO! Don’t reblog this. Take action first. Then reblog. Sign up for a free trial! Trust.Zone offers one (here). Yes. It might be difficult to set up a VPN for some people. But is that going to stop you from protecting yourself and your family? 30 minutes. 30 minutes is all that it takes. 5 if you know how to install software. The problem with some of you is that you see ‘difficult’ as something negative. I want you to see difficult differently. I need you to push through this stuff. You are going to protect yourself. There is nothing negative about that. VPNs are fun and costsaving too! A VPN bypasses geographical restrictions so you can access websites you normally can’t or you could start Netflix’s one month free trial over and over again- forever. And it’s legal! (unless you use it to buy weapons etc.,) Don’t tell yourself that you are too tired and that you will do this tomorrow. Because that isn’t going to happen and you know it. You have to do this right now. You only have to click on it. Don’t let this/shit/life just happen to you. Take yourself seriously. Get a VPN. Privacy is not a privilege, it’s a fundamental human right

joyfuldefender Ok sorry that it’s so freaking long and also sorry for the language, but this is extremely important. Please reblog!

Follow li-ionsandtigersandbears Reblogging again bc this is important

Follow mermaidz4ever We have a VPN you should get one too

killmongersbaby Please read.

Follow bae-in-maine Can you get them for your phones?

Follow kika-lei ^ you can. & when you have a subscription you can use it on your phone and computer. no need for separate subs or purchases. it is absolutely so important for safety. but one of my fave things to do with my vpn is access non-US netflix. I mean other places have all the new good place eps, all the ‘classic’ bggo eps…

i-cant-remember-who-i-am IMPORTANT

Follow theriflemanofroblox reblogging so new people can be aware :)

Follow facelessnamelessanarchist Long as hell, but read it!!!

Source: welcomedhappiness

————————— I found this post and I thought it was important but tumblr wouldn’t let me reblog it for some reason so I copy/pasted it because I’m not very tech savvy

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lockdownuk · 4 years

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Lockdown Diary Part 3

A personal account during the lockdown in the UK due to the Covid-19 outbreak.

23/03/2020 8:30pm Boris Johnson, UK Prime Minister, gives a live address to the nation to, effectively, put the country on lockdown to stem the spread of the deadly coronavirus strain, Covid-19.

Many of us have been self-isolating for days but this latest development within the UK in reaction to the pandemic feels very serious and very scary. I decided to keep a simple diary and where better but online.

Day 61: Writing this in the afternoon on day 62. An exercise driven day. Two walks and stair climb as usual plus I popped round Jeff’s early evening. First time I’ve been to his house, 1 Garden Row, Elmington. It’s further than I thought so, with walking there an back, I managed a daily total of 14km. It was good to see him and have a social (but social-distanced) beer. When I got home, @9:45pm, I made thai green chicken curry, watch The Report (a great, if worrying film) and then TikTok-ed until gone 5am!

Day 62: Typing this on day 64! Beer round Karen’s. Missed Sam’s quiz.

Day 63: Typing this on day 64! Beer round Karen’s. Again! Well, it is bank holiday Monday! Had dirty pizza for tea and watched The Heat. Again! It is the most piss funny film.

Day 64: Well, I have been feeling guilty about treatung the bank holiday w/e l;ike a bank holiday w/e. It’s dawned on me that that guilt is way too self-disiciplned. I got up about midday, usual two walks and stair climb but that’s it. I need to clean the house from top to bottom, get on top of my online courses, get the garden done, get the car fixed, go shopping…fucking hell - if only I had the time…

Day 65: Today I swapped Amazon prime free trial for about the 5th time in my life. Same card and address - will they get wind of my skullduggery. This is all so I can finish watching Hunters and catch Homecoming S2. I went shopping at Asda near Raunds. I wish I hadn’t, it’s no good for a comprehensive shop. Received an email from RCI inviting me to a Zoom meeting with Pal Mulcahy for a business update. I fear the worst. And it’s at 10:00am, FFS!

Day 66: Logged in an attended zoom forum with Paul Mulcahy and over 250 RCI staff this morning. The message was that there is going to be redundancies. I expected this and expected to fall victim. All staff that are going to be put through cionsultation would be contacted today. I however wasn’t! Very, very surpised. meanwhile, Nick Reilly asked to connect via LinkedIn (including become a LinkedIn staff team member - that’s new to me so I’ll see what it is but I accepted the invitation) Later, I WhatsApp-ed him and asked who has been affected from IT. All he could tell me was no one on Jon Rodger’s team is under threat. Also, Mark C emailed - I’ll respond tomorrow. I got up at 09:00ish and had my mornming walk before the 10:00am meeting. I am now, at 09:30pm, fucking knackered. Dinner and then bed, methinks but not before one more episdoe of Hunters!

Day 67: Typing on Day 68. Got pretty drunk last night. I’ve got blisters from walking (new boots) so I don’t think I’ll walk tomorrow (well, today!).

Day 68: I did fuck all today. Got up after 1pm, no walking. I did manage to clean the bathroom (and smash my little mirror) and do my 26 stair climb. I am typing at 9pm and I feel whacked!

Day 69: I have an abscess. It’s not too painful (today) but I am going to call the dentist tomorrow (Monday). I think antibiotics are in order. I watched a film, which I actually started yesterday, called The Voices starring Ryan Reynolds, Gemma Arteton and Anna Kendrick. Fuuuuuuuuuuuucking weird. The closing credits are the most bizarre, in context, I’ve ever seen. But, in general, a very good film. Back to normal exercise regime today plus hovered the hall and stairs. Get me. It’ll be interetingh to see my Google Fit figures for May tomorrow.

Day 70: Contacted the dentist who advised salt water rinsing and ibuprofen. But, tbf, it’s a lot better today and the swelling has gone right down. The dentist I called was the Oundle House (Rodericks) one. I was not hopeful since last time I saw them they referred me to their Northampton clinic for root canal work which was quoted at over £600. However, the dentist was very nice, had my x-ray to hand from that last visit and seemed more interested in making sure I’m OK than gaining a paying customer. He still wants to see me when possible though! I must mention the weather. It has been glorious weather nearly every day throughout May (it’s June 1st today). Seriously sunny and like a holiday every day. The news mentioned it today - the level of sunshine throughout the transition from spring to summer is unprecedented, apparently. My T shirt tan is, quite frankly, ridiculous!

Day 71: Today’s ‘must mention’ is what’s going on in the US and it’s not particularly related to Trump. There was a black man killed while under arrest. George Floyd died Monday 25th May (8 days ago) A policeman, who knelt on his neck for minutes while he complained of not being able to breathe, has been charged with murder. Now there are riots and curfews and military intervention all over the country. It’s similar to the English riots of 2011. It’s worrying, sad, scary and not what the fight against the pandemic needs. Most of all, it’s racism rearing its ugly head yet again. I’ve had a normal-ish day. received an email from Jim checking in, talked to a recruiter about a promising job lead (although the hours are 8-5 which I am not happy about), talked to Barry across the road and sent Barzzy a WhatsApp. And I logged in Shaw Academy and started lesson one of module 2 of web Design. It’s been a while, so long overdue, but I only did about 15 minutes. Must try harder / do better! As I type, late (10:10pm) I have dinner cooking and a strange pain in my left side and am in the middle of No Country for Old Men. Don’t think I’ve seen it since the cinema (13 years!)

Day 72: As soon as (well, within a couple of days) I mention the weather, it turns. It’s rained a little and is a lot cooler (15° rather than mid-20s). Much better for walking, I have to say. I finished Hunters today (Amazon Prime series). While I enjoyed it, it got too surreal at the end. It is loosely based on the real story of Nazi hunters in the US in 1977 but the straying from loosely based to down-right ridiculous fiction annoyed me. If it goes to S2, I will watch it, however. Received some of my rental deposit back today (the law changed so that only 5 weeks rent can be demanded as deposit). Over £600. Nice.

Day 73: I made a short video for Marc and Clare’s 26th wedding anniversary. I ‘dressed up’ for it. I enjoyed doing it and I think it was appreciated.

Day 74: Typing on Day 75 for no other reason than I couldn’t be bothered on day 74! I received a letter either today or the day before (well, yesterday or the previous day!) from Mr Minos at the eye clinic informing me that, while there is some stuff going on in both eyes (garnered from the photo scans done at the last hospital appointment), he wants to see me in three months. Always a refief when that happens. Been getting into two series on Amazon: Alex Rider and Modern Love. One is a male Hanna, the other is soppy affairs of the heart based on real life stories (from essays written in the NY Times). Both enjoyable for totally different reasons.

Day 75: Lazyish day. Well, not really, just that I only went for one walk, alebit 6km andI got pissed on. Wehn the rain hit, it was also fucking freezing! Some of the clouds were stunning today, made for great photos. As I type, it’s 21:12, I’m listening the wonderful Phoebe Bridgiers. Now, I’m gonna make some tea and sup a few ales, I reckon.

Day 76: Done lots of walking today (over 13,000 steps) I made sausage casserole with too much chilli (scotch bonnet and birdeye). I had an online (fb) debate with Sam over whether the George Floyd murder was a racial.

Day 77: Received a new (used) wing mirror for the car. £18 with delivery, I reckon that’s a bargain. I cashed in £20 from Prolific as well, so I’m satisfied at the financial full-circle. Dropped the car off at Barnwell (Nene Valley Body Shop) and walked back - 7km. Just about to dive into tea - finishing the blazing hot sausage casserole from yesterday. Then I’m going to do some more Rubik’s cube practice with my recently acquired GoCube.

Day 78: Lots of daily walking, 26 stair climb, press-up and late nights watching TikTok (gone 3am this morning) are making for a constantly knackered Tim Stubbs. Today I made veg soup and cooked up some meatballs. Both are delish. How did I ever to learn how to conjure up such stuff? The Rubik’s cube learning is coming along except that I need good daylight to distinguish between the yellow and white faces on the flipping thing!

Day 79: Listening to Radio 6 most the day and the news is making for dire listening. Forecast of severe recession, especially if there is a second peak of the virus, which I think there will be. Plus, an offshoot of the George Floyd murder and the #BlackLivesMatter movement, institutions and town councils are being lobbied by campaigners to remove statues of anyone associated with things like slavery (one was toppled in Bristol at the w/e) and rename buildings etc. that were named after historical characters with any links to something that now is deemed wrong or offensive. I agree with it but it’s not pleasant to hear amongst other bleak news. Walked to Barnwell to collect my car - front trim reseated and new wing mirror fitted, £20 - bargain (I source the replacement wing mirror). But, also, forked out £165 on car tax! Cleaned the lounge from top to bottom. Knackering!

Day 80: Chatted with Dad and Rita - he’s pissed off with the slavery backlash but otherwise they are both OK. I saw Baz in the Tesco queue where I mentioned my disgust at the Thursday market being allowed (I found I could not maintain 2m at all times just walking to Tesco’s!) and that I really don’t want to catch Covid19 as I will probably die. Maybe a bit dramatic but he messaged me later today to say he’d been thinking on what I said and offered to shop for me. I replied that I am OK to shop but am scared at how people are taking things so much less seriously than when lockdown started yet the virus is still out there just as it was then! I am very touched at his massage. I thoroughly cleaned the bedroom and changed the bedclothes today. House work really knackers me out!

Day 81: Spare room cleaned today. Not much else to type about. It’s Friday, I making curried mince and I don’t feel like a beer. How I’ve changed!

Day 82: I did have beers last night. Ended up going to bed with daylight and dawn chorus for company. Today, when I woke, gone 1pm, I have been greeted by what can only be described as thoroughly depressing news from every quarter. This includes violence in the capital, further virus outbreak in Beijing. Fog’s political posts on FB make for depressing (but vaild) reading. I’m feeling thoroughly fed up today. Not even music can lift my mood…

…but, I am currently listening to Craig Charles on BBCR6 and, I have to say, he’s putting in quite an exceptional effort - there may be hope that my mood might lift, even at gone 8pm! I might have a beer or two and grab something postivity and enjoyment from the day after all.

Day 83: Another late one last night but up before noon today. Started watching something called Condor on Sky One. It’s OK - there’s stuff I wanna waytch on Amazon Prime but, more often than not, it keeps telling me there’s ‘a problem’ when I try to play anything. Pissing me off. I just checked and I have two weeks of the initial 12 of furlough to go. I shall started asking the questions about what might happen on the Connections website.

Day 84: Typing this on Day 85. On the way back from dropping off some shoes for Sean Davies at his brother’s (martin) I met Karen and she said why not pop round for a beer so I did. Certainly not used to a drink on a Monday so that, and the genral upheaval to my evening, while good fun and a nice change, put pay to my usual diary entry! I sorted Amazon Prime out by leaving the TV turned off for over an hour. Day 85: Tim did the garden today and it looks great. The pipes in the bathroom have been knocking loudly, on and off, for a couple of weeks now. Last night, they were so loud that today I took it upon myself to resolve it or ring Woodfords. So, having turned off the water, run the taps dry to get rid of any trapped air and then turned the water back on slowly, I discoved it’s the cistern and its pipes. Woodfords are arranging Corvee to visit. Meanwhile, leaving the water turned off at least stops the noise which is, otherwise, costant and unbearable! I emailed HR a couple of days ago about what’s happening in a couple of weeks time in terms of furlough when the 12 weeks will be up. Sue Cockimngs got back to me attaching an email Deryn sent on 15th May which I never received. Basically, they’ll extend furlough if need be and an update should be forthcoming late May/early June. Well, that time has passed, so who knows what is going to happen. The furlough scheme (CJRS) has been changed by the govenment, I’ve read, and it looks like any new people would have to have been furloughed by June 10th (it’s the 16th today) so no furlough rotation, which is annoying. The CJRS ends 1st October with employer contributions required from 1st August - that’s D-Day as far as I am concerned….so job hunting will have to step up a notch! Day 86: Pete’s birthday and he bought himself the same speaker as me. When I asked if it lived up to his expectations he mentioned it’s better through WiFi than Bluetooth. That confused me as I haven’t got WiFi available on mine…..long story short, I bought the wrong fucking speaker. I got a AudioPro AddOn T10 instead of C10. To say I am fucked off is an understatement. To think I was so pleased at the cheap price I paid. Now I feel like I have wasted €200. Bollocks.

Day 87: Finished Alex Rider last night. Another series that started off so well and ended a litte weak but, overall, not bad. I’ve started keeping strange meal times…lunch very late (4pm) and dinner really late (11pm). I need to sort it ‘cos it’s playing havoc with my sugar levels. I had a huge hypo while having my second walk today, second day on the trot that’s happened. My late dinner was Chinese chicked curry with a quarter of a scotch bonnet and two birdeye chillies. Delish.

Day 88: I have managed to be bitten yesterday or the day before on one of my walks. There are strange, itchy lumps on my right inner forearm. And I do mean itchy. I trimmed my sideburns today, I was very pissed off with them. My hair looks just a little less shit. I did a shop at Tesco in Corby today. Mainly booze as follows: 20 cans Sam Miguel £18 18 cans Stella £15 20 bottles Bud £10 8 cans Tyskie £9 3 lrg bottles Warsteiner £5 £57 Bargain.

Day 89: Lazy day. One short walk and usual stair climb. Howard and Sue popped round to give me a pressie - bottle of Monkey Shoulder. I’m building up quite a collection of whisky!

Day 90: Dad called and we chatted for an hour or so. I had to apologise for not sending a father’s day card! Dan messaged me and offered to pay for a pizza delivery which I declined.

Football has started again this past week…Prem and Championship only. L1 and L2 season was cut short and Posh missed out on the play-offs by one place. As I type, Everton v Liverpool is on Sky Sports on a Sunday evening - it’s very strange with no crowd. There’s crowd noise being played thorugh the tannoy.

#Diary #Tumblr diary #lockdown #covid19 #lockdownuk

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stream-of-distracted-thought · 5 years

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Young Artists! It’s OKAY to use reference!

It’s okay to use reference! It’s okay to use reference! It’s okay to use reference!

Reference is NOT tracing! Reference is NOT cheating! Reference is NOT bad!

No seriously. Professional artists use reference all of the time.

So today, in one of the art groups I follow on FB, a young artist went about asking for critique on some anatomy with is normally nothing super special. However, this person stressed that they did not want to use reference and that they “relied on reference too much”. (Which isn’t actually a thing. I’ll explain why in a second.) Since I went to college for art, it was drilled into my head by my professors to always use reference when drawing. And these guys were the working in the field and teaching on the side type of guys.

When I was a much younger Starteller, I do remember having this notion myself. That “good” artists didn’t need reference and could just draw whatever. This SIGNIFICANTLY hurt my growth as an artist and was just a wrong opinion on the subject, period. But living in a small town with little access (and little want to) to proper art classes, and growing up during the era of dial-up and low-speed internet, I didn’t really seek things out. I dare say I was too proud too. And my artwork, especially when it comes to human anatomy, suffered. I think a lot of this mentality comes from pride or the pressures of peers and expectations to be “the artist” in your class.

Toss that aside. Professional artists use reference.

While I am no longer working as an artist professionally, I am going to share a few examples of my own, demonstrating what it means to use reference, both from life and from other sources. I’ll start with what I’m most known for: My Wings of Fire Chibi dragons.

Above is my usual workspace that I set up, every time I make a new dragon.

I ALWAYS have the Joy Ang general body plans for each dragon tribe in my file to look at for scale reference and some body reference since both I, and much of the WOF community care about some accuracy to these designs. I also will have color references if I have access to them, be they my own color choices, or someone else’s. As in the case with Blister, I pulled a diamondback image from online to pull colors and her pattern from. I think of this use of reference as transferring one style, to another.

Sometimes, I’m trying to imitate a style exactly. An example like that is my Steven Universe OC. To be very close to the style of the show, I drew almost three pages worth of Pearl, to get her body shape right, as well as head shape. When working on my Black Pearl, I always have at least one of the Pearls (Yellow or Blue too) up in my file to make sure I’m recreating the style as accurately as possible. The same happened for Black Quartz.

References are not always styles or poses; they can be techniques, color palettes, or generalized lighting reference. And its not limited to just those!

I’ve recently found this wonderful little image that I have up a lot now when painting a bit more realistically, to help remind myself what colors to use to help make my shading have a bit more pop.

And I finally found this one too that will help me with painting the lighting on a human face.

Outside of my chibi dragons, (And yes, I do other stuff than dragons) I will use reference from life to help create.

When doing my usual style, I use a photo reference I find online or capture myself to help me transfer the simpler shapes into the lineart. An example of this would be Starteller below (who I use reference to capture a cat’s body shape), and the SkyWing wing shape, which I lifted from a Peregrine Falcon.

However, I use reference much more closely when working on my “uncanny valley” style that I like to use for my monster designs.

This here is a character of mine, the Entity of Fear. We’ll call him Fear for short. His references are: a caterpillar (Face and over-all body shape), an ant (legs) and a mosquito larvae (for the tail-end). I wanted him to look creepy, alien and parasitic so referencing creepy-crawlies to capture this effect.

When it comes to scenery you need both lighting and life reference. Below is the concept art I did for a college project called The Library. Using the chosen reference of our Director, I produced this library (which was used). I lifted some of the perspective from photos that I can’t locate at this time. (I did this project around 6-7 years ago)

This is the one that sold the director! ^

The Trinity Library in Dublin was what I looked at and you can see the inspiration in the concepts.

But wait, you may be saying. “This isn’t the type of referencing I’M talking about! I’m talking about leaning on pose references!”

Yea, pro-artists do this too!

I, for example, use a couple of ways. One is that I use (when doing cartoon humans) DesignDoll to create custom poses that might be hard to find online. I leaned heavily on this method for last year’s Inktober.

The other is looking at real-life reference, be that from photos or a live model. Below is an image of a painting I’ve put aside for a bit while developing my painting skills. The lineart however was referenced from a photo I found online, as well as a reference to Alphonse Mucha’s Art Deco Style. The other three are from a live model.

My workspace while producing the lineart ^

These three were done with a live model during college ^

And if all my examples aren’t convincing enough, below are some images of student and pro work-spaces. Seriously. EVERY PRO ARTIST USES REFERENCE.

The idea that you can lean too heavily on reference is a myth. Using reference actually makes your art better in the long run as well as giving you a stable idea of what you want when creating. How closely you replicate that reference is up to the needs of the project. Obviously, if you were doing a portrait of someone from a photo or life, you would want it to be exactly the way it appears there. If you are creating something that isn’t real, your references will be used more loosely.

References are not restricted to poses, photos or life. They include color schemes, styles and techniques too!

When something isn’t being used as a reference:

-Copying another person’s artwork to a T, or so closely that it is obviously plagiarism. POSES FROM LIFE OR STOCK IMAGES DO NOT COUNT!

#reference #art reference #we all use it #and its a good thing #stream of distracted thought #starteller794

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maisietheyellowlab · 6 years

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My Dog Breed Selection Process

Yesterday I got this message from an anon:

“I saw your getting a Koolie!! Nice!! They're such pretty dogs. And actually if you don't mind I have a question for you? Feel free to not answer. But you have a lab and are getting a koolie, two different breeds obviously, so do you have any tips for someone trying to find a breed? It'll be my first purebred dog and going to the shelter is hard enough because all the dogs are so cute so how do you narrow down the list for the perfect dog? Idk if you had a list - but how'd you decide on a koolie?”

and I quickly realized this was gonna be a long post, so here it is. This whole thing:

This is the general procedure that brought me to my breed choices:

First come up with a list of “must haves” “nice to haves” and “must not haves” for the type of dog you want (size, coat type, shedding, energy level, trainability,..) (as @katieisstilltumbling / @winedogs already pointed out in the original ask).

Be very honest with yourself and consider that while the dog has to be a good fit for you, you have to be a good fit for the dog as well!

Then go through a list of dog breeds and/or take a few “what’s the right breed for you” type quizzes OR if you really like a dog sport check out the breeds that usually do well in that sport (e.g. mushing: Huskies, Alaskan Malamutes,..)

→ see which of those you like and check their breed descriptions

→ check blogs, forums, videos, fb groups of owners and breeders of that breed, see if you still like what you see

→ if there are any events where you might be able to meet the breed irl (dog shows, trials, breed meet ups…) go there and talk to owners! (this step is not always possible but it’s very helpful if you can do it!)

→ check if the dogs of that breed fit your “must haves” and “must not haves”

→ look up breeders

→ contact a breeder, ask about the breed, their dogs, what kind of owner they like for their dogs, ask if you can meet them and their dogs

→ when you meet irl, see if you like the breeder and their dogs

→ if you’re now sure you want a dog of that breed, tell the breeder you’re interested in getting a puppy from their upcoming litter

→ be patient and respectful

→ get puppy

→ done!

So, here’s an example of my personal breed-selection journey:

Dog breed selection process 1 - Labrador Retriever:

The first step at all was trying to think of the dog breeds I'm generally drawn to/think they're cute and looking them up, checking out youtube videos where owners talk in depth about the breed and being real honest with myself if the breed would fit into my lifestyle. For example, I always liked Cocker Spaniels, Golden Retrievers, Border Collies, Labs and Dalmatians.

Second step was going thru breed lists online and checking them out, trying to see if there's more breeds I like, but maybe haven't seen or heard of before.

Third thing I did, was take some Dog Breed Selector quizzes online, to see if I'd like any of the dogs that would come up as recommended to me. Ofc this is not to be take too seriously, bc you can be a perfect home for a border collie, but the quiz results won't match you to Border Collies, just because you didn't tick the box that said »I have an enormous yard.«

So at that point I had somewhat of an idea what I would want in a dog, and I had a list of traits in my mind that I applied to my top ~10 breeds.

It was something like this:

Must haves:

Medium size

Tolerates cold&hot weather

Easy coat maintenance

Easy to train --> biddable or will to please

Medium/high energy

Suitable for hikes&canine sports

Playful

Good around older children

Good for first time owners

Not very sensitive

Okay with being left alone for a few hours regularly/not prone to separation anxiety

Good with people and dogs

Average lifespan longer than 10 years/as long as possible

Breeder in my country

Cute!

Nice to haves:

Doesn’t shed a lot

More of a quiet type of dog

Litter in the next 6 months

Likes water

Longer than average lifespan

Must not haves:

Guards people/property

Very large or very small

Prone to health issues

Very independent

Very sensitive

High maintenance coat

Prone to DA or HA

Pure working line

Ideas: Australian Shepherd, Toller, Border Collie, Golden Retriever, Labrador Retriever, Brittany

I started looking for breeders of those breeds in my area and looked through all the websites I could find. I looked at their dogs, their breeding practices, the offspring and of course, litter plans.

At that point I felt like a balanced Aussie might be the way to go, so I contacted and met up with a breeder. Turns out we didn't really click and the way that she described the breed and her personal requirements for her puppies' owners left me feeling very overwhelmed, so I decided agains getting a dog of hers. I looked at some other breeders websites, but the more I researched the more I also started realizing that an Aussie might not the the best choice for me any the household I was living in at that time.

So here I learned a very important lesson. Not only do you have to find a suitable dog, you also have to find a suitable breeder. A responsible breeder will stay in contact with you for the res tof the dog's life, try to point you in the right direction, will be a source of help regarding the dog's development, health and training, so you need like them and they need to like you back. So I added another bullet point to my puppy search list:

a breeder that is helpful, friendly, nice to be around

Dog breed 1, try 1: Aussie → not a good fit.

I eventually narrowed my selection down to Goldens and Labs, because they were generally easier for first time owners than the rest of the breeds, less prone to sensitivity and there were announced litters in the next few months.

In the end I went for a Lab, because they seemed a little more sturdy and had slightly less health issues, as far as my research showed. Then I contacted two breeders, I think, and I went with the one that felt more right. Oh and also, I thought the parents of the litter looked better, bc that's honestly a big factor too. You're gonna live with this dog for 10+ years, why not choose the one that fits your criteria as much as possible.

So that was it, this is how I chose Maisie's breeder. She's great, helped me a LOT during the first few months when I needed it most, and we're still in touch, I visit her every year. It feels like she's my aunt or smth, she's really nice.

Dog breed 1, try 2: Lab → WIN :D

Dog breed selection process 2 - Australian Koolie:

The second time around I approached the breed selection a little differently, since I had already met more breeds of dogs irl by then and also had an idea of what I’d like in a second dog from experience with Maisie. A part of my decision to go for a herding dog came from what I want to do with them - I want to try more canine sports that include jumping, so a dog with a lighter build and more will to please. That kind of dog will enjoy those activities more and be able to do them more safely than Maisie.

Must haves:

Medium size, lighter build

Tolerates cold&hot weather

Easy coat maintenance

Will to please

Medium/high energy

Suitable for hikes&canine sports

Suitable for jumpy sports

Playful

Okay if sensitive, would prefer less sensitive tho

Okay with being alone for a few hours if needed

Good with people and dogs

Isn’t bothered by obnoxious Lab behavior very much

Average lifespan longer than 10 years/as long as possible

Working/ working x mixed line

Cute

Breeder in Europe

A helpful, friendly breeder

Nice to haves:

Doesn’t shed a lot

Not noise sensitive

Not very sensitive in general

More of a quiet type of dog

Litter in the next 6 months (hahahahhaha I’ve been waiting for a little over 2 years at this point)

Likes water

Likes snow

Likes toys and food as rewards

Longer than average lifespan

Must not haves:

Guards people/property

Very large or very small

Prone to health issues

Very independent

High maintenance coat

Prone to DA or HA

Pure show line

Ideas: Aussie, Border Collie, Rough Collie, English Springer Spaniel, Welsh Springer Spaniel, Toller, Koolie

I’d met enough Aussies by that point to realize they weren’t exactly what I wanted in a dog, but I still really liked Border Collies. This time around I wasn’t intimidated by higher energy level anymore, but I was still a bit worried about sensitivity and the fact that most BCs I’ve met low key hated Maisie. There were a few who liked her, but many didn’t so I kept looking for a better fit (I thought it wouldn’t be fair for the new dog to be stressed by Maisie just existing and being herself..it wouldn’t be fair to either). I was considering Tollers too, but there weren’t any litters announced at all, and I knew of literally one breeders, so I kept on looking. I had a hard time with finding Rough Collies without extreme show coat and had trouble finding non extremely showy Springers around here as well.

I think I found out about Koolies when I was going through herding dogs, and it was a new breed I’ve never heard of or seen before. They were rarely included bc I was mostly looking at very generic lists I think. I read the description, watched a few videos and really really liked them. They had all the traits of aussies and BCs I liked, but weren’t as sensitive as BCs generally are or as prone to guarding as Aussies tend to be. I found two breeders in driving distance, contacted both, one was kinda weird with replies and said she doesn’t want to sell pups outside her country, but the other breeder was very nice and helpful in her replies and that’s how I started talking to the breeder of my future puppy! I met her and two of her dogs about two years ago and loooved them. They also aced the “can tolerate a playful (obnoxious) Maisie” test, the main thing BCs struggled with.

So unfortunately I couldn’t get a puppy from the two litters that were born in 2017 and 2018 bc my life circumstances weren’t suitable for a puppy at the time, but now I am READY and basically just waiting for the puppy to be born sometime this year.

Dog breed 2, try 1: Koolie → win!

#dogblr #choosing a puppy #dog breeds #dog ownership #text #I apologize for all the typos I missed #asks

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marylemay4699537-blog · 5 years

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vb-news-24 · 3 years

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womenofcolor15 · 4 years

Text

Call 'Em Out, Get 'Em Out! How Folks Are Taking Action To Hurt The Pockets Of Racist Business Owners & Individuals

Not only are people protesting in the streets, folks are taking action online to hurt the pockets of racist individuals and big businesses. And THIS is a form of protest too! More inside…

Trump has his racist groupies feeling real bold these days, but it’s costing a few of them. As it should. Sinc ethey want to claim All Lives Matter, people have been showing them exactly what that means. It means black voices SHOULD carry the same weight as white ones. They know our black voices traditionally do not, but folks are seeing the shift now.

A man named Craig Gore found out the hard way. He’s a writer who has penned scripts for shows like “S.W.A.T.” and “Chicago P.D.” He recently landed a writing job for an upcoming “Law & Order” spin-off series.

However, his script for the show will never see the light of day. The reason? Well, he was FIRED for a controversial Facebook post.

In the FB post, Craig shared a picture of himself holding an assault rifle on his porch with the caption, “Curfew…” According to Variety, Craig threatened to “light motherf—ers up who are trying to f— with my property,” in reference to protests that took place in Los Angeles on Monday. Los Angeles has been put on curfew over the raging George Floyd protests.

Now, he’s out of a job.

“I will not tolerate this conduct, especially during our hour of national grief. I am terminating Craig Gore immediately,” Dick Wolf said in a statement to Variety.

Drew Janda, who worked on the OWN’s “Greenleaf” and HBO shows “Big Little Lies” and “Barry,” brought attention to Gore’s remarks:

Sorry - co-executive producer

— drew janda (@drewjanda) June 2, 2020

THIS is how you be an ally.

Craig was represented by Paradigm, but not anymore! They cut ties with the writer/producer.

“Craig Gore is no longer a Paradigm client. We condemn his post in the strongest possible terms,” said a spokesperson for the agency.

Womp.

@WolfEnt one of your writers a convicted felon is allowed to own an Ar-15 and post threatening messages on Twitter. For real? Not a good look. Definitely will not watch your shows after that if that is who you employ

— Daniela_Brooklyn (@DanielaBrookly1) June 2, 2020

Oh and get this…

Would also love to know how a convicted felon got ahold of that gun pic.twitter.com/tvOcvUWvjP

— Joey DaSilva (@joey_lumps) June 2, 2020

Turns out, Craig is a convicted felon, so people are wondering how was he even able to get his hands on a gun like that when legally he shouldn’t be in possession of one. We all know why though. Peep the thread below.

Then, there's this:

Hey!!!! How are you? Thought you forgot about me. Haven't heard from you in years. ALL LIVES MATTER...EVERY SINGLE ONE!!! https://t.co/DfzKl3w0jm

— Grant Napear (@GrantNapearshow) June 1, 2020

Sacramento Kings announcer and KHTK Radio host Grant Napear tweeted out "All Lives Matter" amid the protests demanding justice for George Floyd. Now, he's out of a job. He resigned after receiving backlash.

"Grant Napear has resigned from the Sacramento Kings," the team said, per Jason Jones of The Athletic. "We thank him for his contributions to the team and wish him all the best."

NBA free agent DeMarcus Cousins tweeted Grant asking him what was his take on Black Lives Matter and he tweeted:

"Hey!!!! How are you? Thought you forgot about me. Haven't heard from you in years. ALL LIVES MATTER...EVERY SINGLE ONE!!!"

From the Sacramento Kings: “Grant Napear has resigned from the Sacramento Kings. We thank him for his contributions to the team and wish him all the best.”

— Jason Jones (@mr_jasonjones) June 2, 2020

Bonneville Sacramento, which operates KHTK Radio, also released a statement to announce that they have parted ways with Grant:

Bonneville Sacramento has parted ways with Grant Napear. pic.twitter.com/n2T7CFOItP

— Sports 1140 KHTK (@Sports1140KHTK) June 2, 2020

Welp.

Folks are raising hell on Facebook over a post that was put up on Instagram by Northwest Dermatology Group, a skincare specialists group.

"We get it. We Understand you people. Can we move on, please? This is draining," the words in the post read. Excuse us? Police killing unarmed black people is DRAINING.

The caption reads, "All lives matter!"

Per usual, they deleted the post and claims a former employee hacked their page.

Michigan, do your THING!

Also...

I’m glad people are calling out all the companies that have donated to trumps campaign. I hope we all listen and stop supporting them until they make a change adding on to the #WendysIsOverParty pic.twitter.com/IrFiXGY8o5

— BBY TOXICO (@bvbyboy98) June 2, 2020

Twitter is canceling Wendy's with the #WendysIsOverParty hashtag. The reason? People are pissed the company is a large donor to Trump.

After Trump declared war on the American people with his "glorified violence" tweets, it stirred up more outrage and violence across the nation. In a recently released report, the names of several companies who heavily support Trump were released and now folks are calling for boycotts.

MUY Company CEO James Bodenstedt is one. His company operates several Wendys, Taco Bells, and Pizza Huts across the US. Bodenstedt has reportedly donated over $440,000 to Trump, including $200,000 to the Trump Victory PAC on March 12th, just days before states began shutting down in-person dining, claims a Business Insider report in May.

so you’re telling me wendy’s donated 400k to a billionaire... #WendysIsOverParty pic.twitter.com/0ItlJcB1WB

— papi_sam (@papisam13) June 2, 2020

It's valid for people to be upset at Wendy's, but Twitter should also be calling out all of his other companies as well.

A list of Trump's top campaign donors have been released (some are incorrect as it's the franchise owners who have donated and not the company itself, but still):

Keep in mind, some of the companies are known to donate to both parties in multiple offices to hedge their bets, so they have pull with someone regardless of who gets placed into office.

Also...

MISSISSIPPI I SEE YOU. TWITTER MAKE IT HURT. PAMELA HANCOCK STATING SHE HOPES A DEADLY STRAIN OF CORONA SPREADS TO RIOTERS. https://t.co/TOBXvd16A3 pic.twitter.com/GVvl1SaoS5

— (@GoodGuyKharn) June 2, 2020

Mississippi prosecutor Pamela "Pammi" Hancock needs to be stripped of her job. In a now deleted Facebook comment, she wrote that she can only "hope the deadly strain of COVID-19 spreads in riots."

The Madison County prosecutor was commenting on a Facebook post that reads, "Does Covid spread during massive street riots or just in bars and restaurants? Asking for a friend.”

Now, she claims she was "joking."

“My job is to prosecute all crimes, including civil disobedience,” Pamela told Mississippi Today. “I’m against any breach of peace or criminal activity, and I would prosecute it. I have nothing against people peacefully protesting, but breaking into businesses and stealing things is a crime.”

She continued, “I was really just making light of it.”

Making light of a global pandemic? Oh. She said the initial post “was kind of a joke” and though she was “attempting to joke back,” she “did it very poorly.”

She added that she “was not serious about wanting anyone to die. That’s not who I am.”

Do your thing, Twitter!

Have you personally interacted with racist trolls online? Speak on it in the comments!

Photo: AP Photo/Rafael Yaghobzadeh

[Read More ...] source http://theybf.com/2020/06/03/call-them-out-get-them-out-how-folks-are-taking-action-to-hurt-the-pockets-of-racist-busi

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paulyrhythmics · 7 years

Text

little personal life update

So this past weekend was pretty great & a much needed getaway from all the stress that I’ve been feeling ever since my sister & her kids moved in. It kinda ended on a real sour note though...

Now don’t get me wrong I unconditionally love them via familial obligation bonds & all that lol but just having us cramped all together in one small room has been kinda... painful... Especially since I’m now usually stuck sitting on my bed so that the kids have room to move around & play, without being able to practice guitar. I’m also the one walking around gathering food/supplies for them since they’re new to the area & we don’t have a vehicle to transport the kids in with her, & I’m in charge of cleaning most of the time. (Because MY GOD They’re So Messy & Disorganized, The Chaos Has Really Been The Main Source Of My Stress & I Just Want A BJ lol)

This past Thursday after a bunch of planning I was able to catch a Bart up north to get a ride with my friend’s roommate to her place up further north in the Antioch area. On the way there we saw the aftermath of some sort of collision on the highway as there was a car on fire & several emergency vehicles putting it out. After we finally arrived at their place I spent the night helping them & her moms setup for her B-Day party the next day. It was a pretty chill night, we wound up buying a bunch of stuff from Walmart & getting into some of the libations early & playing few rounds of Beer Pong with one of her other friends who came over to spend the night (me & her roommate won both our rounds & we had a few really good double shots in~)

The next day we all helped out moving things around the house & stuff, (had an early Starbucks run & a Scott Pilgrim movie viewing in the afternoon in between). Once people started pouring in, the party was very lively. Not exactly my sort of crowd in regards to the company present but it was a fun night regardless. I had a better time in the back yard when I was helping out with the fire pit & had several people ranting about Naruto off to the side (freakin’ weaboo Ni🅱🅱as XD) After playing some Smash Bros with people I helped clean up & spent another night there.

Then on Saturday first thing in the morning my friend’s roommate put some Dragon Ball Z on & we enjoyed some Cell Games saga eps. I then got a ride to the Bart station booked it to SF & caught a bus up to Sonoma County & attended another friend’s Scandinavian themed holiday party. I got to spend time with a bunch of great people I don’t get to see very often & meeting some other people that I’ve only met through FB in person for the first time which was cool lol At midnight we held a Glögg ritual & I just had a nice time with good company.

Sunday morning I had a nice time enjoying some old-school anime but I had gotten a message from my father telling me that he was on his way to Nicaragua because the mother of my older siblings had passed away. :/ (She had been sick for some time) Despite him saying I should be home for them I felt like it’d be best if I stay away for a little bit, cause I honestly don’t feel like I could do anything to help cheer em up at this moment in time & things just felt really tense, which makes me feel unbearably uncomfortable. I’m not sure if it was fortunate or not in this situation but my other friend who I was planning on visiting (& to go see the new Star Wars movie with) wasn’t feeling well & I wound up going home anyways.

Once I finally got home (after picking up a pizza on the way :P) I took a much needed shower, since I had either not found the right time or been too afraid to ask people if I could use theirs while I was out lol I had started to get pretty self conscious about it as well. XP (Also side note I had THE DRYEST balls, jeebus lmao)

Fortunately my oldest nephew seems unphased with the news of the passing (the younger ones are too young to get the impact of the situation) or maybe that’s cause for concern? but my sister’s pretty upset & been crying a lot. She’s been talking to as many people over the phone as she can to keep up to date with what’s going on with the funeral that’s going to happen but also to keep herself busy I think. I really hope that she’s able to pull through this tough time. :T

This is going to be a bit of a rough but interesting week, as there’s this looming sense of limited time approaching with this other heavy stuff going on. We’re supposed to be moving sometime soon (I don’t know of a confirmed date which is concerning in itself), I don’t know when my father is going to be returning back to the US, I’ve got to fly out to AZ this weekend to help My mother move, & I don’t really trust anyone with my things (since our last move dad wound up not securing one of my dressers properly & it flew out of his truck on the way to our storage unit while I was out of town at the time) So I need to figure out a way to transport all of that before they start hauling things over to our new place of residence.

Honestly if I could just get that BJ I’d feel a little better haha

#personal rant

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yoursfaundly-blog · 5 years

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preserving-ferretbrain · 5 years

Text

Markedly Worse Than Expected

by Dan H

Sunday, 27 February 2011

Dan really disliked Marked~

As Ferretbrain enters its fifth year (have we really been doing this for that long?) I sometimes fear that our articles in general – and my articles in particular – have become too self-referential. This is especially true given that recently most of what I have been reading has been books that were voted off from our recent

TeXt Factor Special

Six months or so on, I'm still rather pleased with the way the original TeXt Factor turned out – while the whole premise is clearly stupid, every time I've actually tried to finish one of the books we voted out (at least, one of the books we voted out before the point where everything got quite good) I've felt that the experience thoroughly vindicated our original decision to just stop reading the damned thing.

This was certainly true of Marked.

We voted off Marked in

the first round of the Halloween Special

for a variety of reasons, mostly that its protagonist was a horrible, horrible person and that all the stuff about the heroine's “Cherokee ancestry” felt like a big pit of terrible fail waiting to happen.

We were basically right.

Faint Praise

A friend of mine used to have a saying which he used to employ in order to acknowledge the fact that something which he felt was utterly without merit presumably had some value to other people. He would say: “For people who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing that they like.”

This is about the limit of my ability to praise the (apparently very popular) Marked. I can see how it would appeal to certain types of person in certain types of ways. Unfortunately the type of person is “horrible people” and the method of appeal is “by playing on their worst and most selfish instincts.”

Okay, this is an overstatement, but basically Marked is written in the voice (and presumably for a target audience) of a teenage girl who is unbelievably selfish, utterly judgemental, hates everybody who is not part of her immediate social circle, and who believes (it seems quite justifiably) that she is the centre of the entire universe. This is not necessarily a problem in itself – it is perfectly reasonable for books to have unsympathetic protagonists, and as an evocation of a particular kind of thoroughly horrible teenager Marked succeeds admirably – the problem is that the protagonist's repugnant qualities are routinely vindicated by the world in which she lives, and frequently lauded as virtues (particularly her harsh and incessant condemnation of girls she considers “sluts”).

Identity and Appropriation

An area of American race politics about which I know absolutely nothing, and which I would not under ideal circumstances touch with a barge pole, is the question of who is and is not entitled to legitimately identify as Native American.

To present a broad, oversimplistic view of a complicated situation, there are a lot of white people in America who unreasonably appropriate Native American culture and identity, often on the basis of a spurious blood connection (“I'm one-seventeenth Cherokee!”), people also often use this sort of iffy cultural appropriation to excuse other sorts of crappy behaviour (“I'm one-seventeenth Cherokee therefore nothing I say can ever be construed as racist”).

Where it gets more complicated (and I am aware that it gets vastly more complicated, and that this is still an oversimplification of the complexity of the whole thing) is that there are plenty of people who genuinely are “one sixteenth Cherokee” and whose claim to a Native American cultural heritage is never the less completely sound. Not all Native Americans live on reservations or run casinos. It is very tempting for people like me to assume that if somebody lives a life which is more or less the same as my own, that said person cannot be a “real” Native American – this of course is actually a form of subconscious racism, it is easy for me to assume that all Native Americans live picturebook lives of harmony with nature and genteel poverty, when in fact they're twenty-first century people just like me.

Now the thing is, I do think that the way in which “Zoey Redbird” identifies with the Cherokee people in Marked actually does fall into the category of skeevy cultural appropriation but I am very very conscious that I am in danger of dismissing somebody's real and genuine cultural identity just because they don't fit my personal stereotype of a member of their race.

So to start off with, here are some things which I don't think cause a problem, even though they might seem to.

I do not think it is a problem that Zoey passes as white. A lot of Native Americans do.

I do not think it is a problem that Zoey is essentially a normal American teenager. It is extraordinarily important to remember that Native Americans are not some kind of fantasy race, they're real people. I am absolutely certain that there are sixteen year old Cherokee girls who read Gossip Girl and had crushes on Leonardo di Caprio.

I do not think it is a problem that Zoey moves freely between two cultures, taking the elements she likes from both. A person of mixed cultural and racial heritage has a complete right to all of the elements that make up their identity, not just the minority part.

Finally, I do not think that it is a problem that, looking at the photograph in the back of the book, P.C. and Kristin Cast don't “look” Native American. This is true for two reasons. Firstly, pursuant to my first point above, it's possible that they're actually genuinely from a Native American cultural background, and just happen to have relatively pale skin. Secondly, as ever authorial intent is not a major concern. Even if P.C. And Kristin Cast are presenting a cultural identity to which they have a legitimate claim, they might still be doing it in a way which feels like or encourages appropriation of that culture.

Here are the things that do make me think that the Native American elements in Marked can be read as skeevy cultural appropriation:

Firstly, Zoey's Native American heritage is exclusively associated with magic, mysticism and the supernatural. Her one link to that part of her heritage is her Grandmother, who runs a lavender farm and is part of a long line of Cherokee wise women. Zoey is, of course, the natural heir to that power. Her Grandmother is also, for some reason, entirely au fait with and accepted at the House of Night, which is otherwise extremely dismissive of humans. Zoey's Cherokee heritage is routinely cast as part of the same world as the vampires. Although in this world the vampires are clearly the cool, sexy, interesting people and we are supposed to sympathise with them they are still ultimately not human. Although the series (being very much a teen-angst Family Romance) takes a very dim view of humans in general, that does not really make it okay to put “humans” in one box and “Native Americans” in another

On a second, related note, the spiritual beliefs of the Cherokee people (to which Zoey is heir, and for which she feels a strong affinity) are presented as compatible (and at times interchangeable) with the clearly Wiccan-derived beliefs of the House of Night. The vampyre rituals which involve drawing pentagrams, calling the corners, and raising the four elements are presented as blending seamlessly with Zoey's grandmother's traditional cultural practices, despite the fact that pentagrams and a four-element cosmology are strictly European cultural artefacts. It even declares that the Greek Goddess Nyx is one and the same as Grandmother Spider which, well I don't actually know enough about either figure to tell you the differences or similarities, but we're dealing with figures from completely different mythologies – I strongly suspect that saying “Nyx is also Grandmother Spider” on the basis of their both being female deities with an association with night is sort of like saying “Jesus is also Eros” on the basis of their being male deities who have an association with love. It all combines to create the strong impression that Marked uses Cherokee culture as a source of cool special effects and exciting mystical sounding ideas, rather than as something that real people really believe in.

The third thing that pushes my skeeve buttons regarding Zoey's Native American identification is that her “Cherokee features” are always exaggerated by her vampirism. Zoey is always at her most Cherokee when she is at her most inhuman, her most exotic, her most unnatural.

To put it another way, there is never any sense that Zoey's Cherokee heritage is just a part of her, it is never something she just takes for granted as part of her cultural background. It is always presented as something alien, exotic, and mystical. Now I recognise that this could be seen as a realistic portrayal of a sixteen year old girl. It's possible that if you were sixteen and felt like an outsider as many do, that you would fixate on a part of your background that you perceived as mysterious and exotic and would exaggerate the mystery and exoticism of it. On the other hand the rest of the world reinforces this creepy Othering of Cherokee culture – Zoey's heritage really does give her magic powers, her Grandmother obviously feels Zoey really gets it, and of course no amount of subjectivity on the part of the narrator can explain why Cherokee spiritual beliefs are suddenly so compatible with Wicca.

I've spent a really long time talking about this, which is ironic because it's not actually the thing I found the most annoying.

Ain't Shit But Ho's and Tricks

I spend a lot of time on FB dissing people for being sexist. Usually I'm on (comparatively) safe ground because the people I'm dissing are men, and usually what I'm saying is something like “I think this author is being sexist in this way, and I think I can recognise it because I think they are indulging in a sexist impulse which I sometimes recognise in myself.”

I find myself in a difficult position with Marked in that I find its portrayal of women and girls extremely troubling, but am naturally a bit leery of saying “hey, you women are writing about women wrong! Let my penis explain why!” On the other hand, the whole book is full of creepy gender-essentialism and slut-shaming and it's important to recognise that women can be sexists too.

In the first episode of the TeXt Factor Halloween Special, Kyra observed that the thing about Marked was that it really did feel like it was written by a Mom-and-Daughter team, in that it often used very teenage language to express very adult concepts. To put it another way, Zoey reads like a teenage girl who has totally internalised the preconceptions and prejudices of her slightly creepy, more-conservative-than-she-thinks-she-is, sex-negative mother.

So we keep getting lines like:

Did you know that your oldest daughter has turned into a sneaky, spoiled slut who's screwed half the football team? Kinda like those girls who have sex with everyone and think they're not going to get pregnant or a really nasty STD that eats your brains and stuff. Well, we'll see in ten years, won't we? Of course there are girls who think it's 'cool' to give guys head. Uh, they're wrong, those of us with functioning brains know it is not cool to be used like that. Tucked into her countrified jeans was a black, long-sleeved cotton blouse that had the expensive look of something you'd find at Saks or Neiman Marcus versus the cheaper see-through shirts that overpriced Abercrombie tries to make us believe aren't slutty.

And that's from the first ninety pages.

Now I don't want to get too far up on my Minority Warrior horse here, I don't want to say “this book is harmful to young women” or “this book is actively immoral” or anything but as the book progresses it does seem to send profoundly unhelpful and contradictory messages to its primary audience.

The vampyres of the House of Night have a matriarchal society (although it seems to be grounded in some distinctly patriarchal ideas), and the vast majority of the adult vampyres we encounter in the book are female, and every single one of them is drop-dead gorgeous and incredibly sexually alluring, and their sexual allure is held up as something to aspire to.

For example, here is the description of the Vampire High Priestess Neferet:

She was movie-star beautiful, Barbie beautiful. I'd never seen anyone up close who was so perfect. She had huge, almond-shaped eyes that were a deep, mossy green. Her face was an almost perfect heart and her skin was that kind of flawless creaminess that you see on TV. Her hair was a deep red – not that horrid carrot-top orange red or the washed-out blond-red but a dark, glossy auburn that fell in heavy waves well past her shoulders.

I'm breaking this up here mostly to draw attention to the next line, but while I'm adding filler text, I'll just quickly ask: what the hell is up with “almond-shaped eyes”, it's used everywhere but seriously what the hell other shape are eyes supposed to be?

Anyway, the description continues thus:

Her body was, well, perfect. She wasn't thin like the freak girls who puked and starved themselves into whatever they thought was Paris Hilton chic … This woman's body was perfect because she was strong, but curvy. And she had great boobs.

So having just spent half a page describing this woman who fits exactly into an unrealistic, unattainable beauty standard and how amazingly wonderful and gorgeous this makes her and how girls can and should aspire to look like her, she then takes a random sideswipe at girls who aspire to a slightly different beauty standard.

Now just to be clear, I am not complaining that Zoey is not in favour of anorexia. Eating disorders are bad and people who have them need help, not condemnation (I'm not going to get into the whole pro-ana thing here). But Zoey doesn't say “this woman was beautiful because she was confident in her own body, unlike those girls who feel so much pressure to conform to other people's ideas that they puke and starve themselves.” No she says as an objective statement: This Woman's Body Was Perfect. I know we don't get much detail about Neferet's figure, but we aretold that she's “Barbie beautiful” which combined with “strong but curvy” implies fairly strongly that she looks more like Christina Hendricks than Amber Riley.

When Zoey talks about “those freak girls who puked and starved themselves” it sounds a lot like as if she is criticising aims rather than methods. Certainly she is extremely critical of the (one or two) fat people she meets in the book so her issue is clearly not with people trying to lose weight. The problem with “those freak girls” is not that they're trying to make themselves thinner (that's only sensible) it's that they're doing it in order to look like Paris Hilton, instead of like a “real” woman.

I should probably take a step back here and say a couple of things (the second being, in part, a counterpoint to the first). The first thing I should say is that it is possible that the House of Night series is actually being extraordinarily subtle and sophisticated, and that all of these examples of Zoey being judgemental about other girls are going to be shown to be false and hypocritical in future volumes, but I sincerely doubt it.

This brings me to my second point, which is that I can absolutely see where a lot of the problems with this book come from. If I was a mother, trying to write a Young Adult book with the help of my teenage daughter, I would almost certainly wind up putting these kinds of messages into the book in the honest belief that I was setting a positive example for young girls. A lot of Zoey's most hateful pronouncements feel like the kinds of half-truths that a well-meaning parent would tell their daughter in order to help her more-or-less get by in the complicated world of adolescence. If you're trying to explain to your fifteen year old about oral sex, I suspect most parents given the choice between:

“It has lower risk than vaginal or anal sex, but you can still contract most sexually transmitted diseases, if you try it and find you don't like it then stop and don't let anybody make you feel you have to, on the other hand if you find you get pleasure out of it then as long as you're aware of the risks then it's alright, and doing it won't make you a bad person. And remember that just because you give a guy a blowjob it doesn't mean you have to have sex with him, but also remember that guys might not see things the same way, most importantly remember that nobody has the right to control what happens to your body except you”

and

“Girls who do that are stupid and have no self-respect.”

most would choose the latter. Most mothers, I suspect, would far rather tell their daughters that oral sex was something only bad girls did than have to have a conversation about what spunk tastes like. Then there's the risk analysis element: from a perfectly understandable perspective, if you tell your kid that it's okay to enjoy giving head, then the worst case scenario is that she dies of a sex-disease. If you tell her it's not okay to enjoy giving head, then the worst case scenario is that she misses out on something she might have found sexually fulfilling. I can absolutely see why, if you were a parent, you would want your little girl to grow up thinking like Zoey.

The problem, of course, is that it just doesn't work that way. Teaching your children to be frightened or ashamed of sex doesn't, in practice, stop them from having it (the waters are muddied here by the fact that actually a lot of teenagers – by accident or design – avoid sex anyway) what it does is make the sex they do have less safe, both physically and psychologically.

But I digress.

In the latter half of the book, most of Zoey's ire is directed at Aphrodite. To be fair, Aphrodite is a horrible person (although she's kind of made of straw – like most school-story rivals her role is to be a threat to the heroine even though the heroine is superior to her in every way). When we first meet Aphrodite, she is trying to give a guy a blowjob. This is evidence that she is a terrible person. Pretty much the whole of the rest of the book is devoted to the systematic observation that Aphrodite is evil, and therefore a whore, and therefore more evil. She pretty much never appears on the page without Zoey having some criticism of her sexual conduct: her boobs are too big, her lips are too red, she moves her hips too much when she dances.

It is worth remembering that all of this is set against the background of a supposedly matriarchal society. The book makes a great play of the fact that it is women who rule the world of the vampyres, but their matriarchal culture seems grounded in patriarchal assumptions about gender roles. So yes, the priestesses are in charge, but all of the warriors are males, because Male Vampires Are The Protectors (this is stated very explicitly, at least three times) and while the book is very big on Goddess Worship and feminine imagery and The Almighty Power of Womanhood, it does this by presenting a very specific, very conservative, and very contradictory idea of what it means to be a woman.

So all of the adult vampires are presented as beautiful and sexy and confident and powerful, but Aphrodite is condemned for being the wrong sort of beautiful and the wrong sort of sexy and the wrong sort of confident and the wrong sort of powerful. The whole book is a study in the fucked up, contradictory rules that young people, particularly young women are brought up with. You mustn't be fat, but you have to have curves. You have to be sexy, but you can't want sex. Boys have to want you, but can't think they can have you. You have to be strong and clever, but not too strong and too clever, and not too ambitious. You can be beautiful and terrible and powerful and unbeatable, but your role will always be to serve others, and no matter how much power you have, you must leave your protection in the hands of the males, because they have their role just as you have yours.

Cultural appropriation and horrible gender-fail aside, the book is also just shoddily paced. Like a depressing number of these books, the heroine is such a complete Mary Sue that the only real tension is exactly when she will employ her effectively unlimited power to solve whatever the current problem is. Marked sets up quite an interesting plotline involving students dying and coming back as evil spirits, but it only kicks off in the last third and is clearly intended as the metaplot of the entire series. So the climax of Marked is just Zoey's showdown with Aphrodite, except that Zoey has near-unlimited supernatural power, and has the actual high Priestess of Nyx on her side, so in the end you wind up feeling kind of sorry for Aphrodite who, in a certain sense, just gets bullied mercilessly by the asshole protagonist and half the teaching staff.

Indeed you can sort of see the final confrontation as a microcosm for everything that is wrong with the book. In theory, Zoey is supposed to be the plucky underdog going up against the socially and supernaturally superior Aphrodite. In fact the reverse is true. Everybody hates Aphrodite (because she's an evil bitch whore slut whore bitch hag slut whore), the entire teaching faculty and the Goddess Nyx Herself have outright stated that Zoey is all that and a bag of chips. So what casts itself as an inspiring tale of triumph over adversity is really the story of somebody with every conceivable advantage stomping over somebody who does not have those advantages. In much the same way, the book casts itself as being this subversive, anti-authoritarian text (it spends a lot of time condemning the People of the Faith for their hypocritical, controlling natures and there's a particularly galling bit where Zoey “I Hate Sluts” Redbird goes on about how much she hates closed-minded people) when it actually just reinforces a lot of deeply conservative, borderline harmful ideas.

So yeah. One to avoid maybe.Themes:

Books

Sci-fi / Fantasy

Young Adult / Children

Judging Books By Their Covers

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Melissa G.

at 17:59 on 2011-02-27Thanks for slogging through this for me, Dan! I almost want to read it for how bad I know it will be, but I can't quite manage to put my brain through such torture.

My only knowledge of the House of Night series comes from the few chapters of the fifth book that I read with my student. At this point, Zoey's special snowflake-ness is of epic proportions. She has all these tattoos now, which no one has ever had before OMGWTFBBQ!? She's so special it hurts, and not just that, it seems like she knows she's special and Better than You and thus goes around with this air of superiority.

And, dude, poor Aphrodite. It's like her character is constantly getting shat on by the author despite the fact that she is no threat at all anymore and that at this point she and Zoey are FRIENDS. She's been completely de-powered at this point (she is human now, what?), and it just seems like the author keeps taking potshots at her as she's trying desperately to crawl out of range. It's just painful to watch.

Moving on, the fifth book has a lot more sex/sexual situations in it between Zoey and Erik, and I actually found it almost too sexual for a teen book. But perhaps that's me being prude. Shrug. Might also be noteworthy to mention that Zoey lost her virginity to not-her-boyfriend because he magically seduced her or something, which is all kinds of annoying to me, because it's not HER fault she lost her virginity to another guy. I mean, god forbid she just make an actual mistake and have to take real responsibility for it. But no, we'll just make it someone else's fault.

Also from the fifth book on the subject of race fail, a character named Kramisha gets introduced. Kramisha is the very epitome of the sassy black girl stereotype. She talks with poor grammar and outdated black slang, and she's all sassy and confrontational. And you can argue that these kinds of black people do exist in real life and there's nothing inherently wrong with it, but from what I can tell, Kramisha is the only black character around so it's a little unsettling that she's so cartoonishly stereotypical.

We also have token gays!! And they spend all their time talking about being gay, and how being gay means they know how to cook, and how they watch Project Runway (because, you see, they're gay), and how they know about interior design because they're gay, and gay gay gay gay gay gay gay gay. I think you get my point. It's just a bit much. Let them have another character trait. Really, it'll be fine. Also, one of them was described as walking in the room "[screaming] like a girl" and fainting. Fantastic. This is one of those "get off my side" things, as far as I'm concerned.

Anyway, that was my rant. And granted, I haven't read much of the book (not to mention it was the fifth one) so my complaints may not be entirely grounded, but these were my impressions. And I really can't bring myself to read another word of it because it's just garbage. For so many reasons.

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Dan H

at 19:49 on 2011-02-27

At this point, Zoey's special snowflake-ness is of epic proportions. She has all these tattoos now, which no one has ever had before OMGWTFBBQ!?

Yeah, she gets a lot of those at the end of book one (tattoos seem to magically appear on Vampyres as a consequence of their utter awesomeness, although I'm not really sure it counts as a tattoo if it occurs naturally, isn't that just your skin?)

The super-specialness starts out pretty unbelievably insane in the first book and sounds like it only gets worse. In book one we discover that Zoey not only has powers of a variety which are normally only developed by adult vampires, but that her powers are also stronger and greater in number. Basically all adult vampires get a supernatural power called an "affinity", and very rarely they might get an "affinity" for one of the five elements, even more rarely they might have an "affinity" for two or more elements. Zoey of course has an affinity for all five elements (Earth, Air, Fire, Water and Spirit) already and this has NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE IN HISTORY EVER.

Moving on, the fifth book has a lot more sex/sexual situations in it between Zoey and Erik, and I actually found it almost too sexual for a teen book. But perhaps that's me being prude.

I suspect that's one of those YMMV things. I'm personally okay with sex in teen books: I mean they're already saturated in sexual imagery, and I'd kind of rather they were honest about it. Does she at least stop being so judgmental about other girls' sexual behaviour?

Might also be noteworthy to mention that Zoey lost her virginity to not-her-boyfriend because he magically seduced her or something, which is all kinds of annoying to me, because it's not HER fault she lost her virginity to another guy.

I think what would annoy me more in this situation would be if she lost her virginity to another guy because of being magically seduced, and the book didn't flag up that this was, y'know, date rape. Annoying as "I cheated on my boyfriend but it is okay because it was MAGIC" is, it's somewhat less annoying than "I was magically coerced into having sex with a guy, and the only thing that matters about this fact is that it was unfair to my boyfriend because he didn't get to take my virginity."

Also from the fifth book on the subject of race fail, a character named Kramisha gets introduced. Kramisha is the very epitome of the sassy black girl stereotype ... from what I can tell, Kramisha is the only black character around so it's a little unsettling that she's so cartoonishly stereotypical.

I believe that Shaunee (if she's still in it) is black as well, as is one of Aphrodite's minions (although I believe the text describes her as "obviously mixed" - because you can totally tell whether somebody is mixed-race just by looking at them).

We also have token gays!!

Ah, Token Gay is also in the first book (Damien, yeah). To be fair they get some points for allowing the guy to have an actual relationship, although they lose them again for taking the "gays = women (= gender-essentialist stereotypes of feminine behaviour)" angle.

I suspect that a lot of the tokenism actually comes about as a result of everybody except Zoey being an entirely one-dimensional character who exists solely to tell her how awesome she is (or to tell her that she isn't awesome and be proven TOTALLY WRONG).

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Melissa G.

at 20:57 on 2011-02-27

The super-specialness starts out pretty unbelievably insane in the first book and sounds like it only gets worse.

Yeah, I forgot to mention the bit where her dream with Kalona (which is not really a dream) tells us that she's the reincarnated form of Kalona's lover/person who sealed him away. The Mary Sue-ness is mind-boggling.

Does she at least stop being so judgmental about other girls' sexual behaviour?

I didn't notice anything blatant, but I wasn't really looking for it. And I don't feel like going back and checking. :-)

I think what would annoy me more in this situation would be if she lost her virginity to another guy because of being magically seduced, and the book didn't flag up that this was, y'know, date rape.

I'm not sure how it was handled exactly because it happened in the book previous to the one I was reading. But I think it was considered to be sort of date rapey. All I know is that's why she and her boyfriend broke up, and it's made her feel sort of hesitant about having sex again.

I think the sex aspect might have bothered me more because it sounds like an adult writing a sex scene in an adult way that just happens to have teenagers in it. If that makes sense. It felt much like romance novel writing, which there isn't anything wrong with but it turns the sexual situations into fantasies rather than what I would feel is a realistic description of a teenage relationship. But as you said, YMMV.

I believe that Shaunee (if she's still in it) is black as well,

Oh, right, I forgot about her! Fair point. The fifth book kind of just kept lumping new characters and old characters on me from the second chapter on so it was hard to keep them all straight.

Yes. This. So much.

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Dan H

at 21:59 on 2011-02-27

I don't think Kalona's shown up yet.

I think the sex aspect might have bothered me more because it sounds like an adult writing a sex scene in an adult way that just happens to have teenagers in it.

I think I see what you're saying, although I doubt I'll read further to see for myself.

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Melissa G.

at 22:05 on 2011-02-27

I don't think Kalona's shown up yet

Kalona is a scary powerful God-like dude that got released in the fourth book. He's the big bad for the rest of the series, I think, and of course he's obsessed with Zoey.

Apologies for spoilers, but I don't think anyone cares?

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Wardog

at 11:24 on 2011-03-01If anything this review just validates our joint decision NOT TO READ THE DAMN THING.

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Robinson L

at 21:06 on 2011-03-25

If I was a mother, trying to write a Young Adult book with the help of my teenage daughter, I would almost certainly wind up putting these kinds of messages into the book in the honest belief that I was setting a positive example for young girls.

You know, the more I grow up, the more I fortunate my sisters and I are to have such freaking amazing parents.

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#Ferretbrain #Marked #Dan H #The House of Night

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jerseydeanne · 8 years

Text

romance scam

did some research and found some sources and I think I came up with a theory. I remembered Catfish Dev once talking about how the catfish “mirrors” it victims to manipulated them and create an instant sense of intimacy. The catfish in question was targeting a Louisiana soldier in Afghanistan and she’d stolen FB photos from a New Orleans girl with a brother in the Army, so she had all of these pics of a cute blonde in Saints jerseys and Army shirts posing all over New Orleans on her fake accounts. Dev said that that built an instant rapport with her victim. It reminded him of home and made it look like they had all this stuff in common and were soulmates and stuff. That reminded me of Meg’s IG and all the bracelet and hat crap. So I started to wonder if this was all a scam. Now, when I started doing research I expected the Harkle romance to have some of the aspects of a classic romance scam, but I was bowled over when I realized that Harkle followed the exact same steps. It wasn’t just “kinda like” a scam. It was exactly like a scam. Here are my sources. [color=#0e6c70]https://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/media/people/monica-whitty/Whitty_romance_scam_report.pdf[/color] [color=#0e6c70]http://www2.le.ac.uk/departments/media/people/monica-whitty/Anatomy%20of%20the%20romance%20scam_Whitty_Security%20Journal.pdf[/color] How Harry Fell in Love with a Con Artist Harry fits the victim profile: good-natured, non-confrontational, prior abuse, lonely. Extroverts are more vulnerable to these scams as are persons with “agreeable” personality profiles. Romantics and individuals who are thrill or sensation seekers (both of which fit Harry to a “t”) are also very vulnerable. In general the victim is “extremely motivated” to find love. This has been a running theme through Harry;s profiles. NYC also said that he’d broken up with a long-term girlfriend in March/April. So that would also fit. Men who suffer from mental illness are particularly vulnerable, and Harry has been pretty open about his PTSD issues. So he was pretty much a perfect victim. You’d think someone like Harry would be protected from this kind of thing but apparently not. Stage 1 of the scam is building the profile to attract the victim. Meghan didn’t build a fake profile but she adjusted her own and put up the Trudeau and Africa stuff, plus London with his friends (Misha, Markus, Violet), plus the hat and bracelets, and the Africa phone case and his mom’s watch. This stage can be as short as a month! That’s bizarre. In her case it was all through the summer. So he’s in Africa, alone, working on his African Parks stuff and she’s texting and posting stuff about elephants, posing all over Europe with his friends in his hat and bracelet, and generally reeling him him. It’s worth noting that she was posting a LOT during the summer like twice or thrice her usual rate of posting. (ETA: This is where I think she got the bracelet. It’s the same clasp and the shop owner takes custom orders in Etsy. https://www.beadedmoonbeams.com/shop/18678735/seed-bead-bracelets) This technique is called “mirroring.” Basically you imitate your victim (clothes, mannerism, way of speaking) to establish a bond. http://www.loveadvice.com/ARTICLES/Mirror_g.HTM One of the many things I found confusing in this affair was how Meg’s clothes changed. Her prior style was very polished and ladylike, very much like Rachel Zane’s. Once she started dating Harry, however, her style changed form skirts and dresses to raggedy jeans, blue men’s shirts, beanies, baseball caps and even puffy jackets. Does that sound like anyone we know? Yep, she was mirroring. Even the tabs noticed. http://www.etonline.com/news/205339_prince_harry_and_meghan_markle_are_beanie_boo_first_photo_together/ She even changed the way she “spoke,” using words like “darling” in all her posts. Remember that interview where she said that she loved how Brit men called women “darling”? Yep, more mirroring. The article says that it only takes a couple of weeks and several victims speak of how the scammer sent them love poems and crap. Guess what Megs posted in August along with the hat, bracelet, his mom’s watch and the Africa phone case? Love poems. https://www.instagram.com/p/BJOfic8gdJF/?taken-by=meghanmarkle Stage 2 is “grooming.” She “falls in love” in September, very intense with lots of going back and forth. This apparently happens within a week or a couple of weeks so that fits. This is where the victim is pumped for info. This part of the relationship is described as “very therapeutic.” The victim feels understood. He probably told her everything about his family and insecurities and whatnot during this period. This is described as a “hyperpersonal relationship.” It’s like the Matrix and feels more real than a normal relationship, namely because, as in Catfish, the person doesn’t really exist. You’re in love with a construct so it’s more “perfect” than any real relationship could be. The report says that “the victims often stated that they felt closer to the fictitious relationship than any other previous relationship.” This is a running theme through Meg’s PR “they feel like they’ve known each other a long time,” “it feels natural,” etc… That’s the manipulation right there. The Witting paper says: The victims in both studies claimed during this stage, to have self-disclosed very intimate details about their life history, often telling the scammer more about themselves than they have disclosed to any other. I was surprised to hear that the grooming can be so effective that victims start considering marriage at this stage. Witting says: It is during this stage that the scammer claims to love the victim and hopes for a committed, permanent relationship. The victim also often claimed to have fallen in love with the criminal or was very committed to the possibility of spending the rest of their lives with them (often making declarations of their love and commitment to family and friends). His friends must have thought he’d gone nuts. It’s hard to believe that someone would be willing to make a lifelong commitment based on a bunch of IG posts and some texting, but this is apparently quite common. Stage 3 is the “sting.” There’s a small “ask” for money to test the waters. This is where the victim commits to the scam. In this case, that would be the plane ticket NYC says he bought in September. That was the first “dirty weekend” mentioned by we103. They stayed in and ordered food and she didn’t ask for much more. This meet doesn’t even show up on her IG. She gives no sign that she’s in London. She’s establishing trust at this point. This is called the “foot-in-the-door” technique. I can’t believe this is so common that it actually has a name. Bizarre. This is a big step because once the victim fulfills the ask, they are, so to speak, “in the bag.” Apparently, we all have a psychological need to see ourselves as “consistent” so once the victim gives even a small amount he or she is conditioned to give more. That’s why the ask is usually small. It’s just the first step. Witting says In our victims’ cases there is more than consistency that is the pull, but also the desire to maintain their relationships. Moreover, compliance with the first request (an investment in the relationship) could be understood to signify a greater commitment to the relationship, making it more difficult to say no to further requests. When I NYC first said that he bought her a ticket I literally laughed out loud because Harry is a famous cheapskate. Heck, Cressie supposedly broke up with him because he would pay her ticket for Pelly’s wedding. Now here he is paying for a girl he’s shagged once? But it fits the romance scam pattern and, I think, is indicative of how successful Meg’s social media courtship was. At the same time Meg’s in London she’s also leaking the relationship through Markus and Violet. They are just rumors at this point, but she put up Violet’s pics on her Insta in June and Misha’s pics in July and August so the reporters know she has contacts and the rumors may be legit. Then she comes back to Toronto (more pics with Trudeau!) and there’s more texting and another “bigger” ask. The scammer is constantly trying to escalate and the money asks get bigger as they try to gauge how susceptible is the victim. In this case, however, she’s not looking for financial capital. She wants fame and social capital so she asks to be taken to places so she can meet people. That’s October. He takes her around and introduces her to his friends. At this stage she’s already leaked the relationship and the outings give her an opportunity to prove to the reporters that the rumors are real. She puts up Arthur’s dog’s pic on Insta for further “proof.” When she gets word that the relationship is going to leak to returns to Toronto and puts up the “how to be both” post and some Rwanda pics. Later she gets impatient and puts up the bracelet pic. When the Tominey article finally breaks she puts up the bananas and the teapot. Then pap walk, promo, blah, blah, blah… Stage 4 is the “crisis.” That’s when the scammer makes up an emergency (sick kid, kidnapping, accident, whatever) and asks the victim for help, usually it’s a large amount of money but in his case it was the social validation. This is where she calls KP in a panic and lies about the reporters breaking into her home and the nightly legal battles. So she gets the statement and St. Lucia and whatnot. The crisis is carefully crafted to appeal to the victim (sick child if the victim has kids, elderly parent if the victim is a caretaker, immigration emergency if the victim is an immigrant, etc…) This “crisis” was designed for Harry who was raised to fear and loathe reporters and probably blames them for his mother’s death. Note the fact that the KP statement mentions that her mom was harassed in her car. That wasn’t by accident. Note that she caused all of the panic by posting the spooning bananas pic and the puzzle pic and spreading rumors that Harry was at her house. There would’ve been no paparazzi frenzy around her place if she hadn’t spread those rumors through a Toronto reporter’s tweet (remember, Jess’s husband is a Toronto gossip journalist). She caused the “crisis” herself. https://twitter.com/jccordero28/status/793614962098864129 There’s lots of discussion in the articles about how the scammers use “secondary characters” like lawyers and police to build up the scam. She did the same thing with the Toronto police, the reporters, and the Roth lawyers. They were real but she exaggerated them. Her PR people were probably used in this way too. She also used bodyguards as props in her first pap walk. More theatre. They keep playing up this stage and getting more and more. I can see her doing that “they don’t believe me I need…” “They’re still bullying me I need…"The victim is so committed at this point that they keep giving and giving. Usually they don’t get everything they ask for and they modify the request. That’s apparently the "door-in-face-technique.” According to NYC that’s what happened with Sandringham. She didn’t get to meet the Queen obviously but she got a London trip as a “modified” ask. These were the fights during the Caribbean tour. Finally he gives in and hands her St. Lucia, the tree-trimming story, theater pap walk, probably the Soho pap walk, a promised vacation…she got tons of stuff. Stage 5 is sexual abuse. This part surprised me. Apparently, victims are sometimes asked to take naked pics or to put themselves in compromising positions so they can be blackmailed later. I guess that’s what happened here. Hard to believe he was that stupid but apparently it’s a tried and true technique. Although it may not be sex at all. According to NYC she took pictures of Nottingham Cottage and KP during her December trip and he found out and freaked. That may be compromising enough and would fit the “romance scam” pattern. But given that the article mentions nude pics, that makes me wonder about those “Nott Cott” pics that supposedly caused the breakup. Maybe there’s more than furniture and drapes in those pics. Nude pics would also explain why the BRF have been so careful in handling her. Stage 6 is the revelation which can be very traumatic. This was the Xmas fight and explains how he looked at the engagement. It’s apparently devastating and akin to losing a loved one (the person who never existed). The symptoms are similar to sexual abuse. That explains why he looks so awful. According to the article, the “scam gradually comes to an end when the victim focuses less on rewarding aspects of the message and visceral cues and more on external cognitive cues (provided by law enforcement and loved ones).” That would be his family freaking out about what he’d done and showing him the file they’d gathered on Megs. Also, the topless photos came out on the day of the Queen’s lunch. That probably helped bring him back to reality. I know she told everyone they weren’t of her, but Harry knows what she looks like naked. Just sayin’. I think it’s interesting that once she was in London with him, the first thing they did was cut off her social media access. NYC even hinted that they may have hacked her IG account. Harry’s blocking her after NYE is also food for thought. Most of her manipulation was through social media. I think they cut off her influence when they took that away from her. Sometimes they’re in denial and vulnerable to a second wave of the scam. I think that’s what NYC is afraid of. I also think that’s why she remained in London, pretending to live in KP and putting out articles about India and Norway and Barbour and wellies. She was doing some more mirroring, hoping to reestablish a connection. Hopefully that didn’t work and she finally gave up and returned to Toronto. Conclusion So there it is. I’m still fairly attached to my #bananaspandexsuitorgyblackmail theory, but I do find this very persuasive. I have links for most of this stuff. I didn’t put them in because that would make this even longer, but if you have any questions, I’d be happy to provide supporting documentation.

Last Edited By: aspidistra3 hours ago. Edited 3 times

This is amazing how this was put together, blows my mind away, we are dealing with a potentially dangerous person, they have given us fair warning, the game is afoot.

#jerseydeanne bunny boiler lunatic RPO ph #submission

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katharkness · 7 years

Text

Magic on the High Seas Notes

This story draws on background material from both JK Rowling’s Wizarding World and events in real life history. This post gives some of the details and sources I used. Beneath the cut is the general trigger/squick warning for the story, which is also a spoiler. Please use your own judgement in proceeding.

This story is set between the 12th and 19th April 1912, largely aboard the RMS Titanic. The ship struck an iceberg, foundered and sunk at approximately 02:20 am on the 15th April. Due to the speed of the sinking, an insufficient number of lifeboats, a lack of understanding of the urgency of the situation and poor emergency management and training, approximately fifteen hundred people died, including some of my minor characters.

Note 1: Newt travels Second Class for privacy and has a single room. Titanic didn’t sell any Second Class rooms as single, but she was under capacity for her first and only voyage. According to one surviving second class passenger, he got a room to himself due to this.

Note 2: Newt’s case has a rope ladder here. In the film Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, it is a staircase formed from horizontal slats with a diagonal in the centre.

Note 3: According to the film FBAWTFT, Pickett started travelling in Newt’s pocket due to needing body heat to get over a cold.

Note 4: According to the textbook of Fantastic Beasts, nifflers live in lairs up to twenty feet below the surface. The film shows the niffler in a treasure-filled nest at ground level.

Note 5: I’ve borrowed the niffler’s backstory from another story and author, but I can’t remember who. If it’s you, kudos.

Note 6: The Titanic almost crashed into the SS City of New York on her way out of Southampton and was delayed leaving by an hour. Luckily, Newt is antisocial.

Note 7: It was common for men and women to separate to their own pursuits after dinner. For that reason, there were different social rooms offered to different genders.

Note 8: According to the FB textbook, kelpies are a kind of British and Irish water demon. Lobalugs are a venomous creature found on the bottom of the North Sea. Shrake are fish covered in spines that live in the Atlantic Ocean. Sea serpents are found in the Atlantic, Pacific and Mediterranean, and hippocampuses are a fish-horse hybrid creature usually found in the Mediterranean, although one was caught by merpeople off the shores of Scotland in 1949.

Note 9: Titanic had four promenades on each side of the Boat Deck, for Second Class, the engineers, First Class and the officers. All except the First Class promenade were lined with lifeboats. Social walking, or “promenading”, was very popular, especially for getting to know people.

Note 10: A fwooper is a brightly coloured African bird whose song is initially pleasurable but will eventually drive the listener to insanity.

Note 11: I made up the ICW universal beast permit, and any and all permits used by MACUSA previous to the outlawing of private beast ownership.

Note 12: Newt’s case has a switch labelled “Muggle Worthy”. If he made it himself, why would he have a switch like that labelled so blatantly? This suggests to me that he bought and adapted it.

Note 13: According to the Fantastic Beasts textbook, crup tails are removed with a painless severing charm at between six and eight weeks of age.

Note 14: I borrowed AWLs. Again, I can’t remember who from. Considering Newt’s complaining about wizards’ lack of appreciation for beasts, it seems reasonable that Care might not be offered to NEWT level.

Note 15: We still don’t know exactly what happened to end Newt’s Hogwarts career, so I get to play with it.

Note 16: Is there a Beast Division at MACUSA? There’s regulations regarding beast control in the Statute, so there’s probably something.

Note 17: MACUSA in particular keeps tabs on their resident magicals, so they probably keep an eye on immigration, and assist where necessary. Magic evens out quality of life worldwide, I should think, so I doubt there are too many economic migrants. Therefore, there shouldn’t be the same fear of migrants, and the governments would be more friendly.

Note 18: What do diagnostic charms look like? Who knows.

Note 19: Salamanders seem like a nice little pet for Newt, but open fires near trees are dodgy. The containment barriers and holding cells? Mine. The textbook doesn’t say much about the origin of salamanders, but ashwinders spontaneously generate in magical fires so I didn’t want to do that and adopted the technique for birthing a basilisk instead.

Note 20: According to Pottermore’s article on wand woods, bowtruckles are a useful indicator of whether or not a tree is of wand quality, but can also pose a danger when collecting wood. This was what led me to the tree-theft story, which I have not borrowed from anyone.

Note 21: The crup and the puffskeins? All mine.

Note 22: Why not bring in Goldsteins, Kowalskis and Bareboneses? The ages aren’t too bad compared to the film, which is set fourteen years later. The only one whose age really doesn’t fit is Modesty.

Note 23: You never actually hear about non-magical children of mixed blood marriages, but really it should happen. And that kind of problem seems like a reasonable reason to emigrate.

Note 24: Considering Mary Lou’s behaviour in the film, it seems probable that she’d be very conflicted about her own children being magical.

Note 25: It’s suspected that Hermione Granger’s cat Crookshanks is a kneazle/cat crossbreed.

Note 26: History of Magical America and Scourer descendants all from Pottermore. MACUSA initially being called MACA is mine.

Note 27: What does MACUSA do with no-maj-born’s families? I can’t remember who came up with double-cross contracts, but kudos.

Note 28: RL animal conservation wasn’t really a thing in 1912.

Note 29: The diet of nifflers had never actually been revealed.

Note 30: Puppy love between Jacob and Queenie. Why not?

Note 31: What we know of Theseus Scamander is that he is a war hero. Super-attentive auror is fanon, but awesome.

Note 32: Young adults being drunk in charge of wands is a recipe for disaster. All incidents of my own creation. In the incident where the Queen is thrown from her throne, that would be Queen Victoria.

Note 33: Mrs Scamander the hippogriff breeder is established in the “About the Author” of the textbook Fantastic Beasts.

Note 34: Modifying potions to work on creatures is something Newt would love. As mentioned earlier, the presence of bowtruckles is useful for wand makers, although this method of utilising them would clearly prove more trouble than it was worth. All my own creation.

Note 35: Newt is so Pickett’s home tree, so why not play with that?

Note 36: Women’s lib is a very new concept historically speaking, so Mary Lou Barebone quite naturally has what we would term “old-fashioned views”. However, there was a female Chief of the Wizard’s Council (which preceded the Ministry of Magic) as far back as the fourteenth or fifteenth century (See “What is a Beast?” in the textbook Fantastic Beasts.)

Note 37: Why did Newt never place a tracker on his niffler?

Note 38: Anti-Semitism was very common and largely socially acceptable until the 1940s. But trying to argue against Jews for biblical reasons is stupid.

Note 39: In Catholic society, which was virtually all of Europe until the Reformation in the 1500s, being excommunicated was and still is a Big Thing. It would basically exclude you from society. But if you’re not Catholic, and aren’t living in a Catholic society, it’s probably meaningless. The Statute of Secrecy was first signed in 1689, so I’ve improvised on the Wizarding relationship with the Church.

Note 40: Ruler of France in 1942? Reference to Hitler.

Note 41: The Entente Cordiale was an agreement between Britain and France that was expanded to include Russia in the Triple Entente. The Entente forced Germany to back off during two Moroccan Crises in the build-up to the First World War, and the formation of opposing power blocks directly caused the war. The Kaiser was the Emperor of Germany until he was ousted in 1918. France and Germany had a deep enmity.

Note 42: Jervis the jarvey is a creation of mine to help explain the expelling incident. I can see no way that he wouldn’t be put down for injuring a pureblood.

Note 43: Titanic struck the iceberg at 23:39 on Sunday night. Most of those aboard felt it as a jolt to one degree or another. Only those in close proximity registered anything more. It twenty-five minutes before the captain ordered the passengers mustered.

Note 44: The passengers weren’t told that the ship was sinking in order to avoid panic. The First Class stewards were able to give a lot of aid to their charges, having fewer charges per steward than Second or Third Class stewards.

Note 45: Some passengers played football (soccer) with ice chunks on deck. I say again, the passengers weren’t told the severity of the situation.

Note 46: The ship listed due to the water coming in on one side.

Note 47: The engines roared due to venting steam as the engineers tried to pump out water and keep the electricity generators going.

Note 48: The first boat, Boat 7, was lowered at 00:40, from the starboard side. The starboard boats were under the supervision of First Officer William Murdoch. Murdoch operated a “women and children first” policy, but had problems finding people willing to get into the boats. There was also a fear among the crew that the boats couldn’t be safely lowered while fully loaded, and the crew did not know how quick the ship would sink. According to Second Officer Charles Lightoller, who was the highest ranking surviving officer, if they’d known the danger, he “would have taken more risks”. Lifeboats were not expected to keep the entire ship’s complement afloat at once, so the crew did not think to try.

Note 49: Third Class passengers were largely kept segregated from the other passengers due to immigration procedures. There were some gates that got locked and impeded passenger progress. For this reason, there were proportionally fewer Third Class survivors than first or second. However, there was no intentional delaying of these passengers, and one steward in particular led several groups of passengers through the ship’s corridors to the Boat Deck. But many Third Class passengers were also stymied by a lack of English, meaning they didn’t understand what the stewards were telling them.

Note 50: Titanic had a ship’s cat named Jenny, who gave birth to four kittens a week before leaving Southampton. According to stewardess Violet Jessop, she kept the kittens in the galley and was fed scraps. One cabin boy claimed he’d seen Jenny and her kittens leave the ship before starting the mid-Atlantic leg of the voyage, but that seems more like wishful thinking.

Note 51: According to JK Rowling, Grindelwald prevented Queenie and other legilimens revealing him via Occlumency. Suddenly not being able to read someone would be suspicious, so I think it likely Percival also had some skill in the mental arts.

Note 52: The latest theory on the exact sinking of the Titanic is that she broke prematurely and only began her final plunge after breaking. This is backed up by both an examination of a portion of the wreck’s keel and by various documents shipbuilding company Harland and Wolff produced in an attempt to work out how she sank. These two sources reached their conclusions independently; Harland and Wolff did not have access to the wreck and the naval architect who examined the wreck did not know of the existence of the Harland and Wolff documents. Harland and Wolff also knew of structural damage to Titanic’s earlier sister ship Olympic which had pointed to some disturbing weaknesses in the ship’s superstructure. Titanic was given some modifications to try to counter the weakness, but the other sister ship Britannic, launched 1914 and sunk by a mine in 1916, shows signs of a major redesign. There were probably no more than two or three people aboard Titanic at the time of her sinking who knew of her weaknesses: Thomas Andrews the ship designer; Edward Smith the Captain (who appears to have been paralysed by the magnitude of the disaster and as a result gave completely inadequate direction); and J. Bruce Ismay, the ship’s owner (who, judging by his testimony at the Senate’s Inquiry and reported behaviour after the sinking, appears to have been in emotional shock). Of these three, Bruce Ismay was the only one to survive. The rest of the crew claimed they did not think the ship would go down before the rescue ship arrived and appear to have acted accordingly.

Note 53: Those who were below deck when the ship sank would have been killed by the increasing pressure underwater fairly quickly. Those in the water mostly died slowly of hypothermia, although some would have died of the resultant cardiac shock within minutes. Very few are thought to have drowned due to the wide availability of life belts.

Note 54: Mary Lou Barebone has great faith in the Bible, and is also being torn between religious conviction and duty to her children. It’s not unknown to put a life-or-death situation in God’s hands.

Note 55: Why did both Goldsteins stay behind? Partly for plot reasons, but also because people can be irrational, especially when faced with death.

Note 56: A mother committing murder-suicide is usually caused by or related to post-partum depression, but it happens.

Note 57: Is it more morally correct to prevent someone from committing suicide, or to let them? I’m not a philosopher.

Note 58: This boat is Boat 14. It’s loading was supervised by Chief Mate Henry Wilde and Charles Lightoller. Lightoller was in charge of loading the lifeboats on the port side and operated a “women and children only” policy. Captain Smith’s exact order was to “put the women and children in the boats and lower away” and as said earlier, he offered very little leadership, which resulted in Lightoller and Murdoch interpreting the order differently. He also had to be asked by Lightoller if they should put people in the life boats. Wilde and Lightoller were assisted in loading Boat 14 by Fifth Officer Lowe, who finished loading and took charge of the boat after Wilde and Lightoller moved on to another boat. It is reasonably well reported that Lightoller allowed Canadian yachtsman Major Arthur Peuchen to board a boat to assist the quartermaster and single crewman in handling the boat (Lightoller later testified that he operated a policy of one man in charge and two assisting). This was the only example of Lightoller allowing a man into a boat; however, after the departure of Wilde and Lightoller, Lowe took a racket champion from England called C. Williams to help handle the boat. I let Percival take Mr Williams’ place for the sake of the story. It’s also reported that the first signs of panic were as Boat 14 was lowered. Lowe was forced to fire several shots and evicted a young man who jumped into the boat as it was being lowered. However, all three details were absent from Lowe’s testimony at the Senate Inquiry and therefore may well be false or have been committed by someone else.

Note 59: The boats had rowing positions for both facing towards the destination and facing away. Notably, Bruce Ismay rowed with his back to the sinking ship and couldn’t bear to see her final demise.

Note 60: Lowe gathered together five boats: his own 14, 10, 12, another boat he never got that number of, and a collapsible I believe to be Collapsible C due to Lowe meeting up with D and A later, and B being upside down.

Note 61: Lowe defended his decision to wait for the cries to thin out on the basis that if he went into a mass of sixteen hundred people his boat would be overturned. While the men on the Inquiry board weren’t impressed, Boat 14 was the only one that returned to the site to rescue survivors. All the other boats had either passengers or crew refusing to go back.

Note 62: Lowe found an Italian man in his boat wearing a woman’s shawl and, he presumed, skirts. He “caught hold of him and pitched him in” to “the fore part of the boat in which I transferred my passengers”, “because he was not worthy of being handled better”, as Lowe described in his testimony.

Note 63: The four men Lowe pulled from the water were the steward Harold Phillimore, the first class passenger William Fisher Hoyt, the third class passenger Fang Lang and a fourth unknown person, possibly the second class passenger Emilio Ilario Giuseppe Portaluppi. I have substituted Portaluppi with Newt.

Note 64: Captain Arthur Rostron, captain of the Carpathis who came to Titanic’s rescue, order rockets fired from his ship at 02:45 and every quarter hour afterwards. Carpathia arrived at about 04:00, around an hour and forty minutes after Titanic went under.

Note 65: According to Lowe’s testimony, he was sailing and 4 or 5, maybe 6 knots. He thought Collapsible D looked rather sorry and took her in tow. He considered cutting D loose to get to Collapsible A faster as she was in a worse plight than D. When Lowe said he picked up passengers from a sinking collapsible, he was specifically asked if it was upturned, as Collapsible B had floated off upside down. This one was occupied by a number of people, and Officer Lightoller directed the occupants to keep it afloat until another boat rescued them.

Note 66: According to Rostron, boatswains’ chairs, pilot ladders and canvas ask bags were used to get survivors onto Carpathia. He also gave instructions for his stewards to assist Titanic survivors in various ways, such as providing hot tea, coffee and soup, having doctors ready, and preparing to get the names of survivors.

Note 67: We don’t know what Seraphina Piquery did before she became President of MACUSA. I’ve seen her portrayed as Director of Magical Security a few times, and decided to do something different. She has the same job in America as Barty Crouch did in Britain at the time of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

Note 68: The records usually used for immigration purposes were the passenger manifests, which went down with Titanic. Carpathia’s purser did his best to recreate the records, but by-and-large the immigration inspectors were unusually lenient. Ellis Island immigration centre was closed for the night by the time Carpathia arrived, so procedures were undertaken over several days. Carpathia would, technically, have been liable for the lack of documents as she was the ship bringing in the immigrants. As she was owned by Cunard while Titanic was owned by White Star, there were issues of who should pay any and all charges owed. Due to the exceptional circumstances, there was leniency, and Cunard was never charged for the lack of documents. (Carpathia had actually left New York for the Mediterranean a few days before going to Titanic’s rescue, and had to do a U-turn to deliver the survivors to New York.)

Note 69: I imagine non-Caucasian witches and wizards would have used glamours to disguise their ethnicity in large parts of America, especially when going about official or semi-official business in places with a large concentration of Caucasians.

Note 70: I made up a load of officials.

Note 71: Hippogriff OC. It’s widely believed that Artemis and Theseus were hippogriffs that Newt and Theseus were named after (Newt’s full name is Newton Artemis Fido Scamander). Laertes is the name of Odysseus’ father, who was one of Jason’s Argonauts.

I did gather a lot more information on the Titanic, but I didn’t use more. My main sources were Wikipedia, the transcripts of the US Senate Inquiry and the book Titanic’s Last Secrets: The Further Adventures of the Shadow Divers by Brad Matsen (which is actually non-fiction, no matter what it sounds like). I was also, to a degree, inspired by the film A Night To Remember, which is considered the most historically accurate film of the sinking. It’s available on YouTube, and I heartily recommend it. Just don’t be put off by it being in black and white.

#Fanfiction #Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them #Magic on the High Seas

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johnmuffus · 5 years

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Team New Rich Mastermind Review

Team New Rich Mastermind Review (Richard Louie Course)

Today, we’ll review 2 training programs based around the eCommerce business model. Both courses are sold under the Team New Rich Mastermind brand. I’ll go through both programs to help you decide whether the $1,497 and $4,997 price tags meet the value offered.

Clearly, these aren’t particularly accessible courses, so it’s great that you came here before making a choice.

I’ll give you my final verdict at the end, but I’d recommend you read the full review to strengthen your choice.

Who’s the author?

Richard is a teenager entrepreneur mostly focused on eCommerce. He’s been quite a common sight in many YouTube videos and articles covering the online success he’s seemingly found with dropshipping. There’s an interview with Graham Stephen, and the title stated he makes $100,000 every month; the video has almost 200,000 views.

Richard started out as an entrepreneur when he was 16, and he’s delved into 3 different fields closely tied: social media marketing, eCommerce, and real estate.

He says he’s responsible for generating nearly $4 million for his clients using nothing but Facebook Ads, and his monthly eCommerce revenue seems to be around $40,000 monthly, according to different sources.

Richard’s channel isn’t really large, with only nearing 9,000 subscribers, and he seems not to publish a lot lately. Most of his content was from 2017, and it covers the usual eCom topics: strategies and tips.

You can also find him on Instagram as @richardjordan. His account has over 20,000 followers, yet he’s also really absent from it, with just a couple dozens of posts, and it’s the same as other gurus: luxurious lifestyle photos.

About the brand

The Team New Rich Mastermind name is actually the brand used by Richard for selling his courses. There are two right now: foundational and a “high level” marketing guide.

You can access both from the brand’s page on Teachables, where you also pay and access the course.

According to the sales page, you should watch the Foundational course first, so they seem to be developed as 2-part training. In other words, the idea is that you get both courses (by paying $6494).

Let’s go into them.

Foundational

The first course is all about teaching you a strategy used by Richard for scaling a store all the way to $200,000 every month. It gives you the basics before going into how to advertise your products.

You get 6 modules totaling 20 videos as well as downloadable resources that complement the content in the main course.

Content

The first module is about setting up your store. You learn how to create a Shopify store, an LLC, accessing one of the themes recommended by Richard, and linking your store to your domain.

Clicking the free trial URL provided in the video leads you through Richard’s affiliate link to Shopify, which nets him a commission when you build your store. He’s definitely serious about squeezing as much money as he can.

After you’re done with the first module, you go into researching your product and niche as well as your audience. It’s just three videos, and they focus on how you can find the best products, which apps you should integrate into your store, and why your profit margins are important (I doubt anyone doesn’t know why, though).

Module 3 introduces you to Facebook Ads with seven videos. The average is about 5 minutes, and they cover how to configure your pixel, researching your products and clients, how to properly set up your ads, reading analytics, scaling, and which metrics tell you to kill a failing ad.

The 4th module builds on the previous one, and you learn about a PPE method (that’s Pay Per Engagement, by the way) that you can convert into your website conversion ad, he also explains how to do so. You’re also advised to keep an open mind while testing, how to properly use breakdowns, and an explanation of the conversion window and how you can exploit it.

The last real module touches on email marketing. It starts out by telling you what this method is, and he then introduces 2 tools you should use: Klaviyo and Recard. Richard closes the course with a video covering different email sequences for you to imitate and integrate into your store; just don’t do it exactly like it’s shown.

There’s a “special” module after that, but it’s just Richard throwing you some links to his social media and a story of how a student of his overcame the wish to give up. It’s a pretty useless module, but the story was entertaining.

As such, this course is just a brief introduction to how to set up your store, research products, and running your marketing via Facebook Ads and emails.

Richard’s sales page does say that he’ll keep adding content to the course with time, but it doesn’t mention when or how frequent this will happen, nor how much content he’s really going to ad. However, Richard expressed he’s probably going to add content learned from taking other courses from similar gurus, so you can expect him to imitate a lot of subpar classes.

High Level eCommerce Marketing

The premium course is the second option, and you’ll be paying almost $5,000 if you decide to go with it, so make sure you have plenty of funds to cover both the course and the methods he teaches you.

The course aims towards Shopify Facebook Ads. The sales page says you’ll receive “heavy” and advance understanding about Facebook’s algorithm as well as pixel, but let’s see if he actually means something by that.

There are 7 modules with about 27 videos spread among them. You also have access to 25 different files for you to download to complement the main content.

Content

The course opens up by offering you a few themes and templates (already coded) that you can use, but don’t use them as is since anyone with access to the course (if they actually chose to pay such a high amount) is probably using the same.

The Shopify free trial affiliate link makes a second appearance here, but I’m not sure why since this course is supposed to be for advanced members or people who completed the previous class.

The next module gives you a research checklist, a strategy for testing your products, and a section explaining the process for hiring private charter flights at low costs. However, do note that’s not really necessary for your eCommerce, so feel free to save the money.

The 3rd module gives you access to what Richard calls “Mastermind Sessions”. It’s the biggest section in the program by far, but it’s yet more content for beginners: how to set up a high conversion store, strategies for finding products, how to execute the methods, recommended apps, starting out Facebook Ads, setting up your pixel, why email marketing is important and which apps you can use, etc.

A really big part of this course is just rehashed topics from the previous course, so be ready to waste $1497 if you want to buy both programs or if you already took the 1st one and want to take the second class.

However, there’s some new content like creating landing pages, free traffic methods, sales funnels, optimizing your FB ads and store, how you can use free+shipping, FB manual bidding, Instagram for your business, scaling your FB ads, upsells, and more.

You also have a case study about scaling your business, a look into how Richard scales ventures and how you want your store to look, and some tips on using credit cards.

The 4th module provides you with advanced strategies for Facebook Ads. You have content like how to name adsets, an explanation of conversion windows and how to exploit them (again, rehashed), the principles of killing Facebook Ads (somewhat rehashed as well), and using your Breakdowns tab. It closes with a video explaining different approaches to scaling your ads.

The last core module is about setting up and configuring your store, again. It goes right back into how to create a store on Shopify, how to configure your Facebook pixel, and how to add a Favicon.

Once more, this module is solely aimed towards beginners. If you thought this course was for advanced entrepreneurs just looking for how to increase their sales, then keep looking.

What’s even worse is how Richard suggests you should take one course first and then the more advanced one. In other words, Richard wants you the waste almost $1,500, and that’s something that seems plainly disrespectful to me.

There’s a last bonus module like with the Foundational program, and it talks about how and when you should set up your LLC, so more rehashed content. You also get a few tips on how you can improve your energy and productivity, and it closes with brainstorming.

Evidently, this training is much more complete than the basic course. If you’re thinking about getting both, just get this one and save yourself the money and frustration of taking this one after the Foundational.

The course also comes with a month of access to Richard, but keep in mind that it might not be the easiest thing to do since he has to run different businesses, make public appearances and interviews, plus he also has to give support to other students.

Final Verdict

Is It Worth It? Final Verdict

Richard’s story is quite impressive, but he fails to translate all his knowledge value into these courses, which are priced too high for what you actually get. I can’t find a reason, either; Richard should be a millionaire (or just entering that class) by now, so I don’t see why he would sell such overpriced programs.

That problem gets worse once you consider that marketing your eCommerce requires a good budget, and buying any of the two courses will eat away a lot of money from your marketing budget, so I can’t really recommend this course.

Besides, the course provides most depth on Facebook Ads, and other methods (even the free traffic video) don’t really provide enough content for you to put them into practice before doing additional research.

One more thing that worries me is how Richard said he’d add more content to his course from what he learns in other eCommerce programs. You’re paying a lot to receive his own expertise, but that statement makes everything seem like he’s still learning and sharing his observations with you, and I’m 100% sure you didn’t pay for another student to give you classes.

It gets worse when compared with a course like eCom Elites. It comes from a marketing and eCommerce expert like Franklin Hatchett. It offers over 200 videos on dozens of marketing approaches, and it’s priced at just $197. It also gets constant updates, so whenever you see something that feels “old”, it’s because he’s about to improve the content.

I hope you found this review useful and if you have any questions, please comment down below. I’ll be more than happy to assist you.

Once again, thanks for reading my Team New Rich Mastermind Review and I wish you the best of luck.

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